8 ms·
Apple Silicon feels like the most exciting 'Apple computer' news since the launch of the Macintosh. Typing this from a 16-inch MacBook Pro that cost me $5k, I
by mindfulhack 6y ago
Apple Silicon feels like the most exciting 'Apple computer' news since the launch of the Macintosh.
Typing this from a 16-inch MacBook Pro that cost me $5k, I know Apple loves to make money via raw sale price of premium hardware. Imagine what power they'll be able to pack into such a price once they apply Apple Silicon to the MBP. I'm thinking 128 or even 256 GB RAM, extraordinary processing speed options that are orders or magnitude faster than any other laptop (or even desktop), it's major major news.
The big question mark hanging over it is ability to run native Linux. I'm a Linux user, increasingly. We'll have to watch this space.
- jankotek 6y agoHow would make ARM chip DDR RAM cheaper? I expect Apple to finally fix cooling and power management, but that is all.
- christkv 6y agoI think we will see custom acceleration hardware in the future to support stuff like video editing
- monadic2 6y agoHow big is that market?
- the_other 6y agoHuge. Everyone edits video now.
- monadic2 6y agoYea, not in a way that requires specialized hardware though. Edits on the phone are already virtually instantaneous.
- manicdee 6y ago… because of the specialised hardware and the tiny video resolutions supported.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoTiny? 2688x1242 isn’t tiny. Neither is 4K at 60fps.
- Arcanum-XIII 6y agoWithout color grading or other usual video correction. Once you start to tinker with your images, the picture change quite a lot for the cpu/gpu
- NickNameNick 6y agoBig enough that they already sell an fpga card for the Mac pro to do it.
- gruez 6y agoDon't most computers already have hardware accelerated encode/decode via cpu/gpu?
- CodeWriter23 6y agoThe real point is, Apple is an integration company that has now added self-made silicon to its toolset. Whereas in the past, they created the M chips for tracking motion in phones and watches, and the T chips for Secure Enclave and Secure Storage, the roadmap Apple displayed during the keynote indicates they are going to create specialty chips for any application that makes sense.
- mindfulhack 6y agoBy saving money on CPU, they can now pack in more RAM to keep the price up, and give the machines a competitive edge.
- Wandfarbe 6y agoRAM Prices on Mac where never reasonable. Upgrade prices where never reasonable. Why would Apple ever reduce upgrade prices just because they might save 100$ on a CPU? And why would you assume that the development of your own inhouse ARM CPU would make such a financial difference? After all, you have to develop a CPU. And what? Apple reports over 25% profit; Why would you even assume that Apple is doing anything for you? They could easily reduce there profit margin for you. They don't.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoIt's a fallacy to believe that costs have anything to do with prices, except as a lower bound.
- fomine3 6y agoAnyway Apple charges too much for DRAM capacity CTO option so Apple could cut prices now if they wish.
- acomjean 6y agoI wonder how much they’ll save. They sell millions of cpus and can distribute the engineering cost across them, but compared to amds/intels processor numbers it seems small. Plus it seems that the fact that they now need developer to write video drivers/ compiler optimizations etc are all additional costs. They payoff can be big, but so are the risks.
- znpy 6y ago> The big question mark hanging over it is ability to run native Linux. I wouldn't not be surprised if Apple took every measure possible to make it impossible to run Linux on their new machines.
- _ph_ 6y agoIt is not clear to me, why they would care much about it. The selling point of Macs is to a large amount macOS. On the other side, at least for now, it is announced that Apple Silicon hardware only boots into signed operation systems, which currently is only macOS. I would assume, that means there is little chance to run Linux natively on Apple Silicon. On the other side, virtualisation technology is part of macOS, so there should be good support to run Linux inside a virtualized environment. They even showcased Linux during the keynote.
- znpy 6y agowe'll see. for the moment, most people i know complain about poor performances of linux vms in mac os, particularly when running docker (that gets pretty i/o intensive when dealing with images). > at least for now, it is announced that Apple Silicon hardware only boots into signed operation systems this alone already rules out gnu/linux i guess?
- iforgotpassword 6y agoThis is how I feel. It would be the first Apple hardware for me in almost two decades. It's definitely the nerd factor of the idea of having a well designed non-x86 laptop with good specs, but we're currently planning to evaluate arm based servers, so having that as your dev machine doesn't sound like the worst idea. But I'm also exclusively using Linux nowadays, so I guess we'll have to watch this situation unfold for a while to see how viable running Linux on those is. I'm pretty sure it will be possible, but I'm not sure how much pain it will be.
- mindfulhack 6y agoI'm pretty encouraged at how far the Linux kernel's progressed with adding support for current modern MacBook hardware. Every now and then I boot up a distro that tends to have quite bleeding edge kernel version like a Tails USB to see how complete the hardware compatibility is out of the box. Apple's hardware like their trackpad remains superior enough that there seems to be enough interest (like you and me) in seeing it work. https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
- brainbag 6y agoI don't know if anyone else has caught up on this in the last two years since I went laptop shopping, but the trackpad quality is one of the only major things keeping me from buying a Windows laptop and installing Linux.
- acomjean 6y agoPeople bring this up, but honestly I’ve never noticed trackpad quality issues on other higher end PCs. People are basing their OS choices on marginal difference in trackpad quality? How about the fact that with macOS your tied to one vendor and their hardware choices (keyboard /ports etc). I don’t have a new MacBook(work machine 5yrs old), but I didn’t love the giant trackpad on the one I borrowed.
- 6y ago
- _ph_ 6y agoDirectly booting into Linux sounds unlikely by what Federighi said. MacOS would be around as a hypervisor at least, but he claimed that this technology is efficient enough, that it doesn't make a practical difference. I am doing my day-to-day work with Linux in a VMware VM on my MB Pro and couldn't be happier. When running fullscreen, I don't notice any difference to having a "native" Linux install, plus I am getting all the benefits of being able to suspend my VM, having several VMs and of course, switching to the macOS desktop is just a two finger swipe on my mouse. This really has become my favorite compute setup. The big benefit of using VMware for this is, that the necessary "drivers" are open source and have been part of the Linux kernel for quite some time. So you don't need to install custom drivers in your VM any more. Expecially with very new Linux kernels this means, you don't have to wait for the VM provider to supply new drivers. Which is the one thing I didn't like about Parallels, it rarely supports the latest Linux kernels.
- mindfulhack 6y agoI'm not a dev, but for my particular use case this is my current observation: Running Windows or Linux as a VM in macOS has terrible performance in VirtualBox right now (people are discussing it at length in VirtualBox forums). The expensive software Parallels is the only way for it to be usable. VMware is maybe OK, I don't use it much and only briefly tried it the other day. It seems if you want to run Windows or Linux as a guest VM, it's better to make Linux your host OS than Mac. I also increasingly prefer open-source software, so VirtualBox at the very least is desirable. On macOS, that solution is not adequate right now.
- _ph_ 6y agoI only had good experiences with VMware on the Mac. You should give it a try. I prefer it to Parallels for the listed reasons.
- sgerenser 6y agoI’ve been using VMWare Fusion since version 3 or so for work running Linux dev environments. It has generally worked great, which is more than I can say for VirtualBox. I do hope there will be a way to run x86 Linux VMs on Apple Silicon but not holding my breath.
- jeswin 6y ago> extraordinary processing speed options that are orders or magnitude faster than any other laptop If ARM-based chips can be "orders of magnitude" faster than x86, they'll already be dominating datacenters. The performance improvement in sustained compute (within a power envelope) will be incremental rather than the giant leap you're hoping for. x86 CPUs do not execute their CISC instructions natively; they get decoded to simpler instructions. But the decoder consumes only around 5% of the power budget, so it's not like x86 is spending significant amounts of energy because of the legacy instruction set. Now, due to a decade of high-stakes innovation in the mobile market, ARM solutions will do significantly better in idle power consumption (which was essential for phones). So, I'll expect way better standby and well managed low-power states/transitions. But a minor increase in full throttle power.
- klelatti 6y agoThat's interesting - do you have a source for 5% of the power budget spent on decoding?
- jeswin 6y agoSorry, I can't recall where I read the 5% number, but here's a study which investigates the impact: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/cooldc16/cooldc16-paper-hirki.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/cooldc16/cool... They put it at somewhere between 3-10%.
- klelatti 6y agoThanks - and of course ARMv8 decoding will have some cost. I seem to recall that x64 has greater code density too so some offset there.
- thechao 6y agoI haven’t been at Intel in ~8 years, but your description of the implementation of x86 is nothing like the processors I worked on. Admittedly, I never worked on the Xeons; but I would be surprised if decode were 12 watts on those platforms. My guess is that’s off by an easy 2 orders of magnitude.
- bogomipz 6y ago>'Imagine what power they'll be able to pack into such a price once they apply Apple Silicon to the MBP. I'm thinking 128 or even 256 GB RAM ...' I'm interested in why you think Apple will be able to build an integrated memory controller for a laptop that is capable or 128 Gigs or 256 Gig of RAM. Most laptops with Intel were stuck at 16 Gigs of RAM for years although more recently that has increased. My understanding about the reason for this is that these high capacity integrated memory controllers are very difficult to design. Is there something specific to ARM that would make iterating on these easier for Apple than it has been for Intel?
- hantusk 6y agoIsn't it possible to buy most high-end smartphones with 256 gig of RAM?
- acdha 6y agoThat’s storage, not RAM. 8GB of RAM is still a large amount for a phone.
- vaxman 6y agoApple learned (prior to 16”) that a large number of customers want to run huge VMs, load massive AI models and have faster imaging performance that comes with higher memory limits. I don’t think they are going to ever want to introduce another Prosumer machine that people slam publicly that hard again, plus they can’t exactly use the iPad Pro memory controller so they are designing a new one anyway.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]