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Have anyone checked with adobe and autodesk if this essentially kills the professional mac workstation as a viable product going forward? I have no doubt they

Have anyone checked with adobe and autodesk if this essentially kills the professional mac workstation as a viable product going forward? I have no doubt they can make it fast and usable enough for the naive consumer living inside the bubble of what relatively inexpensive(consumer grade) app-store apps can do and that microsoft will release something pretending to be MS office for a new ARM macbook line, but photoshop, autocad, mathematica(ok that one is fairly portable), AfterEffects and whatever it is the pro's use for video editing those days are a different ballgame. We saw microsoft stumble down that path with their successfull port of windows to arm where the OS itself worked but where no major 3rd party business essential app ever got ported to windows for arm, with a lot of IT departments choosing to keep windows 7 around our of fear of what 10 would morph into until MS begun to dial back their ambitions for windows everywhere. Im guessing that the short run result of Apple going though with OSX on arm is that a lot of the CAD and video editing heavyweights just drop support for whatever OSX morphs into to support running on IOS hardware.

bhouston 9y ago
Adobe has a lot of stuff that works well on iOS. ARM has neon instructions for SIMD. I think they will be okay. Changing over from one SIMD architecture to another is not that hard. AutoCAD isn't ultra optimized for Mac anyhow, it will be okay. This transition may screw up or significantly slow down VMs of Intel-based OSes like Ubuntu.
- ssutch3 9y ago
  A lot of progress has been made recently in ARM virtualization (see its push into datacenter units). An ARM VM should run reasonably quick, and Ubuntu works fine on ARM.
  - wilun 9y ago
    Are there extensions with a stronger memory model by at very low cost (matching the one of x86)? If not, we might not get excellent perf with x86 emulated by arm in the multithread & multicore era we are.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    > An ARM VM should run reasonably quick, and Ubuntu works fine on ARM. Sure, but if we're deploying to x86 servers running Linux, then running Ubuntu on virtual ARM doesn't seem terribly wise[0] — it won't tickle the right bugs. [0] For my money, running Ubuntu in general is a poor idea. It's not a great server OS, so it shouldn't be on the server — and if it's not on the server, it shouldn't be on the development systems either. Just run Debian everywhere.
- huebnerob 9y ago
  Your last point may be a bit of an understatement. It's going to absolutely annihilate x86 virtualization on the Mac. Like, I don't think parallels or VMware will even attempt to write an x86 emulator for ARM, they'll just pack up and leave. But the Mac thrived for a very long time without x86 compatibility, and it can do the same again, virtualization was always kind of a happy accident for us anyway.
  - Bud 9y ago
    Parallels and VMWare will just abandon their primary market? No they won't.
    - 0x0 9y ago
      Maybe not Parallels, but VMWare Fusion always seemed like a skunkworks side-project that almost got killed off at least once. Their cash cow is enterprise hypervisors, not $60 consumer windows emulation, unfortunately. (Fusion has been serving me very well for windows and .NET development purposes so far)
    - huebnerob 9y ago
      They can try, but you can't get blood from a stone. Emulating x86 on ARM is going to give you grotesquely low performance, it's arguably not even the same category of problem that they currently solve (virtualization, not emulation). One thing they could run with is ARM-on-ARM virtualization, which is a more direct (heh) parallel to what they do on Intel now, but ARM hypervisors are less mature, and their practical applications, less readily apparent.
    - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
      Didn't Parallels start off with an Intel emulation before Apple switched to x86.
      - huebnerob 9y ago
        There was "Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac" which was x86 emulation for PowerPC but performance was abysmal.
- Stranger43 9y ago
  But adobe's arm work is probably related a completely different series of products directed at the not quite a demanding pro segment of the market, and you still need to port autoCAD something they might not think is worth it. The problem is that you are not just porting from a low TDP atom(by any other name) chip with a intel gfx card but a class of computers that include dual Xeon systems with 2 or more high end ati cards, to something that don't really scale upwards from a macbook air in terms of raw power. And when you remember how badly outperformed even the highest spec mac pro is compared to their competitors, who is likely still going to be around a decade from now the question is to what extend a maker of high margin niche product targeted at demanding professionals(with corporate procurement budgets) to even consider supporting the mac with anything but a simplified html5 based consumer version that lacks most of the advanced features going forward.
- deleted 9y ago
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- mmcconnell1618 9y ago
  I think developers flocked to Intel Macs because it gave them one machine that could run Mac, Linux, Windows in virtual or bootcamp environments. If x86 compatibility goes away, developers may jump ship to Linux or Windows machines.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    UNIX developers you mean.
  - squiggleblaz 9y ago
    I used to have a PPC G5 iMac running Linux. It was fine; hitched me onto the Linux-on-Mac train for more than a decade once I finally ditched Mac OS X. And Linux already works nicely on ARM - it's the most common deployment. This may be a terrible outcome for multi-OS users, but it's not guaranteed.
- mr_toad 9y ago
  Server versions of major Linux distributions already run on ARM. Gnome and KDE too, although I hear that there can be issues. Part of the problem with ARM support is the lack of hardware for Linux developers to test on. MacBooks with ARM would actually help this process.
htormey 9y ago
How do you think the announcement that OSX will be supporting external graphics cards fit into Adobe/Autodesks plans? I don’t really do much video, photo or 3d editing these days but isn’t that all GPU driven? If that’s the case then couldn’t someone like Nvidia pick up the slack for Apple with a really nice external modular offering?
- jlouis 9y ago
  It is also quite likely Apple will try to add some kind of SIMD chip to their ARM efforts. Things just got a hole lot more interesting if we can wrestle Intel from their current leader position.
- abakker 9y ago
  I use both Adobe and Autodesk, and neither yet support eGPU well. Essentially, if they wrote their own graphics engines (both adobe and autodesk did) then eGPU doesn't work that well. Lightroom has started to come over, and some features of Fusion360 seem to work OK, too, but for the most part the only eGPU accelerated parts of the apps seem to be the user interfaces. Given Apple's recent obsession with AR/VR, I wouldn't be surprised if the new apple architecture was really GPU first, CPU second. Apple has always loved graphics, and in all likelihood they recognize that a more parallel OS model might actually suit people's day to day needs better.
- Stranger43 9y ago
  Sure nvidia could build a traditional co-processor card(just like in the old SBUS days) but what are the chance of apple releasing hardware with that kind of extendability after going all in on the IOSification of the mac?, even thunderbolt(which is a much lower level bus then USB3) did not support the same kind of performance as a proper PCIe slot. And even if you could most of the software in question is composed of countless components some of whom predates the mac itself and porting that to support anthing but the traditional big core CPU platform is not a trival thing to do, which is why the Xeon powered workstations and servers still exists and why manycore designs only really work in the supercomputer space. You could argue that the workstation itself is a dead concept and that the future is "cloud" with html5 frontends even for video and CAD workloads* which is something autocad and adobe is likely working on as a long term strategy, but in the short term they need the workstation that post Jobs apple don't appear to to have any interest in building.
api 9y ago
My concern is that they are going to completely lock down and cripple MacOS and turn it into iOS, making it worthless as a professional machine. The CPU doesn't matter but the versatility and user-centric-ness of the OS does. If they're talking about making MacOS more like iOS I think it might be time to start looking for the exit. A laptop/desktop is not just a portable dumb terminal for accessing siloed cloud services.
- olivermarks 9y ago
  I agree and it's unlikely my next laptop will be an Apple device...
  - schappim 9y ago
    I was thinking the same thing, but Apple doesn't care. Folks like us do not represent the majority of the market.
    - olivermarks 9y ago
      exactly. It's a shame... written on old macbook air
- Bud 9y ago
  I see no reason to suspect that changing CPUs would be related in any way to "crippling" macOS. Those are two separate issues.
  - api 9y ago
    They are separate issues, but history has shown that changes in architecture (or form factor) is often used as a pretext to also make other changes. Mobile transformed the computer into a portable surveillance and addictive media device aimed at the user rather than a personal computing device built for the user. Those are two separate issues of course -- there is nothing in mobile that mandates that it be designed to commoditize its users -- but the shift to mobile was used to also smuggle in a total inversion of the user/machine relationship. Apple is kind of a strange company. On one hand they have stuck up for the privacy and security of their users, but on the other hand they were a factor in this inversion of relationship. They weren't the only or even the primary factor, but the locked down nature of their iOS platform helped other actors such as Facebook and Google implement surveillance-capitalist and gamified attention-capitalist user experiences there. Whether or not I stick with Apple depends on whether or not they keep my computer mine even as they swap out the CPU. I could care less about the architecture as long as it performs well, but I do care about the nature of my relationship with the technology that I use. I care about this for both personal and professional/pragmatic reasons.
egypturnash 9y ago
Apple has done this twice already. 680x0 to PowerPC, then PowerPC to Intel. Adobe's come along on both of these.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
  Those changes were all to more powerful processors such that emulating the old architecture wouldn't be that bad. In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors and thus emulation at any reasonable level of performance wouldn't be that viable.
  - schappim 9y ago
    The processors wouldn't necessarily be less powerful. Case in point is the A11 outpacing the CoreM processors. The greater threat is the ios-ofcation of macOS. We've seen many companies pull their apps from the Mac App store due to the limitations of the sandbox.
  - Bud 9y ago
    That's not "likely" at all. Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition, even though the Apple processors in question are designed for mobile devices and have much less power to work with. Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.
    - drham 9y ago
      Faster, probably, but 2x+ Faster like in PowerPC > Intel very unlikely. Which is why there’s much less likely to be enough performance budget for effective emulation.
      - saagarjha 9y ago
        Presumably their "desktop-grade" A-whatever chip will have a higher TDP and clock speed than their mobile counterparts.
tathougies 9y ago
Apple has more experience with architecture changes than many other companies. In general, transitioning to a new processor architecture is very straightforward, and way easier than switching to a new OS. The reason why windows on ARM never caught on was simply that windows was still available for x86. With apple it's different though, because once (Or if) they switch, then the only way to be on OS X is through the use of the new architecture. There are a variety of features of OS X that are going to keep the design community there for the foreseeable future.
- mynameisvlad 9y ago
  Well, except it's not that simple at all. Even if they immediately discontinue all previous models and only introduce new architecture models in one go, you still have several years worth of computers sitting on x86/x64. They won't be able to get rid of it in the OS until at least the mid-2020s. As an example with the PPC->x86 move, they released Rosetta in 2005, stopped pre-installing it in 2009, and only in 2011 did then completely remove the ability to install it. I foresee a similar experience here.
  - tathougies 9y ago
    The technology to do this is already there. Apple will likely extend some piece of open-source work or acquire a small company which specializes in emulating x86 on whatever architecture they transition to. Emulators are complicated pieces of software, but they are well understood ones. We know how to make them reasonably performant, and Apple has had around four major architecture changes under its belt from which it can draw experience. The existence of Rosetta does not prove the transition to be 'complicated'. It just shows the transition was a thing
deleted 9y ago
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feedmeseymour 9y ago
Whenever there is a big change by Apple, I always see a lot of relatively niche comments like this, and they're really important, IMHO. These sorts of "great, now I can't use Mac for XYZ" problems might, at first glance, be dismissed as "well, looks like Apple out-grew your niche market... sorry." Upon further investigation, however, it appears that Apple might letting go of too many niche customers whose needs will be met by niche products; niche products that will grow concentrically, and the Apple we know now will die (has already been dying) a death of 1000 cuts, and the shell that remains will the consumer tech toy company we see taking shape now.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  I don't feel that the parent comment was "niche". This argument comes up every time anyone discusses a architecture switch, and the invariable response is that Apple has already done this twice before with an emulation layer.
  - ascagnel_ 9y ago
    And, if anything, it's easier now than in the past. Most code has been abstracted away from the bare metal, so it's more a matter of porting runtime environments over (V8, JRE, etc) than it is rewriting apps.
- freedomben 9y ago
  Yep, it's the slow death of the general purpose computer (Cory Doctorow reference).
- mediocrejoker 9y ago
  The niche market of "software developer" is in an interesting position if you include developers who create the apps that Apple needs to sell phones. Clearly "iOS app developer" is only a subset of "software developer" but I think there is only so far down the "consumer tech toy" road they can go without doing longer term damage to their ecosystem
  - 9y ago
jasonlotito 9y ago
FTA: The Pro units will remain on Intel until Apple's chips could compete for this reason.
120photo 9y ago
Apple goes where the money is. I'm sure they have ran the numbers. If this makes financial sense I'm sure they are willing to drop the professional graphics market. Still waiting on that new Mac Pro?
- gurkendoktor 9y ago
  If Apple manages to lose both designers and developers, I think the whole ecosystem (not just macOS) will suffer more than Apple's management realizes. I also don't think it's possible to run the numbers on this scenario. Without the insistence of so many designers on using a Mac, would macOS really have won a foothold in corporate environments? If enough designers and developers switch to Windows, who's to say that macOS won't slowly turn into a hobbyist OS that no IT department wants to support (like Linux, or Macs ~12 years ago)?
  - askvictor 9y ago
    Apple doesn't care about the corporate market. They care about individual users. And as long as the CEO wants their shiny Mac (also, see iPhone, iPad) then the IT dept will support it. Your argument might have been valid a decade or so ago, but since then, every home has a laptop or three, and BYOD happened.
    - gurkendoktor 9y ago
      In my limited experience, management often uses a shiny iPhone, a shiny iPad, but then a Windows laptop (or none at all). I can't find any statistics to back it up, though.
laythea 9y ago
Whats the big deal? We all write code that is cross platform, don't we? :)
Lramseyer 9y ago
If you remember back to the mid 2000's when Apple switched from PowerPC to (Intel) x86, the higher end machines still ran with PowerPC chips in them while the mid-low end products had x86 chips. All of the old applications that weren't yet ported to x86 had to use "Rosetta." It wasn't until a little while later, presumably once most of the professional software companies had good working x86 versions of their software - that the high end mac pro systems started seeing Intel chips in them. Microsoft started down that path last year with Windows 10 on ARM, and Intel had some legal issues with that - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel-fires-warning-shots-at-microsoft-claims-x86-emulation-is-a-patent-minefield/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel... It will be interesting to see how Apple handles this.
- apetrovic 9y ago
  There's two problems with that story: first, the famous switch from PowerPC to Intel happened when the desktop was the king, and app developers had strong incentive to recompile programs to the new platform. Right now? Not so much. Second, while Apple's mobile processors are currently the best in ARM world, for "pro" desktop computers Apple needs desktop-grade processor. Making something comparable to i7 isn't such an easy and cheap job.
  - collyw 9y ago
    > the famous switch from PowerPC to Intel happened when the desktop was the king, I though one of the major reasons for the switch to Intel was the power consumption and performance on laptops.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      I'm thinking that in this case "desktop" is cast in opposition to tablets and cell phones and laptop computers can be considered "desktop" devices.
  - Lramseyer 9y ago
    > Second, while Apple's mobile processors are currently the best in ARM world, for "pro" desktop computers Apple needs desktop-grade processor. Making something comparable to i7 isn't such an easy and cheap job. Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Cavium have created very powerful ARM chips for non-mobile application. Apple definitely has the chip architects, the money, and the experience to do such a thing.
wilun 9y ago
There are several aspect to the perf hypotheses you make, and I don't see why Apple could not design its own CPU with excellent perfs. Current Apple best CPUs are already performing very well compared to some Intel CPU. Not the fastest Intel CPU, obviously, but a) Apple Arm implementation is already above all the Arm competitors b) we are talking about an Arm implementation optimized for low energy consumption and other components and functions essential to a high end mobile phone -- and even then it starts to catch up chips that are dissipating more and integrate far less features c) the hypothetical Apple latop/desktop cpu won't be coming today. From a theoretical pov I see nothing that prevent Apple to achieve what they want. Especially with the kind of money they have, and the kind of team they have to already design chips. Oh btw, the A11 has more transistors than a 4core Skylake. That does not means much, except that we are dealing with the similar kind of projects, and that in that kind of project, the perf and thermal budget you have is not something that suddenly makes the people working on it go: oh my god, but we don't know how to make that, we are only good for mobile phone SoC. I suspect some of Apple employees working on their chips even worked at Intel before... Another problem with what you say is that the workloads you consider are especially well suited for accelerations, and it is even simpler to compete in this area compared to old school CPU power. You just need bulk compute power, that can come in the form of, at least: vector instructions; GPU; DSP; fixed function acceleration units. Those areas are not especially dominated by Intel. Some last points are that: top CPU speed are (mostly) not growing anymore. That lets others catch up Intel in the few area that they did not yet -- others also are catching up on the process side. The result of that equation is that I really don't see why Apple could not manage to create high performance CPU to the point of not needing Intel anymore. Maybe at first they would limit to their laptops, and switch the Mac Pro last, but I'm not even sure of that.
- imtringued 9y ago
  >Some last points are that: top CPU speed are (mostly) not growing anymore. That lets others catch up Intel in the few area that they did not yet -- others also are catching up on the process side. Meanwhile in reality the top end non apple ARM SoCs only have the performance of a single highend intel core. http://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks/ http://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks/ vs http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/7779910 http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/7779910
CodeWriter23 9y ago
> is going to require significant work by third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today I don't see recompiling their next release with a different version of Xcode qualifying as "significant work".
RI_Swamp_Yankee 9y ago
If Apple needs to, they could buy either Autodesk or Adobe. To be honest, I'd prefer the buy and port Solidworks.
aoeth43ntnt 9y ago
> whatever it is the pro's use for video editing those days are a different ballgame. That would be Final Cut Pro X, which Apple itself makes. (Also, Motion, Compressor, and honestly, iMovie does a lot of stuff you wouldn't think it could do for a free app.)
- ancientworldnow 9y ago
  There are very very few pros using Final Cut Pro X (lots of wedding videographers though). Every single edit house I've been in recently is on Avid or Premiere (usually both) with a FCP7 computer somewhere for legacy projects. I've never encountered anyone using Motion professionally. It's all Nuke and After Effects with Fusion growing.
adrianmonk 9y ago
I'm not a chip designer, but how practical would it be for Apple to try to make a CPU that has good hardware support for both ARM and x86/x86-64 binaries? It's a radical direction, but they are designing the chip by themselves and for themselves, they have deep pockets, and if it worked well it would reduce an important risk. There are already several chips capable of running multiple instruction sets. Most desktop machines have chips that can run either x86 or x84-64. Some(?) ARM chips have a Thumb mode. So that seems very practical, and obviously there is a bigger "impedance mismatch" when trying to do both x86 and ARM on the same chip, how much worse is it? If you could do some kind of hardware real-time instruction translation without wasting much silicon and without reducing performance (for x86) that much, it seems like it would take a lot of the pain out of the transition.
- aneutron 9y ago
  I'm not a chip designer either, but IIRC, the current architectures are actually something similar, whereas the CISC is broken down into custom RISC-ish instructions by a HW layer, which is then executed by the RISC-ish cores. And while it might be doable (x64 and ARM on the same chip), I think it might not be a smart decision, since some things will not function correctly or will have to be redone (e.g. speculative execution). I don't know either architectures on a deep understanding level (x64 or ARM), but I have a feeling that there should be some big architectural changes that would prevent x64 code to run on ARM natively.
- BooneJS 9y ago
  See: Transmeta.
- mbroncano 9y ago
  AFAIK the biggest impediment might be that Intel would need to license Apple to do so, not to talk about patents etc.
brandonmenc 9y ago
No one wants to be the next QuarkXPress.
matwood 9y ago
Interesting question. I think the advantage Apple has here over MS, is that partners like Adobe already have experience making apps run on Apple's ARM chips. Lightroom on iOS is surprisingly full featured and fast.
romanovcode 9y ago
Why are you so sure that it will be ARM processors tho?
cmrdporcupine 9y ago
Why assume this is an arch switch to ARM? What's stopping Apple from making an x86-64 compatible chip? Or even a chip with dual instruction sets? I'm sure they have the in-house talent at this point to make it happen.
whywhywhywhy 9y ago
>this essentially kills the professional mac workstation as a viable product going forward? Some would argue it's already been dead for a long time. I'm seeing less and less directors and artists using Macs for their workstations when it was close to 100% about 10 years ago. They just didn't supply a competitive workstation machine for so long that many were forced to move to windows if they wanted power. I don't know a 3D artist anymore who isn't doing all their rendering through multiple Nvidia GPUs in a tower PC. The iMac Pro has only been out for a few weeks after years of neglect and I'd struggle to recommend it to anyone at that price point. (Ironically many I know still use a Mac laptop but it's relegated purely to office/email/slack/web tasks that back in the day we'd associate with Windows machines, not the actual creative work)

bhouston 9y ago

Adobe has a lot of stuff that works well on iOS. ARM has neon instructions for SIMD. I think they will be okay. Changing over from one SIMD architecture to another is not that hard. AutoCAD isn't ultra optimized for Mac anyhow, it will be okay. This transition may screw up or significantly slow down VMs of Intel-based OSes like Ubuntu.

ssutch3 9y ago
A lot of progress has been made recently in ARM virtualization (see its push into datacenter units). An ARM VM should run reasonably quick, and Ubuntu works fine on ARM.
- wilun 9y ago
  Are there extensions with a stronger memory model by at very low cost (matching the one of x86)? If not, we might not get excellent perf with x86 emulated by arm in the multithread & multicore era we are.
- zeveb 9y ago
  > An ARM VM should run reasonably quick, and Ubuntu works fine on ARM. Sure, but if we're deploying to x86 servers running Linux, then running Ubuntu on virtual ARM doesn't seem terribly wise[0] — it won't tickle the right bugs. [0] For my money, running Ubuntu in general is a poor idea. It's not a great server OS, so it shouldn't be on the server — and if it's not on the server, it shouldn't be on the development systems either. Just run Debian everywhere.
huebnerob 9y ago
Your last point may be a bit of an understatement. It's going to absolutely annihilate x86 virtualization on the Mac. Like, I don't think parallels or VMware will even attempt to write an x86 emulator for ARM, they'll just pack up and leave. But the Mac thrived for a very long time without x86 compatibility, and it can do the same again, virtualization was always kind of a happy accident for us anyway.
- Bud 9y ago
  Parallels and VMWare will just abandon their primary market? No they won't.
  - 0x0 9y ago
    Maybe not Parallels, but VMWare Fusion always seemed like a skunkworks side-project that almost got killed off at least once. Their cash cow is enterprise hypervisors, not $60 consumer windows emulation, unfortunately. (Fusion has been serving me very well for windows and .NET development purposes so far)
  - huebnerob 9y ago
    They can try, but you can't get blood from a stone. Emulating x86 on ARM is going to give you grotesquely low performance, it's arguably not even the same category of problem that they currently solve (virtualization, not emulation). One thing they could run with is ARM-on-ARM virtualization, which is a more direct (heh) parallel to what they do on Intel now, but ARM hypervisors are less mature, and their practical applications, less readily apparent.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    Didn't Parallels start off with an Intel emulation before Apple switched to x86.
    - huebnerob 9y ago
      There was "Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac" which was x86 emulation for PowerPC but performance was abysmal.
Stranger43 9y ago
But adobe's arm work is probably related a completely different series of products directed at the not quite a demanding pro segment of the market, and you still need to port autoCAD something they might not think is worth it. The problem is that you are not just porting from a low TDP atom(by any other name) chip with a intel gfx card but a class of computers that include dual Xeon systems with 2 or more high end ati cards, to something that don't really scale upwards from a macbook air in terms of raw power. And when you remember how badly outperformed even the highest spec mac pro is compared to their competitors, who is likely still going to be around a decade from now the question is to what extend a maker of high margin niche product targeted at demanding professionals(with corporate procurement budgets) to even consider supporting the mac with anything but a simplified html5 based consumer version that lacks most of the advanced features going forward.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mmcconnell1618 9y ago
I think developers flocked to Intel Macs because it gave them one machine that could run Mac, Linux, Windows in virtual or bootcamp environments. If x86 compatibility goes away, developers may jump ship to Linux or Windows machines.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  UNIX developers you mean.
- squiggleblaz 9y ago
  I used to have a PPC G5 iMac running Linux. It was fine; hitched me onto the Linux-on-Mac train for more than a decade once I finally ditched Mac OS X. And Linux already works nicely on ARM - it's the most common deployment. This may be a terrible outcome for multi-OS users, but it's not guaranteed.
mr_toad 9y ago
Server versions of major Linux distributions already run on ARM. Gnome and KDE too, although I hear that there can be issues. Part of the problem with ARM support is the lack of hardware for Linux developers to test on. MacBooks with ARM would actually help this process.

htormey 9y ago

How do you think the announcement that OSX will be supporting external graphics cards fit into Adobe/Autodesks plans? I don’t really do much video, photo or 3d editing these days but isn’t that all GPU driven? If that’s the case then couldn’t someone like Nvidia pick up the slack for Apple with a really nice external modular offering?

jlouis 9y ago
It is also quite likely Apple will try to add some kind of SIMD chip to their ARM efforts. Things just got a hole lot more interesting if we can wrestle Intel from their current leader position.
abakker 9y ago
I use both Adobe and Autodesk, and neither yet support eGPU well. Essentially, if they wrote their own graphics engines (both adobe and autodesk did) then eGPU doesn't work that well. Lightroom has started to come over, and some features of Fusion360 seem to work OK, too, but for the most part the only eGPU accelerated parts of the apps seem to be the user interfaces. Given Apple's recent obsession with AR/VR, I wouldn't be surprised if the new apple architecture was really GPU first, CPU second. Apple has always loved graphics, and in all likelihood they recognize that a more parallel OS model might actually suit people's day to day needs better.
Stranger43 9y ago
Sure nvidia could build a traditional co-processor card(just like in the old SBUS days) but what are the chance of apple releasing hardware with that kind of extendability after going all in on the IOSification of the mac?, even thunderbolt(which is a much lower level bus then USB3) did not support the same kind of performance as a proper PCIe slot. And even if you could most of the software in question is composed of countless components some of whom predates the mac itself and porting that to support anthing but the traditional big core CPU platform is not a trival thing to do, which is why the Xeon powered workstations and servers still exists and why manycore designs only really work in the supercomputer space. You could argue that the workstation itself is a dead concept and that the future is "cloud" with html5 frontends even for video and CAD workloads* which is something autocad and adobe is likely working on as a long term strategy, but in the short term they need the workstation that post Jobs apple don't appear to to have any interest in building.

api 9y ago

My concern is that they are going to completely lock down and cripple MacOS and turn it into iOS, making it worthless as a professional machine. The CPU doesn't matter but the versatility and user-centric-ness of the OS does. If they're talking about making MacOS more like iOS I think it might be time to start looking for the exit. A laptop/desktop is not just a portable dumb terminal for accessing siloed cloud services.

olivermarks 9y ago
I agree and it's unlikely my next laptop will be an Apple device...
- schappim 9y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, but Apple doesn't care. Folks like us do not represent the majority of the market.
  - olivermarks 9y ago
    exactly. It's a shame... written on old macbook air
Bud 9y ago
I see no reason to suspect that changing CPUs would be related in any way to "crippling" macOS. Those are two separate issues.
- api 9y ago
  They are separate issues, but history has shown that changes in architecture (or form factor) is often used as a pretext to also make other changes. Mobile transformed the computer into a portable surveillance and addictive media device aimed at the user rather than a personal computing device built for the user. Those are two separate issues of course -- there is nothing in mobile that mandates that it be designed to commoditize its users -- but the shift to mobile was used to also smuggle in a total inversion of the user/machine relationship. Apple is kind of a strange company. On one hand they have stuck up for the privacy and security of their users, but on the other hand they were a factor in this inversion of relationship. They weren't the only or even the primary factor, but the locked down nature of their iOS platform helped other actors such as Facebook and Google implement surveillance-capitalist and gamified attention-capitalist user experiences there. Whether or not I stick with Apple depends on whether or not they keep my computer mine even as they swap out the CPU. I could care less about the architecture as long as it performs well, but I do care about the nature of my relationship with the technology that I use. I care about this for both personal and professional/pragmatic reasons.

egypturnash 9y ago

Apple has done this twice already. 680x0 to PowerPC, then PowerPC to Intel. Adobe's come along on both of these.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
Those changes were all to more powerful processors such that emulating the old architecture wouldn't be that bad. In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors and thus emulation at any reasonable level of performance wouldn't be that viable.
- schappim 9y ago
  The processors wouldn't necessarily be less powerful. Case in point is the A11 outpacing the CoreM processors. The greater threat is the ios-ofcation of macOS. We've seen many companies pull their apps from the Mac App store due to the limitations of the sandbox.
- Bud 9y ago
  That's not "likely" at all. Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition, even though the Apple processors in question are designed for mobile devices and have much less power to work with. Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.
  - drham 9y ago
    Faster, probably, but 2x+ Faster like in PowerPC > Intel very unlikely. Which is why there’s much less likely to be enough performance budget for effective emulation.
    - saagarjha 9y ago
      Presumably their "desktop-grade" A-whatever chip will have a higher TDP and clock speed than their mobile counterparts.

tathougies 9y ago

Apple has more experience with architecture changes than many other companies. In general, transitioning to a new processor architecture is very straightforward, and way easier than switching to a new OS. The reason why windows on ARM never caught on was simply that windows was still available for x86. With apple it's different though, because once (Or if) they switch, then the only way to be on OS X is through the use of the new architecture. There are a variety of features of OS X that are going to keep the design community there for the foreseeable future.

mynameisvlad 9y ago
Well, except it's not that simple at all. Even if they immediately discontinue all previous models and only introduce new architecture models in one go, you still have several years worth of computers sitting on x86/x64. They won't be able to get rid of it in the OS until at least the mid-2020s. As an example with the PPC->x86 move, they released Rosetta in 2005, stopped pre-installing it in 2009, and only in 2011 did then completely remove the ability to install it. I foresee a similar experience here.
- tathougies 9y ago
  The technology to do this is already there. Apple will likely extend some piece of open-source work or acquire a small company which specializes in emulating x86 on whatever architecture they transition to. Emulators are complicated pieces of software, but they are well understood ones. We know how to make them reasonably performant, and Apple has had around four major architecture changes under its belt from which it can draw experience. The existence of Rosetta does not prove the transition to be 'complicated'. It just shows the transition was a thing

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feedmeseymour 9y ago

Whenever there is a big change by Apple, I always see a lot of relatively niche comments like this, and they're really important, IMHO. These sorts of "great, now I can't use Mac for XYZ" problems might, at first glance, be dismissed as "well, looks like Apple out-grew your niche market... sorry." Upon further investigation, however, it appears that Apple might letting go of too many niche customers whose needs will be met by niche products; niche products that will grow concentrically, and the Apple we know now will die (has already been dying) a death of 1000 cuts, and the shell that remains will the consumer tech toy company we see taking shape now.

saagarjha 9y ago
I don't feel that the parent comment was "niche". This argument comes up every time anyone discusses a architecture switch, and the invariable response is that Apple has already done this twice before with an emulation layer.
- ascagnel_ 9y ago
  And, if anything, it's easier now than in the past. Most code has been abstracted away from the bare metal, so it's more a matter of porting runtime environments over (V8, JRE, etc) than it is rewriting apps.
freedomben 9y ago
Yep, it's the slow death of the general purpose computer (Cory Doctorow reference).
mediocrejoker 9y ago
The niche market of "software developer" is in an interesting position if you include developers who create the apps that Apple needs to sell phones. Clearly "iOS app developer" is only a subset of "software developer" but I think there is only so far down the "consumer tech toy" road they can go without doing longer term damage to their ecosystem
- 9y ago

jasonlotito 9y ago

FTA: The Pro units will remain on Intel until Apple's chips could compete for this reason.

120photo 9y ago

Apple goes where the money is. I'm sure they have ran the numbers. If this makes financial sense I'm sure they are willing to drop the professional graphics market. Still waiting on that new Mac Pro?

gurkendoktor 9y ago
If Apple manages to lose both designers and developers, I think the whole ecosystem (not just macOS) will suffer more than Apple's management realizes. I also don't think it's possible to run the numbers on this scenario. Without the insistence of so many designers on using a Mac, would macOS really have won a foothold in corporate environments? If enough designers and developers switch to Windows, who's to say that macOS won't slowly turn into a hobbyist OS that no IT department wants to support (like Linux, or Macs ~12 years ago)?
- askvictor 9y ago
  Apple doesn't care about the corporate market. They care about individual users. And as long as the CEO wants their shiny Mac (also, see iPhone, iPad) then the IT dept will support it. Your argument might have been valid a decade or so ago, but since then, every home has a laptop or three, and BYOD happened.
  - gurkendoktor 9y ago
    In my limited experience, management often uses a shiny iPhone, a shiny iPad, but then a Windows laptop (or none at all). I can't find any statistics to back it up, though.

laythea 9y ago

Whats the big deal? We all write code that is cross platform, don't we? :)

Lramseyer 9y ago

If you remember back to the mid 2000's when Apple switched from PowerPC to (Intel) x86, the higher end machines still ran with PowerPC chips in them while the mid-low end products had x86 chips. All of the old applications that weren't yet ported to x86 had to use "Rosetta." It wasn't until a little while later, presumably once most of the professional software companies had good working x86 versions of their software - that the high end mac pro systems started seeing Intel chips in them. Microsoft started down that path last year with Windows 10 on ARM, and Intel had some legal issues with that - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel-fires-warning-shots-at-microsoft-claims-x86-emulation-is-a-patent-minefield/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel... It will be interesting to see how Apple handles this.

apetrovic 9y ago
There's two problems with that story: first, the famous switch from PowerPC to Intel happened when the desktop was the king, and app developers had strong incentive to recompile programs to the new platform. Right now? Not so much. Second, while Apple's mobile processors are currently the best in ARM world, for "pro" desktop computers Apple needs desktop-grade processor. Making something comparable to i7 isn't such an easy and cheap job.
- collyw 9y ago
  > the famous switch from PowerPC to Intel happened when the desktop was the king, I though one of the major reasons for the switch to Intel was the power consumption and performance on laptops.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I'm thinking that in this case "desktop" is cast in opposition to tablets and cell phones and laptop computers can be considered "desktop" devices.
- Lramseyer 9y ago
  > Second, while Apple's mobile processors are currently the best in ARM world, for "pro" desktop computers Apple needs desktop-grade processor. Making something comparable to i7 isn't such an easy and cheap job. Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Cavium have created very powerful ARM chips for non-mobile application. Apple definitely has the chip architects, the money, and the experience to do such a thing.

wilun 9y ago

There are several aspect to the perf hypotheses you make, and I don't see why Apple could not design its own CPU with excellent perfs. Current Apple best CPUs are already performing very well compared to some Intel CPU. Not the fastest Intel CPU, obviously, but a) Apple Arm implementation is already above all the Arm competitors b) we are talking about an Arm implementation optimized for low energy consumption and other components and functions essential to a high end mobile phone -- and even then it starts to catch up chips that are dissipating more and integrate far less features c) the hypothetical Apple latop/desktop cpu won't be coming today. From a theoretical pov I see nothing that prevent Apple to achieve what they want. Especially with the kind of money they have, and the kind of team they have to already design chips. Oh btw, the A11 has more transistors than a 4core Skylake. That does not means much, except that we are dealing with the similar kind of projects, and that in that kind of project, the perf and thermal budget you have is not something that suddenly makes the people working on it go: oh my god, but we don't know how to make that, we are only good for mobile phone SoC. I suspect some of Apple employees working on their chips even worked at Intel before... Another problem with what you say is that the workloads you consider are especially well suited for accelerations, and it is even simpler to compete in this area compared to old school CPU power. You just need bulk compute power, that can come in the form of, at least: vector instructions; GPU; DSP; fixed function acceleration units. Those areas are not especially dominated by Intel. Some last points are that: top CPU speed are (mostly) not growing anymore. That lets others catch up Intel in the few area that they did not yet -- others also are catching up on the process side. The result of that equation is that I really don't see why Apple could not manage to create high performance CPU to the point of not needing Intel anymore. Maybe at first they would limit to their laptops, and switch the Mac Pro last, but I'm not even sure of that.

imtringued 9y ago
>Some last points are that: top CPU speed are (mostly) not growing anymore. That lets others catch up Intel in the few area that they did not yet -- others also are catching up on the process side. Meanwhile in reality the top end non apple ARM SoCs only have the performance of a single highend intel core. http://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks/ http://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks/ vs http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/7779910 http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/7779910

CodeWriter23 9y ago

> is going to require significant work by third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today I don't see recompiling their next release with a different version of Xcode qualifying as "significant work".

RI_Swamp_Yankee 9y ago

If Apple needs to, they could buy either Autodesk or Adobe. To be honest, I'd prefer the buy and port Solidworks.

aoeth43ntnt 9y ago

> whatever it is the pro's use for video editing those days are a different ballgame. That would be Final Cut Pro X, which Apple itself makes. (Also, Motion, Compressor, and honestly, iMovie does a lot of stuff you wouldn't think it could do for a free app.)

ancientworldnow 9y ago
There are very very few pros using Final Cut Pro X (lots of wedding videographers though). Every single edit house I've been in recently is on Avid or Premiere (usually both) with a FCP7 computer somewhere for legacy projects. I've never encountered anyone using Motion professionally. It's all Nuke and After Effects with Fusion growing.

adrianmonk 9y ago

I'm not a chip designer, but how practical would it be for Apple to try to make a CPU that has good hardware support for both ARM and x86/x86-64 binaries? It's a radical direction, but they are designing the chip by themselves and for themselves, they have deep pockets, and if it worked well it would reduce an important risk. There are already several chips capable of running multiple instruction sets. Most desktop machines have chips that can run either x86 or x84-64. Some(?) ARM chips have a Thumb mode. So that seems very practical, and obviously there is a bigger "impedance mismatch" when trying to do both x86 and ARM on the same chip, how much worse is it? If you could do some kind of hardware real-time instruction translation without wasting much silicon and without reducing performance (for x86) that much, it seems like it would take a lot of the pain out of the transition.

aneutron 9y ago
I'm not a chip designer either, but IIRC, the current architectures are actually something similar, whereas the CISC is broken down into custom RISC-ish instructions by a HW layer, which is then executed by the RISC-ish cores. And while it might be doable (x64 and ARM on the same chip), I think it might not be a smart decision, since some things will not function correctly or will have to be redone (e.g. speculative execution). I don't know either architectures on a deep understanding level (x64 or ARM), but I have a feeling that there should be some big architectural changes that would prevent x64 code to run on ARM natively.
BooneJS 9y ago
See: Transmeta.
mbroncano 9y ago
AFAIK the biggest impediment might be that Intel would need to license Apple to do so, not to talk about patents etc.

brandonmenc 9y ago

No one wants to be the next QuarkXPress.

matwood 9y ago

Interesting question. I think the advantage Apple has here over MS, is that partners like Adobe already have experience making apps run on Apple's ARM chips. Lightroom on iOS is surprisingly full featured and fast.

romanovcode 9y ago

Why are you so sure that it will be ARM processors tho?

cmrdporcupine 9y ago

Why assume this is an arch switch to ARM? What's stopping Apple from making an x86-64 compatible chip? Or even a chip with dual instruction sets? I'm sure they have the in-house talent at this point to make it happen.

whywhywhywhy 9y ago

>this essentially kills the professional mac workstation as a viable product going forward? Some would argue it's already been dead for a long time. I'm seeing less and less directors and artists using Macs for their workstations when it was close to 100% about 10 years ago. They just didn't supply a competitive workstation machine for so long that many were forced to move to windows if they wanted power. I don't know a 3D artist anymore who isn't doing all their rendering through multiple Nvidia GPUs in a tower PC. The iMac Pro has only been out for a few weeks after years of neglect and I'd struggle to recommend it to anyone at that price point. (Ironically many I know still use a Mac laptop but it's relegated purely to office/email/slack/web tasks that back in the day we'd associate with Windows machines, not the actual creative work)