Apple reportedly planning three more Macs with its own chips inside them
Apple plans to put custom processors inside at least three more Macs by the end of the year, according to Bloomberg. There are no details on what the chips will be used for, but the report says they'll appear in updated laptops and a new desktop.
Though Apple has been making custom chips for its phones, tablets, and wearables for years now, the company is only just starting to bring its house-made chips to the Mac. That started in a small way in 2016 with the high-end MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, which included a chip that was used to run the Touch Bar and Touch ID. Then last month, Apple included a custom chip inside the iMac Pro that handled, among other things, audio, camera processing, and encryption.
The Bloomberg article includes a detailed history of Apple's chip designs.
Related: Google Hires Key Chip Designer Manu Gulati From Apple
Apple to Design its Own Power Management Chips
Qualcomm Joins Others in Confirming its CPUs Suffer From Spectre, and Other Meltdown News
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Google has hired key chip designer Manu Gulati from Apple to work on future Pixel models. Manu Gulati has been working at Apple since 2009 helping develop the custom CPUs used in iPads and iPhones and has now moved on to Google as lead chip architect. Pixel and Pixel XL have so far relied on Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm which lag considerably behind Apple's SOCs. Googles appears to be reconsidering this strategy in an effort to better integrate it's software and hardware improving performance and battery life. Android makers have long foregone the lead to Apple in mobile performance but this may signal a turning point in this strategy.
Apple will reportedly design its own power management chips (archive) for new iPhones within 1-2 years. The news sent shares of Dialog Semiconductor plummeting:
Apple's long-term plans to cut dependence on suppliers to boost its semiconductor capabilities have been widely-flagged as it consolidates its production chain to better compete with its rivals. But these plans may have claimed a victim, with Dialog shares down 19.16% soon after these exclusive plans were revealed on Nikkei Asian Review. They were down 17.58% at 13:59GMT.
The main power management chip controls an iPhone's charging function, battery management, and energy consumption. "Based on Apple's current plan, they are set to replace partially, or around half of its power management chips to go into iPhones by itself starting next year," said the source. Another person said Apple was indeed developing its own power management chips for iPhones but the time frame was less certain and could be delayed to 2019.
Apple's main power management chips for the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch are now exclusively designed and made by Dialog, according to Credit Suisse. Apple accounted for 74% of Dialog's revenue in 2016. Power management chips are one of the most crucial and expensive components after core processors, modems and memory chips.
Also at Bloomberg and The Verge.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Qualcomm has confirmed its processors have the same security vulnerabilities disclosed this week in Intel, Arm and AMD CPU cores this week.
The California tech giant picked the favored Friday US West Coast afternoon "news dump" slot to admit at least some of its billions of Arm-compatible Snapdragon system-on-chips and newly released Centriq server-grade processors are subject to the Meltdown and/or Spectre data-theft bugs.
[...] Qualcomm declined to comment further on precisely which of the three CVE-listed vulnerabilities its chips were subject to, or give any details on which of its CPU models may be vulnerable. The paper describing the Spectre data-snooping attacks mentions that Qualcomm's CPUs are affected, while the Meltdown paper doesn't conclude either way.
[...] Apple, which too bases its iOS A-series processors on Arm's instruction set, said earlier this week that its mobile CPUs were vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown – patches are available or incoming for iOS. The iGiant's Intel-based Macs also need the latest macOS, version 10.13.2 or greater, to kill off Meltdown attacks.
Apple announces A12X with a 7-core GPU, 90% better multicore performance
It's been just a few short weeks since Apple unveiled the A12 Bionic, but at an event in New York City, the Cupertino company upstaged it with a more powerful model: the A12X Bionic. It's the chip in the new iPad Pro.
Apple's A12X is similarly built on a 7-nanometer process, but bigger than the A12.
"No other tablet, laptop, or even desktop has been able to make this leap forward," John Ternus, vice president of hardware engineering, said onstage.
It has 10 billion transistors and comprises a seven-core GPU and eight-core CPU, the latter of which has four performance cores and four efficiency cores. Single-core CPU performance is up to 35 percent faster compared to last year's iPad Pro chip, and 90 percent faster in terms of multicore performance.
[...] Apple says it delivers "Xbox One S-class" graphics performance in a package that is much smaller, and claims it's faster than 92 percent of all portable PCs.
Also at Wccftech.
Related: Apple Wants to Ship More ARM Chips in Macs
Apple to Include its Own Chips Inside More Macs
Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs From 2020, Replacing Intel
Snapdragon 1000 ARM SoC Could Compete With Low-Power Intel Chips in Laptops
ARM Aims to Match Intel 15-Watt Laptop CPU Performance
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:13PM (5 children)
The real news is Apple makes any custom chips at all, after Woz left and took his innovative chip design skills with him.
Apple is supposed to be a parasitic entity that combines commodity hardware with open source software, slaps on an Apple logo, and sells for enormous profits.
How dare Apple make chips again.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:27PM (3 children)
Sure they do. One of them has a part number that reads NSA7600
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:02PM (2 children)
How is this a troll? You may think Apple shits rainbows, but it seems ever more likely that they are going to be the primary target of hackers. Devs are all switching to Apple because its the user friendly version of Unix and is the hip new thing!! Their impervious encryption? Oh right, bypassed. Their newest and greatest that this time is definitely perfect? Yeah, I'll believe that never.
Custom chips? Yeaaaaah, somehow I just don't trust them. After the Snowden revelations there was a instant rebuttal of propaganda pieces, but as we all know it takes a certain type of letter to compel corporations to do whatever the gov wants and they can't say a thing about it. Yup, totally above board here!
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:24PM (1 child)
Hey, it's not like software is immune to backdoors. And given that backdoors are actually security holes that you might want to close if the snooper loses control of their keys, hardware is probably the last place Apple would want to put their backdoor.
No, I think it's much more likely that they are offloading encryption to a custom chip because it's computationally expensive and they wanted to do it more efficiently for better battery life.
Not that we should trust Apple or anybody else. But this is not the smoking gun you're looking for.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:27PM
Didn't say it was a smoking gun, just want to remind people that trusting any megacorp implicitly is a bad idea.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:11AM
This is only real news to anyone who completely missed Apple's launch of the iPhone and associated ecosystem (actually, their first in-house chip was in some of the pre-touch iPods, but they don't talk about those publicly much). Apple has been doing their own CPU design for years for mobile devices and moved to in-house GPU design last year.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:03PM (3 children)
Apple hardware were known for using custom ASICs, similar to other high-end UNIX workstations makers (SUN, SGI, Apollo, etc. from the 90s), unlike x86 PC makers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:24PM (1 child)
A tradition in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, sure. And again in the 10s. But not so much in the 2Ks.
(Score: 2) by SpockLogic on Wednesday January 31 2018, @12:02AM
Making a Hackintosh will become problematic.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @11:39PM
Nice definition game you play there.
As Apple was the ONLY user of (some of) its chips, they are 'custom ASICs'.
As PC manufacturers represent multiple consumers of the same equipment, they are not, right?
There were plenty of one off custom ASICs in different PCs, they just tended to die off, as the commodity solutions were better standardised, cheaper, and more effective.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:06PM
Zero compatibility with other OSes, or open standards. Just what we need more of.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:08PM
Apple desperately wants to own both CPU and GPU. They forced Intel to integrate AMD Radeon onto CPU's. Within a few years, Macs will run custom CPU/GPU--it may not even be ARM.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:18PM (7 children)
I trust this about as far as I can throw the bathtub, and *that* is cemented to the floor. Has everyone just been mass-hypnotized by Apple, or is it that they don't even know enough tech stuff to know why this is a problem?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:34PM
Remember booting Linux on OldWorld Mac hardware, full of custom chips we don't know what they do?
BootX remembers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:45PM (5 children)
Intel, AMD, and even ARM64 were affected by Meltdown and/or Spectre for years.
We don't know what any of these chips really do when the chips are down.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @11:44PM (2 children)
Come on, you KNOW better.
Spectre is an Intel only problem.
Meltdown is more general.
They are not really related, just happened to have got attention at the same time.
Intel is working VERY hard to try and create FUD over this, as Spectre is the more worrying and harder to fix issue.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 31 2018, @12:05AM
Uhhhhhhh
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:47AM
Nope, Spectre is exploitable on pretty much all superscalar chips.
Nope, Intel patented the technique that turns out to be vulnerable to Meltdown and the patent only expired recently. ARM's Cortex A-75 appears to be the only non-Intel chip vulnerable to Meltdown as a result (yay, patents!).
You mean, aside from the fact that they're both timing attacks that work by exploiting speculatively executed instructions to disclose the contents of memory?
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Funny) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 31 2018, @03:45AM (1 child)
Well, sure we do. Nothing. That's what "down" means in this context.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday January 31 2018, @12:19PM
Ah, so it's an undocumented mode in which the CPU becomes a highly efficient NOP machine?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:42PM
And they say Tesla has production problems.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:49PM
Do you trust Apple? I dont.