I'm shocked Apple hasn't gone to AMD by now. Intel is showing no innovation. Stagnation is the word du jour.
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New References to AMD Processors Discovered in macOS 10.15.4 Beta
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Yep - Apple could flip over to AMD with an unbelievably low amount of work needed on their part..
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Already a thing and powerful as all get-out...
This is already a thing. Has been for about a year.
Only if your main software is something like Candy Crush.
Nothing is ever “seemless” in these types of transitions, although Apple has “THE” best record at this, so I have to give them their due. However, if Apple does move to AMD, then it means Intel is gone after a period of transition and it also means that Apple is NOT transitioning to A-Series for at least another decade. Apple does not invest in multiple parallel paths, especially not on a product line that only accounts for 8% of total sales in 2019.
Only if you consider your data to be important.
All AMD CPUs support ECC memory. Intel uses ECC memory as product segmentation.
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Nope.
I wasn't aware of that.
I just built a new 3900X windows PC, and it totally flys compared to anything Intel offers in even a remotely close price range. It's a shame that AMD's GPU drivers are complete garbage and my 5700XT crashes all the time.
I picked up a AMD Asus laptop that I have been very happy with. They are certainly back into the game.
Apple ARM based CPUs are not faster than Intel CPUs because they have better cores. They don't. With each cycle, any 4 GHz x86 CPU will do 4-5 times more work than any ARM based CPU. There is a reason why ARM is RISC(REDUCED Instruction Set...) Architecture.
The reason why iPad processes video faster than Intel CPUs is because of integrated Image processor, not the cores, themselves. The cores are, and will always be slower, than any x86.
Guys, if you are not enough educated on the topic of CPU architectures, don't hype products up, because if Apple will switch to ARM on anything other than basic Services-access computers, competitors to Chromebooks, to put it plainly - you will make other customers hurt in their workflow.
ARM is not ready, and will never be ready to replace x86 for anything High-Performance. There is a very good reason why there does not exist a single SuperComputer that is based on ARM, all of them are based on x86. Apple is not going to change this.
Changing from one x86 vendor to another x86 vendor has nothing to do with innovation... It’s essentially an operations issue, with a little marketing sprinkled in.
I have to admit that I find it VERY interesting that we have gone from AMD Hackintoshes being a no-go and not recommended about 18 months ago to it seemingly being a 1-2-3 easy peasy lemon-squeezy operation. I get that there are a lot talented people in the Hackintosh community, but AMD used to be NOT a thing.
Yes, apparently AMD’s Navi drovers are a hot mess on Windows and macOS. If this is the way Apple is going, the GPU drivers are the actual hold up, not the other possible AMD hardware pieces.
A 13/14-inch MacBook Pro with way better graphics than what Intel currently offers would be awesome.
And about time too.
And about time too.
Indeed. Laptops make up around 80% of all Mac sales so have a strong APU package would be beneficial for the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini families (with the MacBook Pro 16" also having a dGPU in addition to the APU).
As noted, Apple is constantly tweaking their motherboards for their current products as Intel and AMD change their CPU packages and other ancillary chips. So doing it for AMD would not be an issue. And AMD runs the same x64 code as Intel so there would be little to no recompiling needed for macOS and none for third-party applications running on top of macOS.
This would actually de-fragment the Mac product line as everything would be from AMD instead of a mix of Intel and AMD.
Apple was a co-creator of Thunderbolt with Intel. The TB3 protocol has now been made part of the USB 4.0 standard so non-Intel Thunderbolt controllers will be coming online.
Because AMD processors haven't been competitive from a perspective until now. With Zen 2 and the upcoming Zen 3, now is the right time to do it.
This would be amazing news for AMD. And i think they deserve it, looking at their recent products.
If we are talking 'high end gaming' then it would need to be closer to the $2k, you are not going to switch people from a gaming PC otherwise.
I think at this point everybody should get back to that Mark Gurman's Report that in 2020 Apple will start phase out Intel CPUs from their computers.
Finding AMD APU/CPU references in Mac OS Catalina Beta, which will be ready in time for March event should show you that paint is on the wall quite clear.
Finding AMD APU/CPU references in Mac OS Catalina Beta, which will be ready in time for March event should show you that paint is on the wall quite clear.
Intel’s fab issues aside...the $64,000 question is WHY would Apple maintain both in a shrinking PC industry? Why would they move from Intel to AMD given that the Mac sits at 8% of it sales? Because Intel is not doing great, but they aren’t so bad that Apple couldn’t ride it out a while longer.
Apple’s upgrade path for Mac Pro customers is to buy a new Mac Pro, they aren’t going to take your trade-in if they introduce an AMD-based Mac Pro.
IF Apple is willing to maintain both AMD AND Intel product lines in tandem, it means that a quantum shift in Apple’s thinking about the PC industry has occurred. People need to adjust their expectations accordingly, myself included (IF it happens).
What is so brilliant about VLIW?
Itanium was supposed to be a VLIW architecture and look how that floundered. It reallt didn't scale that well when compared to other CPU's.
Oh, and Intel CPU's are not CISC at the Hardware level. They are RISC and use microcode to emulate the X86/64 Instruction set. I'm sure that there is a lot of performance to be gained by just removing that layer and letting the raw CPU free.
I suspect that AMD is much the same.
Not really, the soft error rate is negligible on desktops with frequent reboots (once every few weeks vs once a year on servers) and small amounts of RAM (16 GB vs 512+).
Modern ECC is for availability. That is, it is designed to be tolerant to complete chip and bus failures (a.k.a. chipkill), which are caused by things like pins going bad, chips having solder cracking. IBM realized this was a significant failure mode decades ago.
To do this there's costs. You have to use low density (ideally x4) DRAM, you pay for extra power in refresh and bus, and you pay in performance (lockstep mode).
So the question is whether you want to pay for all of this to keep your desktop computer running, or just pop out the bad DIMM and reboot.
But WHY is the PC market shrinking Zdigital2015?
Intel went on autopilot for a decade. People aren't going to replace their computers for a 3-5% performance increase. That is precisely why the 4,1s & 5,1s lasted as long as they did. Intel stopped innovating.
AMD is showing a 15 - 20% performance upgrade per generation (which is about 18 months). If you go from a 1st gen Ryzen to a 3rd gen Ryzen, you will see a major performance increase (for very little money).
One thing that no one has pointed out is that going with AMD means that Apple wouldn't have to completely redesign a motherboard everytime AMD releases a new CPU. The AM4 platform goes from 1st Gen Ryzen to 4th Gen Ryzen.
If AMD does the same thing with the AM5 socket (4 years or so), Apple wouldn't have to redesign a motherboard. Simply drop in the next gen AM5 processor.
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I'd first have to troubleshoot the system to discover the bad ram & then I would have to have a replacement DIMM handy.
Saving time from that is worth the cost of ECC, but that is just me.
Intel went on autopilot for a decade. People aren't going to replace their computers for a 3-5% performance increase. That is precisely why the 4,1s & 5,1s lasted as long as they did. Intel stopped innovating.
AMD is showing a 15 - 20% performance upgrade per generation (which is about 18 months). If you go from a 1st gen Ryzen to a 3rd gen Ryzen, you will see a major performance increase (for very little money).
One thing that no one has pointed out is that going with AMD means that Apple wouldn't have to completely redesign a motherboard everytime AMD releases a new CPU. The AM4 platform goes from 1st Gen Ryzen to 4th Gen Ryzen.
If AMD does the same thing with the AM5 socket (4 years or so), Apple wouldn't have to redesign a motherboard. Simply drop in the next gen AM5 processor.
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I'd first have to troubleshoot the system to discover the bad ram & then I would have to have a replacement DIMM handy.
Saving time from that is worth the cost of ECC, but that is just me.
This would so be a WWDC moment.
it would be nice for it to be sooner but you can so see Phil amping this one up during his time on-stage.
iMac Pros with Threadripper.
Mac Pros with Epyc.
iMacs with Ryzen 5-9.
Minis with Ryzen 4000 series APU.
it would be nice for it to be sooner but you can so see Phil amping this one up during his time on-stage.
iMac Pros with Threadripper.
Mac Pros with Epyc.
iMacs with Ryzen 5-9.
Minis with Ryzen 4000 series APU.
My last years AMD PC has
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