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Why Apple ditched PowerPC, and what it says about Apple ditching Intel
- fortran77 6y agoI don't think they're exactly comparable. Ditching PPC (and I was working at Apple at this time) was a bold move. The existing Apple loyal user base -- which Jobs wisely knew was irrelevant -- loved having a "different" "Supercomputer" CPU at the heart of their computer instead of the "slow-as-a-snail" Intel. Jobs knew it was better to appeal to the rest of the world than be true to the "true believers" -- who would have been happy with OS9, too. But it was taking a risk: To the True Believers it didn't matter that by this time ~2003, Intel was fast and much more power efficient. You'd be lucky to get 40 minutes of battery life from a PowerPC based Mac laptop at the time when Intel laptops could run for a few hours. Today, Apple doesn't have a core group of users who are "proud" of their unique CPUs, and isn't fighting an uphill battle as they were in 2003-2005 or so. However, sometimes they choose a tech for "stubborn" reasons rather than technical ones and it's not clear if the ARM decision is made for the right reasons. For example: I think not choosing NVidia, especially for the Mac Pro, was a big mistake and costs them customers.
- agumonkey 6y agoAnd in general, computing have been hidden under one or two more layers. In the early 90s, architecture/OS made a difference (strength, platforms, available software). Nowadays .. everything is so powerful and so similar, and so much is crossplatform.
- dylan604 6y ago>I think not choosing NVidia, especially for the Mac Pro, was a big mistake and costs them customers. Apple's reluctance to use Nvidia has been a total head scratcher. I owned a 2011 with Nvidia dedicated GPU, but this was the line with known manufacturing defects. I had the mainboard replaced twice because of this issue, but eventually replaced the laptop when the GPU failed again. It's like Apple is holding a grudge.
- mirthflat83 6y agoThey absolutely are because Nvidia blamed Apple for the defects
- asjw 6y agoIt's not impossible it's Apple's fault too
- mschuster91 6y agoIt actually was the fault of everyone who implemented the chips, IIRC Nvidia didn't mandate the crap solder that was the problem.
- kitsunesoba 6y agoIt's also due to Nvidia's unwillingness to collaborate. AMD allows Apple to maintain their own fork of AMD's drivers for macOS. From what I've heard, AMD also keeps a handful of engineers on premises at Apple campus to assist with work on this fork. Presumably, Apple wants the same from Nvidia, but Nvidia is notoriously secretive and protective and wants exclusive control over drivers for its hardware. It's easy to pin this on Apple, but Nvidia's lack of openness shows in FOSS too — where AMD has open sourced the Linux version of their GPU drivers, making AMD GPUs work great out of the box with Linux and allowing for the drivers to follow along with the latest in desktop Linux developments (Wayland, etc), Nvidia has stubbornly insisted on keeping their drivers closed, making for a frustrating install experience, and has actively impeded the development and adoption of Wayland.
- slantyyz 6y agoI owned an early 2011 15" MBP with a discrete AMD Radeon GPU which had very well known serious manufacturing defects. I didn't realize Apple had any 2011 model year Macs that used nVidia GPUs.
- dylan604 6y agoI think the 2011 was the last year a discrete Nvidia option was available.
- epage 6y agoThe true-believers didn't matter because they were a cult. I have a family member in the Cult of Apple. Up to the day of the announcement, you would hear him talk about how amazing PowerPC was, Risc vs Cisc, etc. From the day apple anounced the move to Intel and on, he did a 180, talking about how smart Apple was to switch, how modern Cisc was really just a frontend to a Risc processor anyways, etc.
- scarface74 6y agoDon’t forget the reality distortion field. Only Jobs could go to Intel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_goes_to_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_goes_to_China). Just like only Jobs could make a deal with Microsoft.
- canuckintime 6y ago> a bold move. The existing Apple loyal user base -- which Jobs wisely knew was irrelevant -- loved having a "different" "Supercomputer" CPU at the heart of their computer instead of the "slow-as-a-snail" Intel. Jobs knew it was better to appeal to the rest of the world than be true to the "true believers" ... there were no 'true believers' in PPC only 'true believers' in Apple. They argued "slow-as-a-snail" Intel because that's what Jobs/Apple had been arguing for a half a decade. There was little risk in that appeal; once Jobs said switch there were no holdouts for PPC chips or threatening to jumpship. There was more risk in showing Bill Gates at Macworld than moving to Intel and the crowd merely booed then hopped on board.
- acdha 6y ago> To the True Believers it didn't matter that by this time ~2003, Intel was fast and much more power efficient. You'd be lucky to get 40 minutes of battery life from a PowerPC based Mac laptop at the time when Intel laptops could run for a few hours. You’re calling people True Believers and then just making things up like a period flame-warrior. I supported both at the time and there really wasn’t a significant difference in battery – both could last around 6 hours in light usage, especially since if you disabled Flash, or 3-4 for things like developers or scientists.
- fortran77 6y agohttps://www.zdnet.com/article/powerbook-battery-shenanigans/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/powerbook-battery-shenanigans/ > "if you're actually using the PowerBook, a charge won't last nearly that long. Apple claims that the battery life is 3 hours and 45 minutes for a combination of wireless Web browsing and editing a text document, but only 2 hours and 15 minutes for DVD playback." This is actually a quote from MacWorld, which was always charitable to the platform. In actual use as a developer doing compiles, I often got less than an hour. I was working at Apple during this time. I know.
- acdha 6y agoSo you’re moving from your previous statement of “you’d be lucky to get 40 minutes” to “a few hours”? Again, I heavily used both supporting a number of daily users. I’m not saying that the situation was anywhere near acceptable by modern standards but there just wasn’t such a huge difference between platforms: nobody had hardware which would run 100% CPU for a full day but light use (web development, system administration) would get you at least half a day. The one exception to that were the PC laptops which had multiple batteries but that’s because they had 2-3x battery capacity rather than a huge disparity in processor efficiency.
- nojito 6y ago>You'd be lucky to get 40 minutes of battery life from a PowerPC based Mac laptop at the time when Intel laptops could run for a few hours. iBook had 5 hours of battery life. Inspiron 500m had 3 hours of battery life.
- fortran77 6y ago> "if you're actually using the PowerBook, a charge won't last nearly that long. Apple claims that the battery life is 3 hours and 45 minutes for a combination of wireless Web browsing and editing a text document, but only 2 hours and 15 minutes for DVD playback." Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/powerbook-battery-shenanigans/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/powerbook-battery-shenanigans/
- nojito 6y agoWhich is true of literally every single device ever released. Intel didn't win the power performance game in laptops until Core Duo was released.
- acdha 6y agoAlso DVD decoding was an edge case — spinning up an extra drive and expensive decoding until the hardware, drivers, and OS all supported direct hardware decoding — which was relevant to people on planes but almost nowhere else in normal life.
- ddingus 6y agoI think Apple can cultivate a group of users who value ARM from their positive mobile experiences.
- slantyyz 6y agoNot a fan of the rumored platform switch, but I tend to think the vast majority of Apple's Mac users, who aren't power users/techies, care more about the Apple hardware quality/design and OS than the CPU platform that Macs run on.
- ddingus 6y agoI think you're probably right, but there is a mix of both. I'm actually super interested in the platform switch. I can't wait to see what Apple does with arm, and how the differences between arm and Intel change things on laptops.
- rewoi 6y agoDoes Apple actually invests into laptop/desktop development? They are usually couple of years behind competition (DDR3, Sky Lake chips). While their ARM chips are heavily developed. I think they decided long time ago that ARM is good enough, and are waiting for train to stop to change the engine. It is not about Intel quality, but about saving money and independence. AMD is not even considered as an alternative...
- kyriakos 6y agoPeople seem to be buying them anyway. If we consider Form over function could also be playing a role here, Apple's obsession with making their notebooks thinner ditching intel will help a lot with that cause they can at least keep the same battery life with a smaller battery.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoApple’s latest MacBook Pro is thicker than the previous model.
- kyriakos 6y agoThat could also be part of the reason they are switching platforms. Likely not the primary one.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoOr it could be an indication that they don't have an "obsession with making their notebooks thinner"
- _ph_ 6y agoI do think they actually invest significantly into laptop/desktop development. If you look at the teardowns at iFixit, they are pieces engineering art. No other manufacturer offers that nicely designed devices. Just think of the new Mac Pro having no internal cabeling, everything, including the extra power supply for the graphics cards, is on the motherboard. But of course, one can (and I do) disagree with some of their design choices, like non-exchangeable SSD and using far too much glue in the designs.
- tromp 6y agoThe article title "Power Outage" is a very cute description of Apple's migration away from PowerPC.
- jarjoura 6y agoInternally Apple always had an x86 build of OS X running. Just like I’m sure they have an ARM build running today. Intel chips ran cooler, had better power efficiency and were way faster at a lot of things than PowerPC. Leadership was actually super reluctant to switch and it took a demo from an engineer showing the massive improvement to convince them. If Apple is ready to switch to ARM they must have some impressive CPU. Apples not usually one to dabble here and there, so if they switch it’s going to be a wholesale ordeal. What will this look like for the Mac Pro?
- melling 6y agoNeXTStep ran on Intel so when they ported it to PowerPC they simply kept the Intel builds running.
- e2le 6y agoIt's a shame they didn't switch back to PowerPC, more momentum behind OpenPOWER would have being nice to see and allow more freedom to the end user.
- robbyt 6y agoWhy would they switch back after spending so much developing their own ARM CPUs?
- detaro 6y agoDoesn't really make sense given their large existing investment in ARM and there being (afaik) no current work on POWER for mobile applications.
- e2le 6y agoThat's true and it'll likely prove to be a good business decision although not necessarily one that benefits the end user in the long run. I'm also not suggesting they use POWER for mobile applications neither did I suggest they use Intel x86 for that.
- detaro 6y agoSo POWER only for desktop systems, keep macbooks on something else?
- alexisread 6y agoThe way I'm seeing things, RiscV will be in the same business position ARM is in now, in about 5 years. Apple might switch to that, and if so I'd also expect no further migration after that (as it's an open architecture).
- runjake 6y agoApple might, but they probably won’t. They don’t have a strong history of choosing the open options over their roll-your-own solutions.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoWith all of the security issues surrounding Intel CPUs in the last couple of years, not having an Intel processor will be a real advantage for Apple. And competition is a good thing.
- cmiles74 6y agoA lot of these security issues have lead to fixes that have had a negative impact on performance. There's no way that hasn't bothered Apple.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoIf your impression was that modern ARM CPUs weren't affected, I have some bad news for you: https://wiki.netbsd.org/security/meltdown_spectre/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/security/meltdown_spectre/
- gsnedders 6y agoThat chart doesn't include Apple's implementations, but they were some of the relatively few non-Intel CPUs to be affected by Meltdown as well as Spectre.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoMy gut tells me to trust Apple more than Intel on security. As far as I know there is no perfect security.
- wegs 6y agoThose are kind of fundamental to multicore / multithreaded CPUs, not just Intel. If I have many tasks running on the same CPU, tasks can interact in complex ways. That can leak traces of information, and a clever enough person can pry that tincan open. Not much one can do about it, other than running untrusted tasks in a sandbox with very well-controlled performance. That means slow performance.
- protomyth 6y agoThe book "The Race For A New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox and the Playstation 3" by David Shippy has some commentary on Apple with their relationship with IBM and the Cell. It's an interesting book and gives some reasons for Apple to ditch PowerPC.
- _ph_ 6y agoThe key element in the CPU market space is volumen. Volume lowers the cost of manufacturing and allows you to spend much more money on R&D as it is amortised over more devices. While all the big RISC manufacturers had in principle better architectures than Intel, in the 90ies Intel would kill them one by one due to the insane volumes of the PC market. Only on the server PowerPC and Sparc would survive. This is what forced the PowerPC to Intel transition, Apple had litte choices. I always keep wondering what the outcome would have been, if one of the large RISC platforms would have been made available in more consumer level products, e.g. offering an ATX motherboard for running Linux. Volumes would have been much larger. Another big factor for Intel was, that, financed by their huge cash flow, they had the most advanced fabs, so competitors often were 1-2 generations behind in the available processes. But now a few things have changed. First of all, Intel got stuck with their 10nm process, so they are no longer the manufacturing lead. But most importantly, TSMC would pull ahead of Intel and offer their services to everyone in the market. For the first time, AMD had a manufacturing advantage vs. Intel. And the iPhone happened. Given Apple an almost endless supply of money and a huge volume. Over many years, Apple built up a leading chip-design team. This already paid off big with the iPhone, having by far the most powerful CPUs in the mobile space. This also gave Apple a clear insight into the advantages of really owning the whole platform. Designing software and the cpus together. Offering desktop-class CPUs is of course a large additional investment - so it is not a trivial step. But if Apple is willing to do it, it should be very interesting and would give hope that they have ambitious plans with the Mac, as it only makes sense if they really push the platform.
- nextos 6y agoThe big problem with switching CPUs is the instruction set. For most people, it doesn't matter. But if you are in some niche domains, it really has an impact. I don't expect a smooth transition of libraries such as BLAS or VMs such as the JVM. You can't simply recompile these. You typically need a human to rewrite SSE, AVX and other tricky low level code so that performance stays competitive.
- afwaller 6y agoThere’s already BLAS and JVM for ARM.
- github-cat 6y agoMore about Apple's CPU architecture story can be found at https://www.pixelstech.net/article/1592625055-Why-Apple-Mac-switches-its-CPU-The-war-between-Intel-and-ARM https://www.pixelstech.net/article/1592625055-Why-Apple-Mac-..., An interesting read.
- sprash 6y agoP.A. Semi built a powerful and power-efficient Power ISA processor which solved all the problems Apple had with the Power architecture at the time. What did Jobs do? He bought the company and closed it immediately so that nobody noticed that the switch to Intel was not only completely unnecessary but also a big mistake.
- selectodude 6y agoHe didn't close it, he bought it and set them on ARM chips. Which have been very successful.
- runjake 6y agoAnd who knows, maybe Jobs didn’t set them on anything. Maybe he bought PA intending to use their existing bus technology but someone at PA pulled him aside and said “Hey, we don’t think you should waste your time with this. How about we design [what is now their ARM line]?”
- rlonstein 6y agoYou're being downvoted hard which I feel is unfair. The first part of your statement is true, they built the PA6T and was acquired by Apple. The second is your opinion. Mine is that Jobs wanted the team and acquired Palo Alto Semi to get the expertise not the chip.
- acdha 6y agoA single chip oriented at embedded systems can’t be said to have “solved all the problems Apple had” — and after years of falling behind, they really needed to get past the performance issue & its ensuing heat/reliability/cost problems. Customer loyalty only stretches so far and only the Intel option reliably closed the gap across product lines. Putting the team to work on the future made sense: they’re incredibly profitable, the software has matured in key ways making it easier to port, and they’re moving after years of hitting high targets annually.
- classichasclass 6y agoI'm sympathetic to this view but PA6T wasn't going to solve Apple's problems: it was clearly better than the G4, but Apple needed G5-level performance in their next generation laptops as table stakes, and PA6T just doesn't get there (see the AmigaOne X1000 as an example). It also was not at all clear at the time how scalable the microarch was, and it was coming from a company with even fewer (albeit some brilliant, as Apple has proven) engineering resources, so it would have been a big bet that Apple did not want to lose. We'll never know the answer, of course.
- MistahKoala 6y agoPerhaps a naive question, but what will this mean for Bootcamp users?
- spacedcowboy 6y agoFind out on Monday :) Either they’ve integrated Wine, or you’re screwed.
- tgv 6y agoWine is not an emulator, as you may know. It runs the executable directly on the processor, embedded in a Windows compatible runtime. You probably mean something like Rosetta...
- rcoder 6y agoThere's plenty of prior art beyond Rosetta to look at. MS has already done this for Windows on ARM, and simultaneously across ABIs via WSL. Linux offers QEMU-based "on the fly" emulation of different instruction sets based on execution-time examination of the ELF binaries. x86 BSDs have long offered Linux emulation. Even ChromeOS offers lightweight containers for Android and Linux apps. Apple is actually pretty far behind the curve here, at least in terms of end-user-accessible features. Presumably that means they wouldn't have to innovate too much to get x86/ARM translation working, even for binaries that couldn't be readily recompiled to support the new chips directly.
- yyyk 6y agoWell, the GP was talking about getting wine to run. Your examples cover either instruction set emulation or ABI emulation, but not both. In order to get wine to do something useful om ARM mac, it would need to do both while somehow being optimized to not suffer too much performance loss, and without suffering too much compatibility loss. It turns out such a project actually exists![0] But it seems to be in an early stage, and relies on infrastructure not exactly favoured in MacOS (QEMU, deprecated OpenGL). Apple could work to port it and polish it so it works with most apps, but why on earth would they invest so much in Windows compatibility? IMHO, Apple has two reasonable choices here: Ignore Windows compatibility from now on, or do just enough so that Windows on ARM boots, and let Microsoft deal with the supporting x86 Windows headache and blame. [0] https://github.com/AndreRH/hangover https://github.com/AndreRH/hangover
- liquidify 6y agoNo way to easily maintain an ARM ecosystem and an x86, but it sure would be nice if we got to choose our hardware more in our macs. They could solve a lot of peoples issues by letting people customize basics like their laptop ports, magsafe or not, keyboard / touchpad or not, and T2 chip or not. They would have to open the OS up a lot to allow choice of CPU architecture, which they will never do.
- nojito 6y ago>In the early days of the Apple/Intel partnership, their use represented something of a “pressure valve” on processor limitations that the Power Mac G5 created for Apple’s processor line. It helped solve a plateau in Apple’s laptops, which weren’t able to take advantage of the 64-bit architecture that the PowerPC G5 had promised to consumers. I doubt Apple will ever forgive Intel for missing the Merom release date...forcing Apple to support 32bit for an extra decade.
- klelatti 6y agoWhilst most of the discussion has been on Intel vs ARM performance and power consumption as a rationale it's probably worth mentioning two others: - Complete control of the Silicon. Apple will be able to place its own silicon IP on the new ARM chips. Does this mean the integration of the T2 onto the main SoC? Adding Neural Engine hardware? None of this would be possible with Intel and this would seem to provide interesting opportunities for Apple to differentiate the Mac from the PC market. - Economics. It seems likely that the ARM chips will be materially cheaper for Apple to buy than comparable Intel chips, although Apple will have fixed design costs to meet that it wouldn't do if it stuck with Intel. Any advantage would grow if Mac volumes increase which would make it advantageous to try to grow market share. Is this the start of a push to grow Mac volumes significantly?
- pier25 6y agoI think the lower heat density of ARM, and the increasing heat of AMD and Intel is another interesting point. AMD and Intel are racing to smaller manufacturing processes that inevitably will increase heat density. Today the most powerful laptops are those huge PC gaming bricks which of course are much more powerful than any MBP. This is only going to get worse as heat density increases, at least for demanding applications (gaming, 8k video editing, vfx, etc). By moving to ARM, Apple will be able to offer much more performant laptops in a much smaller form factor which will only differentiate Macs even more from the PC world. At least in theory. If this works I wouldn't be surprised if PC laptops moved to ARM too a couple of years later.
- harpratap 6y ago> If this works I wouldn't be surprised if PC laptops moved to ARM too a couple of years later Hasn't PC world ALREADY started the transition to ARM? Snapdragon based laptops already started shipping with SD835, Microsoft already has Windows S for such ARM laptops and many OEMs are already making experimental foldable ARM based devices that can take advantage of these small chips. Apple would be just retro-fitting their ARM chips in the shell of Macbooks 2 years too late.
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- mister_hn 6y agoThere was less software running on PowerPC than x86 back then and still there's less software running on Arm than x86, especially the key ones like professional ones (above all, Adobe suite, AutoCAD, Blender, Ableton, etc.) Arm chips might even be faster for Apple, but MacOS X unfortunately isn't as castrated as iOS and power users will refuse to give away that (small) liberty available in the desktop system than on mobile one. An OS where there's only a way to install software (the AppStore) is a huge limitation and even Microsoft itself learned the mistake with Windows 10 S, offering customers to install the standard version.
- justadudeama 6y agoNot sure about the other ones, but Blender runs on ARM[0], and it seems like adobe is already working on it[1] [0] https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=blender https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=blender [1] https://www.neowin.net/news/adobe-is-working-to-bring-all-of-its-creative-cloud-suite-to-windows-10-on-arm/ https://www.neowin.net/news/adobe-is-working-to-bring-all-of...
- jseliger 6y agoI have also seen the point made that many/most modern desktop apps are just Electron apps: not too many people/companies are invested in Cocoa these days. Adobe/Microsoft are the big obvious exceptions. Computers are fast enough to enable what might otherwise be called "bloat."
- pjmlp 6y agoActually no, because that is how Windows 10X is supposed to work, and it also sandboxes Win32 processes, using the same tech as for WSL 1.
- robertoandred 6y agomacOS running on ARM doesn't mean the App Store would be the only way to install software.
- mister_hn 6y agoSure?
- atarian 6y agoNever thought that I would see the day that Intel would lose its dominance. Every time they came out with a new processor back in the 90s was like a new iPhone.
- mdasen 6y agoI think this article paints a rosy picture of the PowerPC. I was a Mac user and owned G3 and G4 Macs (and a PowerPC 603 Mac). It wasn't a happy time that suddenly came to an end with the G5 and a decaying relationship. IBM and Motorola had been struggling to keep up with Intel for a long time. Apple kept trying to spin it and the next-great-thing was always just around the corner...the problem is that Intel kept getting there faster and cheaper. Apple would talk about the "MHz-myth" a lot. While it's true that MHz doesn't equal performance, Intel was doubling the PowerPC's performance most of the time. The G3 saw Apple do OK, but then Intel went back to dominating in short order. The PowerPC never matched Intel again. It was really bad. People with Windows computers just had processors that were so much more powerful and so much cheaper. You can say that Apple always charges a premium, but not too much today on their main lines. Apple simply doesn't sell low-end stuff. Yes, a MacBook Pro 2GHz costs $1,800 which is a lot. However, you can't compare it to laptops with crappy 250-nit, 1080p screens or laptops made of plastic, or laptops with 15W processors. A ThinkPad X1 Carbon starts at $1,553 and that's with a 1080p display rather than 1600p, 400-nits rather than 500-nits, 8GB of RAM rather than 16GB (both soldiered), and a 15-watt 1.6GHz processor rather than the 28-watt 2GHz part. Heck, for $1,299 you can get something very similar to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon from Apple (though with a 1.4GHz processor rather than 1.6GHz) - $250 cheaper! The point of this isn't to say that you can't get good deals on Windows computers or that there's no Apple premium or even that there's any value in Apple's fit-and-finsh that you're paying for. This is to say that I remember things like the original iMac with CRT display, 233MHz G3 processor, 13" screen (when people wanted 15-17" screens), and an atrocious mouse going against Intel machines for half the price with nearly double the speed and better specs on everything other than aesthetics. Things were really bad trying to argue that someone should spend $1,300 for an iMac when they could get a Gateway, eMachine, Acer, etc. for $600 with a 400MHz processor rather than 233MHz. A year later, Apple's at 266MHz while Intel has released the Pentium III and is cranking it up from 400MHz to 600MHz that year. Yea, you can point to $700 laptops today and say, "why buy an Apple for $1,300?" Sure, but at least I can say that the display is so much better (500 nits vs 250 nits and retina), it's lighter than those bargain laptops, fit-and-finish is so much better, etc. At least I'm not saying, "um, no...all those benchmarks showing the Windows machine twice as fast...um...and the mouse is so cool because it's translucent...you get used to it being terrible." It's very, very different from the dark days of 2000. Plus, today, a price premium doesn't seem as bad. Back in 2000 when you thought you'd be upgrading ever 2-3 years, you'd be shelling out a lot more frequently. If performance doubled every 18 months, 3 years later you'd be stuck with a computer running at 1/4th the speed of something new. With the slowdown in processor upgrades, paying for premium hardware doesn't seem like throwing money away in the same way. The article also paints the RISC architecture as superior. I'm not a chip expert, but most people seem to say that while RISC and CISC architectures have a different history, modern CPUs are hybrids of the approaches without huge advantages inherent in their ideology. Frankly, if Intel were able to get down to 7nm and 5nm, Apple might not be looking at ARM as strongly. I think it also paints Apple as some sort of more demanding customer. In some ways, sure. Apple likes to move things forward. However, it's not like MacBooks are that different from PC notebooks. The difference is that Apple has options. They can move to another architecture. Windows manufacturers don't really have that. Sure, Windows on ARM has been a thing, but Microsoft isn't really committed to it. Plus, Windows devs aren't as compliant when it comes to moving architectures so a lot of programs would be running slowly under CPU emulation. The big issue is that Intel has been stuck for so long. Yes, they've shipped some 10nm 15-watt parts and even made a bespoke 28-watt part for Apple. It's not enough. I'd argue that PC sales are slow because Intel hasn't compellingly upgraded their processors in a long time. It used to be that every 18 months, we'd see a processor that was a huge upgrade. Now it's 5 years to get that upgrade. There's a trade-off between custom products and economies of scale. With the iPhone using so many processors and TSMC doing so well with its fab, Apple now kinda doesn't have to choose. Intel has been charging a huge premium for its processors because people were locked into the x86 and it takes a while for new competition to happen. Their fabs have fallen behind. It looked like they might be able to do 10nm and move forward from that, but that doesn't seem to be working out too well for them. The transition from PowerPC to Intel was about IBM and Motorola not being able to deliver parts. They were falling behind on fabs, they weren't making the parts needed for Apple's product line, and it was leaving Apple in a position where they simply had inferior machines. The transition from Intel to ARM is about Intel not being able to deliver parts. It wasn't simply a short time when they couldn't deliver enhancements, but a decently long trend on both accounts. Apple knows it can deliver the parts it wants with its own processors at this point. The iPhone business is large enough to ensure that and they can make laptop parts that really fit what they're trying to market. Intel got Apple's business because they produced superior parts at a lower price. They're losing Apple's business for the same reason.
- zackmorris 6y agoLack of backwards compatibility every time Apple changed their OS or processor pretty much ruined my life back when I was trying to write games on the Mac, because they coincided with downturns like the dot bomb and housing bubble popping (in that case just after iOS arrived). I was so beat down trying to survive at life that rewriting everything I had just written the last year for the new hotness became too much of a burden. I worked a bunch of dead end jobs instead and wasted whatever potential I might have had. Now midlife has hit and I've generally let all that go, but it still bothers me thinking about what might have been. That said, Intel has sat on their hands for 15 (I would argue 20) years, and so it's unsurprising that Apple is ditching them. I remember seeing 3 GHz processors sometime around 2003-2004. Very little has changed since then. We have faster memory busses now but we've generally lost almost two decades of Moore's law. Before that, processors got twice as fast every 1.5 years, so 100 times faster every decade, which would be performance equivalent to a 30 THz processor today. Note that where progress HAS happened is video cards (GPUs). So I'm somewhat optimistic that if Apple disrupts the CPU industry, we might see true general-purpose computation speed up rather quickly and break the 4 core, 1 memory bus barrier. I think low hanging fruit here would be 16 to 256 cores arranged in a grid, with the square root of that number of memory busses on an edge. With today's tech, we could have 1024 DEC Alpha cores with 32 memory busses for not much more than we're paying for an Intel i9 with 2 billion transistors (the Alpha had 2 million). Yes, I know it's not an exact comparison, but I have a computer engineering degree so this isn't the time to be pedantic. General purpose computing could also disrupt the GPU and AI industries, because we could jump ship from the ever-narrowing niches of rasterization and neural nets, and move on to broader experiments in things like ray tracing and genetic algorithms. I had originally wanted to do that with FPGAs, but I've been burned out so long trying to keep up with the shortening attention span of tech that I had to let it go. Hard to say if any of this will happen, but I just wanted to shed light on the kind of innovations we've missed out on under two lost decades in tech. This is the tip of the iceberg. An explanation for this is that customers want cheap eye candy, and prices have certainly fallen on track with Moore's law. But I've vote to finally see better performance again. Also I'd like to see the emergent effects of better processors, such as more use of parallelized higher-order functions and data driven/functional/declarative programming using something like the Actor model, piping data around with simple tools that do one thing well, borrowing techniques from UNIX and Clojure/Erlang/Go/MATLAB/etc.
- DonHopkins 6y ago>Gassée is certainly correct that Aquarius likely played a historical precursor to Apple’s current processor ambitions, but it likely also played an indirect role in its first major processor shift—that from Motorola’s 68000 series of processors used in the Apple Macintosh of the time, to the PowerPC, which eventually took off in a big way in the 1990s. Hey, Apple's first major processor shift was from 6502 to 68000!
- mavhc 6y agoAt the same time in the mid 80s Acorn was an even smaller company that wanted to make its own CPU, and managed it, and by 1992 had a SoC version with GPU and MMU built in (ARM250)
- doggydogs94 6y agoFor the end user, the migration to the new platform will be simple, but confusing for the average Mac user. For developers, the migration will require much more work (testing and coding for both platforms) for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, the development tools will ease the pain somewhat.
- NotSammyHagar 6y agoI think amd may be on the verge of fixing a lot of the problems that intel has run into in their inability to move forward quickly - the 10nm switch is potentially devestating intel (intel's slow pace of advancement is kind of what the article eventually gets to). If apple said they were going to focus on amd chips at this point, the market would be excited. Are those apple arms going to be able to really handle the cpu load and scale over time like large market intel and amd design teams are scaling investments over billions of devices? I'd just be afraid apple isn't quite big enough. It's very exciting when a change like this comes along in any case. Will they run x86 'legacy' mac programs at a reasonable speed?
- urda 6y agoWhat does this mean for current x86 needs? Will Apple just "bridge" it for a while like their transition to Intel? Do they have a shim or some other way to handle it?
- person_of_color 6y agoIBM should have open-sourced POWER.
- Sloppy 6y agoI ditched my Windows PC when Apple moved to Intel. I will ditch my MacBook when it uses ARM. Not dogma, just practical. I'm a `nix SW Dev and require the 95% of code that works on AMD64 run on my machine. Odd to see MS now supporting more `nix. What we (many SW Devs) need is `nix + AMD64 for the foreseeable future. Furthermore I do not trust Apple. The advent of the iPhone software lock-in echo-system shows where they want to take Macs and that is just a no starter for me. Bye-bye Apple.
- pfranz 6y agoI don't think that's quite a given. I don't think Apple has changed as much as you're implying. When OSX was first released, even though it was Unix-based, most people were pretty confident it wouldn't ship with a Terminal. Apple has always been very opinionated and strongly biased towards a user-facing experience. "Techies" have always been a bit skeptical of what Apple may do and should continue to be. Linux already has a very healthy ecosystem on ARM with Raspberry Pi and others. Heck, it had a healthy ecosystem back in the day on PPC with thins like Yellowdog Linux. I don't think an ARM transition will change this part as much as people think. You've always needed to recompile for macOS.