29 ms·

Apple, ARM, and Intel

• Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > Notably, one thing Apple does not need to give up is Windows support: Windows has run on ARM for the last decade, and I expect Boot Camp to continue. I brought up the possibility of Bootcamp supporting ARM Windows on HN yesterday, and others responded with some rightful criticisms. From mrkstu: > The problem is that Apple has moved to a home-grown stack for it graphics and deprecated OpenGL and moved wholly to Metal. [...] There is no way Apple would create a Windows driver for that custom silicon—it has always relied on AMD or Nvidia for those drivers in the past, it has no in house code base or expertise to write the requisite code in Windows and none of the silicon has been optimized for it. And from pavlov: > I don't think there is a standard BIOS for ARM like there is for x86, so multi-boot would probably require Microsoft to support Macs explicitly in Windows on ARM. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528066
  • jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    The OpenGL bit is even worse than it sounds. The driver is half-broken and the version is ancient, already a decade old.
  • bluedino 6y ago
    >> One thing Apple does not need to give up is Windows support: Windows has run on ARM for the last decade Supporting legacy x86 apps is 'windows support', not 'running windows'
  • deergomoo 6y ago
    The other issue is that Windows for ARM is not a product you can just buy off the shelf right now.
    • rrss 6y ago
      i thought the surface pro x runs windows on arm? or do you mean you can't get a copy of the OS without the product?
      • Kipters 6y ago
        Yep, WoA is only sold preinstalled in devices, you can't buy a copy (but you can install it yourself: https://github.com/WOA-Project https://github.com/WOA-Project)
    • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      You can get ISOs/WIM files if you know where to look...
      • vardump 6y ago
        Official ones are behind two-factor authentication, only downloadable using Internet Explorer. Yeah.
        • saagarjha 6y ago
          I know the Intel ones are available from Microsoft’s site and you can find it if you just search for “Windows 10 ISO”. Are the ARM ones different?
        • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
          The MSDN Subscriber Downloads site (now “My Visual Studio” or similar) hasn’t needed IE since... 2011? Microsoft gives away the ISOs for non-LTSB builds for free - it’s the product-keys that they care about.
          • my123 6y ago
            Windows 10 on Arm shares the same product keys/licenses as on x86.
    • jedieaston 6y ago
      Microsoft would probably make them available if this were to happen, since they'd have to do work to get Windows running on the A-series chips anyway. If Apple wants it (and is willing to help, because some way of breaking their secure boot will be needed), it's beneficial for Microsoft. They get to sell more licenses, and corporate environments that buy Apple hardware to run Windows on (which is apparently not uncommon, according to r/sysadmin) will keep doing it.
  • gsnedders 6y ago
    > I don't think there is a standard BIOS for ARM like there is for x86, so multi-boot would probably require Microsoft to support Macs explicitly in Windows on ARM. Windows on ARM requires UEFI, so that's not a problem.
  • 0x0 6y ago
    I doubt many would find bootcamp on ARM very interesting, especially if that means you need to run Windows-ARM. The great thing about x86 macs is that you can run x86/x64 versions of Windows, at decent speeds, through the likes of Virtualbox or VMWare Fusion, and have access to a vast amount of legacy win32/win64 applications. Nobody needs to run legacy arm windows binaries, there simply aren't any around. It would be a shame to lose access to decent windows VM performance on the Mac.
    • twic 6y ago
      Maybe we'll see a return to the days of coprocessor expansion cards? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Processor_Upgrade_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Processor_Upgrade_Ca...
      • matt_heimer 6y ago
        I think a Windows desktop-as-a-service offering similar to Amazon WorkSpaces is more likely.
        • unicornfinder 6y ago
          Indeed and I think it's where the future of the Win32 desktop is. To be clear, not Windows as a whole, but consider how Microsoft suggested not too long ago that they planned to deprecate Win32 eventually (via Windows 10 X) and render those apps via RDP.
          • aspenmayer 6y ago
            How would games work? I understand that the Xbox One runs a build of Windows 10, and I would expect that to continue on the Series X. Are Xbox One games Win32 binaries?
            • deleted 6y ago
              [deleted]
  • microcolonel 6y ago
    As for standard firmware interfaces, UEFI is as much a thing on ARM as it is on AMD64. It's ugly, but it is at least standard.
  • Kipters 6y ago
    > I don't think there is a standard BIOS for ARM like there is for x86, so multi-boot would probably require Microsoft to support Macs explicitly in Windows on ARM. Apple "just" needs to properly* support UEFI for Windows on ARM to boot *properly == supporting the minimum requirements for Windows
  • rvp-x 6y ago
    High-end ARM servers support standards called "SBBR" and "SBSA" which means they support UEFI and ACPI. The experience of using them is not very different from using x86 machines: boot an arbitrary OS and almost everything works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur... There's an effort to make even the Raspberry Pi support this standard: https://rpi4-uefi.dev/ https://rpi4-uefi.dev/
    • zozbot234 6y ago
      I assume even Windows on ARM relies on that UEFI support. It's not just server-side stuff.
      • surajrmal 6y ago
        Yes, it does.
    • salawat 6y ago
      Yes. UEFI. Because your bootloader should totally be able to access a network stack for future remote attestation...I mean, trusted computing purposes! Reading my way through the specification at the moment, and I'm failing to see how UEFI does anything user-friendly at all. It seems to only be useful to entrenched business interests (read Big *) and to a lesser extent maybe OEM implementers. Whereas all the cryptographic subsystem utilization by industry seems to be being used against users in the interests of fortifying market position. Wish I'd have added my voice to the din back when I was first reading about it back in the oughts. Didn't realize how much of a pain in the rear it was about to make my computing life. Too late to turn back the clock now. I just wish I understood what was so wrong with the old BIOS POST->handoff process. Probably need to sit down with an Old HP or Dell XP box and try to figure that out. Besides the Rootkit issue (which frankly, it feels like there are less intrusive and user-abuse enabling approaches to dealing with) I don't buy that the end-user got a single blessed thing out of UEFI; only lost.
      • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  • monocasa 6y ago
    > > The problem is that Apple has moved to a home-grown stack for it graphics and deprecated OpenGL and moved wholly to Metal. [...] There is no way Apple would create a Windows driver for that custom silicon—it has always relied on AMD or Nvidia for those drivers in the past, it has no in house code base or expertise to write the requisite code in Windows and none of the silicon has been optimized for it. They're derived from PowerVR cores which do have WDDM (AKA windows) drivers. They're not great, but usable. Paying a third party to write new drivers isn't a crazy idea either. Remember, they don't have to be perfect, just usable. > > I don't think there is a standard BIOS for ARM like there is for x86, so multi-boot would probably require Microsoft to support Macs explicitly in Windows on ARM. Microsoft ARM machines use UEFI. It should work fine if Apple implements an UEFI loader on top of iBoot or whatever.
    • zozbot234 6y ago
      PowerVR graphics is quite terrible, no doubt about it. It's the reason why some Intel Atom-based or similarly low-end x86 devices are stuck on an unsupported version of Windows 10, with nothing to upgrade them to. Even Linux won't run properly on that hardware, it's that bad.
      • monocasa 6y ago
        Yeah, those particular drivers were a special kind of terrible. Didn't even run the vertex shaders on the GPU. They do have regular Linux drivers, Imagination just needs to get it's head out of it's ass and recompile them for x86.
    • fomine3 6y ago
      Is the Apple's GPU core really based on PowerVR arch? I suspect that adopting PowerVR arch without grant may cause lawsuit.
      • monocasa 6y ago
        Why do you think they don't have a grant? https://www.imgtec.com/news/press-release/imagination-and-apple-sign-new-agreement/ https://www.imgtec.com/news/press-release/imagination-and-ap...
  • pier25 6y ago
    Also, Apple has gotten to a point where it doesn't really need to support Bootcamp anymore unlike in 2006ish when it released the first intel Macs.
    • akmarinov 6y ago
      Also they probably have to consider how much money they're willing to throw at this. Switching to ARM on macOS will save them money as they don't have to pay Intel and can reuse existing designs and relationships with TSMC. But actively investing money and personnel to support Windows, NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, virtualization, etc on a platform that sells 20ish million units in an year, compared to the hundreds of million of units that iPhones/iPads/Apple TVs, etc sell - probably doesn't make financial sense. Especially with how they've treated macOS lately, enabling easy transitioning via Catalyst, SwiftUI support, making it easy to reuse code for iOS. Switching to and getting more revenue from services, thus them being a bigger priority. And there's the argument of doing all of that instead of investing more time into macOS with the whole Vistalina thing going on. Again no idea whether it makes financial sense, they've more than likely done the math and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
    • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      I saw some stats a couple of days ago that said Bootcamp usage had fallen from 15% of users to just 2%.
      • pier25 6y ago
        Interesting. Any source? Personally I only used bootcamp for gaming a couple of years ago but then I just ended up building a desktop PC. It's just the better option as it will probably outlive all my Macs and I can upgrade parts as needed.
      • mrkstu 6y ago
        I would assume part of that is the improvement in virtualization. Those with adequate RAM can run Windows apps in a VM performantly. You really only need Bootcamp for gaming, and with Nvidia support waning on the Mac, you're going to have a second rate gaming experience even in Bootcamp.
  • jagger27 6y ago
    Windows on Arm might not be able to make use of all the secret sauce and custom silicon these chips are bound to have. Who's going to put in that work?
  • w0utert 6y ago
    >> > The problem is that Apple has moved to a home-grown stack for it graphics and deprecated OpenGL and moved wholly to Metal. [...] There is no way Apple would create a Windows driver for that custom silicon—it has always relied on AMD or Nvidia for those drivers in the past, it has no in house code base or expertise to write the requisite code in Windows and none of the silicon has been optimized for it. That's assuming there will only be ARM-based macs that use Apple GPU's, which doesn't make sense. For iMac/Mac Pro/Macbook Pro I fully expect those would still be equipped with AMD GPU's. Good as the Apple GPU's are for mobile hardware, they are nowhere near the performance and feature set of desktop-class hardware. This would also free up a lot of silicon on the CPU die to allow for higher core counts, bigger caches etc. I think ~50% of the A13 SoC die is just for graphics... On top of that, instead of bootcamp Apple could still support virtualisation to be able to run Windows ARM on Apple ARM hardware and write a paravirtualized GPU driver that just translates guest DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan to host Metal, similar to what pretty all other hypervisors are doing already.
    • danaris 6y ago
      > That's assuming there will only be ARM-based macs that use Apple GPU's, which doesn't make sense. For iMac/Mac Pro/Macbook Pro I fully expect those would still be equipped with AMD GPU's. Good as the Apple GPU's are for mobile hardware, they are nowhere near the performance and feature set of desktop-class hardware. This would also free up a lot of silicon on the CPU die to allow for higher core counts, bigger caches etc. I think ~50% of the A13 SoC die is just for graphics... While I agree that the higher-end machines will still have discrete graphics, that doesn't mean they won't also use on-die graphics—after all, the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on uses Intel HD graphics when it doesn't have to spin up the Radeon. And I wouldn't really want to bet that the Intel onboard graphics are/will be less powerful than Apple's.
      • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        > While I agree that the higher-end machines will still have discrete graphics, that doesn't mean they won't also use on-die graphics But there's no reason those have to work in Windows. Apple isn't going to care if Windows gets crappy battery life. The bigger question is, if Bootcamp would only work with a small portion of Apple's machines anyway, and you'd have to run a version of Windows which no one really wants, and Windows just generally isn't as necessary in 2020 as it was in 2006... is Apple going to bother?
  • yyyk 6y ago
    I'm sure that Apple with its total control of hardware on Macs could get Windows running. If that's too much of a technical effort, Apple should easily be able to get Microsoft itself to lend a hand. After all, Microsoft would like to encourage software companies to make their products available for Windows on ARM as well, being on ARM Macs would make WoA more desirable. Besides allowing Windows to run on ARM macs must be preferable to MS over Apple investing in some Win compat thingy, while Apple would like to avoid investing in Win compat. It's an obvious win-win if Apple wants to do it that way. Apple could on the other hand decide to close the platform further, or manage to do this itself.
    • Bud 6y ago
      A build of Windows 10 for ARM already exists. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/
  • DCKing 6y ago
    Apple has to significantly invest to continue with Bootcamp, only to offer people Windows on ARM. Windows on ARM is actually a great product, but it's not what people use Bootcamp for. There's no value add here for Apple, and I simply can't see them doing it. Not even if they continue using AMD graphics in (some of) their machines. It's not worth any effort to run a platform that is still as niche as Windows on ARM. The only way I see this happening if someone else would do the work. And that someone else would have to be Microsoft. Why? They're the only ones with an incentive to do it. ARM Macs would be a highly available, highly performant development platform for Windows on ARM. Apple could be accidentally solving a supply problem here for Microsoft - a supply of quality high performance ARM desktop hardware. Apple might even be inclined to work with Microsoft (or they might not), but even if unlikely the only way I see this play out is without Apple paying for any of the work.
    • amq 6y ago
      I wouldn't call Windows on ARM a niche product, since it supports x86 emulation, enabling, arguably, most of the use cases.
      • saagarjha 6y ago
        Part of them. If you just want to use one-off old software then emulation is adequate. If you actually care about performance, then no, not really.
      • DCKing 6y ago
        I don't mean to speak against Windows on ARM viability - it's a necessary product and it's well executed. But Windows on ARM is still building a market, and can't run significant high performance software yet. Even for gaming it can't run anything released in the last 15 years in the current Snapdragons, which by itself excludes a really big portion of Bootcamp use cases.
    • m463 6y ago
      I used bootcamp for years to run real games at real speeds (windows+steam) it was pretty much: mac workhorse by day, windows game machine by night all that's fading away.
  • dkonofalski 6y ago
    I don't see how this would change. I haven't seen anything that suggests that Apple would be moving away from using third-party GPUs in this process. The ARM move would only affect the CPU which would have no bearing on the graphics stack on the Windows side.
• phlo 6y ago
  Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23538826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23538826 (which was posted a few minutes earlier).
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Rightfully or not, I think this is the version of record at this point, given that it's sitting at the top of HN right now. They will probably get merged later.
• annoyingnoob 6y ago
  Apples extends its ARM, gives Intel the finger.
  • kiplkipl 6y ago
    Hoping for a job with El Reg?
• Jonnax 6y ago
  "the i3-1000NG4 Intel processor that is the cheapest option for the MacBook Air is not yet for public sale; it probably costs around $150, with far worse performance than the A13" In so curious so see this. Unless I missed it we haven't seen consumer high end ARM chips that are readily available running a general purpose OS. Like the Raspberry Pi is cool, but it's still trash in comparison to an average x86 laptop. Let's see if those really high geekbench scores translate to an excellent computing experience.
  • jagger27 6y ago
    I mean, is the iPad Pro not evidence enough? The A13 is much, much better than the chips in RPis.
    • jcelerier 6y ago
      I'd really like to see an iPad Pro crunch through as many VSTs as my old 2600k did in its 2 millisecond budget
      • mattmar96 6y ago
        I do some light VST development with JUCE and have tested out my synth on my iPad Pro, worked a charm.
        • jcelerier 6y ago
          > I do some light VST development with JUCE and have tested out my synth on my iPad Pro, worked a charm. I mean, of course a single VST works like a charm, single VSTs already worked fine on 500 mhz CPUs with win98-era computers and Cubase VST. The question is how many tracks with synth + 20 filters behind can you layer before having to freeze things.
      • em500 6y ago
        As highlighted in the article, Apple's A13 is on par with Intel's i9-9900K in SPECint2006 and only 15% behind in SPECfp2006.
• jagger27 6y ago
  I wonder what an alternate timeline would look like where Apple went for AMD semi-custom x86 chips instead of Arm. The Mac Pro would have 64 cores, MacBooks would have great APUs, and Apple would be able to segment their products at their own discretion–not Intel's. I also wonder if any chiplet designs will find their way into Apple's Arm-based lineup.
  • larkost 6y ago
    At the time Intel was pushing on performance-per-watt, AMD was not. So AOM was significantly further away from getting the iPhone contract than Intel was. And Apple is already extensively using multiple small chips put together to form their A13 APUs, so they are not far from the full "chiplet" already (they just are not using silicon wafers as the interface yet). Right now I think that the main barrier to the Mac Pro already being on AMD CPUs is the lack of Thunderbolt. Already there is 1 Thunderbolt AMD motherboard, and with Thunderbolt becoming part of USB 4, that barrier will fall next year. So it will be an interesting race: is Apple pushing for AMD Mac Pros, or ARM ones?
• Amicius 6y ago
  The article mentions that while the Apple ARM chips are faster per core, the Intel chips are faster at multi-core operations. How is that possible?
  • noir_lord 6y ago
    Imagine two football teams. One full of excellent prima donna's who don't work together at all. The other full of good players who work really well as a team, communicate well and get out of each others way. Who would you bet on winning?
  • ascagnel_ 6y ago
    I think a big chunk of that is power thermals -- Apple's ARM chips are only used currently in passively-cooled, handheld, power-restricted chassis (phones & tablets). Intel's chips are generally actively cooled and run on mains power, so they can run hotter and draw more power, so they can make up the difference by stuffing more hot cores onto the chip compared to what Apple has been doing.
  • csunbird 6y ago
    The funny thing is, the main selling point for intel processors for me was their better single thread performance over AMD chips and now Apple comes up with a faster single thread performance chip. I might get an ARM Macbook when they are in sale after all.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    Heterogeneous Multi-Core Processing. 2 big cores. 4 small cores. Meanwhile Intel CPUs have 6 big cores.
  • bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Easy answer: Intel chips have more cores than Apple ARM chips. But if they have the same number of cores it's generally a power tradeoff. A 12W chip can give 12W to one core or 3W to 4 cores. Transistors are optimized for a particular voltage & current, so when they run at a different power, performance scaling is not linear.
• eric_khun 6y ago
  On a related note, TSMC is based in Taiwan. Ben Thompson (who wrote this article) chose to live there. It's cheap/friendly/modern/safe/connected to all asia/awesome healthcare system/amazing food/surrounded by nature. Taiwan now puts effort trying to attract new talents. The "gold card visa"[1] is quite easy to get, just earn more than usd5.5k/month at your last/current job, or work in a "trendy" field (AI/big data/energy/biotech...) and you get an "open visa" for 3 years without restrictions for ~300USD. If you're looking for change, I highly recommend her Taiwan! Happy to reply to any questions [1] https://taiwangoldcard.com https://taiwangoldcard.com
  • joaogui1 6y ago
    How hard is it to live in Taiwan speaking only English? Is their official language Mandarin or is it some different Chinese dialect? How safe are Taiwan streets?
    • hellofunk 6y ago
      The main problem, when I was there, as with many places throughout Asia, is the poor air quality. You’ll definitely notice it, my eyes were burning to get through the adjustment period.
      • komali2 6y ago
        Really? I found air quality even within Taipei to be comparable to San Francisco or even better, at least according to my nose, sinuses, and tear ducts.
        • hellofunk 6y ago
          Perhaps you were there during a weather pattern that minimized the effects. Unless you are saying you had a long-term low pollution experience there, which I think is impossible.
          • komali2 6y ago
• DC-3 6y ago
  The unseating of x86 as the de facto standard for laptops, workstations, and servers would be a net benefit for both performance and security. Unfortunately, though Apple will likely find very great success with their ARM Macs, it does not necessarily follow that the architecture will gain significant ground outside the Apple-sphere. I would love for my next laptop to be ARM-based, but I can't see Apple happily flogging chips to Dell or Lenovo, and I'm not sure if anyone else's ARM processors are up to the necessary standard.
  • dijit 6y ago
    I mean, ARM is 'there' in most cases, the issue tends to be perceived latency of RISC vs CISC CPU's on desktop, not overall performance. There are decent quality laptops shipping with ARM already, like the Thinkpad Yoga: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/6/21050758/lenovo-yoga-5g-snapdragon-qualcomm-8cx-x55-arm-windows-laptop-ces-2020 https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/6/21050758/lenovo-yoga-5g-sn... There's also the obvious: Pinebook pro.
    • simias 6y ago
      What do you mean by latency here exactly?
      • dijit 6y ago
        I'm not exactly sure what I mean and that's part of the issue, when using an ARM CPU with desktop software which has not been optimised to hide UI "lag" there's something that feels like it just.. lags. You can feel it on a rpi if you use it for a day, it's not that it's underpowered, you can grab a 15yo celeron that is much slower and single core and it will have less perceptable latency. The Celeron will "feel" as if it's working, the ARM chip will "feel" as if it's laggy. I can't quantify this behaviour, but it's consistent across all ARM CPU's I've ever used with traditional desktop software. Notably these issues don't seem to exist on Android or iOS, someone once told me this is due to the UI elements having a higher priority than anything else on the system.
        • 6y ago
• acqq 6y ago
  > To that end, while I am encouraged by and fully support this bill by Congress to appropriate $22.8 billion in aid to semiconductor manufacturers I fully don't agree. It appears as the exact opposite of what the rational use of market forces should be.
  • rswail 6y ago
    Semiconductors are not just about the market for electronics, they are a national defense issue. As the article talked about, relying on chips that can only be sourced from allies that are not defensible from your primary potential adversary is a major risk. Why do you think Boeing et al are on the government defense teat? It's not just as a disguised socialist job program and Congressional slush fund. There are some legitimate reasons for government funding. It's not "aid", it's government spending on national defense infrastructure and manufacturing capability.
    • acqq 6y ago
      > It's not "aid" I don't see that claim supported by the text: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-semiconductors/u-s-lawmakers-propose-22-8-billion-in-aid-to-semiconductor-industry-idUSKBN23H39M https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-semiconductors/u-s-la... "A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a bill to provide more than $22.8 billion in aid for semiconductor manufacturers, aiming to spur the construction of chip factories in America" Do you have some quote to support your claim?
      • tharne 6y ago
        It's a bad choice of words on the part of the journalist, but that's journalists for you. "Aid" implies an economic motive, whereas here the motive is very clearly national security. We don't give "aid" to the Marines or the Air Force. We spend public dollars on things are are important to national defense and security. Semiconductors fall into that category.
        • acqq 6y ago
• pier25 6y ago
  It all makes sense on paper but I'm still skeptical. For the last couple of years every time Apple has tried to do some acrobatics on the Mac platform it has failed miserably. - Yosemite - Butterfly keyboard - Touchbar - Catalina I'm not much of a CPU guru but a switch to ARM seems like the most ambitious and risky of all these, by far.
  • radicaldreamer 6y ago
    You’re forgetting the most underrated piece of hardware to come from Apple in the last couple of years, the 12” MacBook. The weight to capability ratio of that machine is off the charts and it’s the perfect encapsulation of what a portable Mac should be.
    • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      I'm glad you like that machine, but I would not put it in the success camp. It was the start of the butterfly keyboard, and Apple ended up discontinuing it after just a few years.
      • machello13 6y ago
        It's not really correct to say they discontinued it. They basically just started selling it under the MacBook Air brand.
        • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
          The new Macbook Air is a very different computer. Much larger and thicker, even compared to the 11" Air that was discontinued.
    • slantyyz 6y ago
      If it's so perfect, why is it so underrated? "What a portable Mac should be" is going to mean different things to different people. My perfect portable Mac (based on what's available) would be a 16" MBP, because I care about screen real estate first and foremost, followed by a desire to have a fast chip/gpu, battery life be damned. Other people prefer other models like the 13" MBP or the 13" Air for other reasons.
• mschuster91 6y ago
  Hmm. Random question here... what prevents Apple from building in an x86-to-uops decoder stage into their desktop ARM CPUs? That way they could run old code simultaneously with new code - x86 apps get their memory flagged (by the MMU perhaps?) that all code from this memory region gets executed with the x86 decoder stage, and code in normal memory gets executed with the ARM decoder stage. And to be honest this is entirely what I'm expecting of Apple - yes they are not concerned with backwards compatibility but no one is going to buy a multi-ten-thousands-dollars Mac Pro or even a multi-thousands MacBook Pro if it can't run Photoshop or their favorite sound editing/DJ suite.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Licensing?
    • monocasa 6y ago
      The base x86_64 patents are about to expire.
    • exhilaration 6y ago
      As previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14523587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14523587
  • danaris 6y ago
    Photoshop is already running on ARM—specifically, on Apple's A-series chips.[0] Unless you're doing something at least moderately esoteric, if you have an actively-developed macOS application today, you'll be able to produce an ARM version of it tomorrow (or, y'know, whenever Apple actually activates this capability) by ticking the right box in Xcode. There might very well be a compatibility layer available for a transition period (there was for 68k->PPC, Classic->OS X, and PPC->Intel), but that's not at all the same thing as saying Apple will build in hardware-level x86 support in perpetuity. [0] https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/ipad.html https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/ipad.html
    • 6y ago
• andrewla 6y ago
  A while back Linus said something to the effect that x86 was the default for servers because that's what people used on their desktops. I personally find this news very exciting because the x86 architecture is just so messy and filled with cruft from ages ago. If ARM becomes the standard on the desktop for a significant portion of machines, then I think that we'll probably start to see more ARM processors making inroads in the server and workstation market, which I think will be a huge win.
  • qubex 6y ago
    This is directly addressed in the post and Linus is directly quoted. Haven’t you read it?
    • andrewla 6y ago
      I completely missed that section in my excitement. I skimmed the "Implications of ARM section" when the article started talking about the fact that Apple can tune the architecture, which I found irrelevant and uninteresting. Saves me the trouble of digging up Linus's statement.
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    It seems a bit silly to discuss servers based on Apple's architecture before they reveal something with several cores. Mainstream x86 processors have 64 cores per socket. These are the top contenders in SPEC performance-per-watt benchmarks. Notably, nobody has ever even bothered submitting a SPEC result for an ARM server, in particular not Ampere, whose product "provides industry leading power efficiency/core" even though there is no evidence to back this claim.
    • sergeykish 6y ago
      It is a lucrative market, they have money and followers. I would not believe they could design smartphone processor but here we are. Lets check in five years.
  • clarry 6y ago
• onli 6y ago
  I don't really understand the positive opinion around this. Isn't the break from the Windows and Linux default architecture and thus software too high here? Like in gaming - are Apple users really okay with not having access to a single Steam game? Okay, the ones using this only for ~~work~~ office work, the browser and Netflix won't mind, but for the rest this presents a huge separation from what is available elsewhere. I must miss something.
  • _bxg1 6y ago
    Very few people use Macs for gaming, and many of those that do probably just play Apple Arcade games (which I'm sure will have a smooth upgrade path). And most of the games people play that are on Steam are (these days) built with either Unity or Unreal, which will no doubt have 1-click-rebuilds for the new architecture. In Unity your game logic doesn't even need to compile to native code. Even beyond games, the thing is that nearly every development platform these days is an abstraction above the hardware - be it the JVM, the web browser, etc - and the rest (of the new ones coming out) are built to be cross-platform from the get go. Just look at how smoothly Rust/Cargo can target different architectures. I'm sure the same is true for Go.
    • onli 6y ago
      > And most of the games people play that are on Steam are (these days) built with either Unity or Unreal, which will no doubt have 1-click-rebuilds for the new architecture. I highly doubt that. The architecture difference is too big, and gaming studios are not known to press that button even if it's available. The native Linux gaming support story speaks to that. That they will port existing games is even more unlikely. Will be funny to re-read that comment in the future, be it right or wrong.
      • xigency 6y ago
        The entire draw of Unity and Unreal is that they target all platforms. With regards to Linux, Epic Games has released their games for Linux in the past. There is no commercial incentive to release games for Linux, though. The game engines will support Mac ARM if game developers require that feature, and game developers will target Mac ARM if there is a commercial case for it. The existence of gaming on Mac I think is largely due to companies that support it by choice, like Blizzard, and I don't see why they would abandon the platform due to a CPU architecture change.
• coreai 6y ago
  The problem, as explained here, is also what Linus and recently GKH have mentioned is that the lack of any consumer ARM hardware like laptops and desktops mean that kernel developers or app developers are basically not able to develop and test their code easily to be able to deploy it in the cloud ... if Apple was able to sell their macs with ARM and not only that but also provide instances of the same platform then they might be essentially at the core of architecture revolution
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    I doubt many kernel developers would like to develop on the Mac, considering that as of late it’s been a bit problematic to get Linux to work on.
• thePunisher 6y ago
  I feel that Apple is making a deadly mistake here. Many affluent professionals use Macbooks only because they can also run Windows on it, which they need to make a living. For them Macbooks are a luxury item to show-off their wealth, just as lawyers buy Mercedeses. If Apple starts switching to ARM they'll lose a significant number of these well-paying customers. That in turn will lead to less ISV's bothering to make an Mac OS X version of their software, resulting in a downward spiral. Apple will pay dearly for their blindsightedness and tunnel vision of trying to make even more profit. Fair chance the Macbook Pro and Mac Pro desktop lines will become unsustainable due to low sales. And no, emulation is NOT an option!
• sradman 6y ago
  The irony in the narrative surrounding the ascendence of ARM is that the key innovation occurred in the Apple Newton. [1] History rhymes, they say. If I remember correctly, it was Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) silicon team that transformed ARM into a performance-per-watt powerhouse (no pun intended) to meet the requirements of the Newton. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#ARM_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#ARM_Ltd.
  • the-dude 6y ago
    ARM has always been a performance-per-watt powerhouse. The story goes the first processor was tested without a proper power connection and ran on the IO-pins.
    • monocasa 6y ago
      > The story goes the first processor was tested without a proper power connection and ran on the IO-pins. That's real common actually. The current from the diodes on the I/O pins has to go somewhere.
      • the-dude 6y ago
        Then it is odd I have ever only read the story about ARM. Do Intel's/AMD's proto's run on their I/O pins?
        • monocasa 6y ago
          It's not really a fair comparison, because it's not the same TDP niche. I imagine Intel Quarks will though. Probably any of the SoC versions as well. I've actually had to design around this in a board once. Had a chip where the reset line didn't hook up to all the logic inside it. Originally just put FETs on the power lines, but that wasn't enough and I had to gate off all the I/O lines too.
          • the-dude 6y ago
• jimbokun 6y ago
  Will LLVM IR allow developers to deliver binaries that will run on both Intel and ARM? I see the Swift compiler can output LLVM IR, can you do the same thing with Objective C code bases?
  • monocasa 6y ago
    No, LLVM IR has platform specific parts baked into it like the ABI, and you can't really jump archs like that.
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    Not really. LLVM is not a single interoperable IR, it's more like a family of IR's with many arch-specific details. WASM+WASI could work though.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Not by itself, but of course the LLVM infrastructure has deep support for cross-compilation. (Objective-C can be translated to IR as well; it goes through largely the same pipeline once the frontend is done with it.)
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    Adding to what the other comments said, compilation from source to IR discards a lot of information, such as C preprocessor directives (which might take the form of "if x86" or "if ARM"). So, no.
  • scarface74 6y ago
    No. That rumor was dispelled by Chris Lattner during an interview on the Accidental Tech Podcast.
• throwawaygh 6y ago
  The most important paragraph in this piece is last one, which plugs a $22.8 billion bill to support domestic semiconductor manufacturing in the USA and suggests the need for new entrants. Semiconductor manufacturing is truly one of the few remaining manufacturing industries in which the USA has a competitive advantage (albeit quite eroded by TSMC over the past few years). Especially with US aviation circling the drain, this is an industry we can't afford to lose. Removing semiconductors from US manufacturing statistics makes US manufacturing statistics go from "stagnating" to "extraordinary decline". And it's not just the manufacturing sector. Semiconductors power some of America's most valuable companies (including but not limited to the FAANGs). US economic and actual security absolutely depends on a robust supply of world-class semi-conductors manufactured on-shore. Congress should take the advice in this piece and avoid making the same mistake with Intel that it made with Boeing (piling the bulk of all federal and state support for an entire sector into a single clearly dysfunctional company)
  • api 6y ago
    The US followed the advice of the business schools long ago and outsourced all its core competencies. The US' loss of technical and manufacturing expertise is going to be extremely hard to reverse, and reversing it is going to require a rejection of financial capitalist economic ideology and things like "maximizing shareholder value" as the prime directive. Unfortunately this election gives us a choice between an utterly unacceptable racist crackpot and a bland candidate who belongs to the old guard who still believes that you can have an economy based on nothing. That doesn't make me optimistic.
    • tharne 6y ago
      Don't know why this is getting downvoted. Tone aside, it's a fairly accurate assessment.
      • g-b-r 6y ago
        I'd wager it's because he criticizes Biden (too), but come on, people...
• GiorgioG 6y ago
  I would be more open to this if the new machines had Intel and ARM chips in them. If Apple pulls any walled-garden nonsense around what apps I can and cannot install on my Mac today, at the extreme I can install Windows/Linux and run the majority of software that's available for those platforms. If they move to ARM-only, I lose that choice.
• api 6y ago
  > Third, the PC market is in the midst of its long decline. Is it really worth all of the effort and upheaval to move to a new architecture for a product that is fading in importance? Intel may be expensive and may be slow, but it is surely good enough for a product that represents the past, not the future. This is one of the key things they got wrong. Mobile and tablet devices are not real computers. I can't run any software I want on them. They're locked down, managed, console type devices. There are other weaknesses at the OS and hardware level too, but the lack of flexibility and control is the most fundamental and hardest to change. If you opened up the OS to versatility and user control you could easily scale up an iPad with a bigger battery, more cores, and cooling, and you'd have a fantastic laptop. The UI would need some work too to make it suitable for more complex tasks, but that's an area where Apple excels when they want to. The locked down nerfed nature of mobile OSes is hard to change though because it exists for good reason. It addresses a primary need in their market niche. These devices are marketed to non-technical users, and in today's constant war zone environment a non-technical user without those controls will be inundated by malware and spyware. Still, this keeps them from being viable replacements for desktop/laptop systems in the professional market. For that reason desktop is not going away. We have two markets here that really do seem to demand two solutions. The desktop market decline wasn't the death of desktop. It was the loss of the low-end of the market, with non-technical and casual users migrating to phones and tablets. That transition is nearly complete, and the desktop/laptop market that remains is likely to remain until and unless something appears that truly does address that market niche. It's not a growing market but it is probably a stable one. Having a strong presence in that market is important for Apple because it's the market where developers live, and without developers who is going to make software and ecosystems for the rest of their devices? Who will ensure that these devices reach their full potential and thus are maximally appealing to consumers? No, doing everything in cloud is not that thing. I want to actually own my data, and broadband is still far too slow to make that workable for a wide range of tasks anyway.
  • whywhywhywhy 6y ago
    > Third, the PC market is in the midst of its long decline. Is it really worth all of the effort and upheaval to move to a new architecture for a product that is fading in importance? Yeah this is just an Apple journalist bubble belief that doesn't really reflect the real world in any way and is starting to get tiring. We keep hearing from them how iPad Pro is a computer and how it's so much more powerful than a real laptop yet we still never see it do anything more than tweeting, writing articles, extremely basic video editing and a painting app. Yet I look around every workplace and its still just a sea of laptops doing incredibly varied work across multiple applications and systems most of which still just isn't possible on iPads.
• saagarjha 6y ago
  > Windows, particularly given the ability to run a full-on Linux environment without virtualization An effort that Windows seems to be in the direction of abandoning. (Plus, writing these kinds of compatibility layers is complicated but not super complicated. What you really want is performance, and that’s hard.)
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Are you referring to the fact that WSL2 is technically a VM? You're not wrong, but the point seems a bit pedantic—Microsoft is clearly investing a lot into making WSL2 feel native, and it runs acceptably fast.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      Yes, the VM approach won’t work if your underlying architecture changes. And it’s hard to make it fast if you’re emulating, as I know firsthand from working on this for iOS ;)
      • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        > Yes, the VM approach won’t work if your underlying architecture changes. Well, but that's Ben Thompson's point, I think. If it's true that developers prefer to deploy to the same architecture they develop on, then one of two things are possible: 1. Developers largely abandon the Mac. 2. ARM becomes more common on servers. Apple is presumably betting on #1 (or is just willing to lose the developer audience), but it's a gamble. Lots of developers don't need to deploy code to servers, of course, but it's easy to see a situation where the momentum is felt by all. macOS's UNIX support has made it, well, I don't quite want to call it the "de-facto" development platform, but something approaching that status.
• stevievee 6y ago
  (Speculation) Jim Keller to Apple soon?
• samwillis 6y ago
  Would it be possible for Apple to have an optional dual processor system, an ARM main processor and an optional Intel coprocessor? That way for people who need support for “legacy” x86 apps or for development they could get it. Could you have an external Intel coprocessor like we have external GPUs? (I know nothing about how this would work, obviously the traditional way would be to just have an remote x86 server for running those tasks)
  • pornel 6y ago
    I expect Apple to do something smarter, e.g. extend the ARM instruction set with operations that speed up x86 emulation. For example, emulation of x86 on ARM is expensive due to subtle differences in memory model. Why not make an ARM chip that can operate with x86's memory model?
• robdachshund 6y ago
  This article has some issues. The author states that apple's best ARM chip is comparable to one in a "top of the line" imac. This is utterly false. They also state that the A13 trounces every other ARM chip by 2x yet uses a chart that doesn't include the Qualcomm 865 which is in current flagship android phones. It doesn't really hurt the main point of the article but the logical appeal falls flat when you don't seem to really understand what you are discussing at a technical level.
  • ksec 6y ago
    > the logical appeal falls flat when you don't seem to really understand what you are discussing at a technical level. Qualcomm 865 doesn't make that much difference. Not to mention the 865 wasn't out when those benchmark were done.
  • messe 6y ago
    Here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15207/the-snapdragon-865-performance-preview-setting-the-stage-for-flagship-android-2020/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15207/the-snapdragon-865-perf... A13 still comes out a fair bit ahead in performance, but not in energy usage.
• hellofunk 6y ago
  > Overall, in terms of performance, the A13 and the Lightning cores are extremely fast. In the mobile space, there’s really no competition as the A13 posts almost double the performance of the next best non-Apple SoC. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer. Wow.
  • dannyw 6y ago
    You can thank Intel for that. Single thread performance has stagnated since 2016. Some say 2014.
    • fomine3 6y ago
      Skylake was released in 2015.
• Shivetya 6y ago
  two ifs for me If they pass on the savings to consumers, looking at the price escalation with iPads I don't see why we should expect it to happen. if they don't build that garden wall higher which can include no bootcamp support while TSMC is doing great they are sill in Taiwan, a country which China has been making a lot of dangerous noise about and considering what is happening in Hong Kong how long before Taiwan suffers a similar or worse fate. That is a lot of manufacturing tied up in one area
  • akmarinov 6y ago
    It's very unlikely that they pass on savings to people by coming up with a cheap ARM laptop, after all their whole thing is gouging people with unrealistic prices for the hardware and huge margins on everything. That said, if a laptop rolls around that doubles the 10 hour battery life on existing configurations - they'll scoop up a ton of users regardless whether it can run Windows or not. I don't know how doable that would be, but the iPad Pro has a 28 watt hour battery, the MBP 13 has a 59 watt hour battery, a theoretical Macbook without a discrete GPU and a smaller motherboard footprint of an A13 chip, leaving space for a bigger battery and providing about the same performance could possibly hit 20 hours of battery in about the same space.
    • f6v 6y ago
      How are their prices on hardware unrealistic? Let's look at laptops: any other manufacturer(razer, dell) charges comparable prices for unibody ultrabooks.
      • akmarinov 6y ago
        Their RAM upgrade and SSD pricing is off the charts though. 8 to 16 GB is $200 - which other manufacturer does that?
• fabianmg 6y ago
  Ha!!, man, the end of that sentence made me laugh so hard... "Intel, by integrating design and manufacturing, earned very large profit margins on its chips; Apple could leverage TSMC for manufacturing and keep that margin for itself and its customers."
  • sutterbomb 6y ago
    Have you seen the iPhone pricing strategy? Yes they’ve moved up asp for the high end but are also now selling a $400 phone with chips that outperform anything else in the Android market. It’s very likely some of this margin will be shifted to consumers
    • dannyw 6y ago
      Apple’s pricing in the services world: extraordinarily competitive low end to lure you in. Excessively-margined high end halo products. High margin, but attractive in comparison middle tier.
  • ogre_codes 6y ago
    Dropping the per/unit cost of CPUs by $200/ system would allow Apple to retain their margins while decreasing prices. Or (more likely) push performance at the same price. Take a look at the "Low End" iPad and the iPhone SE. They are both excellent price/ performance devices with highly competitive processors.
• GiorgioG 6y ago
  And with Apple moving to ARM, any hope of serious gaming on a Mac will be gone.
  • yborg 6y ago
    That ship sailed decades ago. Rightfully so, because everyone that has the money for a Mac can easily buy a console, and much gaming has shifted to mobile platforms. Unless you think rainbow colored keyboard backlighting is a key innovation area for a computer company, the gaming market is a complete waste of time except for driving graphics hardware, which Apple has always lagged at even for their Pro products.
    • GiorgioG 6y ago
      Some of us can afford Macs and consoles, but still prefer a computer for playing games (graphics, kb/mouse controller, load times, etc.)
• billpg 6y ago
  Will I be able to have an executable file with all of 68k, PPC, x86 and ARM versions included?
  • larkost 6y ago
    Apple's .app system already has that ability, brought over from the NeXT purchase. Those regularly had PPC and x86 binaries in the same package.
• tiffanyh 6y ago
  What are the chances TSMC announced the plans to build a fab in Arizona because Apple wants to say their chips are produced in the USA? https://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsAction.do?action=detail&language=E&newsid=THGOANPGTH https://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsAction.do?actio...
  • chrisjc 6y ago
    I was wondering the same. Also wondering if a new fab was required in order to scale up for the potential new demand from Apple.
• gspr 6y ago
  Stuff like this is one area where Debian and other GNU/Linux distros are so valuable. The architecture doesn't matter much, and the flexible distros are poised to adapt well to this heterogeneous world.
• komali2 6y ago
  > and a company from a territory claimed by China was. A company from a sovereign country claimed by China.
• abvdasker 6y ago
  I shudder to think of the huge number of applications this will break. This has all happened before with PowerPC (ironically an RISC architecture Apple abandoned ~15 years ago). It's probably necessary but nonetheless frustrating.
• staycoolboy 6y ago
  I'm both excited and troubled, mostly because I fear the loss of LTS on x86-64: how long will Xcode, macports, and even brew support both architectures. Apple isn't one for backwards compatibility so this might be rough few years. I shudder to think about how long it will take to debug all of the Python3 wheels and Node packages macOS devs are accustomed to. I already have issues with versions of both language's packages failing to install with other versions, and that's on the same platform, OS and CPU architecture. Still, I'm excited. Intel is way overpriced compared to Arm at similar performance and power.
  • tgv 6y ago
    O damn, that probably also means no more building docker images on the mac.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    I should note that Xcode supports ARM perfectly well and MacPorts does the same for PowerPC. I'm sure they'll be fine.
    • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Note that Brew doesn't even support macOS Sierra[1]. It doesn't outright refuse to run, but there's a big warning message that stuff will break and maintainers won't care—and lots of stuff does indeed break. Macports's support for legacy versions of OS X is unique, and dare-I-say incredible. 1: https://docs.brew.sh/Installation#macos-requirements https://docs.brew.sh/Installation#macos-requirements
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
• gumby 6y ago
  He big reason to move production offshore was labor cost (straight comparative advantage); now it’s path dependency as the whole supply chain has migrated. This was the US’s big advantage 1890s-1980s but that time has passed. Advanced robotics will offer a chance of a fundamental restructuring as labor costs continue to contribute a declining proportion of COGS. The factories and supply chains could be completely distributed and resilient. But the example of the Internet is discouraging: the ultimate end-to-end system ended up highly centralized too.
• Rafuino 6y ago
  Oof, fun times at Intel right now. There are pockets of Intel not forgetting what made it successful, but they're usually the most difficult places to grow a career as they get snuffed out pretty quick
• ksec 6y ago
  I am beginning to think if it make sense to segment the Mac into two Category. The Pro model will use x86. And retain the compatibility of all macOS apps, some of them may likely never made the move to ARM. They just keep patching it to run on latest macOS. Along with Windows Bootcamp option. That will be Mac Pro, iMac Pro and MacBook Pro. The Non-Pro model will use ARM. You will end up with a 12" Macbook that is priced at $799. With a possible 14" Macbook at $899 ( The BOM cost of an iPad Pro 11" would be the same as 12" Macbook, you are essentially swapping the cost of back camera modules to additional 128GB NAND, the Touch Screen And Glass Panel to Track Pad and Keyboard. ) It will be like the Macbook 2015, except it doesn't cost that ridiculous $1299. And $799 might have been the cheapest portable Mac in recent history as far as I could remember. Even the 11" MacBook Air was priced at $899. It would greatly expand the macOS market shares. Which has very much stagnated for the past few years. Out of 1.4B PC market, Apple has 100M macOS users, 7% marketshare. Compare this to 4.5B Smartphone Apple has 1B iOS users, 22% marketshare. And the most important thing to me would be that Apple also accept / admit Tablet computing will never take over the Desktop / Notebook, or keyboard / trackpad paradigm. It is good enough for large enough of a market to worth continuing the investment into Mac other than trying to get iPad / Tablet to kill it. The only problem with this hypothesises is that the software would be very messy. Would Xcode force all Apps by default to compile with Fat binary? Is Apple going to tell its user the different ? ( Not that I think it would matter to Non-Pro user ) Anyway, this will be an interesting WWDC. ( Or may be everyone got it wrong Apple isn't doing anyway to the Mac )
• wilsonfiifi 6y ago
  I’m not sure Apple’s goal is to replace their x86 line of products; that will alienate too many users and would involve a huge number of software to be ported to ARM. I think they’re probably going to release an iPadOS device in a laptop form factor. Either foldable like the Lenovo Yoga or with a detachable keyboard similar to what Brydge Pro has done [0]. They’re already heading down that path with the new iPad Pro keyboard [1]. [0] https://youtu.be/Kkn9CLppLkI [1] https://youtu.be/JLQAh6IHPc4
  • scarface74 6y ago
    You act as if Apple hasn’t already made a processor transition twice and that their two largest third party software vendors - Microsoft and Adobe - didn’t make the transition each time.
  • ogre_codes 6y ago
    Apple doesn't tend to do things by half measures. If they see Apple on ARM significantly out-performing Intel across their product line, then they will move. There will be frustrations and pain, but it will happen. As Ben hints, this may cause a bigger industry shift as well. With Apple on ARM, it makes Windows and Linux ARM more palatable, in particular this could give ARM servers a significant boost.
• Arcuru 6y ago
  Matching the Spec2k6 scores of a high end desktop does not mean that the A13 has similar real world single-core performance. I've done ARM vs Intel perf comparisons in the past and we mostly ignored Spec2k6 because it looked nothing like real world code. I'm curious if there are any better benchmarks that will run on iOS.
• ogre_codes 6y ago
  > It is not out of the question that Apple, within a year or two, has by far the best performing laptops and desktop computers on the market, just as they do in mobile. This quote from the article is the big takeaway. Apple isn't going to make a lateral move here. A processor transition that nets Apple merely comparable performance would destroy the Mac brand. Apple needs a CPU that runs native code significantly faster than Intel on every device and it needs to be able to emulate Intel chips at reasonable speeds. I suspect Apple knows this and that their chips are going to hit the mark. But we'll see.
  • jtth 6y ago
    Depends on what you mean by performance. The same speed with double or triple battery life would be worth it.
    • ogre_codes 6y ago
      For native apps, yes. But these will need to run older Intel software as well. It needs to be able to run the x86 version of Microsoft Office or Photoshop at reasonable speeds. The only way that is going to happen is with a blazing fast CPU with a good emulation layer. That is more-or-less how they went from PowerPC to Intel, it's likely how they will get from Intel to ARM as well.
  • aneutron 6y ago
    My money is not only on the performance, but also an adjustable thermal envelope, which means perhaps even 5 times the battery life of normal windows laptops.
    • dr_zoidberg 6y ago
      With some Ryzen Renoir machines hitting 9-10hs of battery (when paired with a decent 80+ watt-hour battery, that is), would you expect a mac hitting 50hs of battery life? I mean I could see that happening when pairing a current A13 with a much bigger battery like a notebook has, but as others have said, the performance will have to be superb, so maybe we'll be seeing half the power efficiency? Were you thinkg 50+ hours or more in the lines of 20+ hours?
• magwa101 6y ago
  It is a misstatement to say that developers develop on Macs. They don't, they use Mac as a convenient environment from which to do Linux/cloud development. If it's MS/cloud development, they're running MS. The 3rd party app world on Mac is dying. Apple will be happy with their end to end commercially controlled device. That they put up with 3rd party apps at all was just a convenient anomaly.
• MangoCoffee 6y ago
  its sad to see a king (Intel) slowly dying. Microsoft got its groove back with Satya Nadella and turn Microsoft into player two in the cloud computing and unlock .Net. AMD ryzen to EPYC with Lisa Su and TSMC became king of pure-play foundry under Morris Chang. i think there is a pattern here. a good engineer CEO have a vision of what a company can be while a CFO turn CEO only see the bottom line. i don't know how long Intel can keep squeezing 14+++++++++++++++ nm.
• kaiby 6y ago
  I'm not a business guy, but if Apple's going all-in on ARM processors, and then they expand into the server market (which the article speculates on), could we potentially see Apple opening a new product branch devoted to competing in the Cloud space with AWS, Azure, and GCP? Imagine developing apps on an ARM-powered macbook, deploying onto ARM-powered servers owned by Apple, specifically for applications to be used on MacOS & iOS devices.
• dep_b 6y ago
  Apple having a really fast ARM chip is both an advantage and a disadvantage. If no Windows or Linux box will run on ARM for the same typical workloads a lot of stuff never gets ported. It would help Apple if there would be powerful ARM Windows or Linux PC's. People say Qualcomm is catching up but I'm not sure what kind of performance we'll get from the first ARM PC processor from Apple. It will probably run circles around the 8cx.
• woodylondon 6y ago
  Is the issue here not the software who cares what he hardware is ? MacOS will be ARM based, but if all the software out there needs to be rewritten for ARM then we will lose a lot of great software. A lot of indie Mac software refuses to use the AppStore for commercial reasons, and maybe now will be locked out forever? I understand there will be an emulator but won't we end up with what we had before when we moved from PowerPC > Intel where the old software was slow and buggy and no one wanted to update as was not worth commercially worth it
• mtgx 6y ago
  Since before Steve's death, never once had I not thought that Apple wouldn't use Arm chips in Macs. And I think Steve Jobs would've switched the Air to Arm 3-4 years earlier, too. My point is that it's strange how the Stratechery guy didn't see this coming, despite all of his analysis. Apple's move to its own Arm chips in the Mac (starting with the Air) was a no-brainer, once the performance got good enough to compete with Intel's competitors (for the Air, which are basically the weak Core M/Y-series chips these days). And that happened a few years back. Tim Cook just took his sweet time to prove it both to himself as well as everyone else how much of an obvious move this is. But Jobs, would've done it much earlier, I'm sure of it.
• bgorman 6y ago
  Intel has lost its manufacturing lead, but these changes are not permanent. There is a good chance TSMC stumbles as transistors shrink. Intel has a chance to catch up, but it seems like Intel has structural problems that prevent it from winning deals to manufacture third party designs. Relying on complete vertical integration doesn't seem like a winning business model anymore. Perhaps Intel should buy GlobalFoundries or license Samsung technology to develop competency in building designs for other customers.