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Apple announces Mac architecture transition from Intel to its own ARM chips, offers emulation story
Apple has just announced its plans to switch from Intel CPUs in Macs to silicon of its own design, based on the ARM architecture. This means that Apple is now designing its own chips for iOS devices and its Mac desktop and laptops. Apple said it will ship its first ARM Mac before the end of the year, and complete the Intel -> ARM transition within two years.
Apple will bring industry leading performance and performance-by-watt with its custom silicon. Apple's chips will combine custom CPU, GPU, SSD controller and many other components. The Apple silicon will include the Neural Engine for machine learning applications.
[...] "Most apps will just work".
The Next Phase: Apple Lays Out Plans To Transition Macs from x86 to Apple SoCs
[From] an architecture standpoint, the timing of the transition is a bit of an odd one. As noted by our own Arm guru, Andrei Frumusanu, Arm is on the precipice of announcing the Arm v9 ISA, which will bring several notable additions to the ISA such as Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2). So either Arm is about to announce v9, and Apple's A14 SoCs will be among the first to implement the new ISA, otherwise Apple will be setting the baseline for macOS-on-Arm as v8.2 and its NEON extensions fairly late into the ISA's lifecycle. This will be something worth keeping an eye on.
[...] [In] order to bridge the gap between Apple's current software ecosystem and where they want to be in a couple of years, Apple will once again be investing in a significant software compatibility layer in order to run current x86 applications on future Arm Macs. To be sure, Apple wants developers to recompile their applications to be native – and they are investing even more into the Xcode infrastructure to do just that – but some degree of x86 compatibility is still a necessity for now.
The cornerstone of this is the return of Rosetta, the PowerPC-to-x86 binary translation layer that Apple first used for the transition to x86 almost 15 years ago. Rosetta 2, as it's called, is designed to do the same thing for x86-to-Arm, translating x86 macOS binaries so that they can run on Arm Macs. Rosetta 2's principle mode of operation will be to translate binaries at install time.
See also: Apple Announces iOS 14 and iPadOS 14: An Overview
Apple's First ARM-Based (Mac) Product Is a Mac mini Featuring an A12Z Bionic, but Sadly, Regular Customers Can't Buy It
Previously: Apple Will Reportedly Sell a New Mac Laptop With its Own Chips Next Year
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:40AM (2 children)
Apple was already good at making ARM chips that outperformed its Samsung/Qualcomm/MediaTek/etc. competition, despite having fewer cores and less RAM. And they sold many millions of iPhones and iPads while doing so. So the new ARM SoCs for Macs won't exactly be something no one has, since they will be scaled up versions of the mobile SoCs. Apple IPC is supposedly exceeding Intel's (see confusing AnandTech chart) while performance of the iPad Pro is able to rival Intel ultrabooks.
It remains to be seen whether Apple can thrash the likes of Xeon, Threadripper, and Epyc, but I wouldn't count them out.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by r_a_trip on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:10AM (1 child)
You are talking technical specs on hardware. I'm talking behaviour of users. Two different things.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:32AM
If the outrageous claims are close to being true, they aren't outrageous. It can be clearly seen with Apple vs. Android, where Apple has put out more powerful hardware and arguably a better software experience year after year after year. That's attributed to such factors as vertical integration, not having to chase after useless specs (like 16 GB RAM), etc.
They could put out something that thoroughly destroys current Xeon Macs if they feel like it. I'm not sure if they will be able to compete against a hypothetical 96-core AMD CPU though. There is a clear path to "destroying" all x86 competition (going full 3DSoC), but that's more of a matter of timing than magic.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]