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Apple reportedly planning three more Macs with its own chips inside them
Apple plans to put custom processors inside at least three more Macs by the end of the year, according to Bloomberg. There are no details on what the chips will be used for, but the report says they'll appear in updated laptops and a new desktop.
Though Apple has been making custom chips for its phones, tablets, and wearables for years now, the company is only just starting to bring its house-made chips to the Mac. That started in a small way in 2016 with the high-end MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, which included a chip that was used to run the Touch Bar and Touch ID. Then last month, Apple included a custom chip inside the iMac Pro that handled, among other things, audio, camera processing, and encryption.
The Bloomberg article includes a detailed history of Apple's chip designs.
Related: Google Hires Key Chip Designer Manu Gulati From Apple
Apple to Design its Own Power Management Chips
Qualcomm Joins Others in Confirming its CPUs Suffer From Spectre, and Other Meltdown News
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:18PM (7 children)
I trust this about as far as I can throw the bathtub, and *that* is cemented to the floor. Has everyone just been mass-hypnotized by Apple, or is it that they don't even know enough tech stuff to know why this is a problem?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:34PM
Remember booting Linux on OldWorld Mac hardware, full of custom chips we don't know what they do?
BootX remembers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:45PM (5 children)
Intel, AMD, and even ARM64 were affected by Meltdown and/or Spectre for years.
We don't know what any of these chips really do when the chips are down.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @11:44PM (2 children)
Come on, you KNOW better.
Spectre is an Intel only problem.
Meltdown is more general.
They are not really related, just happened to have got attention at the same time.
Intel is working VERY hard to try and create FUD over this, as Spectre is the more worrying and harder to fix issue.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 31 2018, @12:05AM
Uhhhhhhh
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:47AM
Nope, Spectre is exploitable on pretty much all superscalar chips.
Nope, Intel patented the technique that turns out to be vulnerable to Meltdown and the patent only expired recently. ARM's Cortex A-75 appears to be the only non-Intel chip vulnerable to Meltdown as a result (yay, patents!).
You mean, aside from the fact that they're both timing attacks that work by exploiting speculatively executed instructions to disclose the contents of memory?
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Funny) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 31 2018, @03:45AM (1 child)
Well, sure we do. Nothing. That's what "down" means in this context.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday January 31 2018, @12:19PM
Ah, so it's an undocumented mode in which the CPU becomes a highly efficient NOP machine?