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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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sillema sillema nika su
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday April 24 2020, @05:17PM (3 children)
I remember about 2005 thinking there was coming a day when Microsoft's best days would be behind it. In 2007 Ballmer laughed at the iPhone.
12 years earlier Microsoft had almost missed the internet revolution. Blinded by the "desktop monopoly" googles so that they almost didn't see the potential of web applications. Thus the first browser wars. And IIS vs Apache. And FrontPage. ActiveX. Later XAML/Silverlight as a Flash replacement.
Microsoft didn't see the Netbooks in about 2007-2008. Just in time, they killed off Netbooks by resurrecting XP for a time.
Microsoft then entirely missed the mobile device revolution. Smartphones and tablets.
Microsoft totally did not get Chromebooks and what value they bring. Other people missed that because wireless connectivity was not yet so common. A cheap, secure platform that does what 80% of users need.
Meanwhile, Linux has come to dominate everything that is NOT a desktop PC or laptop. Linux is in everything around us. I could start enumerating things like smart TVs, billions of android phones, routers, and much more.
Now Intel seems to be stumbling. Maybe it's their highly integrated design and fabrication? I don't pretend to know.
I've never liked Intel's architecture. Layers upon layers of cruft added over nearly five decades. (if you count the 4004/8008 as predecessors) Reading early BYTE magazines, I discern that the first 8080 didn't even have relative branch instructions. (I would be happy to be corrected.) Thus making relocatable code impossible or at best difficult.
Then the 8086/8088 segment registers. For decades DOS and Windows systems were hobbled with the limitations of 64K segments. How many compilers had weird restrictions on 64 K arrays, 64 K code segments, etc. And the justification for this unholy abomination? So that the 8086 could be source code compatible with the 8080.
Now our PC processors have management engines? Really? That's entirely crazy insane! Processors once merely executed code starting at power up.
Intel's Atom tried to complete effectively with ARM taking over the exploding mobile device market. (and I don't mean Samsung Galaxy Note 7's)
As with Linux, and I think it is interrelated, ARM, and other RISC processors are in lots of everyday things around us. Even things you don't think of as having a computer. Like a TV, or even a monitor, printer, digital camera, etc.
How long before someone fabricates powerful ARM or RISC-V chips for high performance servers, and desktops?
An amusing thing with Linux and Chrome OS laptops, if the underlying processor changed, the entire ecosystem of Linux comes to the new processor. All of the Debian packages. Etc. Just look at Raspberry PI 4.
As (or if) Intel declines, the biggest loser is Microsoft. Microsoft has tried to introduce Windows ARM devices. The failure is that people expect the Windows brand name to mean that all their legacy junk will run. That they won't have to re-purchase every single software package that they own, and that the software vendors won't price-gouge for the change. And how many legacy Windows programs are deeply tied to Intel?
I assert that the entire value proposition of Windows is in large part tied to Intel and legacy software. Maybe they will sink together just as WinTel was a term that described their ascendancy.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @08:07PM
In all seriousness, they should have called their ARM OS "Doors." The commercials are easy, people wouldn't have the inherent sense of backward compatibility, they'd have been more used to the idea of a walled garden, and their enterprise sector could have vacuumed up schools like Chromebooks are now.
(Score: 1) by petecox on Saturday April 25 2020, @12:33AM (1 child)
Intel Mac software won't run natively on ARM either. But MS, with Qualcomm, built in emulation. As apple did from 68k -> PPC -> x86, when Adobe wanted everybody to pay for a new architecture for Photoshop.
I haven't tried a Surface Pro X but I suspect Microsoft learned from their failed WinRT experiments and now have a 2 year headstart on MacARM64.
Or are you suggesting that the checkbox in Visual Studio to compile for ARM64 is somehow different from the checkbox in XCode to compile for ARM64?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Saturday April 25 2020, @05:24PM
I totally understand what you say, but it is irrelevant. That only applies to NEW software.
And new also means newly compiled old software -- which the end user will have to re-purchase in many cases. Do you really think Adobe is not going to charge you again for an ARM compiled photoshop?
IMO vast amounts of legacy Windows software have x86 dependencies that don't make it trivial to port to ARM or other architectures.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.