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Apple Inc. is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel Corp., according to people familiar with the plans.
The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple's devices -- including Macs, iPhones, and iPads -- work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition.
The shift would be a blow to Intel, whose partnership helped revive Apple's Mac success and linked the chipmaker to one of the leading brands in electronics. Apple provides Intel with about 5 percent of its annual revenue, according to Bloomberg supply chain analysis.
Intel shares dropped as much as 9.2 percent, the biggest intraday drop in more than two years, on the news. They were down 6.4 percent at $48.75 at 3:30 p.m. in New York.
No interest in Apple hardware but it would be interesting to see how they implement a hybrid Desktop/Tablet OS DE. I'm sure Ubuntu and Gnome will follow.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Tuesday April 03 2018, @11:54AM (6 children)
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-Hiring-For-Linux-Kernel [phoronix.com]
Honestly I'd be more than a little disappointed if Apple goes with a conventional ARM core instead of capability based RISC-V.
Btw, WD went with SiFive for their embedded cores: https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/04/03/sifive-partners-with-western-digital-to-produce-1-billion-risc-v-cores/ [cnx-software.com]
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday April 03 2018, @11:58AM (4 children)
Considering the many ARM chips that Apple has designed for its phones and tablets, which are now reaching into 6-core territory, there is no way they would use RISC-V instead of ARM.
The real question: How will they retune ARM for x86-like performance instead of power consumption? Will they still use Intel in high-end Mac desktops?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Tuesday April 03 2018, @01:53PM
Speaking as a Mac user and developer, if they're actually going to do this (which seems exceedingly unlikely to me, but...), the questions that concern me are:
Apple's history on supporting previous architecture-based applications is not at all pretty.
On the plus side, they haven't made a decent Mac Pro since 2013, so at this point, I'm already limited to the used machine market for replacement hardware. I recently picked up a 2010 vintage 12/24 core, 64GB, 3 GHz Mac Pro for about $1500 off of EBay; the performance is sufficient for what I need it to do (some fairly demanding real-time, multi-core signal processing stuff concurrent with a mix of largish compiles, a few communications applications, and 20 MP DSLR image editing.)
I'm having trouble imagining enough of a consumer performance basis for moving from Intel to ARM. I can see where a move of this type could bring about a hardware cost advantage for Apple, though. And historically speaking, they have been able to convince enough of their developers to follow them along, so perhaps they can pull that off again. But I have to say from underneath the eyeshade of my developer hat, Windows would be looking a lot more interesting to me in such a circumstance.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Tuesday April 03 2018, @02:54PM
Apple been dropping licensors left-and-right for two years now regardless of how many of their products are using those techs. I can't think of any good technical, business or political reasons for them to stick to ARM all things considered. They're already maintaining their own tool-chain and design their own cores. They already knee deep into heavy silicon patent litigation. And ARM's acquisition by Softbank over the current political climate isn't too favorable either.
It's not that I think they would do poorly choosing ARM. In fact, being optimistic about Mill's belt machines, I can see merit in wanting to avoid any investments in porting efforts for the next couple of years. But assuming there's a porting effort in the works, I'd be terribly disappointing waking up after 3 years only to read how a new mac is coming out using ARM and a monolithic kernel and not much else. I mean, what's the point?
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(Score: 2) by physicsmajor on Tuesday April 03 2018, @04:47PM (1 child)
Apple has telegraphed that they do not care about the high end at all anymore. Just look at the current so-called Mac "Pro", which is a hilarious dinosaur.
Professionals still using Macs are buying the cheese grater machines from even further back and trying to upgrade the gpus. These people basically have Stockholm syndrome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @03:16AM
This move is hardly surprising, as it's really just the another step in their progression of turning the Mac into an iPad with a keyboard. Apple hasn't been serious about making computers now for several years. Honestly, I'm not even sure why they even bother anymore unless they figure it would be too much work to port their iOS development tools over to Windows.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday April 03 2018, @09:09PM
I think it was called mkLinux.
It was Linux with a Mach core. I don't recall whether its version of Mach was a microkernel, or statically linked as the Mach in OS X is.
I used it for a while and regarded it as high quality, but when OS X 10.0 shipped mkLinux was placed in the circular file.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]