Mac With Apple-Designed Arm Processor Coming in First Half of 2021

[mrkite77]

(1) Apple’s laptop chips are better than Intel’s — they’re faster and more power efficient.

I don't see how he can say that. They haven't really been tested head to head. Geekbench claims to be cross-platform, but they achieved that by removing tests that the desktop excels at to make mobile appear more competitive.

Geekbench 5 dropped all memory testing because the desktops could cache the entire test and mobile couldn't.

Geekbench also inserts a 1 second pause in between each test so thermal limitations of mobile devices don't negatively affect their results.

Basically, Geekbench cripples desktop scores on purpose to make them closer to mobile scores. You people thinking Apple is going to put out an ARM-based laptop that is competitive with Intel are in for a seriously rude awakening.

 

[MallardDuck]

Yep.
And there’s people complaining about losing 32 bit support. Legacy apps and consumers will need to decide if they want to stay in the past or keep moving forward.
Eventually we have to discard the legacy baggage that bogs everything down. That’s software, hardware and consumers.

This assumes that you're only using high level language constructs. There's a lot of applications that include assembly for performance, or otherwise directly access the CPU. The two big ones are Fusion and Parallels, which virtualize (not emulate) the CPU, to give access to windows software.
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I assure you - PowerPC and SPARC were most definitely *not* CISC processors.

I know this for two reasons.

First - it’s widely known.
Second - I designed PowerPC’s at Exponential Technology (the x704 processor) and SPARC at Sun (UltraSparc V). I’m pretty sure I didn’t put any microcode ROMs in there, I didn’t add support for any variable length instructions, and the only way to access data memory was load/store instructions. So, yeah, I’m going with “those are RISC processors.”
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AMD does not license it “same as ARM does.”
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Was away and came back and started paging backward and saw someone ”correcting” me by claiming PowerPC and SPARC are CISC.

So it’s going to be one of those days.

Apologies, my faulty memory must have confused those with something else.

 

[falainber]

This is going to be an iPad killer!

 

[cmaier]

This is going to be an iPad killer!

Not unless they put a touch screen on it

 

[Rigby]

Perhaps it'll just be an iPad Pro with non-detachable keyboard?

Seriously, I hope this will not be a disaster like the Surface Pro X. In any case, I need VMs for my development work, so this will no longer be for me. Hopefully they don't abandon x86-based Macbooks completely, since they are by far my favorite laptops.

 

[bobcomer]

I'm tech savvy but have a limit..

• Will ARM processors run everything? i.e will it be a seamless tansition for us?
• Would this sole change make you careful about buying the first gen ARM based macs?
• What other implications would all this mean? (pro/cons)

Hopefully some of you care or simply find entertaining to help/explain all this!

Regards,

No, ARM Processors wont run everything, and some of what it runs will be emulated. (in otherwords, SLOW)

This change will probably make sure I wont buy a new Mac. Just like the Windows ARM processor devices, it'll be slower and less compatible. I would consider an iPad Pro that could run the occasinal Mac app, but that wouldn't be my "work" machine.

The pro for Apple is they'll make machines cheaper, and they wont be tied to the whims of intel, which definitely would have some value. For me, I can't think of a single Pro, but plenty of cons.

 

[falainber]

Not unless they put a touch screen on it

They probably will. They are way behind PC vendors in this department.

 

[Smearbrick]

“Apple’s product releases have been stymied by Intel chip delays...”

Apple’s product releases have been stymied by Apple’s failure to read their consumers.

That being said... I don’t buy it - not across the whole platform at least. One machine... maybe.

 

[mrkite77]

Yep.
And there’s people complaining about losing 32 bit support. Legacy apps and consumers will need to decide if they want to stay in the past or keep moving forward.

You know that affects games too, right? Catalina absolutely gutted my steam library. Out of 193 games in my Steam Library, only 95 work on Catalina.

What did Apple accomplish except put the final nail in the coffin for mac gaming?

 

[realtuner]

I don't see how he can say that. They haven't really been tested head to head. Geekbench claims to be cross-platform, but they achieved that by removing tests that the desktop excels at to make mobile appear more competitive.

Geekbench 5 dropped all memory testing because the desktops could cache the entire test and mobile couldn't.

Geekbench also inserts a 1 second pause in between each test so thermal limitations of mobile devices don't negatively affect their results.

Basically, Geekbench cripples desktop scores on purpose to make them closer to mobile scores. You people thinking Apple is going to put out an ARM-based laptop that is competitive with Intel are in for a seriously rude awakening.

Hardly.

I can run processor intensive Apps (like Photoshop) on my iPad Pro and have them perform similar functions to their Windows equivalents on a laptop and the iPad Pro is easily faster than an i3 and compares well with an i5.

I find it funny when people dismiss Geekbench as a way to measure performance, and at the same time completely ignore other methods of gauging how fast a machine is.

 

[theluggage]

ever tried to port a complex application across cpus? Especially from a cisc to risc platform?

Well, anybody who has debugged iOS Apps in XCode has without knowing it, because testing the apps on the Mac involves compiling an x86 version and running it in a sandbox on the Mac with an iOS (not ARM) emulation library.

Play with a Raspberry Pi sometime - the majority of the usual range of free Linux software runs on it - including full-blown desktop apps like LibreOffice, Chromium, Firefox as well as the CLI stuff (not to mention several of the competing Linux desktop environments). There are versions of everything from Mathematica to Minecraft. None of that was written specifically for ARM, in many cases it's just been re-compiled or tweaked slightly, often by contributors doing it for nothing.

The vast majority of code in modern applications is written in high-level languages like C, C++, Swift etc. which are mostly independent of CPU architecture. The ARM processors in the A-series chips are 64 bit and little-endian, just like Intel, and most will be compiled with the same compilers so the sizes of various data types will be the same - which takes care of many of the potential glitches.

Writing (CPU specific) assembly code is difficult, time consuming and expensive - developers don't need an incentive from Apple to avoid it wherever possible. Even modern operating systems are mostly written in high-level languages.

Yes, really complex packages like Adobe CS will still be a headache - but apple switched from PPC (RISC) to Intel in 2005 and the world didn't end - and with every year that passes it's less and less likely that applications will have CPU-specific code in them. Apple have had a big drive to get developers to use supported frameworks like Accelerate and Metal rather than hand-coding for CPU-specific special features.

The hard bit is porting between OSs - especially old Windows code that has been handed down from the 8-bit days and was often written by people who didn't think the world existed beyond Windows. Unix/Linux (which run on every CPU under the sun) has more of a tradition of not using CPU-specific code, and hopefully many Mac developers will have had an eye on portability, too.

 

[realtuner]

They probably will. They are way behind PC vendors in this department.

Behind in what? Making something people don't want? Making something with a touchscreen when hardly any Apps are optimized for it? Touchscreens on Windows are a joke. I had a Surface Pro - as a tablet it was sorely lacking.

 

[Bug-Creator]

Isn't it a bit late for groundhog day?

 

[cmaier]

They probably will. They are way behind PC vendors in this department.

They might - but in that case they will need to drastically rethink the MacOS user interface (i use vnc to operate my mac using my 12.9” ipad, using the touch screen. Not a lot of fun!)

And they presumably think that the best touch screen interface is iOS‘S. So, we end up with iPadOS pretty quick if you follow that line of thinking.

 

[Falhófnir]

I don't see how he can say that. They haven't really been tested head to head. Geekbench claims to be cross-platform, but they achieved that by removing tests that the desktop excels at to make mobile appear more competitive.

Geekbench 5 dropped all memory testing because the desktops could cache the entire test and mobile couldn't.

Geekbench also inserts a 1 second pause in between each test so thermal limitations of mobile devices don't negatively affect their results.

Basically, Geekbench cripples desktop scores on purpose to make them closer to mobile scores. You people thinking Apple is going to put out an ARM-based laptop that is competitive with Intel are in for a seriously rude awakening.

Even if that's true, are you expecting Apple to put a 4.5W mobile phone chip in a computer and call it a day?

 

[Bonte]

I'm hoping for a multiple chip system, a good low power intel, good GPU and combined with an Apple chip. In a way the afterburner card in the Mac Pro is exactly that but more specialised.

 

[brinary001]

I need Bootcamp. Period. I *don't* want a slow virtual layer between me and the Windows apps I need to run.

Same here. I'm a software development consultant and, surprise surprise, most of our clients are still way behind the times and are using Windows... I LOVE using my personal MacBook Pro for work, but only because I know I can run Windows without issue in my clients' environments.

If there was no way to buffer all that taxing translation work the system would have to do deep down, and not only that but do it well (i.e. efficiently) then yeah, I don't think I would buy another MacBook again

 

[ShinySteelRobot]

That loud ringing sound you hear is the impending death knell of the Hackintosh movement. Once Apple switches entirely to ARM -- and they probably will someday -- Hackintoshing will no longer be possible (except with old, obsolete versions of macOS). Will probably take at least a few years before we get there, though.

 

[smulji]

Not unless they put a touch screen on it

I would go as far as to say, even without a touch-screen, this has the potential of being an iPad Pro killer. A lot of, if not most people, are using iPP in laptop-mode with a KB attached. The only competitive advantage / feature that iPP will have is Pencil support.
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Perhaps it'll just be an iPad Pro with non-detachable keyboard?

Seriously, I hope this will not be a disaster like the Surface Pro X. In any case, I need VMs for my development work, so this will no longer be for me. Hopefully they don't abandon x86-based Macbooks completely, since they are by far my favorite laptops.

How is the SPX a disaster?

 

[guzhogi]

I'll believe it when I see it. We've had ARM Mac rumors for years, with no official announcements yet.

I can see this as speeding up the Mac release cycles as Apple will control over the CPU, not an outside company. Possibly streamlining R&D and production costs, though I doubt that Apple will lower prices but rather get higher profit margins.

Something I would really like, but very much doubt, is redesigning all all-in-one Macs (IE MacBooks, iMacs) with touchscreens, and redesign macOS for better touch input. Maybe macOS 11, based totally (or at least mainly) in Swift, get rid of Objective-C code. Still have many full-desktop features like full access to the file system, real printing, etc.

 

[MikeZTM]

That makes no sense.. both Sun and SGI were all about performance on proprietary architectures that weren't compatible with the rest of the market. In fact, as they were losing market share, both companies switched to x86 in a last ditch effort to remain relevant.

You kind of proved the opposite of your point with those two examples.

You got it wrong.
Sun exist because they have SPARC that is compatible to Oracle's database and other middleware back in 90s and early 00s.
x86 was the "new and proprietary" architecture at that point. Almost no one ever though x86 will ever take over the server market back then.

 

[bobcomer]

I'm hoping for a multiple chip system, a good low power intel, good GPU and combined with an Apple chip. In a way the afterburner card in the Mac Pro is exactly that but more specialised.

That idea isn't exactly new, I did something similar with an Amiga add-on, but yes, I would find that interesting. The trouble is that it wouldn't be that easy to do right. (Except I'd want a fast intel chip, not a low power one!)

The scheduling of 3 types of CPU's on a combined bus, FAST shared RAM for communication between the CPU's. separate RAM for each CPU, it all makes my head hurt.

 

[firewood]

Gotta say, I don't think Apple really understands just how deep the need for Bootcamp runs.

I think Apple has analytics telling them exactly what percentage of their customer base uses Bootcamp. It's probably less than 10%. And Apple can just drop those MacBook customers and make up that tiny percentage by no longer having to pay Intel's markup. Or make people who want Bootcamp buy even more profitable Mac Pros.

 

[MacsAre1]

Seems to be a lot of confused commenters here. Couple things to keep in mind:

Apple transitioned from a RISC architecture to x86 architecture before, by secretly building OS X to Intel since the NExT era. They have achieved architecture transition many times (From 68k to PowerPC, PowerPC to x86, x86 to x64) and are aptly suited to handle this. Don't freak out.

Apple long ago acquired Rosetta which was able to very efficiently translate PowerPC to x86 code so programs could run with minimal performance overhead. There is little reason to think they would not work out the technology to do that in reverse, run x64 code on ARM machines.

Some say Boot Camp will be no more. There may be a short period without it as there was with the initial switch to Intel chips, but there is little reason not to keep it. Windows runs on ARM chips, it ought to run on an ARM Mac.

Microsoft is already building an x64 emulator to allow ARM based machines to run x64 Windows programs, and this is scheduled to be released in 2021. Since they are building PCs to run on ARM (Surface Pro X), they are possibly ahead of Apple in the transition away from Intel. They have already built an emulator to allow x86 apps to run on ARM (32 bit apps). So whenever Boot Camp is out for ARM Macs, you will likely be able to run all the same Windows apps you can today.

In short, this is an industry trend to shift toward ARM compatibility, and the transition should be fairly painless for the end user.

Me, I'll be sticking with a dual boot Intel machine running Mojave for as long as I can. My iTunes library works in both platforms, something I would lose by upgrading. Oh, and I like my Steam library of 32 bit games.

 

[outskirtsofinfinity]

What happened to 2020? ☹

Coronavirus. It set everything back.