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I think that in the long run you'll see a hybrid ARM/x64 Mac sharing the same case in the same way we have hybrid graphics. If you look at most of the processe
by mmastrac 10y ago
I think that in the long run you'll see a hybrid ARM/x64 Mac sharing the same case in the same way we have hybrid graphics.
If you look at most of the processes running on a Mac, how many of those need to be running on the power-hungrier Intel chip? You could easily offload much of the kernel, Dock, compositor, Twitter desktop, etc to a lower-power ARM. In the case where you aren't running any x64 apps, you could then power that chip down and run solely on ARM.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bhewes 10y agoThe Playstation 4 does this as the south bridge is really just an ARM chip. So I think you are right.
- monocasa 10y agoAnd the PS3 before it. And the WiiU, and the Wii. And every AMD chip since about 2013 (AMD Platform Security Processor, their equivalent of Intel's ME). Honestly, pretty much every complex electronic device (and quite a few not so!) out there has a bunch of ARMs inside of it doing system management. This is borderline a non-story IMO. Hell, an ARM7TDMI was a pretty common core to use on SD cards a few years back. The damn things are everywhere.
- brandonmenc 10y ago> ARM7TDMI was a pretty common core to use on SD cards Which is crazy, because that was the main CPU in the GameBoy Advance.
- wmf 10y agoThe PS4 southbridge has 256MB of RAM, runs FreeBSD, and downloads game patches and such. This seems far more ambitious than a BMC/ME.
- throwawayish 10y agoNot really, the ARM in the SB is much more like a ILOM system; not much different from the various processors scattered around hardware these days, be it ARM or some other more niche architecture, or even special-purpose archs.
- mastax 10y agoAnyone interested in this should watch the CCC talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AoHGJ1g9aM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AoHGJ1g9aM
- bhewes 10y agoYeah dude that talk was awesome.
- cooper12 10y agoDirect video link: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016 https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016 The uploader seems to have recorded themselves playing the video and it's missing the start and has buffering issues,
- Kenji 10y agoDoesn't that complicate the mainboard design vastly? Memory & caching, clocks & time, concurrency, etc.
- simcop2387 10y agoDefinitely going to complicate things but it could easily end up worth it for a laptop if it can reduce power usage to almost that of a phone when not doing anything particularly demanding.
- dbalan 10y agoBoth CPUs are connected with a PCI bus and as far as the main SOC is concerned its a bunch of peripherals on PCI https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016 https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016
- throwawayish 10y agoThe CPUs run different OSes and there is no ability to move tasks between them; this is rather unlike a hybrid or "big.LITTLE" approach.
- Andys 10y agoThankfully Intel has already done alot of new work in this area - allowing PCI devices (GPU, Xeon Phi) etc, to share computing resources more evenly.
- wmf 10y agoThis sounds incredibly kludgey and at odds with Apple's de-investment in macOS. (As in "reduced investment", not "divestment".) Adding massive complexity to eke out another hour or two of battery life seems like a poor choice when there are so many things to be fixed in the OS.
- throwaway91111 10y agoIs apple divesting its mac offering? Sounds like FUD.
- santaclaus 10y agoThis seems... suspect. There are definitely serious concerns (see the Mac Pro), but given the continued yearly releases of macOS and and the (much maligned, but a company spanning effort) touchbar, it hardly seems like they have plans to divest.
- mortenjorck 10y agoDivestment is an oversimplification of the direction Apple seems to be taking the Mac. Consolidation would be a better term: trying to prune the product line into a lineup of hits and nothing else, often to the exclusion of non-mainstream (professional) users. So the test to apply is: will this enable a headline feature? In this case, if it lets Apple put a significantly bigger battery life number on the product page, I'd bet on it.
- throwaway91111 10y agoI mean, I'm not a fan of the new MBP myself, but I don't think they're ignoring professional users. Didn't their MBP sales go UP?
- nordsieck 10y ago"often to the exclusion of non-mainstream (professional) users" The allusion is to the Mac Pro, not the Macbook Pro.
- pilsetnieks 10y agoThere already are ARM chips in the new MBPRs, for example - the touchbar and touch ID with its secure enclave runs on ARM. I could easily foresee them putting in more powerful ARM chips and offloading some tasks to them.
- sorenjan 10y agoWhy doesn't Intel include an Atom core on their CPUs as a next level speed step, like ARMs big.little? It has to be much easier to keep both the high and low power parts the same architecture.
- 5ilv3r 10y agoThat would probably be less power efficient than just running a single core alone at reduced clock.
- runjake 10y agoWhich is why the Atom was discontinued, IIRC: the mainline chips power efficiency had been reduced enough to make the Atom much less viable.
- wmf 10y agoAtom hasn't been discontinued; low-end "Celeron" and "Pentium" chips are actually Atoms.
- throwawayish 10y agoBoth Pentium and Celeron are used for standard mainstream dual-core chips and for Atom chips (eg. J4205, Celeron G3900, Pentium G4400)... so in a way they are Intel's trash-can brand.
- sundvor 10y agoI think you meant the mainline's efficiency increased. :)
- abalone 10y agoThey'll probably follow what they just did with the A10, at least in the near term. It has a low power mode and a high power mode, but doesn't run them simultaneously. Too complicated. It actually has 4 cores (2 low, 2 high) but can only run one pair at a time.[1] So while that is similar on its face to hybrid graphics, I'm not sure it would be feasible to offload background tasks to the low power mode as it would be constantly switching modes every few milliseconds. More likely this architecture is better suited to Power Nap where the whole device enters a low-power state with restricted functions. That also sidesteps the issue of having to compile every third party app for two architectures. They can just implement the Power Nap stuff for ARM. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A10
- drvdevd 10y agoI know it's not really what you mean, but isn't the touchbar powered by an ARM chip already and also the secure enclave?
- masklinn 10y agoYes, it runs on a "T1" SoC, but the software is a watchOS derivative.
- mattkevan 10y agoI see this being the first step as a multi-year transition away from Intel, rather than some sort of merger of iOS and macOS or a sudden architecture switch like PowerPC to Intel. For now, the ARM will be a low-power co-processor handling a few tasks via specially compiled extensions. However, as Apple continues to iterate on the AX processors, and they, along with developers, figure out how to move more stuff onto ARM, the role of the Intel chips will decrease until they are the low-power co-processor running only legacy stuff which can't be easily ported or emulated. Until one day they just go away. It makes sense that they'd want to own their core processor tech – they've got the talent and in a few years time will have the technology. It seems that each architecture change they've made has been driven by a supplier not being able to deliver, from Motorola with 68k to Motorola (again) and IBM with PowerPC and now Intel.
- mmastrac 10y agoI mostly agree with this, but I still haven't figured out what the end-game for this might be. I believe that they'd just emulate low-power-requirement x86 and x64 code rather than keeping a low-end x64 chip in the laptop. If a significant number of MBP customers are running VMWare or Parallels, however, this might seriously hurt the timeline for moving to 100% ARM. In that case they'd either have higher-end Macs with the x64 chips (potentially complicating the product line) or work on adding x64 emulation acceleration to their Ax chip line.