7 ms·

ARM Macs will be the end of the line for many "prosumer" customers of Apple. It will probably sell quite well though. And it will bring back fanless designs.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> ARM Macs will be the end of the line for many "prosumer" customers of Apple. Why do you think that? Do you just think ARM can't match Intel performance? Or do you think the prosumers need Intel-specific functionality like counters? What I'm worried about is implementing top-quality ARM backends for software like the JVM. We need someone doing this rapidly as I think an ARM MacBook Pro will just turn up one day, unannounced.
- rjsw 7y ago
  There have been Hotspot backends for ARM and AArch64 in OpenJDK for several versions now.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Depending who you talk to, you'll get the opinion that they're much lower quality than the AMD64 backends. I think that may be particularly an issue in Graal. Some people will tell you that the way Graal is designed is problematic for ARM and that's a long-term problem. I don't know if that's entirely true or not, but now we need it solved quickly if it is!
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      I used to think that, but apparently nowadays ARM JVM is pretty good. Have no idea about Graal though (and I have no idea why would anyone need Graal at all).
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        > I have no idea why would anyone need Graal at all It has new optimisations like partial escape analysis that C2 doesn't have. In production this saves Twitter 13% on compute resources in their data centre. That's MASSIVE. I presume it's tens of thousands of dollars a month. People also use Graal to compile Java applications to standalone native executables, which isn't something C2 can do. And finally Graal is a system that you can use to run languages other than Java. For example JavaScript on Graal, which runs on a JVM but is about as fast as V8.
        jsjohnst 7y ago
        > I presume it's tens of thousands of dollars a month. You can probably add a zero, if not several more, assuming the 13% number is accurate.
- freehunter 7y ago
  People are constantly predicting the death of Macs. Every time a rumor comes out, “well macs are for real professionals anymore” and every time a new Mac is released “well Apple is finished with real professionals”. Never fails.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    I don't even know what people really mean by 'professionals'. I think it's 'people with my exact workflow'. I mean a lawyer is a professional and they can probably do fine with a 2014 Air.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Somehow I think they always mean GNU/Linux devs using macOS as pretty UNIX.
      - fierarul 7y ago
        Oddly enough, when I first had money for a computer I picked whatever was closer to an UNIX. The Mac won because Thinkpad came out of the box with Windows and they never officially supported any Linux flavour. Today I would compare the Mac with the Dell XPS which is Linux certified. Different times.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Fair enough, but that is a niche use case, and not what developers registered on ADC care about, nor the users of their applications.
        fierarul 7y ago
        I think it's obvious most of what's said here is one's personal opinion. I mentioned 'many' prosumers. I believe there are 'many' Java developers that use Macs but in the grand scheme of things I imagine it's a tiny sliver of the overall professional user base. So, yeah, I don't believe Apple is committing suicide with any market move they make. They have the data, they have the marketing, they will do well. But Macs don't seem like a good future developer workstation to me. Not anymore.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  The JavaScript engines have been doing quite well on ARM for a while now, so I guess someone will just need to put in some love to bring the JVM up to par as well. I doubt it will be Apple, but perhaps we'll see one of the other major companies do it once ARM servers become mainstream.
- mkj 7y ago
  Does much important software still use Java on MacOS? Performance cross platform software would more likely be using Qt, and server Java runs on Linux.
  - Marsymars 7y ago
    > Does much important software still use Java on MacOS? Android development.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > Performance cross platform software would more likely be using Qt Qt is a graphical user interface library - Java is a programming language and runtime. They aren't really the same thing at all and it doesn't really make sense to compare them. > Performance cross platform software would more likely be using Qt, and server Java runs on Linux. Guess where most people develop that Java server software? They're on macOS!
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Actually Windows, macOS on Java shops isn't that common in Europe and company IT tends to provide Windows images to developers as well, as per desktop market.
- dhosek 7y ago
  >What I'm worried about is implementing top-quality ARM backends for software like the JVM. We need someone doing this rapidly as I think an ARM MacBook Pro will just turn up one day, unannounced. Nope. Never gonna happen. There are too many moving parts in a processor transition (and Apple has done two so far: 68xxxx to PowerPC to Intel, not counting the 64 bit transition). There's always more than a simple recompile (if that's even possible as some of the big players may be using their own proprietary toolchains for building, although I imagine this is less common now than it was during the last two processor transitions).
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    All rumors point to an ARM Mac, and some very credible ones point to one rolling out within a year. Apple has been gradually abandoning cruft that they probably didn't want to bother porting across architectures.
    - macintux 7y ago
      I have no idea whether a transition is imminent, but Apple is famous for abandoning cruft, so I wouldn’t treat that as indication of anything.
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      I think the transition will happen, but I don't think the post above worrying that "an ARM MacBook Pro will just turn up one day, unannounced" is going to be correct. It's not impossible, but the PowerPC-to-Intel transition didn't happen that way -- they shipped developer-only machines in mid-2005 and didn't start shipping consumer Intel machines until January 2006, and took nearly all of 2006 to make that transition. I'd expect an ARM transition to be similar, and if anything, slower.
    - dhosek 7y ago
      The not going to happen isn't about the transition but about it happening suddenly.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- fierarul 7y ago
  macOS is getting more locked down in time to the point of being iOS with a keyboard. This makes a lot of developer tools hard to use, eg. debuggers don't work anymore https://jdk.java.net/macos/ https://jdk.java.net/macos/ So, software changes alone require quite some upkeep on your existing tooling otherwise you run into problems. Now imagine a whole new CPU architecture which means none of your tools work unless they are a) recompiled or b) virtualised. I expect the pain of virtualisation and the problems with that to make the whole experience miserable. And many tools will either never be recompiled or take so much time you are forever stuck in pleistocene times. I remember, ahem, fondly when Apple dropped Java and we had to wait forever to be able to work with modern versions on OS X. At some point Landon Fuller stepped in and hand-made a Java 6 build. Catalina is also quite famous in my circles as something to avoid. And the notarization requirements for macOS tools that are not on the macOS AppStore is also something that has been wasting some of my time (and the $99 for Apple, of course). So, all in all, I don't see how ARM Macs combines with the Catalina successor and even more stringent Apple rules are going to make a good developer workstation.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    You may download a version of Java lacking notarization if you'd like to debug it.
    - fierarul 7y ago
      I'm doing http://www.openbeans.org http://www.openbeans.org which is an IDE supporting Java among other programming languages. It's made in Java too. So, I need to distribute a notarized build that also provides a JDK for users. My users would naturally want to debug their own code using the provided JDK. So either we just forget about notarization on developer tools and we just tell people to disable everything or Apple has to figure out some better way. I already see they apply the notarization rules differently so perhaps if you get your tool on the "internal Apple tools whitelist" it's easier. I programmed on Macs since the G4 days but I will not be upgrading the current software or hardware given the current trend. Just switch to a nice Thinkpad running Linux (or a BSD if I feel adventurous).
- H1Supreme 7y ago
  > Why do you think that? Do you just think ARM can't match Intel performance? Can it match single core performance? Audio production plugins are often running on single cores. The A13 maxes at 2.65ghz, and the 80-core Altra maxes at 3.0 (turbo boosted). Both of those are too low for me to use in audio production. I intentionally went with less cores and a higher clock speed on my last computer because of this.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    I'm not sure you can compare processors with wildly difference ISA on clock-speed alone like that.
  - ken 7y ago
    Clock speeds aren't comparable between different architectures. You're also looking at a CPU designed for a phone, and a CPU designed for a server farm. If Apple were to design a CPU for professional multimedia workstations, it would not have the same parameters as either of these.
  - mcphage 7y ago
    > Both of those are too low for me to use in audio production. What do you consider the minimum to be usable in audio production?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Apple's chips have some of the best single core performance in the industry.
nottorp 7y ago
[quote] It will probably sell quite well though. And it will bring back fanless designs. [/quote] Fanless? Wishful thinking. Check out the Raspberry Pi 4's overheating problems. If they make an ARM Mac, it won't be fanless.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  A laptop with heat sinks will have a larger area to dissipate heat. Where the perfect balance is remains to be seen as always.
- ianhowson 7y ago
  Thankyou. ARM and x86 are both capable of very high performance. ARM isn't magically capable of putting out 10x the FLOPS in the same power envelope. Modern x86 parts are very close to ARM in terms of work completed per unit energy consumed. The difference is that it's rare to see an ARM part with a heatsink/fan and it's rare to see an x86 part without one. RPi and MacBook 12 are notable exceptions to this. All of this presumes that CPU utilization is what's eating the power. It's not. For an idle machine (e.g. ARM iPad vs. x86 MacBook) most of the energy goes into the display backlight. The SoCs idle down to near zero energy consumption. It's even difficult to assert that CPU usage is a big power culprit on these machines. My MacBook 12 can max out CPU forever and hold 1.8GHz with no fan. The 4 core post-Haswell MacBooks can max out their CPUs and have the fan running very slowly. But run the GPU hard on either of those machines? You'll max out the fans and power consumption immediately and things will start throttling. TL;DR: CPU arch makes no difference. ARM Macs will have similar cooling solutions to the current ones.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> ARM Macs will be the end of the line for many "prosumer" customers of Apple. Why do you think that? Do you just think ARM can't match Intel performance? Or do you think the prosumers need Intel-specific functionality like counters? What I'm worried about is implementing top-quality ARM backends for software like the JVM. We need someone doing this rapidly as I think an ARM MacBook Pro will just turn up one day, unannounced.

rjsw 7y ago
There have been Hotspot backends for ARM and AArch64 in OpenJDK for several versions now.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Depending who you talk to, you'll get the opinion that they're much lower quality than the AMD64 backends. I think that may be particularly an issue in Graal. Some people will tell you that the way Graal is designed is problematic for ARM and that's a long-term problem. I don't know if that's entirely true or not, but now we need it solved quickly if it is!
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    I used to think that, but apparently nowadays ARM JVM is pretty good. Have no idea about Graal though (and I have no idea why would anyone need Graal at all).
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      > I have no idea why would anyone need Graal at all It has new optimisations like partial escape analysis that C2 doesn't have. In production this saves Twitter 13% on compute resources in their data centre. That's MASSIVE. I presume it's tens of thousands of dollars a month. People also use Graal to compile Java applications to standalone native executables, which isn't something C2 can do. And finally Graal is a system that you can use to run languages other than Java. For example JavaScript on Graal, which runs on a JVM but is about as fast as V8.
      - jsjohnst 7y ago
        > I presume it's tens of thousands of dollars a month. You can probably add a zero, if not several more, assuming the 13% number is accurate.
freehunter 7y ago
People are constantly predicting the death of Macs. Every time a rumor comes out, “well macs are for real professionals anymore” and every time a new Mac is released “well Apple is finished with real professionals”. Never fails.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  I don't even know what people really mean by 'professionals'. I think it's 'people with my exact workflow'. I mean a lawyer is a professional and they can probably do fine with a 2014 Air.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Somehow I think they always mean GNU/Linux devs using macOS as pretty UNIX.
    - fierarul 7y ago
      Oddly enough, when I first had money for a computer I picked whatever was closer to an UNIX. The Mac won because Thinkpad came out of the box with Windows and they never officially supported any Linux flavour. Today I would compare the Mac with the Dell XPS which is Linux certified. Different times.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Fair enough, but that is a niche use case, and not what developers registered on ADC care about, nor the users of their applications.
        fierarul 7y ago
        I think it's obvious most of what's said here is one's personal opinion. I mentioned 'many' prosumers. I believe there are 'many' Java developers that use Macs but in the grand scheme of things I imagine it's a tiny sliver of the overall professional user base. So, yeah, I don't believe Apple is committing suicide with any market move they make. They have the data, they have the marketing, they will do well. But Macs don't seem like a good future developer workstation to me. Not anymore.
saagarjha 7y ago
The JavaScript engines have been doing quite well on ARM for a while now, so I guess someone will just need to put in some love to bring the JVM up to par as well. I doubt it will be Apple, but perhaps we'll see one of the other major companies do it once ARM servers become mainstream.
mkj 7y ago
Does much important software still use Java on MacOS? Performance cross platform software would more likely be using Qt, and server Java runs on Linux.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  > Does much important software still use Java on MacOS? Android development.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > Performance cross platform software would more likely be using Qt Qt is a graphical user interface library - Java is a programming language and runtime. They aren't really the same thing at all and it doesn't really make sense to compare them. > Performance cross platform software would more likely be using Qt, and server Java runs on Linux. Guess where most people develop that Java server software? They're on macOS!
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Actually Windows, macOS on Java shops isn't that common in Europe and company IT tends to provide Windows images to developers as well, as per desktop market.
dhosek 7y ago
>What I'm worried about is implementing top-quality ARM backends for software like the JVM. We need someone doing this rapidly as I think an ARM MacBook Pro will just turn up one day, unannounced. Nope. Never gonna happen. There are too many moving parts in a processor transition (and Apple has done two so far: 68xxxx to PowerPC to Intel, not counting the 64 bit transition). There's always more than a simple recompile (if that's even possible as some of the big players may be using their own proprietary toolchains for building, although I imagine this is less common now than it was during the last two processor transitions).
- saagarjha 7y ago
  All rumors point to an ARM Mac, and some very credible ones point to one rolling out within a year. Apple has been gradually abandoning cruft that they probably didn't want to bother porting across architectures.
  - macintux 7y ago
    I have no idea whether a transition is imminent, but Apple is famous for abandoning cruft, so I wouldn’t treat that as indication of anything.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    I think the transition will happen, but I don't think the post above worrying that "an ARM MacBook Pro will just turn up one day, unannounced" is going to be correct. It's not impossible, but the PowerPC-to-Intel transition didn't happen that way -- they shipped developer-only machines in mid-2005 and didn't start shipping consumer Intel machines until January 2006, and took nearly all of 2006 to make that transition. I'd expect an ARM transition to be similar, and if anything, slower.
  - dhosek 7y ago
    The not going to happen isn't about the transition but about it happening suddenly.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fierarul 7y ago
macOS is getting more locked down in time to the point of being iOS with a keyboard. This makes a lot of developer tools hard to use, eg. debuggers don't work anymore https://jdk.java.net/macos/ https://jdk.java.net/macos/ So, software changes alone require quite some upkeep on your existing tooling otherwise you run into problems. Now imagine a whole new CPU architecture which means none of your tools work unless they are a) recompiled or b) virtualised. I expect the pain of virtualisation and the problems with that to make the whole experience miserable. And many tools will either never be recompiled or take so much time you are forever stuck in pleistocene times. I remember, ahem, fondly when Apple dropped Java and we had to wait forever to be able to work with modern versions on OS X. At some point Landon Fuller stepped in and hand-made a Java 6 build. Catalina is also quite famous in my circles as something to avoid. And the notarization requirements for macOS tools that are not on the macOS AppStore is also something that has been wasting some of my time (and the $99 for Apple, of course). So, all in all, I don't see how ARM Macs combines with the Catalina successor and even more stringent Apple rules are going to make a good developer workstation.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  You may download a version of Java lacking notarization if you'd like to debug it.
  - fierarul 7y ago
    I'm doing http://www.openbeans.org http://www.openbeans.org which is an IDE supporting Java among other programming languages. It's made in Java too. So, I need to distribute a notarized build that also provides a JDK for users. My users would naturally want to debug their own code using the provided JDK. So either we just forget about notarization on developer tools and we just tell people to disable everything or Apple has to figure out some better way. I already see they apply the notarization rules differently so perhaps if you get your tool on the "internal Apple tools whitelist" it's easier. I programmed on Macs since the G4 days but I will not be upgrading the current software or hardware given the current trend. Just switch to a nice Thinkpad running Linux (or a BSD if I feel adventurous).
H1Supreme 7y ago
> Why do you think that? Do you just think ARM can't match Intel performance? Can it match single core performance? Audio production plugins are often running on single cores. The A13 maxes at 2.65ghz, and the 80-core Altra maxes at 3.0 (turbo boosted). Both of those are too low for me to use in audio production. I intentionally went with less cores and a higher clock speed on my last computer because of this.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  I'm not sure you can compare processors with wildly difference ISA on clock-speed alone like that.
- ken 7y ago
  Clock speeds aren't comparable between different architectures. You're also looking at a CPU designed for a phone, and a CPU designed for a server farm. If Apple were to design a CPU for professional multimedia workstations, it would not have the same parameters as either of these.
- mcphage 7y ago
  > Both of those are too low for me to use in audio production. What do you consider the minimum to be usable in audio production?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Apple's chips have some of the best single core performance in the industry.

nottorp 7y ago

[quote] It will probably sell quite well though. And it will bring back fanless designs. [/quote] Fanless? Wishful thinking. Check out the Raspberry Pi 4's overheating problems. If they make an ARM Mac, it won't be fanless.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
A laptop with heat sinks will have a larger area to dissipate heat. Where the perfect balance is remains to be seen as always.
ianhowson 7y ago
Thankyou. ARM and x86 are both capable of very high performance. ARM isn't magically capable of putting out 10x the FLOPS in the same power envelope. Modern x86 parts are very close to ARM in terms of work completed per unit energy consumed. The difference is that it's rare to see an ARM part with a heatsink/fan and it's rare to see an x86 part without one. RPi and MacBook 12 are notable exceptions to this. All of this presumes that CPU utilization is what's eating the power. It's not. For an idle machine (e.g. ARM iPad vs. x86 MacBook) most of the energy goes into the display backlight. The SoCs idle down to near zero energy consumption. It's even difficult to assert that CPU usage is a big power culprit on these machines. My MacBook 12 can max out CPU forever and hold 1.8GHz with no fan. The 4 core post-Haswell MacBooks can max out their CPUs and have the fan running very slowly. But run the GPU hard on either of those machines? You'll max out the fans and power consumption immediately and things will start throttling. TL;DR: CPU arch makes no difference. ARM Macs will have similar cooling solutions to the current ones.