11 ms·

Macintel: The End Is Nigh

166 points by donmcc 12y ago

PaulHoule 12y ago
The real weakness of Intel in power consumption relative to ARM hasn't been so much in the chips as the chip sets, software and the balance-of-system. To create a low power system, ALL components need to be low power, and it is easier to start from a system built to be low power and scale up capabilities rather than go the other way around. For instance, I have a Windows-based laptop which is a great machine, but if I have a web browser open, any web browser, the fan spins, it gets hot, and battery life is less than 1.5 hours. Is it the fault of Windows, the browser vendors, the web platform, adware, crapware, who knows what? It doesn't matter, but controlling power consumption on a legacy platform is a game of whac-a-mole that doesn't end. Because Windows users expect to plug in devices that draw power from USB, a Windows tablet has to have a huge power transistor to regulate voltage, a power supply system scaled up so it can supply enough power through the USB port to charge an Android tablet, at this point you might add the fan and then you are doomed.
- eloff 12y ago
  The x86 instruction baggage is a red-herring. It takes maybe 3% of the transistor budget to support it. I saw an interesting interview once with an ARM exec who leveled and said they don't really have a big power advantage over Intel, despite what people commonly think. I didn't manage to find the article with Google though.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  To me it seems mostly a problem of unwalled garden. When Apple owns the platform from the silicon to the development environment, it's easier for them to manage power. Wintel on the other hand has so much variety all the way down the software stack and even into hardware, it is more difficult to control... x86+Linux (Lintel?) suffers the same problem. The unwalled garden can still be made low power. Android has set an example of tackling that problem with the battery tracker, which profiles which application is chewing up battery. For power over USB, what do you mean? My Android cell phone can power keyboards, flash drives, and the like with an OTG cable. It certainly has no fan.
  - jp555 12y ago
    If you think Android isn't a walled garden (unless you mean non-Google Android?) then the devil has convinced you he doesn't exist.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      It is at least much less of one than iOS
      - jp555 12y ago
        Which may appeal to you as a developer, but from a user perspective, that isn't a good thing. Consider this analogy: Would you buy an "open-source" deadbolt for your house? Great feature for aspiring locksmiths! But very likely not such a great feature for 99.9% of home owners.
    - scandinavian 12y ago
      Wikipedia says: "A closed platform, walled garden or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system where the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applications or content." Google doesn't restrict access to applications or content on my Nexus 5, so how is it a walled garden?
sudhirj 12y ago
For someone who's not very knowledgeable about architecture shifts, what software changes would be require to make this happen? I'd assume that the Mac OSX itself might be able to make the shift easily, given that Swift and ObjC code seems to run on both iOS/ARM devices and MacOS/x386 machines. What else will have to change? Or is this purely a hardware choice?
- wyager 12y ago
  The fact that iOS shares a lot of the same code as OS X will make this a much easier transition. Apple can take a lot of the low-level stuff from iOS, where they've had years to figure out how to get Darwin working smoothly on ARM. Beyond that, all apps on the OS X app store will have to be recompiled and resubmitted. None of the binaries installed on current OS X machines will still work, unless Apple includes an x86 emulator like they did for the transition from PowerPC. This will also open up the possibility of running iOS apps natively on OS X, but I doubt Apple will pursue that at all (for UX reasons).
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    The transition will be easy for applications that rely on Apple's APIs only, the fun will be for programs that use proprietary third party components all of which will need to be rebuilt, as well as all binary plugins to applications. I can imagine this might be a huge job for some of the more heavyweight production programs for Mac , as well as AAA games. It would basically spell doom for Parallels and other virtualization software which give Mac switchers an escape hatch back to any Windows programs they might use.
    - umanwizard 12y ago
      Another negative in the same vein is that it would prevent fast emulation of Windows and many Linux/BSD distributions in something like VMWare.
      - dublinben 12y ago
comrade1 12y ago
The transition from powerpc to x86 was surprisingly relatively painless. There was some pain but most apps ran fine in the translation layer and eventually the native apps moved over. It'll probably be even easier the next time since apple has done it once already and knows how to provide the proper dev tools.
- gsnedders 12y ago
  They've done it twice, not once. They moved from 68k to PPC in the early 90s, again with full emulation. In that case it was even more extreme, as much of the OS ran emulated in early PPC releases (yet it was still quicker than running on actual 68k hardware!).
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    I think it's technically irrelevant, how many people from the 68k/ppc era are still there, and the os/tooling/techniques back then have probably nothing to do with what's in place nowadays. Pyschologically it still matters though, as you said, they did it twice and the first was surely a harder task.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      They almost certainly have some 68k/ppc guys left, and while tooling has changed they at least had a historical recipe (e.g., go ahead an emulate somethings, transition gradually, etc) that was proven to work.
  - bryanlarsen 12y ago
    You've highlighted the big difference this time. Switching from Intel to ARM would be a step down in performance, or at least not a step up. There's no headroom for a legacy emulation layer.
    - bostik 12y ago
      However, it does work with the playbook of going ever closer to computing appliances from general-purpose computers. In the beginning there was the motherboard and a CPU. Then, before homogenic PC era, we had dedicated chips that took care of certain operations. The SID chip in C-64. The blitter chip in Amiga. (Can't remember the name, I'm sorry.) Even the x87 math coprocessor in the 386/486 age! With advent of PC and the megahertz wars, dedicated peripheral chips became less common - except in SoC environment. Where the x86 world went with raw processing power, embedded world had to find ways to fit specialised chips on the board. My experience is mostly centred around crypto accelerators, but I know from very painful experience that all Maemo devices had on-board DSP units to handle some sound decoding, and pretty much all video processing. So the pendulum swings: CPU for everything, then peripheral devices for specific high-intensity jobs. Some of the most commonly used get integrated into CPU's, making entire classes of chips irrelevant ... until the next CPU-intensive thing comes up, and the main processor is again too slow. Apple is banking on their ability to both predict and dictate the direction of near-future computing needs. I expect the A7/A10 boards to come up with all kinds of integrated support chips to handle the heavier loads. As long as their predictions are correct, all is well. Any bets on what's the next CPU burner that will require a dedicated ASIC to preserve even the semblance of battery longevity?
jareds 12y ago
If this happens I hope entry level Mac’s get below $500. I bought a MacBook Air for use as a Windows machine with the plan to learn iOS development at some point. It was worth the cost since I can use it as my day to day machine running Windows. I wouldn’t be able to justify spending $1000 on a Mac Laptop that could not run Windows. I could justify $400 for an entry level Mac Mini running ARM but not a lot more then that.
- RexRollman 12y ago
  Based on Apple's pricing history, I don't think ARM based Macs would be cheaper, at least not by much.
- geon 12y ago
  FWIW, it should be able to run ARM Windows, right?
- joshstrange 12y ago
  I find the "Apple is too expensive" argument to hold little water when you really look at it. I won't argue that up front you will pay more for the lowest-end Apple laptop/desktop over a Windows laptop/desktop but in my experience Apple products hold their value much better than any Dell/HP/etc product. Even if you hate OS X then you still are better off buying an Apple laptop and running Windows than you are buying a Windows laptop. The hardware is more reliable, the resale value is greater, and they look 100x better than anything else out there. Comparing a Dell XPS to a Macbook Pro Retina with the very similar stats (CPU/RAM/HD), the Mac has a few better specs, leaves us with a price difference of $100 in Dell's favor but I can promise you that the MBPr will resale for much higher than the XPS in 1-2 years time. I had friends in college that always would joke that I paid a small fortune for my MBP ($1500) however these were the same people who would buy a $500 laptop every year or so because their bargain bin laptops just didn't last long before they started having hardware issues or massive slowdowns. My MBP ran quite smoothly for 2.5 years before I needed a faster CPU (I'm a developer) and I sold my machine for $900 which resulted in an operating cost of $240/yr for the period I owned it.
  - 12y ago
twotwotwo 12y ago
Apple does look like it's making chips to handle heavy workloads, not just to compete with the latest Krait or whatever. But I'm not sure ARM Macs are the direction they'll take that. It'd make some business sense for them to instead position iOS so it can take over more and more traditional Mac duties. The IBM push could be an example of that. Investing in iOS gives Apple the tight control and the 30% cut they're used to from that space, and it avoids the Windows-RT-ish heartbreak of "why is this ARM OS like my Intel OS but without all my apps?" (If there were Mac-on-ARM, I'd expect it to be Mac App Store only.) Anyway, the A7 is already a beast (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchitecture-detailed http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchi... does various measurements, http://cryptomaths.com/2014/04/29/benchmarking-symmetric-crypto-on-the-apple-a7/ http://cryptomaths.com/2014/04/29/benchmarking-symmetric-cry... is an interesting case study), and there are still future process nodes and microarchitecture changes that will let them make better chips. I don't know if an ARM MacBook Air is specifically where this goes, but they're certainly making ARM capable of more serious stuff.
- geon 12y ago
  > why is this ARM OS like my Intel OS but without all my apps? The problem should be much smaller on OS X than on Windows. Apple has a culture of breaking things regularly, instead of worshipping backwards compatabillity. The result is that most Mac apps are kept up to date by the developer. Recompiling for an arm-based OS X shouldn't be an issue.
  - deong 12y ago
    > The result is that most Mac apps are kept up to date by the developer. That's maybe true for indie developers. It's not generally true for things like Photoshop, Microsoft Office, MATLAB, Mathematica, Skype, and dozens of other major titles that would likely be complete dealbreakers for a pretty significant portion of their userbase.
    - MBCook 12y ago
      Apple kept Carbon (the OS9 to OS X transitional bindings) around for so long because of Photoshop and Office. From personal experience, I can tell you that this does not happen with big software. Apple released the first Intel Macs in early 2006. The next year Intuit released Quicken 2007 which was PPC only. The first version of Quicken to be x86 for Mac was Quicken Essentials 2010. First of all that's four years after the transition. Second, Quicken Essentials was crippled. Here's a quote from Wikipedia: > Some of the features of Quicken are not present in Quicken Essentials for Mac, such as the ability to track investment buys and sells or to pay bills online from the application. So unless you wanted something ultra-basic you were screwed. Intuit's answer was that they'd give you a free copy of Quick '08 for Windows. All you needed to do was buy Parallels (etc.) and Windows. This was a big problem because OS X finally dropped PPC emulation support, called Rosetta, in 2011 with the release of Lion. So after 5 years Intuit, a VERY big company, was unwilling to update their software or provide a real equivalent for their Mac users. If you look at the announcements for each version of Adobe Creative Suite for Mac you'll find references to starting to use features of the OS that Apple introduced years ago.
eurleif 12y ago
I wonder if this will mean the end of Flash Player for Mac? Will Adobe bother releasing an ARM version?
- stuaxo 12y ago
  There are already ARM versions for Android, but whether they will bother making the mac version build for it is a different question.
  - dublinben 12y ago
    Not any more. Flash player for Android hasn't been updated or available for more than a year.
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  > I wonder if this will mean the end of Flash Player for Mac? You say that like it's a bad thing. I wish Flash on Mac would die die die. Youtube has the ability of showing me non-flash video on a Mac. And yet they often won't. The exact same video that won't play on a Mac will play just fine on an iPad. Evil bastards! With Flash dead, Google wouldn't be able to demand I use it.
  - demallien 12y ago
    Activate Developer Tools in the preferences of Safari. This gives you a Developer menu in the toolbar. When a site refuses to play video on your Mac because it needs Flash, you tell Safari to pretend it's an iPad. The site invariably serves you the video you wanted, without Flash.
    - PhantomGremlin 12y ago
      I read this advice previously on HN, and it worked for a while. Then Google changed something, and it stopped working. I don't know, maybe I was screwing up. Or maybe it's just easier for Google to roll ads ahead of the video when it's in Flash. Or maybe Google wants me to download Chrome, which has a built in Flash player. Not gonna do that until it supports NoScript. YMMV, obviously.
gchucky 12y ago
Had a hard time loading it, so here's the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SDIaXc5Z72sJ:www.mondaynote.com/2014/08/03/macintel-the-end-is-nigh/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SDIaXc5...
fsiefken 12y ago
From what i've understood from benchmarks and reviews the latest Intel atom processors have a better power/performance ratio then arm processors. I'm not sure if the performance/price ratio is better though, does anyone know?
martingordon 12y ago
I think it's funny that the main reason people cite the need to switch from Intel to ARM is power consumption. A big reason to stay on Intel is that a lot of people have real needs to run Windows software (whether in Bootcamp or a VM). Switchers feel a lot better jumping to the Mac if they could fall back to Windows if they wanted to. Regarding battery life: The latest MacBooks get 9-12 hours of battery life. I haven't experienced battery anxiety on a Mac in a long time. In contrast, my iPhone is dead by the end of the day and watching it creep below 50% makes me start thinking about the nearest Lightning adapter (yes, I understand the Mac has a much larger battery and cell radios are power hungry). Put another way, max power consumption on an iPad Air is ~11W[1]. The max power draw on a Haswell MacBook Air is 15-25W (~50% improvement in battery life from 2012 to 2013, which had 21-34W max draw)[2][3]. Given that Macs have more space available for batteries due to larger screens and the need for keyboard and trackpad, I don't see power consumption argument holding water. [1]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7460/apple-ipad-air-review/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7460/apple-ipad-air-review/3 [2]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6063/macbook-air-13inch-mid-2012-review/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/6063/macbook-air-13inch-mid-20... [3]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7180/apple-macbook-air-11-2013-review/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7180/apple-macbook-air-11-2013...
- RexRollman 12y ago
  I recently switched back to Mac for the first time since 2006 and one of the factors in my decision is that I can run other x86 compatable OSes. I haven't felt the need to but it is nice to have the option.
  - eropple 12y ago
    Agreed entirely, save for that I develop my game on Windows via Boot Camp (and, when lazy, VMWare Fusion to mount the partition). An ARM Mac means I go to Linux and Windows full-time and, probably, decide not to give a damn about a Mac port. Fortunately, because I really like OS X, I think it's vanishingly unlikely that Apple is this stupid.
  - Glide 12y ago
    Compatibility with x86 is a lot like why people don't buy purely electric cars. Being able to run another OS is much like being able to take a very long road trip.
overgard 12y ago
I'm probably in the vast minority, but I tend to use apple hardware to run windows... so I'm hoping this doesn't come to pass. I use OSX occasionally, but the thing that got me to switch to apple in the first place was bootcamp.
- millstone 12y ago
  It's quite possible that ARM Macs will run Windows. Windows RT already runs on ARM, and Microsoft seems to be moving in the direction of embracing alternative platforms (see how they push Azure for iOS). They'd sell more Windows licenses and gain more users, and at worst they'd lose some Surface sales. Whether Apple would allow it is a different question.
  - shawn-butler 12y ago
    WindowsRT is a dead man walking. I wouldn't predict a long maintenance life for it. Surface2 and the Nokia 2520 is about all the hardware left running it?
  - 0x0 12y ago
    I'd wager most people with a need for running windows on a mac do it to run some "legacy" win32/win64 binary application (and not just iexplore.exe or msword.exe), so an "ARM Windows Bootcamp" mode probably wouldn't solve anyone's problem.
SyneRyder 12y ago
If Apple were to switch from Intel, I'd probably have to (reluctantly) go back to a Windows laptop. I love my MacBook, but most of my money is still earned working with clients who use Windows environments. There's still some software that never made the jump to Mac either, for which I still have to use Parallels Desktop. The best bit of having a Mac is that I can run OS X, Windows & Linux all on the same box. Of course, if Apple is also making their own x86 compatible chips, that's a different story. I don't need an Intel chip specifically, I just need something that runs Windows / x86 perfectly....
baq 12y ago
apple has been known in the last decade for picking the best hardware for the job. i don't see how ARM chips can compete with intel chips in terms of performace or performance per watt - unless you want a 4W macbook. (hint: you probably don't.) ARM competes very well in performance per dollar - but AMD does, too, and I don't see macs with AMD CPUs in them. i can see a laptop-sized ARM-based product from apple, but it won't replace any of the macs, it'll be something completely new - let's call it a macpad.
ggreer 12y ago
What would happen to the cost, battery life, and size of an A10-powered MacBook Air? It would be worse in almost every aspect. The cost wouldn't change much, and Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch. The cited CPU cost is the suggested retail price. Apple's volume lets them negotiate huge discounts. Battery life would go up a bit, but battery life is already pretty good on Apple laptops. My 2013 11" Air gets 8 hours easily, but can go as long as 12 or as short as 2 depending on screen brightness and CPU usage. Unless you're keeping the CPU busy, the screen is the biggest consumer of power. Cutting CPU power consumption in half would only increase battery life by 20-ish%. The PowerPC to Intel transition worked for several reasons. Most importantly, Intel CPUs were much faster than PowerPC. In everyday usage, the fastest ARM chips are 10x slower than a quad-core Haswell. Moving to x86 also increased the features of Macs, allowing them to dual-boot Windows and efficiently virtualize other x86-based OSes. Switching to ARM would backtrack on both fronts. An ARM-based Apple laptop would have no boot camp, no Windows virtualization, and no efficient emulation of legacy applications. CPUs are only a small part of why tablets have longer battery life than laptops. Tablets have no keyboard, trackpad, or hinge, so they can basically be a giant battery with a screen attached. The iPad has a bigger battery than the 11" MacBook Air, despite the Air weighing 50% more and taking up 30% more volume. (Edit: This has recently changed. The 11" Air has a 38 watt-hour battery. The iPad 3 and 4 had a 42 watt-hour battery, but the iPad Air has a 32 watt-hour battery. Still, it's even smaller than the earlier iPads, massing less than half the 11" Air.) In short, it doesn't seem worthwhile to do all this work and sacrifice so much performance for some incremental increases in battery life and profit.
- keithwarren 12y ago
  I would also venture a guess that Apple may know a percentage if not even a majority are only interested in trying a Mac because the x86 proc gives them a bridge from Windows. If you take that away then mac sales may take a hit and possibly a significant one. Anecdotally I know for me, this would cause me to move from a top of the line Macbook Pro Retina to an Air or even a mini. Time and market has changed to where having a mac is a must for me as a professional developer but I won't spend 3K on a single machine whose primary differentiator is ability to compile iOS applications.
- 12y ago
fiatmoney 12y ago
"The aging x86 architecture is beset by layers of architectural silt accreted from a succession of additions to the instruction set... Because of this excess baggage, an x86 chip needs more transistors than its ARM-based equivalent" I wish people would stop saying this. On the inside, x86 CPUs are basically RISC. There is a translation layer from the publicly facing instruction layer to the internal representation. The transistor and power budget for this translation layer is absolutely trivial. Intel has an enormous amount of expertise in the actual manufacturing and design layers, as evidenced by the rate of improvement in their Atom CPUs (striking range of ARM, actually), integrated GPUs, and quasi-GPU compute cards. They are not in danger of "losing" in the long term in a performance or performance / watt race. The risk is they get disrupted due to all CPUs turning into a commodity in roughly the same way that RAM is a commodity.
- deleted 12y ago
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  - the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
    What does the Mill have to do with either the article or the original comment? The Mill (while cool) is completely different and incomparable. What makes more sense is comparing an x64 to an ARM chip.
    - tux1968 12y ago
      The article, and quote from the root of this thread, may well be wrong in the detail but correct in the long-run as evidenced by the ideas exposed in the Mill. The comment I was responding too seemed to be generally discounting the possibility that there was any room to improve upon the internals of Intel CPU's which was the motivation for linking back to the Mill.
- jblow 12y ago
  Yeah, as soon as the guy started saying this I discounted the whole article. Yes, maybe Apple will switch to A7 chips, but this author sure doesn't know enough about processors to have any kind of a privileged viewpoint. If one doesn't even know what uops are, and doesn't have a mental estimate of what percentage of i7 silicon is devoted to the instruction decoder, one doesn't get to write articles comparing Intel to ARM chips. Edit: Going back to the article I note the author is Jean-Louis Gassee, so this is just bizarre. He is kind of just talking out his ass and I would hope he'd know better than that, because whereas making stuff up is a survival skill in exec-land, being blatantly and demonstrably wrong about said make-ups is not.
JohnBooty 12y ago
From the article: > Because of this excess baggage, an x86 chip needs more > transistors than its ARM-based equivalent, and thus it > consumes more power and must dissipate more heat. This is true but it ignores the primary reality of "desktop class" processor design today: RAM is the bottleneck in a really major way and most of a desktop class CPU's transistors are dedicated to overcoming this. In the ancient days, CPUs ran synchronously (or close to it) with main memory. Hasn't been that way for decades. CPU performance has ramped up so much more quickly than that of main memory that it's ridiculous. And this is where most of your transistors are spent these days - finding ways to allow the CPU to do some useful work while it sits around waiting for main memory. Look at a modern i5 CPU die: https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+core+i5 https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+core+i5 Things to note: - Tons of L1/L2/L3 cache so we can keep things in fast memory. The transistors dedicated to cache dwarf those allocated to the actual processing cores, let alone the parts of those processing cores dedicated to those crufty ol' x86 instructions - Lots of transistors dedicated to branch prediction and speculative execution so we can execute instructions before we've even waited around for the data those instructions depend upon to arrive from slow-ass main memory Sure, mobile ARM chips are tiny and efficient! They run at 1-2GHZ while paired with fast RAM that's not that much slower than their CPUs. They don't need to devote gobs and gobs of transistors to speculative execution and branch prediction and cache. But all that changes if you want to scale an ARM chip up to perform like a "desktop-class" Intel chip. You want to add cores and execution units? If you want to keep them fed with data and instructions you're going to need all that extra transistor-heavy baggage and guess what -- now you're just barely more efficient than Intel, and you can't match Intel's superior process technology that's been at least a transistor shrink or two ahead of the competition since the dawn of the semiconductor industry. Eventually, yes, the ARM chip makers will solve this. RAM will get faster and processes will be enshrinkified. Just understand that transistor size and pokey RAM are the bottlenecks, not that nasty old x86 instruction set.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Cribbing a die shot: http://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/cpu/intel_core_i5_760_benchmark_preview/i/lynnfield_layout.jpg http://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/cpu/intel_core_i5_760_b... Notice the size of the L3. Now look at a core- each core is probably 50% L2 by area, and the L1 + branch predictor/prefetcher probably occupies another 25%.
matthewmacleod 12y ago
These arguments make no sense. Aside from anything else, the computing power of the Mac I'm currently using—quad 2.4GHz Ivy Bridge—is so far in excess of anything that is available in the ARM architecture that it's difficult to see this being the case at any point.
- justincormack 12y ago
  There are people building serious 64 bit arm chips, for server type applications. No idea what actual performance will be yet.
imaginenore 12y ago
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe How far does Apple want to go? The rabbit hole is pretty much infinite. Do they want to make their own plastics and paints and metals? Do they want to mine the materials for all of the above? Do they want to make the mining machines for their mines? Etc, etc, etc.
ksec 12y ago
As much as i want this to happen. I dont see this coming in the near future. Why would they release the new MacPro with Intel Xeon if they had ever planned to switch away? And would MacPro be staying in x86 land if Apple decide to switch the rest to ARM? Another obstacle is Thunderbolt. This DisplayPort + External PCI-Express Cable is totally in control by Intel. AMD's version is based on USB 3, which is an ugly hack that Apple will unlikely use. The performance gap between Haswell and A7 is huge. Watts to Watts, at Notebook / Desktop power range Intel wins hands down. Although the gap is shrinking with each Ax SoC. Then there is the part about Intel Atom losing on performance. Which is wrong. Intel Atom SoC performs really well. It didn't get much wins simply because of its ecosystem and prices. The Mobile SoC market are operating at thin margin comparatively speaking. Even if Intel are offering Atom at the same price, why would any OEM wants to be bound by Intel & x86 again? So Intel decide to offer those SoC at a lost and what happened? On the Western world it is dominated by Qualcomm where it offer better solution or cheaper TC with its integrated Modem. In Eastern World or China it is hit by "8 Core" marketing team from MediaTek. Everyone thoughts more Core = better. I dont see how Intel is going win this Mobile battle. Apple will pretty much drive Intel to where they want, which is to Fab SoC for them.
ggreer 12y ago
While I think the article's prediction is incorrect (see my other comment for why), it did give me an idea: Why doesn't Apple design their own x86 CPU? Their work on the Ax series has probably taught them quite a bit that could be ported over to x86-land. Also, Apple could leave out x86 cruft they don't use: legacy addressing modes, PAE, etc. And of course, they could design the CPU specifically for their products instead of searching for the closest match sold by existing vendors (or cajoling Intel to tweak their designs). Apple already has strong relationships with fab companies. They have the talent and teams to design such a CPU. One wonders if they're already working on such a thing. Even if it never shipped, it could be used to negotiate lower prices from Intel.
- freehunter 12y ago
  If they left out stuff they didn't use, they would still have to keep in stuff that others use. Apple might not use Feature A, but application A might use Feature A, or at the least, VMWare might need Feature A in order to run Windows 7 or Ubuntu. If Apple wanted to go full-iOS and lock out everything that isn't Apple-approved, then this would be a good idea. If they wanted to keep Bootcamp, virtualization, or an unregulated third-party application development environment, designing chips without the standard features of Intel chips wouldn't be a great idea.
- justincormack 12y ago
  You can't without a license from Intel, for various patents etc. Well it has been tried see http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/patent/intel-and-the-x86-architecture-a-legal-perspective-2 http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/patent/intel-and-the-x86-... for a brief history, but it is pretty hard, most of the people who used to make x86 chips (Transmeta, NEC, ...) have dropped out.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  > Why doesn't Apple design their own x86 CPU? There's the small matter of getting an x86 license. Which would mean buying Intel or AMD, since it's vanishingly unlikely that Intel will be handing them out any time soon.
  - 12y ago
tanvach 12y ago
I actually see Apple branding A7 as 'desktop class' to leverage better CPU price from Intel.
ralphc 12y ago
The "transitions" comments leave out a big piece of functionality; certainly big for me, and I imagine big for others. That's VMs for Windows and Linux. I have all kinds of Linux VMs I run on my Mac, and I imagine others that need "that one Windows app" run Windows a lot in VMWare and VirtualBox. Going to ARM would torch a big part of Mac functionality for me.
bio4m 12y ago
According to Geekbench the current CPU in the iPad Air (the A7) scores about the same as a Core 2 Duo from 2006 (the E6600). Nothing to sneeze at and definitely getting close to the low power Haswell CPU's in systems like the Macbook Air. But I reckon it'll be a few generations of A series CPU's before they reach the point where they can challenge Intel for the crown
sah88 12y ago
An ARM based Air might make a nice facebook machine but what about Pros/Desktop and the high performance market? I really doubt there are any ARM chips anywhere near the performance of an i7. What are they going to do segment their PC lineup or just abandon the high performance side? I doubt they are willing to do either.
Scalar 12y ago
Very interesting, wouldn't surprise me if we saw an AMD/ARM acquisition by Apple by this time next year.
- deleted 12y ago
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throwaway90609 12y ago
I speculate (with no inside information on this matter) that Intel has known for some time that Apple is switching to ARM. Last fall Intel shut its Waterloo site[1] which had been doing X86 LLVM work. Apple is the one big influential Intel customer using X86 LLVM, so there's only one way that makes sense. [1] http://www.therecord.com/news-story/4152783-intel-closing-waterloo-office/ http://www.therecord.com/news-story/4152783-intel-closing-wa...
davidgerard 12y ago
This is a horribly low-quality article. The central proposition is entirely analyst speculation, with no actual information to hook it onto that doesn't date back years. The author appears, from how he gets details subtly wrong, not to actually know anything about the history of CPUs (and not to have bothered e.g. checking Wikipedia). There is nothing here that is backed-up news whatsoever.
archagon 12y ago
I'm saddened that nobody ever brings up video games when talking about these architectural shifts. Practically all PC games in the past few decades have been written for x86, and most of them will never be patched for ARM compatibility. These games are as important to many of us as movies or music, and yet I fear they're destined to disappear from our cultural memory if this shift ever happens. Virtualization just won't cut it; most modern games barely even run with Wine, to say nothing of performance. And given the slowing of Moore's law, we can no longer count on emulation to give us seamless reproductions a few years down the line. Does nobody care? Why doesn't anyone say anything? I love my Mac, but if I have to choose between ARM and my Steam library, I'll choose Steam and begrudgingly go back to whatever Windows version still supports it. On a related note, I think it's important to differentiate between utility software that's assumed to be temporary, and one-off pieces of software that are intended to live forever. I wish there was an easier way to write software in such a way that it can easily be guaranteed to run in the future, no matter the architecture. (Open source is not a guarantee. Ever try compiling the source to a AAA game?)
- eru 12y ago
  > I wish there was an easier way to write software in such a way that it can easily be guaranteed to run in the future, no matter the architecture. Opening the source would help quite a lot with that.
- ayrx 12y ago
  Is the problem really with architecture? How many games (not game engines) have large globs of assembly? Or is the problem more to do with use of OS-specific APIs?
jmmcd 12y ago
> Googling “Mac running on ARM” gets you close to 10M results. Why should we listen to someone who doesn't know what quotes do in search queries?
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Half right, but only by accident.
epynonymous 12y ago
this is about the most poorly written article i've ever read! well, second that to some of the trash on techcrunch. how about some benchmarks of compiling code on intel vs arm instead of saying that since ipads (arm based) cost more than macbook airs (intel), so therefore intel will fade from apple's line of laptop/desktops. i think arm processor laptops are going to become mainstream, but not for most of the arguments specified in the article. i believe this fate is still far away as x86 still offers total raw compute power over arm, even though arms are more energy efficient. also, the self noted digressions in the article arent even funny, feels like someone with an english degree and subscription to "i can spell x86" magazine wrote this article
nsxwolf 12y ago
Losing native Windows virtualization seems like a big deal. That was a huge selling point with the switch to Intel. It's become indispensable for many Mac users and was the reason many Windows users were able to switch. Unless Microsoft also drops Intel, I don't see this happening.
kabdib 12y ago
The Windows kernel guys were evaluating ARM systems for us, and the gist was "Run away, don't walk; the memory systems on those things are terrible." I like the ARM architecture a lot. It's simple and easy to write software for, all the way from embedded controller stuff to "real" operating systems. But they're not all that great at doing massive computation. We were going to use one in the video path of a popular gaming system for a while, and it turned out to be inadequate by at least an order of magnitude (probably a factor of 100, but comparing CPU cycles to GPU cycles is pretty unfair). Intel is executing really well, and it'll probably take an alien invasion to dethrone them.
- aidenn0 12y ago
  When was this? ARM historically has abysmal memory systems, but there have been significant improvements over the past few years (I don't know that they've caught up, but they are in a different league from about 5 years ago or so).
  - kabdib 12y ago
    Within the last three years, but projecting availability out about a year.
glitch003 12y ago
What seems more likely to me is a hybrid ARM / x86 machine that switches dynamically between processors, kind of like how some macs can switch dynamically between their integrated and discrete GPUs.
willyt 12y ago
Apple needs x86 to run existing apps. Who would accept a a big slow down for a slightly cheaper laptop. x86 intel chips are a RISC design with a glue layer which grafts x86 on the outside. Could Apple design an x86 chip with an ARM RISC core hidden inside? Sounds pretty complicated, I doubt they have a big enough hardware engineering team. If there was an ARM core inside could it be exposed for recompiled software to take advantage of it? Big issues managing state/contention between 2 different ISAs?
Grynn 12y ago
I blogged about this in April. http://vishaldoshi.me/2014/04/25/apple-intc/ http://vishaldoshi.me/2014/04/25/apple-intc/ It looks like Chromebooks are a very popular format and I think an ARM based 'AirBook' could compete in that space. Napkin Math MacBook Air current generation (mid-2013) retail price: $999 ($1099 for 13″ model with same CPU). Intel Core i5-4250U, Tray: $315, http://ark.intel.com/products/75028/ http://ark.intel.com/products/75028/ (sure Apple will be getting large discounts on this, but it can't be that large, since $INTC has ~60% gross margin overall) Apple A7, Tray: $20 (estimated) Intel Atom E3827, Tray: $41 Tray = 1000 pcs; The Core i5 has a 15W TDP; 1.3 Ghz clock (turbo to 2.6Ghz); 2 cores, 4 threads. Sunspider 250ms. The Apple A7 has a 2W TDP; 1.3Ghz clock; 2 cores, 2 threads. Sunspider 397 ms. http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-4250U-vs-Apple-A7 http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-4250U-vs-Apple-A7 It’s not looking all that different! Esp. when you take into account that the A8 will be twice as fast (think Tegra K1) – i.e – a Sunspider score of 200ms maybe?
lurkinggrue 12y ago
Seriously, Not really.

166 points by donmcc 12y ago

The real weakness of Intel in power consumption relative to ARM hasn't been so much in the chips as the chip sets, software and the balance-of-system. To create a low power system, ALL components need to be low power, and it is easier to start from a system built to be low power and scale up capabilities rather than go the other way around. For instance, I have a Windows-based laptop which is a great machine, but if I have a web browser open, any web browser, the fan spins, it gets hot, and battery life is less than 1.5 hours. Is it the fault of Windows, the browser vendors, the web platform, adware, crapware, who knows what? It doesn't matter, but controlling power consumption on a legacy platform is a game of whac-a-mole that doesn't end. Because Windows users expect to plug in devices that draw power from USB, a Windows tablet has to have a huge power transistor to regulate voltage, a power supply system scaled up so it can supply enough power through the USB port to charge an Android tablet, at this point you might add the fan and then you are doomed.

eloff 12y ago
The x86 instruction baggage is a red-herring. It takes maybe 3% of the transistor budget to support it. I saw an interesting interview once with an ARM exec who leveled and said they don't really have a big power advantage over Intel, despite what people commonly think. I didn't manage to find the article with Google though.
sliverstorm 12y ago
To me it seems mostly a problem of unwalled garden. When Apple owns the platform from the silicon to the development environment, it's easier for them to manage power. Wintel on the other hand has so much variety all the way down the software stack and even into hardware, it is more difficult to control... x86+Linux (Lintel?) suffers the same problem. The unwalled garden can still be made low power. Android has set an example of tackling that problem with the battery tracker, which profiles which application is chewing up battery. For power over USB, what do you mean? My Android cell phone can power keyboards, flash drives, and the like with an OTG cable. It certainly has no fan.
- jp555 12y ago
  If you think Android isn't a walled garden (unless you mean non-Google Android?) then the devil has convinced you he doesn't exist.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    It is at least much less of one than iOS
    - jp555 12y ago
      Which may appeal to you as a developer, but from a user perspective, that isn't a good thing. Consider this analogy: Would you buy an "open-source" deadbolt for your house? Great feature for aspiring locksmiths! But very likely not such a great feature for 99.9% of home owners.
  - scandinavian 12y ago
    Wikipedia says: "A closed platform, walled garden or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system where the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applications or content." Google doesn't restrict access to applications or content on my Nexus 5, so how is it a walled garden?

sudhirj 12y ago

For someone who's not very knowledgeable about architecture shifts, what software changes would be require to make this happen? I'd assume that the Mac OSX itself might be able to make the shift easily, given that Swift and ObjC code seems to run on both iOS/ARM devices and MacOS/x386 machines. What else will have to change? Or is this purely a hardware choice?

wyager 12y ago
The fact that iOS shares a lot of the same code as OS X will make this a much easier transition. Apple can take a lot of the low-level stuff from iOS, where they've had years to figure out how to get Darwin working smoothly on ARM. Beyond that, all apps on the OS X app store will have to be recompiled and resubmitted. None of the binaries installed on current OS X machines will still work, unless Apple includes an x86 emulator like they did for the transition from PowerPC. This will also open up the possibility of running iOS apps natively on OS X, but I doubt Apple will pursue that at all (for UX reasons).
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  The transition will be easy for applications that rely on Apple's APIs only, the fun will be for programs that use proprietary third party components all of which will need to be rebuilt, as well as all binary plugins to applications. I can imagine this might be a huge job for some of the more heavyweight production programs for Mac , as well as AAA games. It would basically spell doom for Parallels and other virtualization software which give Mac switchers an escape hatch back to any Windows programs they might use.
  - umanwizard 12y ago
    Another negative in the same vein is that it would prevent fast emulation of Windows and many Linux/BSD distributions in something like VMWare.
    - dublinben 12y ago

comrade1 12y ago

The transition from powerpc to x86 was surprisingly relatively painless. There was some pain but most apps ran fine in the translation layer and eventually the native apps moved over. It'll probably be even easier the next time since apple has done it once already and knows how to provide the proper dev tools.

gsnedders 12y ago
They've done it twice, not once. They moved from 68k to PPC in the early 90s, again with full emulation. In that case it was even more extreme, as much of the OS ran emulated in early PPC releases (yet it was still quicker than running on actual 68k hardware!).
- agumonkey 12y ago
  I think it's technically irrelevant, how many people from the 68k/ppc era are still there, and the os/tooling/techniques back then have probably nothing to do with what's in place nowadays. Pyschologically it still matters though, as you said, they did it twice and the first was surely a harder task.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    They almost certainly have some 68k/ppc guys left, and while tooling has changed they at least had a historical recipe (e.g., go ahead an emulate somethings, transition gradually, etc) that was proven to work.
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  You've highlighted the big difference this time. Switching from Intel to ARM would be a step down in performance, or at least not a step up. There's no headroom for a legacy emulation layer.
  - bostik 12y ago
    However, it does work with the playbook of going ever closer to computing appliances from general-purpose computers. In the beginning there was the motherboard and a CPU. Then, before homogenic PC era, we had dedicated chips that took care of certain operations. The SID chip in C-64. The blitter chip in Amiga. (Can't remember the name, I'm sorry.) Even the x87 math coprocessor in the 386/486 age! With advent of PC and the megahertz wars, dedicated peripheral chips became less common - except in SoC environment. Where the x86 world went with raw processing power, embedded world had to find ways to fit specialised chips on the board. My experience is mostly centred around crypto accelerators, but I know from very painful experience that all Maemo devices had on-board DSP units to handle some sound decoding, and pretty much all video processing. So the pendulum swings: CPU for everything, then peripheral devices for specific high-intensity jobs. Some of the most commonly used get integrated into CPU's, making entire classes of chips irrelevant ... until the next CPU-intensive thing comes up, and the main processor is again too slow. Apple is banking on their ability to both predict and dictate the direction of near-future computing needs. I expect the A7/A10 boards to come up with all kinds of integrated support chips to handle the heavier loads. As long as their predictions are correct, all is well. Any bets on what's the next CPU burner that will require a dedicated ASIC to preserve even the semblance of battery longevity?

jareds 12y ago

If this happens I hope entry level Mac’s get below $500. I bought a MacBook Air for use as a Windows machine with the plan to learn iOS development at some point. It was worth the cost since I can use it as my day to day machine running Windows. I wouldn’t be able to justify spending $1000 on a Mac Laptop that could not run Windows. I could justify $400 for an entry level Mac Mini running ARM but not a lot more then that.

RexRollman 12y ago
Based on Apple's pricing history, I don't think ARM based Macs would be cheaper, at least not by much.
geon 12y ago
FWIW, it should be able to run ARM Windows, right?
joshstrange 12y ago
I find the "Apple is too expensive" argument to hold little water when you really look at it. I won't argue that up front you will pay more for the lowest-end Apple laptop/desktop over a Windows laptop/desktop but in my experience Apple products hold their value much better than any Dell/HP/etc product. Even if you hate OS X then you still are better off buying an Apple laptop and running Windows than you are buying a Windows laptop. The hardware is more reliable, the resale value is greater, and they look 100x better than anything else out there. Comparing a Dell XPS to a Macbook Pro Retina with the very similar stats (CPU/RAM/HD), the Mac has a few better specs, leaves us with a price difference of $100 in Dell's favor but I can promise you that the MBPr will resale for much higher than the XPS in 1-2 years time. I had friends in college that always would joke that I paid a small fortune for my MBP ($1500) however these were the same people who would buy a $500 laptop every year or so because their bargain bin laptops just didn't last long before they started having hardware issues or massive slowdowns. My MBP ran quite smoothly for 2.5 years before I needed a faster CPU (I'm a developer) and I sold my machine for $900 which resulted in an operating cost of $240/yr for the period I owned it.
- 12y ago

twotwotwo 12y ago

Apple does look like it's making chips to handle heavy workloads, not just to compete with the latest Krait or whatever. But I'm not sure ARM Macs are the direction they'll take that. It'd make some business sense for them to instead position iOS so it can take over more and more traditional Mac duties. The IBM push could be an example of that. Investing in iOS gives Apple the tight control and the 30% cut they're used to from that space, and it avoids the Windows-RT-ish heartbreak of "why is this ARM OS like my Intel OS but without all my apps?" (If there were Mac-on-ARM, I'd expect it to be Mac App Store only.) Anyway, the A7 is already a beast (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchitecture-detailed http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchi... does various measurements, http://cryptomaths.com/2014/04/29/benchmarking-symmetric-crypto-on-the-apple-a7/ http://cryptomaths.com/2014/04/29/benchmarking-symmetric-cry... is an interesting case study), and there are still future process nodes and microarchitecture changes that will let them make better chips. I don't know if an ARM MacBook Air is specifically where this goes, but they're certainly making ARM capable of more serious stuff.

geon 12y ago
> why is this ARM OS like my Intel OS but without all my apps? The problem should be much smaller on OS X than on Windows. Apple has a culture of breaking things regularly, instead of worshipping backwards compatabillity. The result is that most Mac apps are kept up to date by the developer. Recompiling for an arm-based OS X shouldn't be an issue.
- deong 12y ago
  > The result is that most Mac apps are kept up to date by the developer. That's maybe true for indie developers. It's not generally true for things like Photoshop, Microsoft Office, MATLAB, Mathematica, Skype, and dozens of other major titles that would likely be complete dealbreakers for a pretty significant portion of their userbase.
  - MBCook 12y ago
    Apple kept Carbon (the OS9 to OS X transitional bindings) around for so long because of Photoshop and Office. From personal experience, I can tell you that this does not happen with big software. Apple released the first Intel Macs in early 2006. The next year Intuit released Quicken 2007 which was PPC only. The first version of Quicken to be x86 for Mac was Quicken Essentials 2010. First of all that's four years after the transition. Second, Quicken Essentials was crippled. Here's a quote from Wikipedia: > Some of the features of Quicken are not present in Quicken Essentials for Mac, such as the ability to track investment buys and sells or to pay bills online from the application. So unless you wanted something ultra-basic you were screwed. Intuit's answer was that they'd give you a free copy of Quick '08 for Windows. All you needed to do was buy Parallels (etc.) and Windows. This was a big problem because OS X finally dropped PPC emulation support, called Rosetta, in 2011 with the release of Lion. So after 5 years Intuit, a VERY big company, was unwilling to update their software or provide a real equivalent for their Mac users. If you look at the announcements for each version of Adobe Creative Suite for Mac you'll find references to starting to use features of the OS that Apple introduced years ago.

eurleif 12y ago

I wonder if this will mean the end of Flash Player for Mac? Will Adobe bother releasing an ARM version?

stuaxo 12y ago
There are already ARM versions for Android, but whether they will bother making the mac version build for it is a different question.
- dublinben 12y ago
  Not any more. Flash player for Android hasn't been updated or available for more than a year.
PhantomGremlin 12y ago
> I wonder if this will mean the end of Flash Player for Mac? You say that like it's a bad thing. I wish Flash on Mac would die die die. Youtube has the ability of showing me non-flash video on a Mac. And yet they often won't. The exact same video that won't play on a Mac will play just fine on an iPad. Evil bastards! With Flash dead, Google wouldn't be able to demand I use it.
- demallien 12y ago
  Activate Developer Tools in the preferences of Safari. This gives you a Developer menu in the toolbar. When a site refuses to play video on your Mac because it needs Flash, you tell Safari to pretend it's an iPad. The site invariably serves you the video you wanted, without Flash.
  - PhantomGremlin 12y ago
    I read this advice previously on HN, and it worked for a while. Then Google changed something, and it stopped working. I don't know, maybe I was screwing up. Or maybe it's just easier for Google to roll ads ahead of the video when it's in Flash. Or maybe Google wants me to download Chrome, which has a built in Flash player. Not gonna do that until it supports NoScript. YMMV, obviously.

gchucky 12y ago

Had a hard time loading it, so here's the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SDIaXc5Z72sJ:www.mondaynote.com/2014/08/03/macintel-the-end-is-nigh/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SDIaXc5...

fsiefken 12y ago

From what i've understood from benchmarks and reviews the latest Intel atom processors have a better power/performance ratio then arm processors. I'm not sure if the performance/price ratio is better though, does anyone know?

martingordon 12y ago

I think it's funny that the main reason people cite the need to switch from Intel to ARM is power consumption. A big reason to stay on Intel is that a lot of people have real needs to run Windows software (whether in Bootcamp or a VM). Switchers feel a lot better jumping to the Mac if they could fall back to Windows if they wanted to. Regarding battery life: The latest MacBooks get 9-12 hours of battery life. I haven't experienced battery anxiety on a Mac in a long time. In contrast, my iPhone is dead by the end of the day and watching it creep below 50% makes me start thinking about the nearest Lightning adapter (yes, I understand the Mac has a much larger battery and cell radios are power hungry). Put another way, max power consumption on an iPad Air is ~11W[1]. The max power draw on a Haswell MacBook Air is 15-25W (~50% improvement in battery life from 2012 to 2013, which had 21-34W max draw)[2][3]. Given that Macs have more space available for batteries due to larger screens and the need for keyboard and trackpad, I don't see power consumption argument holding water. [1]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7460/apple-ipad-air-review/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7460/apple-ipad-air-review/3 [2]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6063/macbook-air-13inch-mid-2012-review/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/6063/macbook-air-13inch-mid-20... [3]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7180/apple-macbook-air-11-2013-review/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7180/apple-macbook-air-11-2013...

RexRollman 12y ago
I recently switched back to Mac for the first time since 2006 and one of the factors in my decision is that I can run other x86 compatable OSes. I haven't felt the need to but it is nice to have the option.
- eropple 12y ago
  Agreed entirely, save for that I develop my game on Windows via Boot Camp (and, when lazy, VMWare Fusion to mount the partition). An ARM Mac means I go to Linux and Windows full-time and, probably, decide not to give a damn about a Mac port. Fortunately, because I really like OS X, I think it's vanishingly unlikely that Apple is this stupid.
- Glide 12y ago
  Compatibility with x86 is a lot like why people don't buy purely electric cars. Being able to run another OS is much like being able to take a very long road trip.

overgard 12y ago

I'm probably in the vast minority, but I tend to use apple hardware to run windows... so I'm hoping this doesn't come to pass. I use OSX occasionally, but the thing that got me to switch to apple in the first place was bootcamp.

millstone 12y ago
It's quite possible that ARM Macs will run Windows. Windows RT already runs on ARM, and Microsoft seems to be moving in the direction of embracing alternative platforms (see how they push Azure for iOS). They'd sell more Windows licenses and gain more users, and at worst they'd lose some Surface sales. Whether Apple would allow it is a different question.
- shawn-butler 12y ago
  WindowsRT is a dead man walking. I wouldn't predict a long maintenance life for it. Surface2 and the Nokia 2520 is about all the hardware left running it?
- 0x0 12y ago
  I'd wager most people with a need for running windows on a mac do it to run some "legacy" win32/win64 binary application (and not just iexplore.exe or msword.exe), so an "ARM Windows Bootcamp" mode probably wouldn't solve anyone's problem.

SyneRyder 12y ago

If Apple were to switch from Intel, I'd probably have to (reluctantly) go back to a Windows laptop. I love my MacBook, but most of my money is still earned working with clients who use Windows environments. There's still some software that never made the jump to Mac either, for which I still have to use Parallels Desktop. The best bit of having a Mac is that I can run OS X, Windows & Linux all on the same box. Of course, if Apple is also making their own x86 compatible chips, that's a different story. I don't need an Intel chip specifically, I just need something that runs Windows / x86 perfectly....

baq 12y ago

apple has been known in the last decade for picking the best hardware for the job. i don't see how ARM chips can compete with intel chips in terms of performace or performance per watt - unless you want a 4W macbook. (hint: you probably don't.) ARM competes very well in performance per dollar - but AMD does, too, and I don't see macs with AMD CPUs in them. i can see a laptop-sized ARM-based product from apple, but it won't replace any of the macs, it'll be something completely new - let's call it a macpad.

ggreer 12y ago

What would happen to the cost, battery life, and size of an A10-powered MacBook Air? It would be worse in almost every aspect. The cost wouldn't change much, and Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch. The cited CPU cost is the suggested retail price. Apple's volume lets them negotiate huge discounts. Battery life would go up a bit, but battery life is already pretty good on Apple laptops. My 2013 11" Air gets 8 hours easily, but can go as long as 12 or as short as 2 depending on screen brightness and CPU usage. Unless you're keeping the CPU busy, the screen is the biggest consumer of power. Cutting CPU power consumption in half would only increase battery life by 20-ish%. The PowerPC to Intel transition worked for several reasons. Most importantly, Intel CPUs were much faster than PowerPC. In everyday usage, the fastest ARM chips are 10x slower than a quad-core Haswell. Moving to x86 also increased the features of Macs, allowing them to dual-boot Windows and efficiently virtualize other x86-based OSes. Switching to ARM would backtrack on both fronts. An ARM-based Apple laptop would have no boot camp, no Windows virtualization, and no efficient emulation of legacy applications. CPUs are only a small part of why tablets have longer battery life than laptops. Tablets have no keyboard, trackpad, or hinge, so they can basically be a giant battery with a screen attached. The iPad has a bigger battery than the 11" MacBook Air, despite the Air weighing 50% more and taking up 30% more volume. (Edit: This has recently changed. The 11" Air has a 38 watt-hour battery. The iPad 3 and 4 had a 42 watt-hour battery, but the iPad Air has a 32 watt-hour battery. Still, it's even smaller than the earlier iPads, massing less than half the 11" Air.) In short, it doesn't seem worthwhile to do all this work and sacrifice so much performance for some incremental increases in battery life and profit.

keithwarren 12y ago
I would also venture a guess that Apple may know a percentage if not even a majority are only interested in trying a Mac because the x86 proc gives them a bridge from Windows. If you take that away then mac sales may take a hit and possibly a significant one. Anecdotally I know for me, this would cause me to move from a top of the line Macbook Pro Retina to an Air or even a mini. Time and market has changed to where having a mac is a must for me as a professional developer but I won't spend 3K on a single machine whose primary differentiator is ability to compile iOS applications.
12y ago

fiatmoney 12y ago

"The aging x86 architecture is beset by layers of architectural silt accreted from a succession of additions to the instruction set... Because of this excess baggage, an x86 chip needs more transistors than its ARM-based equivalent" I wish people would stop saying this. On the inside, x86 CPUs are basically RISC. There is a translation layer from the publicly facing instruction layer to the internal representation. The transistor and power budget for this translation layer is absolutely trivial. Intel has an enormous amount of expertise in the actual manufacturing and design layers, as evidenced by the rate of improvement in their Atom CPUs (striking range of ARM, actually), integrated GPUs, and quasi-GPU compute cards. They are not in danger of "losing" in the long term in a performance or performance / watt race. The risk is they get disrupted due to all CPUs turning into a commodity in roughly the same way that RAM is a commodity.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
  What does the Mill have to do with either the article or the original comment? The Mill (while cool) is completely different and incomparable. What makes more sense is comparing an x64 to an ARM chip.
  - tux1968 12y ago
    The article, and quote from the root of this thread, may well be wrong in the detail but correct in the long-run as evidenced by the ideas exposed in the Mill. The comment I was responding too seemed to be generally discounting the possibility that there was any room to improve upon the internals of Intel CPU's which was the motivation for linking back to the Mill.
jblow 12y ago
Yeah, as soon as the guy started saying this I discounted the whole article. Yes, maybe Apple will switch to A7 chips, but this author sure doesn't know enough about processors to have any kind of a privileged viewpoint. If one doesn't even know what uops are, and doesn't have a mental estimate of what percentage of i7 silicon is devoted to the instruction decoder, one doesn't get to write articles comparing Intel to ARM chips. Edit: Going back to the article I note the author is Jean-Louis Gassee, so this is just bizarre. He is kind of just talking out his ass and I would hope he'd know better than that, because whereas making stuff up is a survival skill in exec-land, being blatantly and demonstrably wrong about said make-ups is not.

JohnBooty 12y ago

From the article: > Because of this excess baggage, an x86 chip needs more > transistors than its ARM-based equivalent, and thus it > consumes more power and must dissipate more heat. This is true but it ignores the primary reality of "desktop class" processor design today: RAM is the bottleneck in a really major way and most of a desktop class CPU's transistors are dedicated to overcoming this. In the ancient days, CPUs ran synchronously (or close to it) with main memory. Hasn't been that way for decades. CPU performance has ramped up so much more quickly than that of main memory that it's ridiculous. And this is where most of your transistors are spent these days - finding ways to allow the CPU to do some useful work while it sits around waiting for main memory. Look at a modern i5 CPU die: https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+core+i5 https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+core+i5 Things to note: - Tons of L1/L2/L3 cache so we can keep things in fast memory. The transistors dedicated to cache dwarf those allocated to the actual processing cores, let alone the parts of those processing cores dedicated to those crufty ol' x86 instructions - Lots of transistors dedicated to branch prediction and speculative execution so we can execute instructions before we've even waited around for the data those instructions depend upon to arrive from slow-ass main memory Sure, mobile ARM chips are tiny and efficient! They run at 1-2GHZ while paired with fast RAM that's not that much slower than their CPUs. They don't need to devote gobs and gobs of transistors to speculative execution and branch prediction and cache. But all that changes if you want to scale an ARM chip up to perform like a "desktop-class" Intel chip. You want to add cores and execution units? If you want to keep them fed with data and instructions you're going to need all that extra transistor-heavy baggage and guess what -- now you're just barely more efficient than Intel, and you can't match Intel's superior process technology that's been at least a transistor shrink or two ahead of the competition since the dawn of the semiconductor industry. Eventually, yes, the ARM chip makers will solve this. RAM will get faster and processes will be enshrinkified. Just understand that transistor size and pokey RAM are the bottlenecks, not that nasty old x86 instruction set.

sliverstorm 12y ago
Cribbing a die shot: http://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/cpu/intel_core_i5_760_benchmark_preview/i/lynnfield_layout.jpg http://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/cpu/intel_core_i5_760_b... Notice the size of the L3. Now look at a core- each core is probably 50% L2 by area, and the L1 + branch predictor/prefetcher probably occupies another 25%.

matthewmacleod 12y ago

These arguments make no sense. Aside from anything else, the computing power of the Mac I'm currently using—quad 2.4GHz Ivy Bridge—is so far in excess of anything that is available in the ARM architecture that it's difficult to see this being the case at any point.

justincormack 12y ago
There are people building serious 64 bit arm chips, for server type applications. No idea what actual performance will be yet.

imaginenore 12y ago

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe How far does Apple want to go? The rabbit hole is pretty much infinite. Do they want to make their own plastics and paints and metals? Do they want to mine the materials for all of the above? Do they want to make the mining machines for their mines? Etc, etc, etc.

ksec 12y ago

As much as i want this to happen. I dont see this coming in the near future. Why would they release the new MacPro with Intel Xeon if they had ever planned to switch away? And would MacPro be staying in x86 land if Apple decide to switch the rest to ARM? Another obstacle is Thunderbolt. This DisplayPort + External PCI-Express Cable is totally in control by Intel. AMD's version is based on USB 3, which is an ugly hack that Apple will unlikely use. The performance gap between Haswell and A7 is huge. Watts to Watts, at Notebook / Desktop power range Intel wins hands down. Although the gap is shrinking with each Ax SoC. Then there is the part about Intel Atom losing on performance. Which is wrong. Intel Atom SoC performs really well. It didn't get much wins simply because of its ecosystem and prices. The Mobile SoC market are operating at thin margin comparatively speaking. Even if Intel are offering Atom at the same price, why would any OEM wants to be bound by Intel & x86 again? So Intel decide to offer those SoC at a lost and what happened? On the Western world it is dominated by Qualcomm where it offer better solution or cheaper TC with its integrated Modem. In Eastern World or China it is hit by "8 Core" marketing team from MediaTek. Everyone thoughts more Core = better. I dont see how Intel is going win this Mobile battle. Apple will pretty much drive Intel to where they want, which is to Fab SoC for them.

ggreer 12y ago

While I think the article's prediction is incorrect (see my other comment for why), it did give me an idea: Why doesn't Apple design their own x86 CPU? Their work on the Ax series has probably taught them quite a bit that could be ported over to x86-land. Also, Apple could leave out x86 cruft they don't use: legacy addressing modes, PAE, etc. And of course, they could design the CPU specifically for their products instead of searching for the closest match sold by existing vendors (or cajoling Intel to tweak their designs). Apple already has strong relationships with fab companies. They have the talent and teams to design such a CPU. One wonders if they're already working on such a thing. Even if it never shipped, it could be used to negotiate lower prices from Intel.

freehunter 12y ago
If they left out stuff they didn't use, they would still have to keep in stuff that others use. Apple might not use Feature A, but application A might use Feature A, or at the least, VMWare might need Feature A in order to run Windows 7 or Ubuntu. If Apple wanted to go full-iOS and lock out everything that isn't Apple-approved, then this would be a good idea. If they wanted to keep Bootcamp, virtualization, or an unregulated third-party application development environment, designing chips without the standard features of Intel chips wouldn't be a great idea.
justincormack 12y ago
You can't without a license from Intel, for various patents etc. Well it has been tried see http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/patent/intel-and-the-x86-architecture-a-legal-perspective-2 http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/patent/intel-and-the-x86-... for a brief history, but it is pretty hard, most of the people who used to make x86 chips (Transmeta, NEC, ...) have dropped out.
rodgerd 12y ago
> Why doesn't Apple design their own x86 CPU? There's the small matter of getting an x86 license. Which would mean buying Intel or AMD, since it's vanishingly unlikely that Intel will be handing them out any time soon.
- 12y ago

tanvach 12y ago

I actually see Apple branding A7 as 'desktop class' to leverage better CPU price from Intel.

ralphc 12y ago

The "transitions" comments leave out a big piece of functionality; certainly big for me, and I imagine big for others. That's VMs for Windows and Linux. I have all kinds of Linux VMs I run on my Mac, and I imagine others that need "that one Windows app" run Windows a lot in VMWare and VirtualBox. Going to ARM would torch a big part of Mac functionality for me.

bio4m 12y ago

According to Geekbench the current CPU in the iPad Air (the A7) scores about the same as a Core 2 Duo from 2006 (the E6600). Nothing to sneeze at and definitely getting close to the low power Haswell CPU's in systems like the Macbook Air. But I reckon it'll be a few generations of A series CPU's before they reach the point where they can challenge Intel for the crown

sah88 12y ago

An ARM based Air might make a nice facebook machine but what about Pros/Desktop and the high performance market? I really doubt there are any ARM chips anywhere near the performance of an i7. What are they going to do segment their PC lineup or just abandon the high performance side? I doubt they are willing to do either.

Scalar 12y ago

Very interesting, wouldn't surprise me if we saw an AMD/ARM acquisition by Apple by this time next year.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

throwaway90609 12y ago

I speculate (with no inside information on this matter) that Intel has known for some time that Apple is switching to ARM. Last fall Intel shut its Waterloo site[1] which had been doing X86 LLVM work. Apple is the one big influential Intel customer using X86 LLVM, so there's only one way that makes sense. [1] http://www.therecord.com/news-story/4152783-intel-closing-waterloo-office/ http://www.therecord.com/news-story/4152783-intel-closing-wa...

davidgerard 12y ago

This is a horribly low-quality article. The central proposition is entirely analyst speculation, with no actual information to hook it onto that doesn't date back years. The author appears, from how he gets details subtly wrong, not to actually know anything about the history of CPUs (and not to have bothered e.g. checking Wikipedia). There is nothing here that is backed-up news whatsoever.

archagon 12y ago

I'm saddened that nobody ever brings up video games when talking about these architectural shifts. Practically all PC games in the past few decades have been written for x86, and most of them will never be patched for ARM compatibility. These games are as important to many of us as movies or music, and yet I fear they're destined to disappear from our cultural memory if this shift ever happens. Virtualization just won't cut it; most modern games barely even run with Wine, to say nothing of performance. And given the slowing of Moore's law, we can no longer count on emulation to give us seamless reproductions a few years down the line. Does nobody care? Why doesn't anyone say anything? I love my Mac, but if I have to choose between ARM and my Steam library, I'll choose Steam and begrudgingly go back to whatever Windows version still supports it. On a related note, I think it's important to differentiate between utility software that's assumed to be temporary, and one-off pieces of software that are intended to live forever. I wish there was an easier way to write software in such a way that it can easily be guaranteed to run in the future, no matter the architecture. (Open source is not a guarantee. Ever try compiling the source to a AAA game?)

eru 12y ago
> I wish there was an easier way to write software in such a way that it can easily be guaranteed to run in the future, no matter the architecture. Opening the source would help quite a lot with that.
ayrx 12y ago
Is the problem really with architecture? How many games (not game engines) have large globs of assembly? Or is the problem more to do with use of OS-specific APIs?

jmmcd 12y ago

> Googling “Mac running on ARM” gets you close to 10M results. Why should we listen to someone who doesn't know what quotes do in search queries?

lotsofmangos 12y ago

Half right, but only by accident.

epynonymous 12y ago

this is about the most poorly written article i've ever read! well, second that to some of the trash on techcrunch. how about some benchmarks of compiling code on intel vs arm instead of saying that since ipads (arm based) cost more than macbook airs (intel), so therefore intel will fade from apple's line of laptop/desktops. i think arm processor laptops are going to become mainstream, but not for most of the arguments specified in the article. i believe this fate is still far away as x86 still offers total raw compute power over arm, even though arms are more energy efficient. also, the self noted digressions in the article arent even funny, feels like someone with an english degree and subscription to "i can spell x86" magazine wrote this article

nsxwolf 12y ago

Losing native Windows virtualization seems like a big deal. That was a huge selling point with the switch to Intel. It's become indispensable for many Mac users and was the reason many Windows users were able to switch. Unless Microsoft also drops Intel, I don't see this happening.

kabdib 12y ago

The Windows kernel guys were evaluating ARM systems for us, and the gist was "Run away, don't walk; the memory systems on those things are terrible." I like the ARM architecture a lot. It's simple and easy to write software for, all the way from embedded controller stuff to "real" operating systems. But they're not all that great at doing massive computation. We were going to use one in the video path of a popular gaming system for a while, and it turned out to be inadequate by at least an order of magnitude (probably a factor of 100, but comparing CPU cycles to GPU cycles is pretty unfair). Intel is executing really well, and it'll probably take an alien invasion to dethrone them.

aidenn0 12y ago
When was this? ARM historically has abysmal memory systems, but there have been significant improvements over the past few years (I don't know that they've caught up, but they are in a different league from about 5 years ago or so).
- kabdib 12y ago
  Within the last three years, but projecting availability out about a year.

glitch003 12y ago

What seems more likely to me is a hybrid ARM / x86 machine that switches dynamically between processors, kind of like how some macs can switch dynamically between their integrated and discrete GPUs.

willyt 12y ago

Apple needs x86 to run existing apps. Who would accept a a big slow down for a slightly cheaper laptop. x86 intel chips are a RISC design with a glue layer which grafts x86 on the outside. Could Apple design an x86 chip with an ARM RISC core hidden inside? Sounds pretty complicated, I doubt they have a big enough hardware engineering team. If there was an ARM core inside could it be exposed for recompiled software to take advantage of it? Big issues managing state/contention between 2 different ISAs?

Grynn 12y ago

I blogged about this in April. http://vishaldoshi.me/2014/04/25/apple-intc/ http://vishaldoshi.me/2014/04/25/apple-intc/ It looks like Chromebooks are a very popular format and I think an ARM based 'AirBook' could compete in that space. Napkin Math MacBook Air current generation (mid-2013) retail price: $999 ($1099 for 13″ model with same CPU). Intel Core i5-4250U, Tray: $315, http://ark.intel.com/products/75028/ http://ark.intel.com/products/75028/ (sure Apple will be getting large discounts on this, but it can't be that large, since $INTC has ~60% gross margin overall) Apple A7, Tray: $20 (estimated) Intel Atom E3827, Tray: $41 Tray = 1000 pcs; The Core i5 has a 15W TDP; 1.3 Ghz clock (turbo to 2.6Ghz); 2 cores, 4 threads. Sunspider 250ms. The Apple A7 has a 2W TDP; 1.3Ghz clock; 2 cores, 2 threads. Sunspider 397 ms. http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-4250U-vs-Apple-A7 http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-4250U-vs-Apple-A7 It’s not looking all that different! Esp. when you take into account that the A8 will be twice as fast (think Tegra K1) – i.e – a Sunspider score of 200ms maybe?

lurkinggrue 12y ago

Seriously, Not really.