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Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset
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Old 22-06-2020, 23:14   #1
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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:

Quote:
So far, Apple's chip division has excelled in every market it has entered. In the world of smartphones, the company's SoCs are easily a generation ahead of the best Qualcomm, Samsung, and MediaTek have to offer. Apple's most dominant smartphone showing is probably the iPhone SE, a $400 iPhone that will out-perform $1200 Android phones thanks to the A13 Bionic SoC.
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.
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Old 22-06-2020, 23:36   #2
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Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset

It will interesting how they handle the binary compatibility issue for 3rd party software
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Old 22-06-2020, 23:52   #3
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Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset

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Originally Posted by ianch99 View Post
It will interesting how they handle the binary compatibility issue for 3rd party software
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.
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Old 23-06-2020, 00:54   #4
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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.
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Old 23-06-2020, 15:28   #5
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Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset

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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.
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.
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Old 23-06-2020, 15:30   #6
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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.
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Old 23-06-2020, 15:35   #7
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Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset

... and in English?
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Old 23-06-2020, 15:42   #8
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Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset

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... and in English?
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.
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Old 23-06-2020, 17:48   #9
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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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Old 23-06-2020, 18:07   #10
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Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset

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.
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Old 23-06-2020, 18:56   #11
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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.
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Old 24-06-2020, 20:17   #12
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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.
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Old 24-06-2020, 22:55   #13
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Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset

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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.
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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Old 24-06-2020, 22:59   #14
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Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset

If the raw numbers were that good they would be selling them to server farms.
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Old 24-06-2020, 23:16   #15
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Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset

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