Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Macs With Intel Processors Still Coming Amid Transition to Apple Silicon
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Lazy developers will take the lazy approach either way. Watched it with the last architecture change. Will watch it with this one. Some software and hardware (drivers) will just vanish forever, just like last time.
According to iFixit’s tear down of the newest MacBook Pro’s, there’s an Intel chip doing SOMETHING related to Thunderbolt….
Hasn’t been said because it’s not true.
According to iFixit’s tear down of the newest MacBook Pro’s, there’s an Intel chip doing SOMETHING related to Thunderbolt….
They are not using Intel’s Thunderbolt controller chip in the M series Apple Silicon, the Thunderbolt controller is part of the M chips themselves.
Yeah, it’s just a retimer. Very different than a controller. It just cleans up the TB signal to make it less noisy. Costs about $2 or less in bulk.
Ok, but my point still stands. Apple is still an Intel customer. Even if it’s just a $2 chip, they’re still buying it from Intel.
Sure. They buy lots of things from Intel, so I’m not sure what the point is. They buy lots of things from lots of companies.
But when Apple stops using Intel’s CPUs, I don’t that $2 chips for macs are going to make intel feel much better about the situation.
Many professional tools has lots of modules/plug-in, it’s very difficult and time consuming to update and check all of them
If my work is entirely dependant on those tools, I would get something more proven and reliable (albeit loud and hot) than something more energy efficient
If my work is entirely dependant on those tools, I would get something more proven and reliable (albeit loud and hot) than something more energy efficient
I can tell from Intel’s ads against Apple, they really appreciate the $2 chip sales.
Sure, absolutely. But my original comment was in response to this article talking about Apple completely severing ties with Intel. Even when the entire Mac line-up is running on Apple Silicon, Apple will still be an Intel customer. That’s all I was saying. Don’t read into it too much.
Lazy/mega-corporate developers do whatever is the least effort. Blaming everyone but themselves is an easy pick for those types. No matter what option you leave them to blame Apple, they’ll pick that before they pick “doing the work”.
Good thermal constraints are where I care about enthusiast, pro, prosumer, machines being designed well.
Modularity is for repair, IMO. Upgrades are less an issue in my world than they used to be. The last machines I upgraded more than RAM or storage on were old Mac clones I got on eBay, and it didn’t extend their usability by much at all by that point. But RAM & storage do need to be modular!
But does apple cpus even have say half of the pci-e, ram, max video feeds out that the mac pro has now?
and apple may not want to piss off the pro users with an New trash can limited system.
and being able to boot windows / run windows in an VM may be needed for some pros as well.
maybe an swap ram disk pool of ram? That is say not at full speed of the on die ram but acts an very high speed tmp / swap disk with no SSD wear out
Would be amazing if they could figure out how to get both an Intel SoC AND an M1 SoC into the same enclosure. Best of both worlds.
Rosetta allows such software to run effortlessly on the M1. Name one application that won't run sufficiently.
If Apple makes more Intel Macs I would assume it's because of their contract with Intel (which probably expires 2022?).
That's why Apple said with such confidence that the transition to Apple silicon would take two years.
I don't think this is about pleasing a handfull of customers who don't want to use Rosetta 2.
That's why Apple said with such confidence that the transition to Apple silicon would take two years.
I don't think this is about pleasing a handfull of customers who don't want to use Rosetta 2.
There is zero reason not to make a Zen based Mac Pro at this point.
I think this is a really likely scenario. It's used by software dev teams, so being able to natively run both Apple Silicon and x86 apps would be amazing.
Agreed -- it would be very challenging, but Apple has done unique projects like Fusion Drive and APFS before.
Even with PCI-E 3.0/DDR4 on the current Mac Pro with large memory, Afterburner and recent HBM2 based GPUs large size projects actually do run circles around current Apple Silicon lines. The fact of the matter is no one is testing against a fully stacked Mac Pro against the M1Max Macbook 16" becaue it would be pointless.
Now if Apple opens up these new x86 updates with a PCEI-5/DDR5 whether Threadripper Zen3+ or Zen 4 EPYC that is 96core/192 threads on 5nm to even the successor to Alder Lake on 5nm and you toss in the MI200 series Compute GPGPU from AMD nothing Apple can produce would remotely be within a country mile of such configurations.
HPC computing is being dominated by AMD EYPC solutions. All the high end Supecomputers are all AMD EPYC Milan-X/Genoa 128 core/256 thread ala El Capitan and the like.
Apple can cut the price off their Mac Pros by at least $15k moving away from Xeon to Zen and increase their margins considerably by expanding their options with Compute via these cards:
AMD Instinct™ Accelerators
Discover how AMD Instinct™ GPU accelerators are supercharging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads.
If Apple wants to own the Post Processing, FX/Modeling, Audio production world from mixing to mastering in immersive studios a 1U EPYC Genoa Zen 4 with an MI250x coupled with Afterburner 2.0 and 4TB of RAM on MCM designs and 3D stacked cache will have no one touching them for 5-10 years.
Nothing Apple can do with their ARM SoC designs can touch where AMD is now and soon be headed with the Xilinx merger IP and hardware coupled with these Zen lines who already are designed out to Zen 7 right now.
Apple has no more excuses about not using Zen.