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With the R&D costs involved, there's no way that Apple does this to save costs. It makes even less sense financially considering that unless Apple is planning t
by my123 6y ago
With the R&D costs involved, there's no way that Apple does this to save costs. It makes even less sense financially considering that unless Apple is planning to make Macs with much higher volumes than before... (which would be a bold bet)
- Zenst 6y agoThose R&D costs are a bit shared with their whole ecosystem, so whilst some features for a desktop based version of the CPU would not be viable on a phone today or an iPad, down the line they may will filter in. So they kinda already have the volume to cover R&D costs thanks to how well their phones and tablets have sold.
- baybal2 6y agoNo, I don't think so. Intel squeezes Apple dry on CPU pricing. Intel squeezes everybody dry. There is no client big enough for them to loose.
- my123 6y agoExpecially with the low volume for the high end Mac Pros they'll have few choices for those with the transition: 1) Either they are going to sell those chips on the wider market, which probably won't ever happen, or 2) Eat the costs and make the machine unprofitable to retain a market, which isn't too likely either, or 3) Make the machine less expensive and trying to do a high-volume play out of it, or 4) Massively raise the costs. There's no way out apart from those, which raises questions on what they'll do.
- valuearb 6y ago5) 40 and 50 core versions of the A14 that cost a fraction of Intel Xeon CPUs and offer similar performance.
- imtringued 6y agoThat's just wishful thinking. Mac Pros don't have the sales volumes to ever recover the necessary R&D. Apple is also completely unwilling to sell their chips to competitors. Building a server grade CPU requires a completely different expertise. 99% of the work is in the interconnect, interfaces like DRAM, PCIe. Apple can do all of that except it will take half a decade and only lose the company money. Instead of having such a foolish dream it makes more sense to just find an existing ARM server vendor.
- 1996 6y agoFor 1. and 3., sell the chips to specialized hosting companies who want to try things. Scaleway had a ARM hosting line. There are many innovative and competitive hosting companies in Europe that take advantage of the cheap bandwidth. They won't sneeze at cheaper hardware.
- terandle 6y agoApple already did #4 - massively raise the base cost of the 2019 Mac Pro, so it could be that this is priced in already.
- sjwright 6y ago5) Treat the Mac Pro chips as a line item in their R&D budget for future iPhone and iPad CPUs. 6) Maybe Apple will never build "Mac Pro" class CPU. Instead the Mac Pro ekes out an existence with a higher thermal budget and more GPU/FPGA accelerator cards. (Imagine if Apple released many more FPGA programs for their Afterburner and then let you add two or even four into a Mac?) 7) Use their most powerful chips to build a games console and crush out Nintendo like Sony did to Sega twenty years ago.
- valuearb 6y agoApple is definitely going to go for higher volumes. Imagine how well a better faster entry MacBook Air sells at $750 instead of $900. They can do this while maintaining their margins at the same levels. And additional R&D costs are a drop in the bucket. They already have a big team to design processors, next year will be their 14th version. Every year they have a large team rev MacOS. If they spent $1B a year on R&D for the Apple Silicon transition, they will get double that back the first year on lower CPU costs on a $25B sales rate. Except their sakes are going to increase substantially. And they won’t even spend half a billion total on R&D for the entire two year transition, Rosetta already existed, the A14 was already being designed, etc, etc.