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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: 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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 24 2020, @04:49PM
Also, you get a +1 Informative
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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.