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Gassée is focusing on the wrong things. "Thermal envelope"? Bah. In the block diagram of the SoC for the new Macs, Apple very clearly signaled what they are do

Gassée is focusing on the wrong things. "Thermal envelope"? Bah. In the block diagram of the SoC for the new Macs, Apple very clearly signaled what they are doing. They are working towards Steve Jobs's long-term vision. Onboard "advanced audio processing", "enhanced camera", "neural engine", "AI processing": this is about making Macs that support development of the next generation of software for iPhones. Mobile phones right now are stuck. Apple wants to make them more useful to their users, and the way to to that is to make them context aware, continuously listening and occasionally looking around. so the phone knows what's going on. Context-aware phones is what this is about. "Siri, write minutes of the meeting we just had, and email them to everyone." Users will never accept a phone that's continuously uploading everything in their lives to Apple's servers (or anyone else's), so all of this capability has to be on board the device. Intel is incapable of making a SoC that will support this, and no-one else has the capacity, so Apple has to do it themselves. (Also, Apple wants to keep the IP to themselves.)

detaro 6y ago
If they wanted those extra things available on x86 macs, they could just stuff them in an accelerator chip.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Yeah, and they're already shipping custom chips (like the T2) in their intel laptops.
- simonh 6y ago
  That’s an incredibly costly and inefficient approach. You used to be able to get x86 add on boards for Macs back in the late 80s and early 90s, but they cost a fortune and were incredibly clunky.
  - detaro 6y ago
    That's not a comparable thing. Putting specialized functions in their own chips is completely normal, and only a problem if they need really deep integration with the host CPU, or efficiency or size are extremely important (iPhone: sure. laptop, not so much), so I don't think those are a primary concern for the move to ARM laptops.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  How does that help with making software for iPhones? My guess is that they want the development platform to be a beefed up version of the target platform.
BooneJS 6y ago
Intel is making silicon for an entire industry. The "white box" industry flourished by assembling a box of parts and shipped them out the door with no other value added. Intel hyperthreading is ancient at this point, but for years Linux scheduler would schedule work on hyper threads before real cores. Apple is aggressive on software which requires them to be aggressive on hardware.
- amluto 6y ago
  I don’t really buy this. Apple, in general, seems to be shockingly bad at software. They have a design aesthetic, they’re pretty good at ideas, and they are able to execute. They accumulate plenty of technical debt, though, and they are bad at maintaining their software portfolio. Intel throws a lot of money at software, much of it open source, and this has played out fairly well for them. AMD is far, far behind in this regard. I fully expect a cutting edge implementation of macOS on ARM, and I fully expect it to languish post release.
  - BooneJS 6y ago
    I think “shockingly bad” is a bit dramatic. OpenCL, Metal, and Grand Central Dispatch are all technologies Apple created to help developers take advantage of the hardware Apple ships. I think a fair criticism would be the noise created by developers about the quantity and average age of bugs in their APIs. In 2015, 10% of Intel’s engineers were software. I don’t know how that’s changed in recent years.
    - attractivechaos 6y ago
      Apple also played an important role in the development of LLVM and WebKit.
  - mamp 6y ago
    The previous head of Windows would disagree with you: https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/apples-relentless-strategy-and-execution-7544a76aa26 https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/apples-relentless-stra...
sjwright 6y ago
> this is about making Macs that support development of the next generation of software for iPhones. This doesn't sound right to me. You seem to be looking for ulterior motives where none need exist. Isn't it a sufficient explanation that Apple believes they can build a superior product at a lower cost? Why does it need to be some conspiracy about re-framing the Mac as an iOS devkit? For this conspiracy to hold, you'd first have to believe that Apple builds Macs with developers in mind. Nobody with a passing familiarity with recent Mac history could believe that. It's been a long time since Apple has focused any Mac product on the needs of developers. Why would they start now? Besides, so what if future Macs are more like the iPhone? While it might be of occasional benefit to iOS developers by increasing feature parity of their iPhone Simulator, that's an extraordinarily marginal reason to overhaul a critical nexus of Apple's product stack.
emptybits 6y ago
> "Users will never accept a phone that's continuously uploading everything in their lives to Apple's servers (or anyone else's), so all of this capability has to be on board the device." Oh man, I genuinely want you to be right in that prediction. But I wouldn't bet on it. IMO we already see many (most?) users and even tech industry pros (who should "know better"?) showing comfort in uploading/streaming/routing large swaths of their lives to many companies. Companies arguably less "good" than Apple. (And many of these are Apple users who also have no problem hosting their lives on Google and Zoom). Because convenience, shiny things, and lifestyle marketing. And "free". I would love a future where all personal data and heavy computing was done on local hardware but I bet most people, given the choice, would choose a cheaper option that puts streams and storage and computing in someone else's hands. Because "free" and/or "cheap". i.e. the product is you
blueblisters 6y ago
Slightly off-topic: why SoCs? Cramming everything into a single die seems to be a poor design decision since your die size is likely to be limited by yield considerations. Curious why Apple doesn't go for ASICs inside a SiP or tightly coupled on an interposer/PCB.
ebalit 6y ago
Intel has bought Movidius. Movidius Myriad could provide the right basis for this kind of "context awareness". It has been tailored for vision tasks originally but I don't see any reason why other perception tasks wouldn't benefit from this architecture.

detaro 6y ago

If they wanted those extra things available on x86 macs, they could just stuff them in an accelerator chip.

kevingadd 6y ago
Yeah, and they're already shipping custom chips (like the T2) in their intel laptops.
simonh 6y ago
That’s an incredibly costly and inefficient approach. You used to be able to get x86 add on boards for Macs back in the late 80s and early 90s, but they cost a fortune and were incredibly clunky.
- detaro 6y ago
  That's not a comparable thing. Putting specialized functions in their own chips is completely normal, and only a problem if they need really deep integration with the host CPU, or efficiency or size are extremely important (iPhone: sure. laptop, not so much), so I don't think those are a primary concern for the move to ARM laptops.
tuatoru 6y ago
How does that help with making software for iPhones? My guess is that they want the development platform to be a beefed up version of the target platform.

BooneJS 6y ago

Intel is making silicon for an entire industry. The "white box" industry flourished by assembling a box of parts and shipped them out the door with no other value added. Intel hyperthreading is ancient at this point, but for years Linux scheduler would schedule work on hyper threads before real cores. Apple is aggressive on software which requires them to be aggressive on hardware.

amluto 6y ago
I don’t really buy this. Apple, in general, seems to be shockingly bad at software. They have a design aesthetic, they’re pretty good at ideas, and they are able to execute. They accumulate plenty of technical debt, though, and they are bad at maintaining their software portfolio. Intel throws a lot of money at software, much of it open source, and this has played out fairly well for them. AMD is far, far behind in this regard. I fully expect a cutting edge implementation of macOS on ARM, and I fully expect it to languish post release.
- BooneJS 6y ago
  I think “shockingly bad” is a bit dramatic. OpenCL, Metal, and Grand Central Dispatch are all technologies Apple created to help developers take advantage of the hardware Apple ships. I think a fair criticism would be the noise created by developers about the quantity and average age of bugs in their APIs. In 2015, 10% of Intel’s engineers were software. I don’t know how that’s changed in recent years.
  - attractivechaos 6y ago
    Apple also played an important role in the development of LLVM and WebKit.
- mamp 6y ago
  The previous head of Windows would disagree with you: https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/apples-relentless-strategy-and-execution-7544a76aa26 https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/apples-relentless-stra...

sjwright 6y ago

> this is about making Macs that support development of the next generation of software for iPhones. This doesn't sound right to me. You seem to be looking for ulterior motives where none need exist. Isn't it a sufficient explanation that Apple believes they can build a superior product at a lower cost? Why does it need to be some conspiracy about re-framing the Mac as an iOS devkit? For this conspiracy to hold, you'd first have to believe that Apple builds Macs with developers in mind. Nobody with a passing familiarity with recent Mac history could believe that. It's been a long time since Apple has focused any Mac product on the needs of developers. Why would they start now? Besides, so what if future Macs are more like the iPhone? While it might be of occasional benefit to iOS developers by increasing feature parity of their iPhone Simulator, that's an extraordinarily marginal reason to overhaul a critical nexus of Apple's product stack.

emptybits 6y ago

> "Users will never accept a phone that's continuously uploading everything in their lives to Apple's servers (or anyone else's), so all of this capability has to be on board the device." Oh man, I genuinely want you to be right in that prediction. But I wouldn't bet on it. IMO we already see many (most?) users and even tech industry pros (who should "know better"?) showing comfort in uploading/streaming/routing large swaths of their lives to many companies. Companies arguably less "good" than Apple. (And many of these are Apple users who also have no problem hosting their lives on Google and Zoom). Because convenience, shiny things, and lifestyle marketing. And "free". I would love a future where all personal data and heavy computing was done on local hardware but I bet most people, given the choice, would choose a cheaper option that puts streams and storage and computing in someone else's hands. Because "free" and/or "cheap". i.e. the product is you

blueblisters 6y ago

Slightly off-topic: why SoCs? Cramming everything into a single die seems to be a poor design decision since your die size is likely to be limited by yield considerations. Curious why Apple doesn't go for ASICs inside a SiP or tightly coupled on an interposer/PCB.

ebalit 6y ago

Intel has bought Movidius. Movidius Myriad could provide the right basis for this kind of "context awareness". It has been tailored for vision tasks originally but I don't see any reason why other perception tasks wouldn't benefit from this architecture.