Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

Big news from Apple today: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...ay-from-intel/

They're finally doing what has been long speculated and moving from Intel to their own A-Series, ARM-based, chipsets.

It means Apple now have even more control over their hardware but it'll be interesting to see if they do for their Macs what they've managed to do with their iOS devices and get huge performance gains. As Ars points out their own chipsets have blown away their rivals with their 'cheaper' iPhone still outperforming the latest Android flagships:

It's no sure thing they can do the same with a higher power envelope but if they can they the next generation of Macs might be quite something. Especially when it comes to battery life for the performance they get.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

It will interesting how they handle the binary compatibility issue for 3rd party software

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

Anything built with any of Apple's languages and frameworks can compile down to the ARM version as of today. So most apps will be working very soon. Legacy software will be virtualised effectively.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

They do know how to do this sort of thing. They transitioned from PowerPC to intel chips 15 years ago and had a dynamic translator called Rosetta that allowed a lot of PPC applications to continue working on intel Macs. As both a PowerPC and intel Mac user I can attest that it worked perfectly well, although native ‘Carbon’ applications written to run natively on intel Macs obviously were quicker, smoother and prettier.

For me the most exciting thing about this is the prospect of a much more fluid relationship between Apple’s phones, tablets and PCs. It ought to be possible to effortlessly toss material between an iPhone or iPad and a full-scale Mac by just running the same app on all of them. We’re reasonably close to that at the moment with Handoff working on Apple’s own apps but outside of that it’s limited.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

I don't see that radically changing beyond what Apple already does to support it. Those limitations are higher up in the software.

What it will do is make it easier for iPad and iPhone applications to port across directly. Although Apple already support this with Catalyst, most of the apps on the next version of macOS will be iPad conversations such as Maps.

Desktop software is dying out so coasting off the success of iOS apps is the only way this is going to work.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

This will have implications for "pro" users. ARM floating point efficiency is only about 1/4th what it is on an x86.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

... and in English? :D

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

Things like scientific computing, photoshop and video encoding will be way slower. But on the plus side it won't burn your balls off like a current macbook pro will.

They could try to mitigate this by doing tricks with the graphics card, but those are a massive pain in the arse for developers.

This actually touches on what I'm doing professionally. We had the clock speed era (with the number of mhz and ghz going up) then we had the multicore era (with the number of cores going up). They are now wanting to do the heterogeneous computing era, where a computer will have several different kind of chips for different things and they all need to work together.

Massive pain in my arse it is.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

We'll have to see what they actually come up with. They were oddly quiet on the performance implications of the switch yesterday, they did show them doing video work on the new Macs but they're clearly not ready to say the benchmarks.

That said the iPad Pro, last year's one, does really well at video encoding out performing Intel Chips: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/new-ipa...ews-28453.html

I am not sure how Apple gets around that performance issue but they are heavily adapting the ARM architecture and they use other chipsets. I think on the modern Macbook Pros they throw over some tasks to their T2 security chip.

If they can do that with the iPad then in theory they should be able to push it even further with the extra heat capacity they'll have in a larger Mac.

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Those are very impressive for an ARM chip, I suspect adobe has written some special software to offload the work onto the gpu elements. But I don't have time to look into it atm.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

Apple do make their own GPU which is on the same chipset 'A13' or whatever as the CPU so we'll see the same thing on Macs, hopefully bigger and better though.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

If the first release candidates for new hardware are an iMac and the 13" Macbook Pro you would think that there's a more capable processor on the cards to compensate for the performance they would have achieved with the 10th Gen i9.

There's also the Xeon based Mac Pro to replace which was only released a few months ago. Unless it's going to be discontinued yet again.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

Developers are under an NDA to not benchmark or report benchmarks from the development units they're getting.

It's possible they are very capable processors and the reason Apple do not want raw numbers out there is they're good enough to depress sales of the existing Mac range.

It's also possible they're very good and Apple doesn't want competitors to react yet. Let's say they clock in at 50%+ improvements over their equivalent predecessors, that would shake the laptop industry and Microsoft will make a much bigger push into ARM than they have done so far.

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If the raw numbers were that good they would be selling them to server farms.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

They might do eventually but Apple makes chipsets for Apple. If they wanted to make them for others there would be a lot of companies very interested in their mobile chips.

Apple will only want to be worried about the roadmap for their products and not concerned about getting ARM chips ready for severs. Maybe they'll bring back the Xserve.

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You have to understand if an ARM chip exceeds the x86 in floating point performance without gpu offloading then the x86 is defacto obsolete. Which means AMD will be brought to it's knees and intel will be on life support.

The only people who will be buying x86 will be retro gamers.

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We'll see but people are excited about ARM so Intel should be concerned. The warning signs have been there for a while now, first when the iPhone started really started getting impressive numbers and then when the iPad Pro started dominating in multi-score tests as well as single-core ones.

The iPad Pro is genuinely more powerful than most consumer laptops.

If Apple prove ARM to work very well on proper laptops then Intel will be in serious trouble for the consumer market.

They might be saved by compatibility issues with the software. Apple is well-suited for such transitions because they don't have too many businesses running 20-year-old software on modern macs. Their control over the platform for the software that is run means they can get developers over quickly to the new platform. Microsoft will find this transition harder.

I don't know enough about servers but my understanding is x86 will survive there for a while yet according to people who do know. Xeon chips just seem to be well suited to that task.

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I feel there's a 3rd, much more obvious (and in my mind, likely) possibility - they're simply not as fast as x86.

x86 vs ARM is not a new thing, it's something that has been debated for years and years. They're ultimately both very good at different things but apples to apples, ARM is way more efficient at lower power draw and x86 is way more powerful (And expensive!) at higher power draws.

We've seen both sides of this - we've seen x86 in embedded devices, like phones and got great performance with awful battery life. We've also now got ARM in the server space, which (shock horror) isn't quite as fast as its x86 counterparts but works out much cheaper overall as they're cheaper to run (And presumably cheaper to buy). Keep in mind those benchmarks were against slightly older-gen x86, but even then it's clear where ARM shines and where it doesn't.

I would not expect to see performance gains here at all, that's not what ARM has ever been about , but..comparable performance is still nothing to be sniffed at.

Apple tends to have some pretty awful thermal designs in their machines, so you might even see better performance just from sheer efficiency, but Apple aren't going to be looking to knock Intel or AMD's performance crown off any time soon.

Keep expectations in check, competition is always a good thing.

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What I foresee happening is Apple implementing APIs for offloading things to the GPU, adobe will quickly adapt to establish market share (as it seems they already have high performing software). Initially open source software will be frozen out by lack of manpower leaving them with crap performance for a while.

Maybe after a few years it will have evened out depending on how open the apple standard is.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

I think there would be surprise if Apple doesn't outperform the equivalent intel chips when they first come out. After all they're posting very competitive scores with their phones and iPads at the moment and those devices have to consume less power and generate less heat than their laptop counterparts.

The advantages may only come from efficiency but that's sort of the point. In laptops and anything that doesn't have the luxury of being able to generate a lot of heat and a lot of power it may be that ARM can get better performance than x86 for the same heat/power draw.

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I think there's going to be a big distinction between Apple's ARM chips compared to the intel equivalent and Apple's ARM chips compared to previous Apple implementations of those chips.

This is something I watched recently and is related to the subject. Essentially, Apple's recent devices haven't been particularly great at thermal management of those chips. I think at one point in the video Linus speculates if it's deliberately bad so that when it comes to the ARM chip switch, it doesn't look like you're loosing much (any?) ground. While that's a throwaway comment and not meant to be taken seriously, I do think there's possibly a sliver of truth to it.

So you'll have this situation where you'll see comparable or even better performance than the previous gen Apple machines, but realistically the performance won't actually beat x86 if x86 has adequate cooling. In other words Apple will use murky comparisons to skew things in their favour. And maybe that's fine, because you can argue that it's a strength of ARM to require less cooling, but you can tell from the Video that Apple really half-arsed their cooling.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

The thermal advantage only exists if Apple don't cram too much stuff on the SOC, ie: Co-processors, encoding chips etc etc. Cramming more components onto a tiny surface area doesn't really bode well for dissipating heat.

We don't really know much at this point what is going into the new machines. The only information which seems to be out there are some supposed leaked benchmarks from the developer kits Apple have been sending out. This is probably the most informative article:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...ransition-kit/

Main things to note:

- The developer kit is a Mac Mini running a hobbled A12X SOC from the iPad Pro (half of the cores disabled)

- Benchmarks are from non-native (x86) Geekbench tests via the Rosetta 2 interpreter

- Results: 20% slower benchmarks than an entry level i3 Macbook Air on single thread performance

- 38% faster for multi threading

Which is not too bad really if you factor in the fact there's a performance penalty associated with not running native ARM code.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

Yeah I remember reading that article a few days ago. It's certainly looking like Rosetta is at least decent at what it does, but there's so many caveats and questions it's hard to really draw many conclusions.

I'm going to try anyway, though!

Assuming that it's legitimate and somewhat indicative of performance, assuming overhead for the Rosetta2 implementation, etc. I still think it's in line with what I'm saying - these processors aren't going to be faster than x86, apples to apples. The single-threaded performance is a dead giveaway, even accounting for the Rosetta overhead. If it was emulation we were talking about then that would be one thing, but recompiled code shouldn't be 30% slower.

I do wonder why they've disabled 4 of the 8 cores of the A12, presumably the disabled cores are the little low-power cores, maybe they just don't have a fully working OSX scheduler that can handle big.LITTLE CPU's so it's easier to just fudge a homogenous chip for now.

You could have 8 beefy full cores instead, plus with general manufacturing process improvements, etc. that could be quite the beefy chip when all is said and done, but again even accounting for all that, there's nothing that suggests Apple has suddenly beaten the likes of Intel and AMD at things like IPC. Core to Core, I just don't see Apple beating big blue or AMD any time soon.

The only thing that could possibly swing it is accounting for Rosetta's overhead (Which as I said, I doubt is that big), or Apple going for multithreaded performance with a 12 or 16 core SoC - but even still, Intel and AMD especially have gone there and beyond and I would expect 8 core CPUs to be pretty mainstream in 2 years time so again, it's not really an area I see Apple competing in.

I genuinely believe Apple is doing this to give themselves more control over their ecosystem. They'll be able to make thinner, lighter devices with better battery life than the competition, they'll be able to push a universal app ecosystem that more easily allows developers to develop native apps for iOS and desktop with the same codebase (Something that others have tried and so far failed to do well), that will perform well enough but isn't going to be the top performer out there - and it doesn't need to be.

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There's reports that apple did this because intel faffed them around with skylake. I imagine the heterogeneous bandwagon is also instrumental. Since they have so much control over their eco system they are in the best position to leverage it.

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That's Apple clearly capping the developer unit because they knew people would benchmark it. They didn't just disable the cores, they seem to have underclocked it as well

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Yes it seems likely and the fact that the low power cores to which the article relates have been disabled this could be a nod to the fact that these will not be used in the chips which will power the RTM units when they finally surface. Also, perhaps some of the embedded image processing stuff which is used by mobile device cameras won't be required.

Looking at the bigger picture though, some of the tech which goes into these new generations of processing engines is mind bending stuff so it's difficult to make meaningful comparisons with the olde worlde tech we used to use in our systems to play Doom and Sim City.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

Eldest begins studying sound production in September and is in the market for a high-end laptop to support his education. He’s leaning towards a MacBook Pro ... we’re a Mac household, and he’s been composing on GarageBand since he was about 7. But is it now a serious risk, buying a powerful MacBook in the next 8 weeks? Normally I’d hope for at least 5-7 years service out of such a machine but if their range fully transitions to ARM-based chips over the next 2 years, at some point they’ll cut support for intel machines.

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Without visibility of any firm timescales it's difficult to say how much of a risk it would be sinking a hefty chunk of cash into a new machine in the next few weeks.

During the previous transition from PPC to Intel Apple dropped OS support for PPC three years after releasing the first Intel units. That doesn't mean to say that apps stopped working of course. IIRC Logic Pro for example was still working on PPC until X was released in 2013.

My 2p worth would be to hang on until Christmas time and see what falls out of Santa's sack when he empties it and perhaps wait a little while longer to find out whether or not the new platform turns out to be good or crap.

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I purchased a new Macbook Pro just last month with full knowledge that switch was happening. I typically replace on a 4-year cycle but here are my reasons why:

• Intel support is not going anywhere soon. They still have Macs with these chips to release and Apple supports hardware for a long time. At the very least it'll be inclusive of the three year Applecare warranty from the date of the last Intel Mac that can be purchased. They're not going to have Macs still in the Applecare window on an old OS
• I would prefer to have the last generation of the Intel Mac than the first generation of the ARM-based ones. The former is a mature and long-developed range of products. The ARM one will be the first generation with all the risks and quirks that comes with first-generation products.
• Whilst most applications are likely to be native from day one (especially Garageband) you already know your software will work on the current Mac.
• Windows! If you need to Bootcamp for virtualise Windows then that works fine on an Intel Mac.

I get the risk you are worried about. The other thing to consider we expect the first ARM-based Macs to have a nicer screen with a smaller bezel and Face ID. If they were BOTH out today then I might lean towards getting the newer one but it's a close call and i think taking into account the wait then now is a good time.

Just make sure you do get the NEW one so it has the nicer keyboard.

Also if it's for University then wait a bit because Apple always does a 'Back to School' promotion around August/September where you get free AirPods or something. Also, your son would get a UniDays account which gets you 10% off.

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Given they aren't going to be selling ARM macs for a couple of years and they'll be supporting their existing Macs for a couple of years after that, I see no issue with buying a Mac today.

In 12-18 months that gets tricky.

Macs (And Apple hardware in general) tends to retain its value really well regardless.

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The first ARM Macs are supposed to be released around Christmas. Nothing official mind.

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I think the biggest issue is do you really want to be getting the first-generation of ARM-based Macs?

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It might be moot, he’s now drooling over a Dell XPS 17. He went on his favourite Internet forum and asked “Mac or PC?” ... poor boy, doesn’t yet know how these things go. :rofl: I tried explaining to no avail, kiddies just tell you to get what they already have (or want). The fact such debates were on this very forum and its predecessor since before he was born cuts no ice.

The Dell is very very shiny though. And it has a touchscreen.

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The Dell XPS is really nice especially the quality of the screen and the compact form factor. Just make sure he doesn't need Logic Pro and the ports are up to spec. I was looking at a Dell XPS 13 but I couldn't work out if I could reliably dock two 25inch monitors via their version of the Thunderbolt port without using a dock.

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Ah,well I misunderstood the transition period!

In fairness for what he wants to do, it'll likely make little difference in the long run. Most of the big media editing packages are available on both and he'll probably get more for his money.

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I will admit to being mostly wrong on this. The performance figures do show it is behind in floating point work but it is much better than I or many experts predicted. The cpu market will definitely be interesting in the near future.

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It's interesting that for the time being some of the new M-series models will continue to have an Intel equivalent also for sale. Apple seems to see this as a very long-term transition, or perhaps they still need to persuade some of the software makers to get onboard.

Eldest spent a king's ransom on a 16" MacBook Pro in the end. It is very, very nice indeed. And clearly its Intel chip isn't going obsolete any time soon.

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The transitory period seems to be going faster than I anticipated also. Blizzard for instance have already released ARM versions of their software. This is probably due to the better coding standards and tools available today. Had transitioning been this easy in 2000 then the Intel Itanium may still be with us.

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The results are pretty amazing. The Macbook Air now benchmarks quicker than Apple's fastest laptop even when emulating Intel-based apps. The scores for native performance are extraordinarily good. Everyone else must be taking note of this and hopefully, Microsoft will commit more to ARM now as it's hard not to conclude that this is where the consumer computer market is going.

In addition to the huge performance improvements, the battery life of the laptops has nearly doubled as well.

---------- Post added at 11:51 ---------- Previous post was at 11:49 ----------

The Macbook Pros have now divided between a lower tier and an upper-tier for a while. The upper-tier getting a more powerful processor range and two additional ports.

It's the lower tier they've replaced with M-Series chips so I suspect they're waiting for M1X or whatever they come up with - a more powerful processer which draws more energy - before replacing both the upper tier 13" and the 16" range.

Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
 

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