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CNet:
Apple will start selling Macs that use in-house processors in 2021, based on ones in upcoming iPhones and iPad Pros, Bloomberg reported Thursday. The company is apparently working on three of its own chips, suggesting a transition away from traditional supplier Intel.
The initial batch of custom chips won't be on the same level as the Intel ones used in high-end Apple computers, so they're likely to debut in a new type of laptop, the report noted. These processors could have eight high-performance cores and at least four energy-efficient cores, respectively codenamed Firestorm and Icestorm.
Just another brick in the wall[ed garden]?
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Apple Will Reportedly Sell a New Mac Laptop With its Own Chips Next Year
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @08:51AM (17 children)
This is the fourth processor ecosystem transition they have done. The 68000 to PowerPC, the PowerPC to x86, the x86 to x86-64, and now x68-64 to ARM. Each one worked with relative ease, as old software would still run on the new machines and new software ran on the old ones. Sure different mechanisms were required for each direction to work and there were some hiccups, but most end users probably wouldn't have really noticed them due to the firm deadlines known in advance. Beautiful illustration of planning and execution.
Although, I do wonder if they remembered the old lessons and have the right engineers at the helm to pull it off this time. Like launching a manned rocket to space, it isn't exactly easy despite looking so when done by people who know what they are doing and success can easily breed institutional overconfidence, complacency, and carelessness.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday April 24 2020, @09:42AM (14 children)
While I modded you up, I still consider transition of Macs to ARM a significant regression.
That makes me to consider future Apple devices as just unimpressive multimedia toys, not universal computers.
I may continue to buy some, as I usually pick a dedicated device for a specific task only, free of maintenance burden, but the awesomeness of their ecosystem is long gone away with Jobs.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 24 2020, @11:07AM (12 children)
That is a bizarre take. There are billions of ARM devices, there are ARM server chips, etc. Apple already makes some of the best-performing ARM SoCs, and they can certainly make ARM chips that perform better than some of the low-end Intel x86 chips that were in the cheaper Macs. The 12-core described in the article will be powerful, and will use more Watts per core (at least for the Firestorm portion) than Apple's previous designs.
If it's about the software, there have been articles signalling this move for years now. Apple has a lot of money to throw around, and developers will target these chips and be able to hit iPad Pro, etc. at the same time.
There are some weak quad-core Intel CPUs in the lineup, and even a dual-core in the Macbook Air.
Yes, they could even challenge Xeon/Threadripper-based systems eventually.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday April 24 2020, @12:30PM (11 children)
I don't think so. The weakest point of all the ARM franchise is inferior memory bandwidth. Always was. It is not so obvious in toys but it will be clearly distinctive in work devices.
Apple already slipped into the cult of low power at all cost and that's what
cripplesdrives their designs. Every next of them is worse than the previous one. This dogma of low powered endpoints complements the dogma of central clouds. And the goal of this dual dogma is: make user devices as powerless as possible, and dependent on services.Sheer count of processors is no metric to compare platforms.
I am looking forward for AMD64 phones, not for ARM notebooks.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @01:04PM
Do you have a source for that? What about the ARM servers we're starting to see in AWS?
In certain benchmarks, the iPad Pro is pretty close to the Macbooks. Isn't that all the evidence needed?
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by epitaxial on Friday April 24 2020, @03:11PM (2 children)
You're so full of shit your eyes are brown. The cheapest iPhone now has a faster processor than the most expensive Android.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 24 2020, @04:46PM
Disclaimer: somewhat of an android fanboy here
While I do not dispute that Apple may have faster processors than the most expensive android . . .
According to the last state of this animated chart [youtube.com], android has about 8.5 x the market share of Apple. (btw, watching how mobile operating systems changed from the 90's until 2019 is very interesting and amusing.)
I was a fan of WebOS at one point (I think about 2009) but then it became clear to me that Android would absolutely win. If you watch that animated chart, as soon as Android appears, it rapidly sweeps away everything else.
Why?
Here is an insight.
In my younger days I was on the flip side. I was a true card-carrying loyal Apple fanboy and developer. And quite smug. After all Mac was clearly superior in every way to PCs with DOS and Windows 3.1. Yet the PC ecosystem was vastly bigger.
Apple didn't license Mac OS to other hardware manufacturers until it was too late. When they did, they realized that those other hardware makers could way underprice Apple, which Steve Jobs had refused to believe they could. After all, who could possibly make a Mac more inexpensively than Apple?
Consider this. If you were going to start making computers in the 1980's, what OS would you go with? What choices were there? Oh, yeah. There was DOS / Windows. Apple wasn't going to license Mac OS to you.
In 2007 with the iPhone, I saw the exact same thing. Superior product. Artificially high prices. No licensing to third parties. Like the Mac, only one design. The one true way. Period.
Meanwhile in the Android world (like the PC world before it) devices came in every size, shape, style color, feature set and price point. It was so obvious to me that a blind man could see it. Android would win.
Now, all that said. How long will it be before flagship android devices get more powerful processors. It is a myth (that I once partly believed) that Apple and their engineers somehow had magical powers that nobody else could replicate.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 24 2020, @04:49PM
Also, you get a +1 Informative
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 24 2020, @04:49PM (3 children)
Is there some fundamental reason that the ARM architecture cannot be fabricated with faster switches, higher voltages, generate more heat, have more parallelism, or certainly more cores per chip, have higher memory bandwidth, etc?
I hear about ARM designs in powerful servers.
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(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday April 24 2020, @07:16PM (2 children)
Yes, it is. A fundamental reason. On ARM, no AMD HyperTransport, namely its superset Infinity Fabric architecture. A true breakthrough, a new techlevel. This one cannot be imitated correctly even by Intel with all their money pile, not mentioning poor ARM.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 24 2020, @07:51PM
That is interesting information about AMD. Thank you.
So what about comparing ARM / RISC-V with Intel. What would prevent building high performance, power hungry, room heating processors?
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 24 2020, @09:36PM
A high-speed interconnect doesn't cure everything, it will be imitated, and Apple is not replacing AMD CPUs, they are replacing Intel CPUs. Apple also has a much bigger money pile than ARM (SoftBank).
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by petecox on Saturday April 25 2020, @12:20AM (1 child)
tried and failed, Intel wanted to cram an Atom into a phone - turns out there was no market. If there's ever a challenger to ARM on mobile, think RISC-V (and we're still perhaps half a decade away).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2020, @11:37AM
AMD could use RISC-V as well. It would be interesting.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Alphatool on Saturday April 25 2020, @11:38AM
Memory bandwidth isn't an inherent problem with the ARM architecture. While there are chips out there with limited memory bandwidth, there are also ARM chips with great memory bandwidth, like the Fujitsu A64FX [anandtech.com]. If Apple want they are more than capable of making an A series chip with huge memory bandwidth.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by epitaxial on Friday April 24 2020, @12:06PM
What makes you think ARM is less useful than x64?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 24 2020, @01:43PM (1 child)
That depends on the slant of your fanboi fedora. I inherited my dad's cast-off PowerPC MacMini in 2005, and it quickly turned into a paperweight while the 2006 Intel based MacMinis are still relatively useful today. I suppose if your perspective is: "I always upgrade to the latest hardware within 12 months after Apple releases it" then, sure, that transition was painless.
I do applaud the move to low power ARM based PCs. I put it in the "it's about time" category - web browsers, word processors, spreadsheets and powerpoints don't really need more than ARM compute power and the electrical power savings are very significant and appropriate in the mobile form factors, including laptops.
Intel chips continue to have more compute power, but the percentage of Mac (and PC) users who need that power more than a cool running, long lasting, small battery in their mobile device is probably lower than the percentage of people who are going to die of COVID-19. If you're among the heavy compute load minority, sure: buy your $5000 lap-burners if that's what you're into. Personally, I offload my heavy compute tasks to an i7 desktop box and use lightweight laptops and NUCs for the majority of my actual human-computer interface work.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @07:53PM
Well relative does mean relative, after all. Besides, the transition worked much better than some cold swap. They released Intel computers in 2005 but still released updates for PPC OSX into 2009, and their official software after that. You could take a single installer or package and have it work on both systems, more or less transparently. A five year transition period like that is pretty good for a change so fundamental to the operation of the ecosystem.