29 ms·

Based on this article, it doesn't sound like Bloomberg has enough information to distinguish between Apple being committed to a transition, or Apple developing

Based on this article, it doesn't sound like Bloomberg has enough information to distinguish between Apple being committed to a transition, or Apple developing chips to improve their negotiating position with Intel. It's also very unlikely to happen on such a fast timetable; given the IP situation, it's unlikely Apple could make an x86_64 chip, and any move away from x86_64 is going to require significant work by third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today.

madeofpalk 9y ago
> it's unlikely Apple could make an x86_64 chip Why is it unlikely that Apple would make a x86 chip? Because of IP/licensing, or for technical reasons?
- lima 9y ago
  IP/licensing.
  - Skunkleton 9y ago
    I would argue technical reasons too. x86_64 is a huge and complicated beast.
  - squarefoot 9y ago
    And cost. Making something you can license to others and/or sell to 250000 users each year has a completely different cost compared to something you use only on your 20000 machines (source: [1]). Macs are already overpriced, I don't know how much Apple could sustain an in-house production of proprietary chips without hitting their users; they're probably going to ARM. [1]: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43495918 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43495918
    - Bud 9y ago
      And the fact that Apple can already beat x86 on speed per unit of electricity with its own architecture.
      - jiveturkey 9y ago
        that only matters for large data centers and mobile. for laptops and desktops raw power matters.
        Bud 9y ago
        Uh, actually not. It matters tremendously for laptops.
    - nnnnnnnnnnnnn 9y ago
      I think you might have misread the table at the page you linked. Above the table, it says "Shipments are in thousands of units." According to the table, Apple shipped 20 million notebooks and desktops last year, not 20 thousand.
      - squarefoot 9y ago
        Doh... Same proportions but yeah, damn language barrier, over here the comma and point meanings are reversed compared to English. Thanks!
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    Shouldn't the patents be expired by then?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
X-Istence 9y ago
The PPC -> Intel transition also happened, and yes devs had to do work to make it happen, but it doesn't mean it is unheard of or impossible.
- BuildTheRobots 9y ago
  To be fair, their PPC-on-Intel emulation that let old versions run of apps (and the entirety of OS9, IIRC) was a technical marvel on a number of levels - especially considering the hardware limitations of the early chips.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    Mac OS 9 never ran on Intel. That was a separate migration path, where Mac OS X would run a Mac OS 9 VM, but this "Classic" experience never made it past PPC.
    - BuildTheRobots 9y ago
      My apologies, I'm remembering wrong. On PPC you could either dual-boot or run OS9 (and 8?) apps seamlessly on an OSX desktop, which was pretty impressive. The seamless emulation of OSX-PPC apps on an Intel processor was extremely impressive though. I remember the majority of stuff working surprisingly well with little slowdown (though this might now be rose-tinted).
      - philwelch 9y ago
        Mac OS 9 could run apps written for anything from System 7 onwards, and sometimes even System 6 apps though that was hit or miss. It could even run 68k binaries. Mac OS 9 inside of “Classic” (the VM that ran OS 9 inside of OS X) wasn’t especially seamless, but what was seamless was “Carbon”, a transitional API that allowed developers to build apps that ran natively on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. It didn’t take nearly as long to port code from OS 9 to Carbon as it would have taken to port to Cocoa, so many early OS X apps were Carbon ports.
- 9y ago
Skunkleton 9y ago
If apple uses its own chips, I would assume that they would be aarch64 and not x86_64. Also, Microsoft has some magics for executing x86_64 binaries on aarch64 with good performance, so Apple may have a similar technology. We could end up with another situation similar to the Power->x86 transition that happened back in 2006. Or it could be nothing. This is a pretty thin article.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > If apple uses its own chips, I would assume that they would be aarch64 and not x86_64. Also, Microsoft has some magics for executing x86_64 binaries on aarch64 with good performance, so Apple may have a similar technology. They definitely do have OSX running on ARM64, they had OSX running on x86 for years before the switch (in fact they had OSX running on x86 before it even was OSX, NeXT ran on x86, SPARC, PA-RISC and 68k, PPC is the one Apple had to add), they've already gone through two architectural migrations (68k -> PPC and PPC -> x86) and by all accounts the iOS core is very much shared with OSX, it wouldn't make sense not to port OSX along the way.
  - spitfire 9y ago
    NeXT actually had prototype PPC hardware, so they may have had that at the ready too. Less developed and with less driver support of course.
  - rlkf 9y ago
    > they had OSX running on x86 for years before the switch (in fact they had OSX running on x86 before it even was OSX Although NeXTStep ran on x86, the MacOS build on x86 was John Scheinberg's personal skunkworks project until it became Marklar in 2001 (and then kept under the hood for another four years). Mind, Darwin was always written to be portable, but it wasn't a deliberate strategy to take it to Intel. This time around though, I too reckon that they have already a MacBook running on an A10X in the labs.
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    What I'm really curious about is what they've still maintained: what they publicly ship now is all little-endian; are they still maintaining any big-endian port? Do they have a big-endian ARM port? Have they preserved the big-endian PPC port?
MBCook 9y ago
I wonder if this is more about coprocessors and other chips than the main CPU. I know the iPad Pros certainly outperform many cheaper Intel chips while using lower power. But I doubt they would want to split the line into half ARM half Intel, or move the Mac Pro to ARM.
- jcadam 9y ago
  Apple has been trying to chase power users and professionals off of their platform for years. A switch to ARM is an opportunity to rid themselves of the few remaining holdouts and focus 100% on high-end consumer electronics.
  - jernfrost 9y ago
    I would say that is more about the boxes they use than CPU. The difficulty of adding your own hard drives, memory, graphics cards etc to a Mac is the biggest problem I think. What pro task, really requires high single thread performance? I imagine Apple could match intel by simply using more cores on their ARM CPUs.
    - jcadam 9y ago
      True, I miss the old Powermac towers: Workstation class machines, but with low-end configurations for those of us on a budget. When I was faced with the choice between: - an iMac that didn't really meet my needs - a ridiculously unaffordable Mac Pro tower I jumped over to Linux running on commodity PC hardware.
    - timc3 9y ago
      Audio from what I know is best with have multiple high speed cores, rather than many lower speed cores. (I use my machines for audio)
      - jernfrost 9y ago
        And what are your processing times like? I use my Mac for video editing, but I have never had any problems doing that smoothly even on much weaker Macs. Only issue I have on Mac is compiling large programs.
mcphage 9y ago
> significant work by third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today I dunno, I feel like the writing has been on the wall for Apple to switch to their own ARM chips, for 3 or 4 years now. At first it was "yeah maybe someday", but by this point, I'm just surprised they're waiting until 2020. I was hoping the first ARM Macbooks would be this summer. (Really, last summer, if I'm being honest).
- jernfrost 9y ago
  Agree this was obviously something that was going to happen. My prediction was 2019 tough. My thoughts was that they probably wanted to get more developers over to using bitcode first as well as ARM being almost at desired performance but not quite there yet. In 2020 I doubt anyone will see any problems with ARM performance on a desktop or laptop.
  - stiGGG 9y ago
    I remember Chris Lattner giving some details to bitcode a while ago and according to him it's not possible to recompile an app for a different architecture having only the so called bitcode. Edit: Found the source: http://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript/#bitcode http://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript/#bitcod...
bobwaycott 9y ago
Is the IP/licensing situation particularly onerous here to prevent making their own x86_64 chip?
- masklinn 9y ago
  Yeah. There are only three extant architectural license holders (Intel, AMD and VIA) and they're basically in a circular firing squad of patents. To make their own chips, they'd need to either license from an existing holder (which wouldn't let them tinker unless it was a partnership or they acquired the license) or they'd need to make something so incredibly great the other three would trip over themselves to use it, and bind themselves in the process.
  - jononor 9y ago
    If they wanted to go x86 they would just buy VIA? I think it will be aarch64
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Without meaning to comment on whether it is likely or not, they could also easily buy AMD. (Price tag would be in the ballpark of $15-20 billion, 3 months of income for Apple)
      - Coffeewine 9y ago
        AMD's cross-licensing agreements are unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, nontransferable. https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clarifies-cross-license-with-intel-change-of-control-terminates-agreement-for-both/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clar...
        zlynx 9y ago
        I wonder if "non-transferable" covers tricks like Apple loaning AMD the cash for AMD to buy Apple. Then renaming the new AMD to Apple. Then it would pay itself back for the loans.
notatoad 9y ago
> It's also very unlikely to happen on such a fast timetable the article (thin as it is) claims a multi-step transition. Apple almost certainly has a version of Mac OS that can run on their iPad hardware - the transition path that makes the most sense to me is a 12" MacBook that runs essentially the same internal hardware as an iPad pro, and a MacOS that can run iOS apps. There would be a great consumer market for a MacBook that runs iOS apps, and it would serve as a hardware test bed for developers to get their MacOS applications ported over to ARM before transitioning the MacBook Pro lineup away from x86.
- taborj 9y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head here
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  I’m still very skeptical of the “Mac that can run iOS apps” concept. Tim Cook has been pretty unambiguous in his statements about Mac vs iPad. https://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/16/tim-cook-no-converged-mac-ipad/ https://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/16/tim-cook-no-converged-m... >We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad, because what that would wind up doing, or what we’re worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants. So we want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world. And putting those two together would not achieve either. You’d begin to compromise in different ways.
  - ariwilson 9y ago
    Apple has a long history of saying one thing and doing another (I don't blame them; the "Elop effect" is real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#%22Burning_Platform%22_memo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#%22Burning_Platfo...).
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    Of course this is from 2015, and it’s possible they’ve been prototyping for years and think they can overcome the fear of a subpar device. But as a former Surface Pro owner who now has an iPad Pro, I don’t see that happening. The iPad is immeasurably better as a tablet when you have tablet-oriented software available. And when you don’t, obviously the Surface’s compromise of “have a crappy desktop experience too” is usable if you need to have that option. But it’s not good compared to stuff designed for a tablet. Similarly, the chunks of Windows 10 that are clearly designed for touchscreens (like the new Settings app) are not great on a desktop compared to the older and still more powerful control panel. More consistent, sure, as any ground-up redo would be, but the information density of things like the Add or Remove Programs list is awful compared to what it was before. I don’t think Apple is going to make those compromises. They might do a more converged developer backened for Mac and iOS to make it easier to target both platforms, but they won’t shove the frontends together.
cptskippy 9y ago
Apple did a pretty decent job when they transitioned from PPC to x86_64, it has Rosetta to translate PPC to x86. Microsoft and partners released ARM based Windows Laptops this year that can run Win32 apps in emulation. What's stopping Apple from shipping Macbooks with a custom SoC that can run existing Apps in emulation until developers can recompile? I would argue that most Air and Macbook owners aren't developers and probably don't have many apps that didn't ship with their system.
- danaliv 9y ago
  And before that they successfully managed the transition from m68k to PPC. The processor doesn't matter.
  - pvg 9y ago
    It does matter that the new processor is a lot more powerful and faster than the old processor. This wouldn't be the case this time.
    - x0x0 9y ago
      But what -- and work with me here -- if the processor is slimmer. With rounded corners.
    - zitterbewegung 9y ago
      Maybe the first few hardware revisions it won't be as performant. Its probably going to be an Armbook that will have the form factor of the Air or the Macbook but with A12 chips. The current A11s are in striking distance for performance.
      - Aaargh20318 9y ago
        The current A-series SoC’s were also designed around the power and thermal requirements of a mobile phone. In a laptop or desktop they would have a lot more wiggle room.
jernfrost 9y ago
It will obviously be an ARM transition not x86: https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/in-3-years-apple-will-switch-from-intel-to-arm-a6816058a1b2 https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/in-3-years-apple-will-switch-f...
- otterley 9y ago
  What is so "obvious" about it?
  - djrogers 9y ago
    The fact that Apple develops and ships hundreds of millions of ARM processors every year, which are widely regarded to be the best ARM processors made, and they design and ship no X86 processors?
    - otterley 9y ago
      That alone doesn't make it "obvious" as applied _to a Mac_, which is a very different kind of device that caters to a different audience that often has special needs. See our other discussion threads elsewhere.
  - jernfrost 9y ago
    That is what I explain in the link. I saw this move coming two years ago when I wrote that article. I noticed how regular users were using iPhones and iPads for almost everything they do. I noticed how office apps like Pages, Keynote and Numbers worked without any performance issues on iPad. I concluded ARM was fast enough for 90% of users. Once you don't have the restriction of battery life and small enclosure it is not hard to imagine that Apple could beef up ARM a lot for their desktops and laptops. Why run multiple CPU architectures when one does the job and is much cheaper? I've been thinking hard about what kind of workload ARM can't handle and I can't think of anything. Ok... there is one 1st person shooter games. But iOS is a more successful gaming platform than Mac.
    - robotresearcher 9y ago
rdsubhas 9y ago
> Apple developing chips to improve their negotiating position with Intel Not necessary. They only need to ship one model of Mac Mini or any small desktop lineup with Ryzen to improve their negotiating position while still being compatible with the existing x86_64 ecosystem. So no, this is not merely a negotiation jibe. There are definite long-term prospects. We're already moving to a mobile-first design and approach world. Having those mobile/tablet apps expand automatically to desktop is the next logical conclusion. As an app developer, there is nothing better than write-once-run-everywhere, and the cascading effects of that on the whole Apple ecosystem and future consumer audience is hard to understate. Keeping aside power, efficiency, device prices, opportunity costs and much more. > significant work by third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today. Definitely not today. Its been speculated for many years now ever since the A4 chips, and its still not official news. Usual "people who don't want to be identified". If or when this becomes official news, most partners would be like about time, because everyone is in one way or another working on convergence and multi-device. Adobe and Microsoft are examples of pivoting many of their desktop businesses successfully to cloud and apps already.
- macintux 9y ago
  > Having those mobile/tablet apps expand automatically to desktop is the next logical conclusion. Thankfully Apple comprises vastly smarter people than me, but I've always thought this is a bad idea. The two interaction models are so dramatically different that I don't see how merging them makes sense. A finger is not a mouse.
  - PullJosh 9y ago
    It's hard to argue with the resounding success of Windows 8.
    - mamon 9y ago
      Its easy to succed when you have the monopoly in PC operating systems so success of Win 8 proves absolutely nothing. Touchscreen in PC is about as useful as a waterproof towel
djrogers 9y ago
The article doesn't say that Intel will be gone in 2020, just that Apple will be shipping macs with their own chips starting in 2020. It will likely start with one or two models available for devs, then a launch that covers more of the platform. Doesn't all have to happen at once, and Apple has been though this before in the PPC-Intel switch, which went rather well.
mtgx 9y ago
I wouldn't know, but hasn't Apple made its Mac Store apps architecture-agnostic? I'd be surprised if that's still not the case.
- ken 9y ago
  No, the Xcode workflow is set up to make applications CPU-agnostic by default, but there's nothing about the Mac App Store that requires it. The executables are ordinary x64 binaries. It'd be perfectly valid to write an application for the MAS in x64 assembly, if you want, as long as it's sandboxed and doesn't touch any private APIs.
danielrhodes 9y ago
> third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today This announcement is hardly a surprise. The writing has been on the wall for at least the last 5 years since LLVM replaced GCC in XCode. It became even more obvious when Apple started compiling to "Bitcode" so that they could deliver optimized binaries to devices. What that replacement meant is that it would ease Apple's transition away from any particular architecture - developers shouldn't have to do much if the app is installed from the App Store.
- gurkendoktor 9y ago
  > The writing has been on the wall for at least the last 5 years since LLVM replaced GCC in XCode. It became even more obvious when Apple started compiling to "Bitcode" so that they could deliver optimized binaries to devices. These weren't clear signs of an upcoming ARM switch: • Apple has been purging software that's under the GPL for quite a while now, and GCC was probably high on the list since Apple (NeXT) had been bitten by its license before[1]. • The Intel switch in 2006 was extremely smooth even using GCC. • Bitcode is not enabled on macOS, and even if it were, it's not abstract enough to recompile an x86 app for ARM[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9728162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9728162
pohl 9y ago
It could be that they are just trying to improve their negotiating position. Even if that's true, I'd wager that it is just the short-term contingency of an investment with a long-term view. I bet they have their eye on the end-game. When I say that, I'm thinking of the old TED Talk by Amory Lovins called "Winning the Oil Endgame". I feel like there's some parallel one could draw between peak oil and process improvements. Intel has slowed down now that it's more difficult to extract increased performance with each iteration. I'm guessing someone at Apple is thinking about where they'd like to be positioned when the well runs dry.

madeofpalk 9y ago

> it's unlikely Apple could make an x86_64 chip Why is it unlikely that Apple would make a x86 chip? Because of IP/licensing, or for technical reasons?

lima 9y ago
IP/licensing.
- Skunkleton 9y ago
  I would argue technical reasons too. x86_64 is a huge and complicated beast.
- squarefoot 9y ago
  And cost. Making something you can license to others and/or sell to 250000 users each year has a completely different cost compared to something you use only on your 20000 machines (source: [1]). Macs are already overpriced, I don't know how much Apple could sustain an in-house production of proprietary chips without hitting their users; they're probably going to ARM. [1]: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43495918 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43495918
  - Bud 9y ago
    And the fact that Apple can already beat x86 on speed per unit of electricity with its own architecture.
    - jiveturkey 9y ago
      that only matters for large data centers and mobile. for laptops and desktops raw power matters.
      - Bud 9y ago
        Uh, actually not. It matters tremendously for laptops.
  - nnnnnnnnnnnnn 9y ago
    I think you might have misread the table at the page you linked. Above the table, it says "Shipments are in thousands of units." According to the table, Apple shipped 20 million notebooks and desktops last year, not 20 thousand.
    - squarefoot 9y ago
      Doh... Same proportions but yeah, damn language barrier, over here the comma and point meanings are reversed compared to English. Thanks!
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  Shouldn't the patents be expired by then?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

X-Istence 9y ago

The PPC -> Intel transition also happened, and yes devs had to do work to make it happen, but it doesn't mean it is unheard of or impossible.

BuildTheRobots 9y ago
To be fair, their PPC-on-Intel emulation that let old versions run of apps (and the entirety of OS9, IIRC) was a technical marvel on a number of levels - especially considering the hardware limitations of the early chips.
- philwelch 9y ago
  Mac OS 9 never ran on Intel. That was a separate migration path, where Mac OS X would run a Mac OS 9 VM, but this "Classic" experience never made it past PPC.
  - BuildTheRobots 9y ago
    My apologies, I'm remembering wrong. On PPC you could either dual-boot or run OS9 (and 8?) apps seamlessly on an OSX desktop, which was pretty impressive. The seamless emulation of OSX-PPC apps on an Intel processor was extremely impressive though. I remember the majority of stuff working surprisingly well with little slowdown (though this might now be rose-tinted).
    - philwelch 9y ago
      Mac OS 9 could run apps written for anything from System 7 onwards, and sometimes even System 6 apps though that was hit or miss. It could even run 68k binaries. Mac OS 9 inside of “Classic” (the VM that ran OS 9 inside of OS X) wasn’t especially seamless, but what was seamless was “Carbon”, a transitional API that allowed developers to build apps that ran natively on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. It didn’t take nearly as long to port code from OS 9 to Carbon as it would have taken to port to Cocoa, so many early OS X apps were Carbon ports.
9y ago

Skunkleton 9y ago

If apple uses its own chips, I would assume that they would be aarch64 and not x86_64. Also, Microsoft has some magics for executing x86_64 binaries on aarch64 with good performance, so Apple may have a similar technology. We could end up with another situation similar to the Power->x86 transition that happened back in 2006. Or it could be nothing. This is a pretty thin article.

masklinn 9y ago
> If apple uses its own chips, I would assume that they would be aarch64 and not x86_64. Also, Microsoft has some magics for executing x86_64 binaries on aarch64 with good performance, so Apple may have a similar technology. They definitely do have OSX running on ARM64, they had OSX running on x86 for years before the switch (in fact they had OSX running on x86 before it even was OSX, NeXT ran on x86, SPARC, PA-RISC and 68k, PPC is the one Apple had to add), they've already gone through two architectural migrations (68k -> PPC and PPC -> x86) and by all accounts the iOS core is very much shared with OSX, it wouldn't make sense not to port OSX along the way.
- spitfire 9y ago
  NeXT actually had prototype PPC hardware, so they may have had that at the ready too. Less developed and with less driver support of course.
- rlkf 9y ago
  > they had OSX running on x86 for years before the switch (in fact they had OSX running on x86 before it even was OSX Although NeXTStep ran on x86, the MacOS build on x86 was John Scheinberg's personal skunkworks project until it became Marklar in 2001 (and then kept under the hood for another four years). Mind, Darwin was always written to be portable, but it wasn't a deliberate strategy to take it to Intel. This time around though, I too reckon that they have already a MacBook running on an A10X in the labs.
- gsnedders 9y ago
  What I'm really curious about is what they've still maintained: what they publicly ship now is all little-endian; are they still maintaining any big-endian port? Do they have a big-endian ARM port? Have they preserved the big-endian PPC port?

MBCook 9y ago

I wonder if this is more about coprocessors and other chips than the main CPU. I know the iPad Pros certainly outperform many cheaper Intel chips while using lower power. But I doubt they would want to split the line into half ARM half Intel, or move the Mac Pro to ARM.

jcadam 9y ago
Apple has been trying to chase power users and professionals off of their platform for years. A switch to ARM is an opportunity to rid themselves of the few remaining holdouts and focus 100% on high-end consumer electronics.
- jernfrost 9y ago
  I would say that is more about the boxes they use than CPU. The difficulty of adding your own hard drives, memory, graphics cards etc to a Mac is the biggest problem I think. What pro task, really requires high single thread performance? I imagine Apple could match intel by simply using more cores on their ARM CPUs.
  - jcadam 9y ago
    True, I miss the old Powermac towers: Workstation class machines, but with low-end configurations for those of us on a budget. When I was faced with the choice between: - an iMac that didn't really meet my needs - a ridiculously unaffordable Mac Pro tower I jumped over to Linux running on commodity PC hardware.
  - timc3 9y ago
    Audio from what I know is best with have multiple high speed cores, rather than many lower speed cores. (I use my machines for audio)
    - jernfrost 9y ago
      And what are your processing times like? I use my Mac for video editing, but I have never had any problems doing that smoothly even on much weaker Macs. Only issue I have on Mac is compiling large programs.

mcphage 9y ago

> significant work by third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today I dunno, I feel like the writing has been on the wall for Apple to switch to their own ARM chips, for 3 or 4 years now. At first it was "yeah maybe someday", but by this point, I'm just surprised they're waiting until 2020. I was hoping the first ARM Macbooks would be this summer. (Really, last summer, if I'm being honest).

jernfrost 9y ago
Agree this was obviously something that was going to happen. My prediction was 2019 tough. My thoughts was that they probably wanted to get more developers over to using bitcode first as well as ARM being almost at desired performance but not quite there yet. In 2020 I doubt anyone will see any problems with ARM performance on a desktop or laptop.
- stiGGG 9y ago
  I remember Chris Lattner giving some details to bitcode a while ago and according to him it's not possible to recompile an app for a different architecture having only the so called bitcode. Edit: Found the source: http://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript/#bitcode http://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript/#bitcod...

bobwaycott 9y ago

Is the IP/licensing situation particularly onerous here to prevent making their own x86_64 chip?

masklinn 9y ago
Yeah. There are only three extant architectural license holders (Intel, AMD and VIA) and they're basically in a circular firing squad of patents. To make their own chips, they'd need to either license from an existing holder (which wouldn't let them tinker unless it was a partnership or they acquired the license) or they'd need to make something so incredibly great the other three would trip over themselves to use it, and bind themselves in the process.
- jononor 9y ago
  If they wanted to go x86 they would just buy VIA? I think it will be aarch64
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Without meaning to comment on whether it is likely or not, they could also easily buy AMD. (Price tag would be in the ballpark of $15-20 billion, 3 months of income for Apple)
    - Coffeewine 9y ago
      AMD's cross-licensing agreements are unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, nontransferable. https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clarifies-cross-license-with-intel-change-of-control-terminates-agreement-for-both/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clar...
      - zlynx 9y ago
        I wonder if "non-transferable" covers tricks like Apple loaning AMD the cash for AMD to buy Apple. Then renaming the new AMD to Apple. Then it would pay itself back for the loans.

notatoad 9y ago

> It's also very unlikely to happen on such a fast timetable the article (thin as it is) claims a multi-step transition. Apple almost certainly has a version of Mac OS that can run on their iPad hardware - the transition path that makes the most sense to me is a 12" MacBook that runs essentially the same internal hardware as an iPad pro, and a MacOS that can run iOS apps. There would be a great consumer market for a MacBook that runs iOS apps, and it would serve as a hardware test bed for developers to get their MacOS applications ported over to ARM before transitioning the MacBook Pro lineup away from x86.

taborj 9y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head here
wlesieutre 9y ago
I’m still very skeptical of the “Mac that can run iOS apps” concept. Tim Cook has been pretty unambiguous in his statements about Mac vs iPad. https://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/16/tim-cook-no-converged-mac-ipad/ https://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/16/tim-cook-no-converged-m... >We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad, because what that would wind up doing, or what we’re worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants. So we want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world. And putting those two together would not achieve either. You’d begin to compromise in different ways.
- ariwilson 9y ago
  Apple has a long history of saying one thing and doing another (I don't blame them; the "Elop effect" is real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#%22Burning_Platform%22_memo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#%22Burning_Platfo...).
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  Of course this is from 2015, and it’s possible they’ve been prototyping for years and think they can overcome the fear of a subpar device. But as a former Surface Pro owner who now has an iPad Pro, I don’t see that happening. The iPad is immeasurably better as a tablet when you have tablet-oriented software available. And when you don’t, obviously the Surface’s compromise of “have a crappy desktop experience too” is usable if you need to have that option. But it’s not good compared to stuff designed for a tablet. Similarly, the chunks of Windows 10 that are clearly designed for touchscreens (like the new Settings app) are not great on a desktop compared to the older and still more powerful control panel. More consistent, sure, as any ground-up redo would be, but the information density of things like the Add or Remove Programs list is awful compared to what it was before. I don’t think Apple is going to make those compromises. They might do a more converged developer backened for Mac and iOS to make it easier to target both platforms, but they won’t shove the frontends together.

cptskippy 9y ago

Apple did a pretty decent job when they transitioned from PPC to x86_64, it has Rosetta to translate PPC to x86. Microsoft and partners released ARM based Windows Laptops this year that can run Win32 apps in emulation. What's stopping Apple from shipping Macbooks with a custom SoC that can run existing Apps in emulation until developers can recompile? I would argue that most Air and Macbook owners aren't developers and probably don't have many apps that didn't ship with their system.

danaliv 9y ago
And before that they successfully managed the transition from m68k to PPC. The processor doesn't matter.
- pvg 9y ago
  It does matter that the new processor is a lot more powerful and faster than the old processor. This wouldn't be the case this time.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    But what -- and work with me here -- if the processor is slimmer. With rounded corners.
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    Maybe the first few hardware revisions it won't be as performant. Its probably going to be an Armbook that will have the form factor of the Air or the Macbook but with A12 chips. The current A11s are in striking distance for performance.
    - Aaargh20318 9y ago
      The current A-series SoC’s were also designed around the power and thermal requirements of a mobile phone. In a laptop or desktop they would have a lot more wiggle room.

jernfrost 9y ago

It will obviously be an ARM transition not x86: https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/in-3-years-apple-will-switch-from-intel-to-arm-a6816058a1b2 https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/in-3-years-apple-will-switch-f...

otterley 9y ago
What is so "obvious" about it?
- djrogers 9y ago
  The fact that Apple develops and ships hundreds of millions of ARM processors every year, which are widely regarded to be the best ARM processors made, and they design and ship no X86 processors?
  - otterley 9y ago
    That alone doesn't make it "obvious" as applied _to a Mac_, which is a very different kind of device that caters to a different audience that often has special needs. See our other discussion threads elsewhere.
- jernfrost 9y ago
  That is what I explain in the link. I saw this move coming two years ago when I wrote that article. I noticed how regular users were using iPhones and iPads for almost everything they do. I noticed how office apps like Pages, Keynote and Numbers worked without any performance issues on iPad. I concluded ARM was fast enough for 90% of users. Once you don't have the restriction of battery life and small enclosure it is not hard to imagine that Apple could beef up ARM a lot for their desktops and laptops. Why run multiple CPU architectures when one does the job and is much cheaper? I've been thinking hard about what kind of workload ARM can't handle and I can't think of anything. Ok... there is one 1st person shooter games. But iOS is a more successful gaming platform than Mac.
  - robotresearcher 9y ago

rdsubhas 9y ago

> Apple developing chips to improve their negotiating position with Intel Not necessary. They only need to ship one model of Mac Mini or any small desktop lineup with Ryzen to improve their negotiating position while still being compatible with the existing x86_64 ecosystem. So no, this is not merely a negotiation jibe. There are definite long-term prospects. We're already moving to a mobile-first design and approach world. Having those mobile/tablet apps expand automatically to desktop is the next logical conclusion. As an app developer, there is nothing better than write-once-run-everywhere, and the cascading effects of that on the whole Apple ecosystem and future consumer audience is hard to understate. Keeping aside power, efficiency, device prices, opportunity costs and much more. > significant work by third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today. Definitely not today. Its been speculated for many years now ever since the A4 chips, and its still not official news. Usual "people who don't want to be identified". If or when this becomes official news, most partners would be like about time, because everyone is in one way or another working on convergence and multi-device. Adobe and Microsoft are examples of pivoting many of their desktop businesses successfully to cloud and apps already.

macintux 9y ago
> Having those mobile/tablet apps expand automatically to desktop is the next logical conclusion. Thankfully Apple comprises vastly smarter people than me, but I've always thought this is a bad idea. The two interaction models are so dramatically different that I don't see how merging them makes sense. A finger is not a mouse.
- PullJosh 9y ago
  It's hard to argue with the resounding success of Windows 8.
  - mamon 9y ago
    Its easy to succed when you have the monopoly in PC operating systems so success of Win 8 proves absolutely nothing. Touchscreen in PC is about as useful as a waterproof towel

djrogers 9y ago

The article doesn't say that Intel will be gone in 2020, just that Apple will be shipping macs with their own chips starting in 2020. It will likely start with one or two models available for devs, then a launch that covers more of the platform. Doesn't all have to happen at once, and Apple has been though this before in the PPC-Intel switch, which went rather well.

mtgx 9y ago

I wouldn't know, but hasn't Apple made its Mac Store apps architecture-agnostic? I'd be surprised if that's still not the case.

ken 9y ago
No, the Xcode workflow is set up to make applications CPU-agnostic by default, but there's nothing about the Mac App Store that requires it. The executables are ordinary x64 binaries. It'd be perfectly valid to write an application for the MAS in x64 assembly, if you want, as long as it's sandboxed and doesn't touch any private APIs.

danielrhodes 9y ago

> third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today This announcement is hardly a surprise. The writing has been on the wall for at least the last 5 years since LLVM replaced GCC in XCode. It became even more obvious when Apple started compiling to "Bitcode" so that they could deliver optimized binaries to devices. What that replacement meant is that it would ease Apple's transition away from any particular architecture - developers shouldn't have to do much if the app is installed from the App Store.

gurkendoktor 9y ago
> The writing has been on the wall for at least the last 5 years since LLVM replaced GCC in XCode. It became even more obvious when Apple started compiling to "Bitcode" so that they could deliver optimized binaries to devices. These weren't clear signs of an upcoming ARM switch: • Apple has been purging software that's under the GPL for quite a while now, and GCC was probably high on the list since Apple (NeXT) had been bitten by its license before[1]. • The Intel switch in 2006 was extremely smooth even using GCC. • Bitcode is not enabled on macOS, and even if it were, it's not abstract enough to recompile an x86 app for ARM[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9728162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9728162

pohl 9y ago

It could be that they are just trying to improve their negotiating position. Even if that's true, I'd wager that it is just the short-term contingency of an investment with a long-term view. I bet they have their eye on the end-game. When I say that, I'm thinking of the old TED Talk by Amory Lovins called "Winning the Oil Endgame". I feel like there's some parallel one could draw between peak oil and process improvements. Intel has slowed down now that it's more difficult to extract increased performance with each iteration. I'm guessing someone at Apple is thinking about where they'd like to be positioned when the well runs dry.