Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month, says report

[hishnash]

3 minutes ago, Kaloob said:

You make some good points, but I assume independent repair shops are going to have quite the bad time getting Apple's chips, which will be another blow to them.

Replacing the cpu is never the fix. It is always the motherboard/memory or something else that fails not a CPU.

Also for things like laptops (95% of all macs apple sell) independent repair already cant just buy an intel cpu to fit into them. (for any laptop brand that is not socketed intel don't sell those cpus unless you have a agreement with intel). If replacing the cpu is the fix normally what shops do today is find a broken motherboard from anther mac and de-solder the cpu and resolder it this is just the same with an ARM cpu.

[DrMacintosh]

Apple has been building up for this move for years. The hardest part is the UI responsiveness. 

 

For customers of the MacBook Air, an ARM MacBook that runs iPadOS apps with a keyboard and a macOS interface will be enough for ~90% of consumers. 

 

Obviously the Pro Macs will continue to exist, but for the regular consumer. ARM is probably the future. I welcome this future. Apple is leading the industry with ARM SoCs. Imagine what they can do if they give their A-Series chips a power budget. 

[StDragon]

Told ya. No one believed me. And there it is!

[hishnash]

6 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Obviously the Pro Macs will continue to exist, but for the regular consumer. ARM is probably the future. I welcome this future. Apple is leading the industry with ARM SoCs. Imagine what they can do if they give their A-Series chips a power budget. 

They will do a ARM macPro within the next 2 years, having a fragmented market is worce for everyone. It is will easy for them to produce a 32 or 64 core arm cpu, infact making a cpu that is good for the macPro is simpler than making one that is good for the iMac. The mac pro does not have very good single core clock speeds compared to the imac.

 

 

2 minutes ago, Kaloob said:

CPUs can fail, especially when they run as hot as they do in ultrabooks

evem then cpus in macs have not field, the thing that fails is the socket. You can have a motherboard fail that ends up firing the cpu with to much voltage! but then putting a new cpu in that motherboard IS NOT A G
 

[DrMacintosh]

1 minute ago, hishnash said:

They will do a ARM macPro within the next 2 years, having a fragmented market is worce for everyone.

Nah, nobody would buy it. Having non x86 support invalidates usage from anyone who is actually needing the power of a Mac Pro. 

[Curious Pineapple]

Just what we need, low power CPU's with a piece of aluminium foil and an asthmatic borrower as a cooling system. Bet they'll still find a way to fuck the thermal management up

[mr moose]

This has come up so many times.  While there is no doubt everyone is still trying to make RM happen in the x86 market, I'll comment on it's actual ruefulness when I see it working in the real world.

 

 

In other news, apple preparing the new Mac RT.   Totally making the mac the best option for people who want to write phone apps.

[hishnash]

10 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Nah, nobody would buy it. Having non x86 support invalidates usage from anyone who is actually needing the power of a Mac Pro. 

That all depends on the software apple will get Adobe on board very fast, and of course apples apps like FCPX etc will support it day one. I think within 2 years most apps used on the mac. Apple already killed all legacy apps with 10.15 dropping 32bit support so the macPro today only runs apps that will be easy to port to ARM. For many users apple will be able to provide much better performance than intel. 

 

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

1 hour ago, hishnash said:

Moving to ARM has not affect of right to repair at all. 

 

Apple will have Adobe on stage and they will show it working well already dont worry apple are well aware of this. 

 

For the macPro target user ARM is a much better solution, even if you go for vanilla ARM. For the macPro it is all about mutli-threaded performance.

* Building a 32core or even 64core ARM cpu is easy, even people like AWS have been doing this.
* ARM cpus support DDR6 the improved memory speed/latency will be a massive perf improvement for pro workloads.
* ARM supports PCIe4 and even PCIe5 (this year) and has supported PCIe4 for over 4 year now! this will mean apple can drop the costly PCIe switch they have on the motherboard and improve bandwidth to the slots.

 Replacing the iMacs cpu with an ARM cpu will be the hardest, since the iMac is the mac with the highest single core clock speed. The macPros single core performance is != iPhone 10 (Xeons are just not built for single core speed).

A gaming mac would require apple to do what Sony does and pay off a load of developers... does not matter about the hardware **content is king**.

people also do things like photo editing on Mac Pro's. also professional software needs to be supported. 

[Jotoco]

52 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Replacing the cpu is never the fix. It is always the motherboard/memory or something else that fails not a CPU.

Tell that to the Apple engineer who put the 48V back light connector right beside I've that goes straight to the CPU for 4 generations already. 

 

Just ask Louis rossman

[mr moose]

14 minutes ago, Kaloob said:

Didn't think the sockeg failed along with the CPU when the latter dies from heat.

Regardless, there are more pressing issues for independent repair shops.

Like motherboards that develop there own holes:

 

But don't worry, as a part of apple's outstanding after sales service they will tell you it's water damage rather than offer to replace the board.   This is a 3 year old product FFS.

[Jotoco]

I keep hearing that arm can have 64 core CPUs on lower power envelopes but why is that they don't exist?

 

Why did Microsoft launch surface X with anemic arm? Why didn't they build a better SoC? Why don't OEM starting making 64 core arm desktops using windows on arm? Or just as Linux workstations? 

 

I'm pretty sure with 64 cores you could dedicate some for real time emulation and recompiling and still beat 3950X performance by a mile. If that was so easy as people seem to think. 

[hishnash]

31 minutes ago, Ashley said:

people also do things like photo editing on Mac Pro's. also professional software needs to be supported. 

Adobe make more than photoshop,  The majority of macPro users are either using apples Audio/Video solutions or using Adobe audio/Video solutions.  Some will be using other tools but after killing 32bit support and requiring hardened runtime + notarisation apple have already ensure that all apps that run on the macPro are compiled with the latest version of XCode so they will be easy to compile to ARM.

 

 

7 minutes ago, Jotoco said:

Tell that to the Apple engineer who put the 48V back light connector right beside I've that goes straight to the CPU for 4 generations already. 

 

Just ask Louis rossman

And if this kills the cpu you dont just replace the cpu on the motherboard...  what happens is the motherboard then kills your replacement cpu. Also when he replaces a cpu he does not buy it new from someone he gets it from a doner board that was broken in some other way moving to arm will not affect that for him, he will still have dead boards to take cpus from. 

 

 

3 minutes ago, Jotoco said:

I keep hearing that arm can have 64 core CPUs on lower power envelopes but why is that they don't exist?

These high core count server grade ARM cpus are not low power, they still use lots of power. You cant put them in a laptop!

A 64core ARM cpu will still use a lot of die area, that will cost a lot to make in a fab. It will cost a lot more than the 3950X to make.

[Jotoco]

8 minutes ago, hishnash said:

 

A 64core ARM cpu will still use a lot of die area, that will cost a lot to make in a fab. It will cost a lot more than the 3950X to make.

Yes, then tell people to shut up about this already. People who think like this must ask why they don't put an Epyc CPU in their phone if it is so much better... 

 

Arm as far as I know doesn't scale as well as x86-64 when talking about 60W to 150W, in desktops. But also I don't know about the 45W to 70W of high performance notebooks. I would really like to see it done, though. 

 

In the 15W region, here they can shine with the right software. The SoC in the surface X felt a bit rushed IMO, they lazily just tweaked the current Snapdragon. 

[hishnash]

10 minutes ago, Jotoco said:

Arm as far as I know doesn't scale as well

Arm scales just the same as x86 in the end they are just instruction sets the cpus internally don't even use them they decode them into thier own micro-ops.

 

The abilty to scale has nothing to do with the instruction set and all down to things like cache sizing etc, these are all things that can be tuned depending on what you are targeting.

There are 200W Arm cpus with many many cors that scale very well. Typically arm cors take up less cpu space (but again this is not really due to the instruction set and more due to the choices around cache etc). 

When comparing to AMD Zen based remember apple also use TSMC and apple get access to the new TSMC node 6 months to 1 year before AMD, since apple fund most of its development. 

[StDragon]

It's not about performance. Going to ARM helps them unify a code-base between iOS and OSX; especially for app development.

 

It's all about setting the table, and you can't start implementing software changes until you have the prerequisite hardware already in place and in use.

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, rhn94 said:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21284960/apple-arm-based-macs-wwdc-2020-report-intel-laptops-desktops-power-efficiency

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/apple-plans-to-announce-move-to-its-own-mac-chips-at-wwdc

Is this the beginning of the end of x86 architecture?

I'll believe it when Apple actually does, because otherwise, everytime you see this thing in an investment-oriented website, assume it's just wishful thinking by the no-nothing investors who have yet to figure out how to loot Apple's cash horde.

 

[hishnash]

45 minutes ago, StDragon said:

unify a code-base between iOS and OSX

it is nothing to do with the instruction set it is all about the system libs you can talk to. 

All iOS applications have been building and running on x86 since before the iPhone shipped. the Xcode simulator requires you to build an x86 version of your iOS app to use it. The reason it is hard to port code between he platforms is all the system libs you depend on and use in your code are different so you need to re-write your code to use different apis. Its like the issue with porting code from windows x86 to macOS x86 all the work is about changing what apis you call. Changing cpu instruction set is just a flag at compile time people dont write raw assembly these days. Even when you use AVX you are just adding annotations to C/C++. 

 

 

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, hishnash said:

 

No modern software is written for modern compilers, even if your using AVX etc you are not writing raw assembly any more, you are annotating your code so that the compiler generates AVX instructions. Turns out the LLVM (the compiler that you use if you produce macOS applications) can compile to ARM just as well as to x86 and can even take code with AVX annotations and produce working code for ARM cpus...  

LLVM is a mutli layered compiler your code is first compiled to LLVM IR then to LLVM bytecode (a bit like jave-bytecode) then LLVM runs a load of optimisations on it at this level then it can (optionally you can just run it as bytecode) be compiled down to the cpu. But the layer that reads your source code does not even know about what target cpu you will compile down to at the end. So code written to compile with LLVM is not written for x86 it is written for LLVm IR/Bytecode.

That's not how it works.

 

When you write code in C or C++ and you actually use intrinsics , anything that would normally be "tight assembly" is replaced with C code on platforms that do not have an equivalent library. Thus simply changing the target from x86-64 to aarch64 works in that scenario. However legacy programs, those written in 32-bit code and those written using in-house tools and libraries (such as Adobe's software, who took three whole version cycles last time to switch from Power to x86 32-bit, and only switched to x64 kicking and screaming on both Windows and OSX) will not be there on day one and may not be there for 4 years. Hence why Apple came out with the Rosetta layer, and the Mac Classic layer that worked on OSX 10.4/10.5. 

 

There's a whole host of software types that are simply not gong to switch at all, and this is why we're unlikely to see this switch entirely across the mac platform. It's likely only to happen to the laptop slot the "Air" takes up, not the Mac Pro. But the Air is already not a good option for people if they can buy the iPad Pro since the iPad Pro already has more performance than Air does.

 

But here we go again with how investors don't know jack about how computers are made. These other vendors producing "ARM" laptops? They are doing it to produce a cheap near-rubbish product to run as a revival of the previously rubbish nettop/netbook tier, because there is much more profit to be had in selling rubbish that only runs a web browser.

[Jotoco]

And about Adobe doing anything... 

 

If anything monthly subscription only made then lazier. 

 

Before they had to push new features of anyone was to buy their new version. Now they can just sit down and collect money. And I feel this is what they are doing. 

 

Many people are moving away to other software and I really wish done of the big fish started doing so too, like Linus. Adobe need a shake down just like Intel. 

[StDragon]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

But here we go again with how investors don't know jack about how computers are made. 

"What's a computer?" -Apple

 

 

[captain_to_fire]

This rings a bell

Chances are, either Tim Cook or Craig Federighi will tell that the rumors are true and that Apple's Mac line will undergo another transition:

1994-1996: Motorola 68k to PowerPC

2006-2007: PowerPC to Intel

2020-202x: Intel to ARM

 

Then they'll probably will launch changes to XCode so that devs can rewrite their apps to become a universal binary or something like that so that an app can natively run on both x86 and ARM. It would be interesting if Apple will greenlight Windows 10 on ARM via Bootcamp and provide the necessary drivers.

Edited June 10, 2020 by captain_to_fire

[hishnash]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

However legacy programs, those written in 32-bit code and those written using in-house tools and libraries

Apple does not care about legacy 32bit apps they already dropped support in 10.15 so that people don't say they are not making it to ARM.  Apple has already forced all developers that support the new macPro (you cant run 10.14 on the macPro) to be modern 64bit applications that link to the new hardened runtime linking to this requires using the latest version of LLVM. So any app that runs on the current macPro will be simple to re-compile for ARM. Apple basically already killed the other apps off. 
 
 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

When you write code in C or C++ and you actually use intrinsics ,

Yes but when compiling with LLVM your code goes to LLVM IR first and then goes to x86, even code you tag with intrinsics! It is not hard to take that IR/Bytecode and retarget it to ARM in-fact that is how you can use these x86 intrinsics code today for iOS apps and it compiles and runs, the company i work for has code like this, as long as you dong put any inline assembly LLVM (well apples fork included in Xcode) will map it to ARM equivalents (might bean adding extra instructions, and might not be the most optimal arm version) but i runs. 

 

1 hour ago, captain_to_fire said:

It would be interesting if Apple will greenlight Windows 10 on ARM via Bootcamp and provide the necessary drivers.

Would require Microsoft to provide an installer/licensee for it at the moment i think it is bound the their hardware purchase.

 

1 hour ago, captain_to_fire said:

become a universal binary

Reminds me of when it was possible to have a universal binary with 4 different versions of the app: PPC-32, PPC-64, x86-32 and x86-64.... all of that functionality is still in Xcode, and macOS still understands how to select the correct one. All they will do is move it from an obscure setting to a main checkbox that is checked by default. Apps build with this will be able to run on older versions of macOS. 
 

[captain_to_fire]

9 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Would require Microsoft to provide an installer/licensee for it at the moment i think it is bound the their hardware purchase.

I’m not sure that this was the case with version 1 of Bootcamp in Mac OS X Tiger for Intel and I don’t think it’ll be the case should Apple allow W10oA. Back then, what you need are two physical discs, a Mac OS X disc and a Windows 7 disc, now it’s just a Windows 10 ISO file. 
 

17 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Apps build with this will be able to run on older versions of macOS. 

If older MacOS you mean pre-Snow Leopard, I don’t think it’ll be the case since Apple has removed any support for PowerPC applications by removing the Rosetta translator.

[hishnash]

Just now, captain_to_fire said:

, now it’s just a Windows 10 ISO file. 

Not sure if MS provide the ARM version as an ISO?

 

1 minute ago, captain_to_fire said:

If older MacOS you mean pre-Snow Leopard,

No i mean fat applications build with Xcode 12 that include both Arm and x86 will be able to run on 10.15 since 10.15 already knows how to select the x86 version.