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posted by janrinok on Friday April 24 2020, @07:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the replacing-the-Apple's-core dept.

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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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday April 24 2020, @12:30PM (11 children)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Friday April 24 2020, @12:30PM (#986444) Journal

    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 cripples drives 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

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @01:04PM (#986455)

    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)

    by epitaxial (3165) on Friday April 24 2020, @03:11PM (#986498)

    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

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 24 2020, @04:46PM (#986547) Journal

      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

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 24 2020, @04:49PM (#986554) Journal

      Also, you get a +1 Informative

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 24 2020, @04:49PM (3 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 24 2020, @04:49PM (#986552) Journal

    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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    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday April 24 2020, @07:16PM (2 children)

      by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Friday April 24 2020, @07:16PM (#986649) Journal

      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

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 24 2020, @07:51PM (#986656) Journal

        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

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday April 24 2020, @09:36PM (#986696) Journal

        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)

    by petecox (3228) on Saturday April 25 2020, @12:20AM (#986772)

    I am looking forward for AMD64 phones

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2020, @11:37AM (#986885)

      AMD could use RISC-V as well. It would be interesting.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Alphatool on Saturday April 25 2020, @11:38AM

    by Alphatool (1145) on Saturday April 25 2020, @11:38AM (#986886)

    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.