14 ms·

Apple’s abandonment of Intel chips is inevitable (2018)

78 points by partingshots 6y ago

sitkack 6y ago
Having a single vendor for the most important, developer exposed component in your system is very very risky.
- greendave 6y ago
  Seems that'd be an argument for x86, not against it. Especially now when AMD is quite competitive. > starting sometime around 2020 That prediction hasn't proven wrong yet, but it's looking increasingly unlikely. If the Mac were a bigger part of their revenues, they'd probably be further along in the transition though.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    If I were AMD, I'd court Apple with a bespoke part just like they do for all the consoles.
    - m463 6y ago
      AMD already does that with apple. their mac pro gpus (current and 2013) seem to be special designs.
      - sitkack 6y ago
        Already does but has are totally different. AMD could be ideally suited to ship an X86/ARM hybrid, run stuff on say 8 cores of ARM and say 2 cores of X86 for stuff that has compat problems. AMD already has ARM server experience with the https://www.amd.com/en/amd-opteron-a1100 https://www.amd.com/en/amd-opteron-a1100
sarah180 6y ago
It could happen, but I suspect this is a negotiating position more than a real desire to leave behind x86 in favor of Apple's ARM architecture chips. It makes more sense for them to improve the iPad Pro than to drop software compatibility across the MacBook lines.
- FreeFull 6y ago
  Well, this wouldn't be the first time they've switched architectures. Before, it was PowerPC to x86, back around 2006.
  - city41 6y ago
    And before that, Motorola 68k.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      For each of those there was a clear perf advantage on the transition though.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        For native apps sure. But my 6100/60 - the slowest PPC Mac - was slower in emulation than my LCII with a 68030-40Mhz accelerator. My computer was less than half the speed of the high end 040s at the time.
      - jkestner 6y ago
        1. We haven’t yet seen what Apple's desktop-class chip can do. 2. Performance per watt is critical. Apple moved to Intel in large part because PowerPC couldn’t get this down, and one of the first two Intel Macs introduced was the MacBook Pro.
- EricE 6y ago
  I dunno - an ARM version of the MacBook Air would be very appealing. I doubt that many MacBook Air users are running VMS (although the latest model supporting 16GB makes it more practical, it wouldn’t be my first choice) or Boot Camp. The vast majority of Mac Apps I use are in active development and I doubt there would be much lag before universal versions that also support ARM would be released. Apple has done this twice before(68K and PPC), and currently runs a split CPU architecture ecosystem - granted there are hard product delineations between them today, but there aren’t any significant technical reasons why Apple couldn’t effectively support both ARM and Intel Macs - and do so for an indefinite period of time.
CyanLite2 6y ago
Intel is dying under the weight of its own technical debt. AMD will eventually have this problem too as ARM catches up. Meanwhile, it's 2020 and and x86 instruction sets upgrades are infrequent compared to ARM. And x86 CPUs still are required to support 16-bit devices from 35 years ago.
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  > And x86 CPUs still are required to support 16-bit devices from 35 years ago. I heard somewhere that this year Intel was going to begin to phase out support for BIOS, which would allow Intel to eliminate CPUs booting up in "real mode". I think as long as plain PCI is something supported, some sort of 16-bit support has to be in the firmware because of option ROMs. Though I'm not sure UEFI couldn't service those with some sort of emulation layer (may as well, UEFI's already complex enough).
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Intel (and AMD's) problems have nothing to do with any supposed "technical debt" imposed by x86. Also, the x86 instruction set gets upgraded with practically every single generation of Intel and AMD processor.
  - bcatanzaro 6y ago
    ARM is very old as well and has plenty of technical debt. RISCV, on the other hand...
    - mikece 6y ago
      What do you suppose the chances are of Apple compiling/running iOS and macOC on RISCV?
      - pram 6y ago
        zero percent
      - 6y ago
xt00 6y ago
Another aspect of Intel not working that closely with Apple (it this ARM transition happens) is that Apple is often seen as knowing what they are talking about on deep technical issues (basically they have lots of really good engineers). So Intel will need to find other smart customers that they can work closely with to understand the consumers needs and what they should modify in their chips for the next gen.
- soperj 6y ago
  Is that why they dropped intel in the 90s?
  - MengerSponge 6y ago
    Apple didn't switch processor vendors in the 90's. They dropped Motorola/PowerPC in the 00's in favor of Intel's Core processors that were remarkably faster and more power efficient.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      Well, they did swap processor architectures in the 90s too. 68k for powerpc.
      - MengerSponge 6y ago
        Oh yeah, my mistake. Motorola made both though, right?
        cptskippy 6y ago
        IBM developed the Power architecture and I believe a consortium of Apple, IBM and Motorola (AIM) did the whole ISA.
        jandrese 6y ago
        Yes, but there were totally incompatible so that didn't help much.
EricE 6y ago
I would love an ARM based MacBook Air. I dunno why it’s widely assumed if Apple introduces one ARM based Mac that all Mac’s will eventually go ARM - Operating systems supporting multiple CPU architectures isn’t a new thing, and Apple has had more commercial success than anyone else. I have no doubt for me as an end user that once apps are updated I wouldn’t experience any difference - other than better performance, battery performance, and a cooler running computer. Thankfully I’m not clinging to any older unsupported apps so I realize it’s easy for me to be pro ARM Mac - which is why I don’t expect Apple to go ARM only any time soon but offer a choice for quite a while while the market settles out. And who knows, Intel could turn it around. They haven’t managed for the last 7 years or so, but I suppose it could still eventually happen.
- dragonshed 6y ago
  > I dunno why it’s widely assumed if Apple introduces one ARM based Mac that all Mac’s will eventually go ARM Two points to think about on this issue: 1) When Apple moved away from PowerPC, they did so entirely. 2) Apple historically* wanted to keep its hardware offerings simple and easy to understand, and supporting multiple architectures could muddy their offerings. * When Jobs returned to Apple, he killed the confusing lineups in favor of one option each of desktop or mobile, for pros and home users. This has changed a bit lately, but I can imagine ARM and Intel options of Macbook vs Macbook Air vs Macbook Pro being a nonstarter. Anyway, I agree, an ARM Macbook Air would be awesome, assuming the software followed suit.
- soneil 6y ago
  I suspect that only going ARM on a few models could be detrimental. The risk is creating a niche within a niche. If they move everything, as with previous arch moves, it's "do or die" for third-parties. But if, eg, MacBook Air turns into MacBook ARM but MacBook Pro remains Intel - this would be a very difficult schism. Many publishers might look at it as being pro customers staying on Intel and cost-sensitive customers on ARM, which could damage adoption. The risk is having no carrot and no stick - not entirely dissimilar to Itanium's problem.
  - wtallis 6y ago
clairity 6y ago
apple is moving on from intel because intel burned them badly with 10nm process chips. those were supposed to be out 5 years ago, when apple was readying the current design generation of macbook pros. apple finally had to give up hope and release the machine with hotter and less performant chips than they thought they’d be launching with. that was the point that apple realized intel had become incapable of leading the industry any longer and started looking beyond intel.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  There's some parallels with IBM dropping the ball on PowerPC, driving Apple to jump to Intel. The situation hasn't gotten quite as bad as it was with PowerPC, but Apple has seen this all before and wants to make the leap before it gets that bad, or at the very least open up an escape hatch or two (given Apple's relationship with AMD for graphics, I would be shocked if they haven't also talked about Ryzen in high end Macs).
mikece 6y ago
"Because Intel isn't moving anywhere..." reminds me of the rationale of why they dumped POWER processors 15(?) years ago.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  Apple could just go for AMD, they have a really decent offering these days. Next to zero cost for external vendors as both are functionally equal, only a bit of cost for them to re-design their PCBs...
0xy 6y ago
Obviously we'll be waiting a while before ARM hits high-end MacBook Pro and Mac Pro machines, what are the odds that Apple would retool to support AMD chips in that time? I would love an AMD MBP. Intel's chips have rapidly diminishing value for pretty much all use cases and AMD is firing on all cylinders with Dr Lisa Su.
- artificial 6y ago
  I'd like to see AMD as well, Ryzen is awesome bang for the buck. How would these perform in a laptop though since even the MacBook Air has overheating issues.
gumby 6y ago
One thing that is ignored by the punditocracy is that a laptop has a lot of other silicon beyond the CPU.* Apple would have to have all the support chipset as well. Internal connections like memory controller etc they already have from iPhone/iPad, but Intel provides support for peripheral access. This works for the iPad, but note that the iPad Pro doesn't have laptop-class USB-C support much to the annoyance of some people. A laptop would have to, and probably would need USB4/TB4 (since if you're designing your own you might as well go straight there -- classic Apple move) which would need all the PCIe, DP etc plumbing they are currently getting from Intel. Certainly doable, but there's a lot more boring spadework needed beyond the sexy CPU. * This is why I always laughed when I saw articles comparing laptops by CPU clock speed rather than actual performance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- adiabatty 6y ago
  > note that the iPad Pro doesn't have laptop-class USB-C support much to the annoyance of some people. What would make it laptop-class, other than by adding more USB-C ports?
  - gumby 6y ago
    In short, thunderbolt. I suspect they went to the USB Type-C connector (on the iPad Pro) mainly for power delivery and while they got DisplayPort, they don’t have full peripheral support. USB 3.1g2 (putatively 10 GBPs) is the fastest supported; may be ok for an iPad but not really suitable for a non-archival external disk. These limitations are perfectly reasonable for an iPad but not for a laptop. FWIW nothing but a single TB 4 port (not even an audio jack) would work just fine for me, but I know some others feel differently for their use.
    - jkestner 6y ago
      Thunderbolt is built on PCIe, which iPhones don’t use except for the SSD.
dathinab 6y ago
My guess is that there is a high chance that Apple will ship ARM laptops (air) running iOS, just potentially a modified version of it. Then they will slowly deprecate MacOS, but only after they made sure that development of software can be done one the modified version of iOS. Through that's just a wild guess.
- Spartan-S63 6y ago
  Given their penchant for keeping their touch interfaces (and software) separate from their non-touch, I'd imagine you'd get a full-fat macOS compiled for ARM. At this point, I'm sure they have internal builds of macOS on ARM that they've been toying with for years. It just doesn't make sense to adapt iPadOS even more to a MacBook Air computer if they're not going to include a touchscreen. With them holding out as long as they have on touchscreens, I can't imagine them reversing course.
- Tagbert 6y ago
  also, iOS is not, yet, ready to satisfy all of the use cases for Mac OS. It is possible to build an iOS laptop and some people would like that but it’s not going to cut it for a big number of their customers. Apple had been letting Macs and Mac OS languish for a few years but has really stepped up their game over the last couple of years. I think they will keep them separate for a long time while brings things together under the hood. Apple certainly has Mac OS ported for Arm and they also certainly have their own apps cross-compiled for Arm Mac OS. Once the OS and libraries are ported, the apps are relatively easy to adapt to the new system.
pmarreck 6y ago
Ryzen Threadripper is the Intel wake-up call, if ARM wasn't already
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  Meanwhile Intel's sitting with record revenues & profits. Like they haven't had wake-up calls in their history ...
  - scarface74 6y ago
    RIMs most profitable year was in 2010. Three years after the iPhone camera out. Profits are a lagging indicator.
    - Synaesthesia 6y ago
      Alright, but Intel isn’t exactly RIM, they can adapt. They’ve been around for quite a while now! I obviously applaud the competition, both from AMD and ARM
      - rleigh 6y ago
        Can they adapt in time? Being "around for a while" means nothing. There are thousands of big-name businesses that fail all the time after being in business for decades, or even centuries. As they say, past performance is not an indicator of future success...
        scarface74 6y ago
        I couldn’t find any numbers for the server market, but Apple alone sells more products based on their chip design than all of the personal computers sold worldwide. Intel has already lost the mobile market, threw the towel in on the cellular chip market and sold the division to Apple, lost the console market to AMD, and the worlds largest cloud provider AWS has started selling access to both AMD and ARM servers at a much cheaper cost/cpu rate. The education market is rapidly moving to ARM based Chromebooks.
dschuessler 6y ago
> "As investment and development dollars continue flowing into the dominant mobile platforms — Android and iOS — it’s logical to expect that every useful desktop application that hasn’t yet been adapted to them already is on its way there." I'm unsure whether some classes of desktop applications can ever be as useful on mobile platforms as they are on the desktop. I'm thinking of applications that legitimately need a lot of screen estate to stay useful like digital audio workstations or IDEs with extensive debugging support. I contend that useful desktop applications are sometimes useful precisely because they run on a desktop.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  If they make a 16 inch iPad Pro with enough connectors to drive multiple external displays, I'm not sure there would be much of a difference.
mihaaly 6y ago
Mobile first applications make software difficult to use, compromising features to the limited nature of mobile devices. It is a worrying trend driven not by practical but appearance focused design not only corrupting desktops but the web too. So many good old software or solutions go down the drain being ported to mobile platform and becoming increasingly difficult to use or/and pure dumb. Mobile platforms are auxiliary from productivity point of view, never can be the main thing. Have its good place where it shines but fails terribly elsewhere. Putting into the centre brings degradation.
- nine_k 6y ago
  Is a laptop a mobile device? Is my laptop with an i7 and 32GB RAM a crippled device? Imagine a 15" iPad Ultra Pro with comparable hardware, running iOS, with wireless keyboard and mouse / touchpad. Could it be a real workstation?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mihaaly 6y ago
    Working on a handheld device with fingers requires different approach than keyboard and mouse put on a desk together with the device, the trouble is with the OS and software not with the technical specification. If those are made for one, effective for one, will be crippled for the other. Also try using the same software on both 5" and 32" and with either finger only or keyboard and mouse only, efficiently. Good luck with that! If powerful processor and plenty of RAM would make a laptop then your Playstation was a laptop too! :)
cosmotic 6y ago
Apple's abandonment of <Whatever they replace Intel chips with> is inevitable
xoa 6y ago
I'm honestly somewhat surprised in all these discussions that one word hasn't come up a lot more frequently, more so as the years go by: patents. Patents under the current regime last 20 years. AMD64 was a 1999 announcement and spec was out in 2000 IIRC, 1st implementation (Opteron?) was like 2003, Conroe was 2006. And chip designs are done years before mass fabbing too. All of which means that, starting this year and definitely in the next few years all possible patents on the core x86-64 standard will expire, with each additional year bringing a few extra extensions. As far as what Apple requires to run historic macOS code, they clearly have not built a dependence on every cutting edge new instruction. They officially supported 2010 Mac Pros (which were on the Westmere chips) until last year, and 10.15 can still be made to run on them. Ever since Apple giving up on Intel chips has been discussed one general assumption/objection that I have always seen essentially assumed is that it also means abandoning x86 too, and in turn an enormous amount of macOS software, compatibility, etc. But need that actually be the case? x86-64 going patent free for all the essential parts opens up a lot of options for a lot of players. Maybe I've missed a lot of discussion (and if so I'd love to be directed to it) but so far I really haven't seen it considered much. 20 years is a long time in tech, but it's not forever. Without IP holding them back, need Apple ever give it up? They can focus on ARM, but a high performance hardware/software translation layer would certainly change the math around a transition wouldn't it?
- wtallis 6y ago
  I think the big problem here is that code which really needs to be run on native x86-64 hardware rather than through emulation/dynamic translation is likely to also be code that uses newer instruction set extensions that Apple would have to license.
ksec 6y ago
And there are similar articles in 2019, 2017, 2016, all the way to 2011 [1]. One of the thing about these rumours is that they are always 6 months or so before another new Mac product launches or refresh. It could also have been coincidence since Mac used to update once a year, and any rumours would always fit into that time frame. But I cant help and wonder if this is just a tactics from Apple on pricing. Apple doesn't get any marketing subsidies from the Intel stickers since Apple dont use any of those. Surely Apple would still want an equivalent incentives if not more. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/05/apple-could-adopt-arm-for-laptops-but-why-would-it/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/05/apple-could-adopt-ar...
- saagarjha 6y ago
  There have been a number of fairly credible leaks in this direction recently, pointing to a launch within a year or so.
- prewett 6y ago
  There were similar persistent rumors about Apple having a build of OS X running on x86 back in The Day. I dismissed them as wishful thinking by the rumorer. One day Apple announced x86 Macs and I was simply shocked.
  - ksec 6y ago
    As far as I am aware, Apple had been running x86 OSX before even Steve knew about it. So the 5 years double life secret agent was merely a marketing pitch. The whole story was written on cake.co But what was clear though was Steve wanted a notebook, and Intel Centrino was the perfect fit. And the roadmap from IBM was a dead end. And it was very obvious, ( unless you belong to those group that does not believe in Notebook market) that switching to Intel was the only choice. But this time there is nothing ARM / Apple CPU can do that Intel cant. The only real advantage Apple get is cost reduction. Intel isn't like IBM where it has no low power roadmap, and Intel's IPC aren't far behind either.
- kevindong 6y ago
  The public always gets constantly bombarded with "Apple rumored to do _X_ in _Y_ months" news articles. I always wondered how accurate those predictions turn out to be since I don't think anyone ever does a retrospective on the accuracies of those fodder of news articles.
rsynnott 6y ago
Case in point; the chart in the article shows Ice Lake coming out in 2018. It's _still_ barely out.
alasdair_ 6y ago
I was at Sun around 2002 or so, when the writing was on the wall about SPARC perhaps not being the best long-term plan and various x86 projects starting. I hope Apple learns from Sun's mistakes. Also, somewhat related: does anyone remember Transmeta? They were about a decade too early but their ideas on low-power, low-heat x86-compatible mobile-friendly processors were pretty cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta
- traden210 6y ago
  Apple has built an ecosystem of automatic app re-compiling for new architecture. Every AppStore app that is built using modern (last 5 years) tools and xcode, in theory, should be transparently re-compilable to a different uarch. Apple currently does this with watchos apps. So, yes, they learned. I suspect they will ship an x86 emulator as they did with Rosetta, additionally.
  - andrekandre 6y ago
    for between arm variants that is true, but bitcode is still tied to the target architcure [1], so transparent re-compiling x64 bitcode into arm64 is unlikely unless apple has done some changes to how bitcode works that im unaware of [1] https://www.infoq.com/articles/ios-9-bitcode/ https://www.infoq.com/articles/ios-9-bitcode/
- FullyFunctional 6y ago
  Oranges and, eh, pears. Sun never had the volume Apple does. SPARC was far from competitive with x86 in its later days, unlike Apple's A-series chips. Transmeta? I was there from ~2001 until we closed the doors. What some people still don't understand was that Transmeta's failure was a business failure, not a technical one. When Crusoe launched it had greater power efficiency than Intel's chips. Intel has _officially_ credited Transmeta with kickstarting Intel's focus on power. Execution and business failure cost Transmeta to slip more than a year at which point opportunity and customer goodwill had sailed. Someone really should write a book about all the drama.
dreamcompiler 6y ago
On the one hand I like this idea because I'm tired of Intel's lousy security and lousy energy budget. On the other hand I dread it because Apple will not fully document the ISA of their new CPU (just like with their current mobile lineup) which means it will become impossible to develop one's own programs for the Mac, write code in whatever language you wish, or distribute programs for the Mac outside the Apple-controlled walled garden. You'll use Swift and Xcode and you'll distribute your programs via the App Store with Apple's approval, and you'll like it. Or you won't develop for the Mac.
- gumby 6y ago
  I write code in c++ (using Emacs), compile it with the latest (non-Apple) llvm, and link it with some UI code I developed with Xcode. I can even compile from within Emacs by calling xcodebuild (though these days I just have cmake do that). Or compile it all in Xcode. Not terrible, I just happen not to like guis.
- p2t2p 6y ago
  I think it's incorrect assumption. If you want to develop a compiler for this new ISA, you'll develop a compiler into Clang's IL (intermediate language, that's probably incorrect name, I'm not a specialist in compilers) and then Apple's Clang will do the rest. Or may be even Apple will develop that part of Clang and make it open source then this is your documentation effectively.
- scoot_718 6y ago
  I stopped supporting Mac versions of software when they kept breaking compatibility for no real reason.
  - esmi 6y ago
    Did you stop developing software altogether? What doesn’t break compatibility from time to time?
    - saati 6y ago
abinaya_rl 6y ago
I would love an ARM based MacBook Air but for the Mac book pro's I would like to prefer the Intel one.

78 points by partingshots 6y ago

sitkack 6y ago

Having a single vendor for the most important, developer exposed component in your system is very very risky.

greendave 6y ago
Seems that'd be an argument for x86, not against it. Especially now when AMD is quite competitive. > starting sometime around 2020 That prediction hasn't proven wrong yet, but it's looking increasingly unlikely. If the Mac were a bigger part of their revenues, they'd probably be further along in the transition though.
- sitkack 6y ago
  If I were AMD, I'd court Apple with a bespoke part just like they do for all the consoles.
  - m463 6y ago
    AMD already does that with apple. their mac pro gpus (current and 2013) seem to be special designs.
    - sitkack 6y ago
      Already does but has are totally different. AMD could be ideally suited to ship an X86/ARM hybrid, run stuff on say 8 cores of ARM and say 2 cores of X86 for stuff that has compat problems. AMD already has ARM server experience with the https://www.amd.com/en/amd-opteron-a1100 https://www.amd.com/en/amd-opteron-a1100

sarah180 6y ago

It could happen, but I suspect this is a negotiating position more than a real desire to leave behind x86 in favor of Apple's ARM architecture chips. It makes more sense for them to improve the iPad Pro than to drop software compatibility across the MacBook lines.

FreeFull 6y ago
Well, this wouldn't be the first time they've switched architectures. Before, it was PowerPC to x86, back around 2006.
- city41 6y ago
  And before that, Motorola 68k.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    For each of those there was a clear perf advantage on the transition though.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      For native apps sure. But my 6100/60 - the slowest PPC Mac - was slower in emulation than my LCII with a 68030-40Mhz accelerator. My computer was less than half the speed of the high end 040s at the time.
    - jkestner 6y ago
      1. We haven’t yet seen what Apple's desktop-class chip can do. 2. Performance per watt is critical. Apple moved to Intel in large part because PowerPC couldn’t get this down, and one of the first two Intel Macs introduced was the MacBook Pro.
EricE 6y ago
I dunno - an ARM version of the MacBook Air would be very appealing. I doubt that many MacBook Air users are running VMS (although the latest model supporting 16GB makes it more practical, it wouldn’t be my first choice) or Boot Camp. The vast majority of Mac Apps I use are in active development and I doubt there would be much lag before universal versions that also support ARM would be released. Apple has done this twice before(68K and PPC), and currently runs a split CPU architecture ecosystem - granted there are hard product delineations between them today, but there aren’t any significant technical reasons why Apple couldn’t effectively support both ARM and Intel Macs - and do so for an indefinite period of time.

CyanLite2 6y ago

Intel is dying under the weight of its own technical debt. AMD will eventually have this problem too as ARM catches up. Meanwhile, it's 2020 and and x86 instruction sets upgrades are infrequent compared to ARM. And x86 CPUs still are required to support 16-bit devices from 35 years ago.

tenebrisalietum 6y ago
> And x86 CPUs still are required to support 16-bit devices from 35 years ago. I heard somewhere that this year Intel was going to begin to phase out support for BIOS, which would allow Intel to eliminate CPUs booting up in "real mode". I think as long as plain PCI is something supported, some sort of 16-bit support has to be in the firmware because of option ROMs. Though I'm not sure UEFI couldn't service those with some sort of emulation layer (may as well, UEFI's already complex enough).
throwaway2048 6y ago
Intel (and AMD's) problems have nothing to do with any supposed "technical debt" imposed by x86. Also, the x86 instruction set gets upgraded with practically every single generation of Intel and AMD processor.
- bcatanzaro 6y ago
  ARM is very old as well and has plenty of technical debt. RISCV, on the other hand...
  - mikece 6y ago
    What do you suppose the chances are of Apple compiling/running iOS and macOC on RISCV?
    - pram 6y ago
      zero percent
    - 6y ago

xt00 6y ago

Another aspect of Intel not working that closely with Apple (it this ARM transition happens) is that Apple is often seen as knowing what they are talking about on deep technical issues (basically they have lots of really good engineers). So Intel will need to find other smart customers that they can work closely with to understand the consumers needs and what they should modify in their chips for the next gen.

soperj 6y ago
Is that why they dropped intel in the 90s?
- MengerSponge 6y ago
  Apple didn't switch processor vendors in the 90's. They dropped Motorola/PowerPC in the 00's in favor of Intel's Core processors that were remarkably faster and more power efficient.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Well, they did swap processor architectures in the 90s too. 68k for powerpc.
    - MengerSponge 6y ago
      Oh yeah, my mistake. Motorola made both though, right?
      - cptskippy 6y ago
        IBM developed the Power architecture and I believe a consortium of Apple, IBM and Motorola (AIM) did the whole ISA.
      - jandrese 6y ago
        Yes, but there were totally incompatible so that didn't help much.

EricE 6y ago

I would love an ARM based MacBook Air. I dunno why it’s widely assumed if Apple introduces one ARM based Mac that all Mac’s will eventually go ARM - Operating systems supporting multiple CPU architectures isn’t a new thing, and Apple has had more commercial success than anyone else. I have no doubt for me as an end user that once apps are updated I wouldn’t experience any difference - other than better performance, battery performance, and a cooler running computer. Thankfully I’m not clinging to any older unsupported apps so I realize it’s easy for me to be pro ARM Mac - which is why I don’t expect Apple to go ARM only any time soon but offer a choice for quite a while while the market settles out. And who knows, Intel could turn it around. They haven’t managed for the last 7 years or so, but I suppose it could still eventually happen.

dragonshed 6y ago
> I dunno why it’s widely assumed if Apple introduces one ARM based Mac that all Mac’s will eventually go ARM Two points to think about on this issue: 1) When Apple moved away from PowerPC, they did so entirely. 2) Apple historically* wanted to keep its hardware offerings simple and easy to understand, and supporting multiple architectures could muddy their offerings. * When Jobs returned to Apple, he killed the confusing lineups in favor of one option each of desktop or mobile, for pros and home users. This has changed a bit lately, but I can imagine ARM and Intel options of Macbook vs Macbook Air vs Macbook Pro being a nonstarter. Anyway, I agree, an ARM Macbook Air would be awesome, assuming the software followed suit.
soneil 6y ago
I suspect that only going ARM on a few models could be detrimental. The risk is creating a niche within a niche. If they move everything, as with previous arch moves, it's "do or die" for third-parties. But if, eg, MacBook Air turns into MacBook ARM but MacBook Pro remains Intel - this would be a very difficult schism. Many publishers might look at it as being pro customers staying on Intel and cost-sensitive customers on ARM, which could damage adoption. The risk is having no carrot and no stick - not entirely dissimilar to Itanium's problem.
- wtallis 6y ago

clairity 6y ago

apple is moving on from intel because intel burned them badly with 10nm process chips. those were supposed to be out 5 years ago, when apple was readying the current design generation of macbook pros. apple finally had to give up hope and release the machine with hotter and less performant chips than they thought they’d be launching with. that was the point that apple realized intel had become incapable of leading the industry any longer and started looking beyond intel.

kitsunesoba 6y ago
There's some parallels with IBM dropping the ball on PowerPC, driving Apple to jump to Intel. The situation hasn't gotten quite as bad as it was with PowerPC, but Apple has seen this all before and wants to make the leap before it gets that bad, or at the very least open up an escape hatch or two (given Apple's relationship with AMD for graphics, I would be shocked if they haven't also talked about Ryzen in high end Macs).

mikece 6y ago

"Because Intel isn't moving anywhere..." reminds me of the rationale of why they dumped POWER processors 15(?) years ago.

mschuster91 6y ago
Apple could just go for AMD, they have a really decent offering these days. Next to zero cost for external vendors as both are functionally equal, only a bit of cost for them to re-design their PCBs...

0xy 6y ago

Obviously we'll be waiting a while before ARM hits high-end MacBook Pro and Mac Pro machines, what are the odds that Apple would retool to support AMD chips in that time? I would love an AMD MBP. Intel's chips have rapidly diminishing value for pretty much all use cases and AMD is firing on all cylinders with Dr Lisa Su.

artificial 6y ago
I'd like to see AMD as well, Ryzen is awesome bang for the buck. How would these perform in a laptop though since even the MacBook Air has overheating issues.

gumby 6y ago

One thing that is ignored by the punditocracy is that a laptop has a lot of other silicon beyond the CPU.* Apple would have to have all the support chipset as well. Internal connections like memory controller etc they already have from iPhone/iPad, but Intel provides support for peripheral access. This works for the iPad, but note that the iPad Pro doesn't have laptop-class USB-C support much to the annoyance of some people. A laptop would have to, and probably would need USB4/TB4 (since if you're designing your own you might as well go straight there -- classic Apple move) which would need all the PCIe, DP etc plumbing they are currently getting from Intel. Certainly doable, but there's a lot more boring spadework needed beyond the sexy CPU. * This is why I always laughed when I saw articles comparing laptops by CPU clock speed rather than actual performance.

deleted 6y ago
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adiabatty 6y ago
> note that the iPad Pro doesn't have laptop-class USB-C support much to the annoyance of some people. What would make it laptop-class, other than by adding more USB-C ports?
- gumby 6y ago
  In short, thunderbolt. I suspect they went to the USB Type-C connector (on the iPad Pro) mainly for power delivery and while they got DisplayPort, they don’t have full peripheral support. USB 3.1g2 (putatively 10 GBPs) is the fastest supported; may be ok for an iPad but not really suitable for a non-archival external disk. These limitations are perfectly reasonable for an iPad but not for a laptop. FWIW nothing but a single TB 4 port (not even an audio jack) would work just fine for me, but I know some others feel differently for their use.
  - jkestner 6y ago
    Thunderbolt is built on PCIe, which iPhones don’t use except for the SSD.

dathinab 6y ago

My guess is that there is a high chance that Apple will ship ARM laptops (air) running iOS, just potentially a modified version of it. Then they will slowly deprecate MacOS, but only after they made sure that development of software can be done one the modified version of iOS. Through that's just a wild guess.

Spartan-S63 6y ago
Given their penchant for keeping their touch interfaces (and software) separate from their non-touch, I'd imagine you'd get a full-fat macOS compiled for ARM. At this point, I'm sure they have internal builds of macOS on ARM that they've been toying with for years. It just doesn't make sense to adapt iPadOS even more to a MacBook Air computer if they're not going to include a touchscreen. With them holding out as long as they have on touchscreens, I can't imagine them reversing course.
Tagbert 6y ago
also, iOS is not, yet, ready to satisfy all of the use cases for Mac OS. It is possible to build an iOS laptop and some people would like that but it’s not going to cut it for a big number of their customers. Apple had been letting Macs and Mac OS languish for a few years but has really stepped up their game over the last couple of years. I think they will keep them separate for a long time while brings things together under the hood. Apple certainly has Mac OS ported for Arm and they also certainly have their own apps cross-compiled for Arm Mac OS. Once the OS and libraries are ported, the apps are relatively easy to adapt to the new system.

pmarreck 6y ago

Ryzen Threadripper is the Intel wake-up call, if ARM wasn't already

Synaesthesia 6y ago
Meanwhile Intel's sitting with record revenues & profits. Like they haven't had wake-up calls in their history ...
- scarface74 6y ago
  RIMs most profitable year was in 2010. Three years after the iPhone camera out. Profits are a lagging indicator.
  - Synaesthesia 6y ago
    Alright, but Intel isn’t exactly RIM, they can adapt. They’ve been around for quite a while now! I obviously applaud the competition, both from AMD and ARM
    - rleigh 6y ago
      Can they adapt in time? Being "around for a while" means nothing. There are thousands of big-name businesses that fail all the time after being in business for decades, or even centuries. As they say, past performance is not an indicator of future success...
      - scarface74 6y ago
        I couldn’t find any numbers for the server market, but Apple alone sells more products based on their chip design than all of the personal computers sold worldwide. Intel has already lost the mobile market, threw the towel in on the cellular chip market and sold the division to Apple, lost the console market to AMD, and the worlds largest cloud provider AWS has started selling access to both AMD and ARM servers at a much cheaper cost/cpu rate. The education market is rapidly moving to ARM based Chromebooks.

dschuessler 6y ago

> "As investment and development dollars continue flowing into the dominant mobile platforms — Android and iOS — it’s logical to expect that every useful desktop application that hasn’t yet been adapted to them already is on its way there." I'm unsure whether some classes of desktop applications can ever be as useful on mobile platforms as they are on the desktop. I'm thinking of applications that legitimately need a lot of screen estate to stay useful like digital audio workstations or IDEs with extensive debugging support. I contend that useful desktop applications are sometimes useful precisely because they run on a desktop.

alasdair_ 6y ago
If they make a 16 inch iPad Pro with enough connectors to drive multiple external displays, I'm not sure there would be much of a difference.

mihaaly 6y ago

Mobile first applications make software difficult to use, compromising features to the limited nature of mobile devices. It is a worrying trend driven not by practical but appearance focused design not only corrupting desktops but the web too. So many good old software or solutions go down the drain being ported to mobile platform and becoming increasingly difficult to use or/and pure dumb. Mobile platforms are auxiliary from productivity point of view, never can be the main thing. Have its good place where it shines but fails terribly elsewhere. Putting into the centre brings degradation.

nine_k 6y ago
Is a laptop a mobile device? Is my laptop with an i7 and 32GB RAM a crippled device? Imagine a 15" iPad Ultra Pro with comparable hardware, running iOS, with wireless keyboard and mouse / touchpad. Could it be a real workstation?
- deleted 6y ago
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- mihaaly 6y ago
  Working on a handheld device with fingers requires different approach than keyboard and mouse put on a desk together with the device, the trouble is with the OS and software not with the technical specification. If those are made for one, effective for one, will be crippled for the other. Also try using the same software on both 5" and 32" and with either finger only or keyboard and mouse only, efficiently. Good luck with that! If powerful processor and plenty of RAM would make a laptop then your Playstation was a laptop too! :)

cosmotic 6y ago

Apple's abandonment of <Whatever they replace Intel chips with> is inevitable

xoa 6y ago

I'm honestly somewhat surprised in all these discussions that one word hasn't come up a lot more frequently, more so as the years go by: patents. Patents under the current regime last 20 years. AMD64 was a 1999 announcement and spec was out in 2000 IIRC, 1st implementation (Opteron?) was like 2003, Conroe was 2006. And chip designs are done years before mass fabbing too. All of which means that, starting this year and definitely in the next few years all possible patents on the core x86-64 standard will expire, with each additional year bringing a few extra extensions. As far as what Apple requires to run historic macOS code, they clearly have not built a dependence on every cutting edge new instruction. They officially supported 2010 Mac Pros (which were on the Westmere chips) until last year, and 10.15 can still be made to run on them. Ever since Apple giving up on Intel chips has been discussed one general assumption/objection that I have always seen essentially assumed is that it also means abandoning x86 too, and in turn an enormous amount of macOS software, compatibility, etc. But need that actually be the case? x86-64 going patent free for all the essential parts opens up a lot of options for a lot of players. Maybe I've missed a lot of discussion (and if so I'd love to be directed to it) but so far I really haven't seen it considered much. 20 years is a long time in tech, but it's not forever. Without IP holding them back, need Apple ever give it up? They can focus on ARM, but a high performance hardware/software translation layer would certainly change the math around a transition wouldn't it?

wtallis 6y ago
I think the big problem here is that code which really needs to be run on native x86-64 hardware rather than through emulation/dynamic translation is likely to also be code that uses newer instruction set extensions that Apple would have to license.

ksec 6y ago

And there are similar articles in 2019, 2017, 2016, all the way to 2011 [1]. One of the thing about these rumours is that they are always 6 months or so before another new Mac product launches or refresh. It could also have been coincidence since Mac used to update once a year, and any rumours would always fit into that time frame. But I cant help and wonder if this is just a tactics from Apple on pricing. Apple doesn't get any marketing subsidies from the Intel stickers since Apple dont use any of those. Surely Apple would still want an equivalent incentives if not more. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/05/apple-could-adopt-arm-for-laptops-but-why-would-it/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/05/apple-could-adopt-ar...

saagarjha 6y ago
There have been a number of fairly credible leaks in this direction recently, pointing to a launch within a year or so.
prewett 6y ago
There were similar persistent rumors about Apple having a build of OS X running on x86 back in The Day. I dismissed them as wishful thinking by the rumorer. One day Apple announced x86 Macs and I was simply shocked.
- ksec 6y ago
  As far as I am aware, Apple had been running x86 OSX before even Steve knew about it. So the 5 years double life secret agent was merely a marketing pitch. The whole story was written on cake.co But what was clear though was Steve wanted a notebook, and Intel Centrino was the perfect fit. And the roadmap from IBM was a dead end. And it was very obvious, ( unless you belong to those group that does not believe in Notebook market) that switching to Intel was the only choice. But this time there is nothing ARM / Apple CPU can do that Intel cant. The only real advantage Apple get is cost reduction. Intel isn't like IBM where it has no low power roadmap, and Intel's IPC aren't far behind either.
kevindong 6y ago
The public always gets constantly bombarded with "Apple rumored to do _X_ in _Y_ months" news articles. I always wondered how accurate those predictions turn out to be since I don't think anyone ever does a retrospective on the accuracies of those fodder of news articles.

rsynnott 6y ago

Case in point; the chart in the article shows Ice Lake coming out in 2018. It's _still_ barely out.

alasdair_ 6y ago

I was at Sun around 2002 or so, when the writing was on the wall about SPARC perhaps not being the best long-term plan and various x86 projects starting. I hope Apple learns from Sun's mistakes. Also, somewhat related: does anyone remember Transmeta? They were about a decade too early but their ideas on low-power, low-heat x86-compatible mobile-friendly processors were pretty cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta

traden210 6y ago
Apple has built an ecosystem of automatic app re-compiling for new architecture. Every AppStore app that is built using modern (last 5 years) tools and xcode, in theory, should be transparently re-compilable to a different uarch. Apple currently does this with watchos apps. So, yes, they learned. I suspect they will ship an x86 emulator as they did with Rosetta, additionally.
- andrekandre 6y ago
  for between arm variants that is true, but bitcode is still tied to the target architcure [1], so transparent re-compiling x64 bitcode into arm64 is unlikely unless apple has done some changes to how bitcode works that im unaware of [1] https://www.infoq.com/articles/ios-9-bitcode/ https://www.infoq.com/articles/ios-9-bitcode/
FullyFunctional 6y ago
Oranges and, eh, pears. Sun never had the volume Apple does. SPARC was far from competitive with x86 in its later days, unlike Apple's A-series chips. Transmeta? I was there from ~2001 until we closed the doors. What some people still don't understand was that Transmeta's failure was a business failure, not a technical one. When Crusoe launched it had greater power efficiency than Intel's chips. Intel has _officially_ credited Transmeta with kickstarting Intel's focus on power. Execution and business failure cost Transmeta to slip more than a year at which point opportunity and customer goodwill had sailed. Someone really should write a book about all the drama.

dreamcompiler 6y ago

On the one hand I like this idea because I'm tired of Intel's lousy security and lousy energy budget. On the other hand I dread it because Apple will not fully document the ISA of their new CPU (just like with their current mobile lineup) which means it will become impossible to develop one's own programs for the Mac, write code in whatever language you wish, or distribute programs for the Mac outside the Apple-controlled walled garden. You'll use Swift and Xcode and you'll distribute your programs via the App Store with Apple's approval, and you'll like it. Or you won't develop for the Mac.

gumby 6y ago
I write code in c++ (using Emacs), compile it with the latest (non-Apple) llvm, and link it with some UI code I developed with Xcode. I can even compile from within Emacs by calling xcodebuild (though these days I just have cmake do that). Or compile it all in Xcode. Not terrible, I just happen not to like guis.
p2t2p 6y ago
I think it's incorrect assumption. If you want to develop a compiler for this new ISA, you'll develop a compiler into Clang's IL (intermediate language, that's probably incorrect name, I'm not a specialist in compilers) and then Apple's Clang will do the rest. Or may be even Apple will develop that part of Clang and make it open source then this is your documentation effectively.
scoot_718 6y ago
I stopped supporting Mac versions of software when they kept breaking compatibility for no real reason.
- esmi 6y ago
  Did you stop developing software altogether? What doesn’t break compatibility from time to time?
  - saati 6y ago

abinaya_rl 6y ago

I would love an ARM based MacBook Air but for the Mac book pro's I would like to prefer the Intel one.