Apple rumored to be working on its own non-mobile ARM processor and ditching Intel around 2020

[indrora]

Via 9to5mac ( https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/17/apple-custom-chips-macs-apple-car/ ) and The Verge ( https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/2/17189372/apple-intel-chip-processors-macs-date )

 

It smells like Apple is getting in on the desktop ARM game. According to Ming-Chi Kuo's close ear to the Apple supply chain, TSMC might be working with Apple to develop an ARM chip that could go into Macs sometime around 2020, and are also apparently working on producing self-driving car stuff slated for sometime around 2023, according to 9to5mac:

Quote

A new note today from Ming-Chi Kuo looks at how Apple’s A-series chips will guide the future of the company including its Apple Car efforts, Mac, and iPhone. He believes we could see Macs with Apple chips by 2020, while an autonomous Apple Car system may be run from custom silicon by 2023.

[...]

In the long-term, Kuo predicts that TSMC will produce custom chips for “Apple Car’s Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.” He forecasts that Apple’s vehicle efforts will bring Level 4 or Level 5 fully autonomous driving to consumers. He says that only TSMC’s 3nm or 5nm chip process in the future will enable that level of autonomous driving.

The Verge speculates it's probably going to start shifting from Intel to their home-rolled single-origin ARM on laptops before they move to their higher end professional workstations:

Quote

Apple’s last major Mac processor transition of this scope occurred when it moved away from IBM’s PowerPC chips in favor of Intel’s. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs announced the move in 2005 and it was completed by the end of the following year. As in that earlier example, Bloomberg notes this would require a “multi-step transition.” Intel chips will almost certainly remain in Apple’s top-end machines like the iMac Pro and forthcoming Mac Pro revision until the company can produce in-house chips that are capable of meeting the demands of professional Mac users.

The Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-is-said-to-plan-move-from-intel-to-own-mac-chips-from-2020 ) also notes that moving away from Intel would make Apple owner of most everything inside a Mac:

Quote

For Apple, the change would be a defining moment. Intel chips remain some of the only major processor components designed by others inside Apple’s product portfolio. Currently, all iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and Apple TVs use main processors designed by Apple and based on technology from Arm Holdings Plc. Moving to its own chips inside Macs would let Apple release new models on its own timelines, instead of relying on Intel’s processor roadmap.

 

--

 

My thoughts: Everyone gather 'round the "Let's change processor architectures again maypole". Doing so would mark the fourth processor family that has graced the mac, from Motorola's 68k family, IBM's PowerPC, and currently Intel's X86 architecture, seeing a homegrown ARM variation would be interesting. There's evidence that Apple has been trying to combine multiple iOS variants, with iPads and iPhones getting more feature parity in the latest releases of iOS, bringing gesture consistency and such. It would also possibly give them more room for thin and light always-connected devices like the Macbook Air has aimed to be.

[Master Disaster]

This has been rumoured for years, I'll believe it when I see it.

 

There's zero chance of Apple ditching X86 entirely, it would cause far to many problems for a company whose raison d'etre is ease of use for customers.

[Lil Ramen]

It makes sense due to apparently the iPhone X CPU beating an i5 in the MBP 13 (2017 7th gen) and now the XS with the 7 nm CPU

[Arika]

Just now, Lil Ramen said:

It makes sense due to apparently the iPhone X CPU beating an i5 in the MBP 13 (2017 7th gen) and now the XS with the 7 nm CPU

absolutely false, it beat it in SOME niche benchmarks which are optimized for mobile phone cpus. it is no where close to a i5

[Master Disaster]

4 minutes ago, Lil Ramen said:

It makes sense due to apparently the iPhone X CPU beating an i5 in the MBP 13 (2017 7th gen) and now the XS with the 7 nm CPU

Apart from the fact that it would require rewriting all software to work on ARM. Not just Apple software, all third party applications and infact any software that exists at all.

 

It would cause havoc for customers.

[captain_to_fire]

Universal Binary macOS? I think it’s coming. 

 

[Curufinwe_wins]

Have fun with it. If it comes true, years of hilarious headaches will ensue. But hey, if it works, and works well, we will have more incentives to ditch some of the really old legacy support crap holding back CPUs today.

 

PS: Topics like this I really miss Patrick. RIP @patrickjp93

[Master Disaster]

3 minutes ago, captain_to_fire said:

Universal Binary macOS? I think it’s coming. 

 

Personally i think Apple are going to go down a dual CPU route. They'll stick with Intel for the bulk of the work but offload some of the more mundane operating systems tasks too a custom ARM core.

 

This method gives the best of both worlds, they don't have to go through months (if not years) of dealing with software incompatibilities while being able to offer support for iOS apps natively on macOS and also effectively killing the hackintosh scene dead overnight.

 

Obviously that's just my idea and opinion. I just don't see them ditching X86 and certainly not all in one go.

[indrora]

13 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Apart from the fact that it would require rewriting all software to work on ARM. Not just Apple software, all third party applications and infact any software that exists at all.

 

It would cause havoc for customers.

Not the first time. Apple's done this twice, once already with OS 10: The PowerPC - Intel transition happened only 10 years ago. Plus, just like PowerPC supplanting Motorola 68000 with Rosetta, there is plenty of work about running Intel x86 programs on ARM (See also, Microsoft's Cobalt coming to fruition in the Asus NovaGo)

[Drak3]

This rumor comes up every year, and Apple has said that it wasn't happening for good reason everytime they say anything about it.

[Master Disaster]

Just now, indrora said:

Not the first time. Apple's done this twice, once already with OS 10: The PowerPC - Intel transition happened only 10 years ago. Plus, just like PowerPC supplanting Motorola 68000 with Rosetta, there is plenty of work about running Intel x86 programs on ARM (See also, Microsoft's Cobalt coming to fruition in the Asus NovaGo)

Not true, both times Apple swapped architectures they were upgrading to a more powerful one and were able to maintain 100% compatibility through emulation.

 

I'm sorry but there's zero chance of Apple maintaining 100% compatibility when swapping from X86 to ARM, it's never going to happen. Imagine trying to run the X86 versions of Premiere, After Effects, FCP, Photoshop, Logic etc on an ARM CPU. Yeah, good luck with that.

[indrora]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

I'm sorry but there's zero chance of Apple maintaining 100% compatibility when swapping from X86 to ARM, it's never going to happen. Imagine trying to run the X86 versions of Premiere, After Effects, FCP, Photoshop, Logic etc on an ARM CPU. Yeah, good luck with that. 

It's not amazing -- this is running on the equivalent of a galaxy S8 -- but neither was running 68k apple software on MacOS. I'll repeat, we've been through this before: Apple introduced Fat applications that had both PowerPC and Intel, and later both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel app packages.

[Dabombinable]

So they'll have gone PowerPC>Intel x86>ARM?

[Olennex]

Yea based off the productivity programs that run only on x86, I doubt they'll ditch it. Imagine Apple going to Adobe asking them to recreate all their programs for ARM. Sure they'll just laugh at them

[Ja50n]

7 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

This has been rumoured for years, I'll believe it when I see it.

 

There's zero chance of Apple ditching X86 entirely, it would cause far to many problems for a company whose raison d'etre is ease of use for customers.

ARM’s ability to emulate x86 has come a long way, and look at Rosetta, Apple’s switched architectures before, and used an emulation stopgap so everyone could port their code away from PowerPC. So, there’s at least some chance!

[Curufinwe_wins]

7 hours ago, indrora said:

It's not amazing -- this is running on the equivalent of a galaxy S8 -- but neither was running 68k apple software on MacOS. I'll repeat, we've been through this before: Apple introduced Fat applications that had both PowerPC and Intel, and later both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel app packages.

I'll repeat. By the time Apple was migrating to x86-64 from PowerPC, everything else already existed on x86. That was moving from the fringe to the market juggernaut. This would be moving from the market juggernaut to something with very little support for power-user software portfolio. Additionally at the time Apple moved over, processing power was increasing well over 100% annually (well at the end of that rapid growth phase, nearer to 30-40% annual at final movement), so even if some software was slower at first, the improved hardware could easily help carry the load. It is rather unreasonable to believe this would be anything other than a regression in hardware capability.

 

Anyways, the real thing is that that project is software emulation, and only for 32bit. Neither an actual option (notice how we haven't heard much about it, even though it should be a really big deal). Well for better or worse, Intel and AMD both threatened lawsuits over emulating instructions of x86, which Microsoft/Apple/Qualcomm don't have licence to.

 

I mean yes. It can happen. It is dramatically different than last time though. If they do, well expect years of bugs and growing pains.

[Nowak]

7 hours ago, indrora said:

It's not amazing -- this is running on the equivalent of a galaxy S8 -- but neither was running 68k apple software on MacOS. I'll repeat, we've been through this before: Apple introduced Fat applications that had both PowerPC and Intel, and later both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel app packages.

This does not show the real-world performance of Windows 10's x86-to-ARM translation layer. The reality is much worse. As in, "worse than an entry-level Celeron" bad.

 

Who's to say that, if Apple were to switch to ARM, they'd be able to do the compatibility layer better than Microsoft, a much larger company, could?

[Curufinwe_wins]

2 minutes ago, NowakVulpix said:

 

Who's to say that, if Apple were to switch to ARM, they'd be able to do the compatibility layer better than Microsoft, a much larger company, could?

Apple and Microsoft now have very similar levels of employees, and Apple has much larger market cap ofc. But the point still works in that Microsoft is a much more experience company when it comes to these things than Apple is.

[ignaloidas]

I don't see it, even new iPhones have x86 in them (https://lcq2.github.io/x86_iphone/)

[GoldenLag]

4 minutes ago, ignaloidas said:

I don't see it, even new iPhones have x86 in them (https://lcq2.github.io/x86_iphone/)

that is at a very different level than ARM to x86 in the OS

 

that instance there is in respect to broadband. 

[JoostinOnline]

8 hours ago, indrora said:

The Verge speculates

You lost me right there. XD

 

Jokes aside, this would mean no more boot camp.

[D13H4RD]

Don't think that's a possibility any time soon. 

 

Not when they have to recode the OS and applications for ARM 

[Master Disaster]

9 hours ago, indrora said:

It's not amazing -- this is running on the equivalent of a galaxy S8 -- but neither was running 68k apple software on MacOS. I'll repeat, we've been through this before: Apple introduced Fat applications that had both PowerPC and Intel, and later both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel app packages.

Great marketing video, unfortunately the reality is much much worse than that video makes out. Notice everything he ran was already loaded and sat in the background? Yeah, that because things take a very very long time to load. Let's be clear, no one is saying these things won't run, far from it but it's going to be a very hard sell for customers when app load times treble and suddenly that 1 hour video render now takes 3 or 4 hours (1 example of many I could give).

 

Also again you're wrong, Apple never used PPC & X86 dual binaries, when they released macOS 10 it had a PPC emulation layer which was capable of running PPC apps on X86 platforms at near 100% speed. That was possible because X86 was multiple times more powerful than the G series PPC CPUs Apple used, the faster architecture was able to make up the speed deficit of the emulation layer. That's not a luxury they have when moving from X86 to ARM.

 

Also as has already been covered, when they moved from PPC to X86 X86 was already the dominant platform, most all major applications used by professionals already had X86 versions available for Windows making the conversion process much simpler. Can you honestly see Adobe rewriting the Creative Suite for ARM just for support on a single platform?

 

Finally can we stop referring to X86-64 as though its a separate architecture because it isn't, it's an extension of an existing platform and backwards compatibility in the instruction set was maintained. X86-64 CPUs can natively run apps written for X86 without any additional work required. Any compatibility issues come from the operating system, not the architecture.

[sof006]

Apple would have to have their large library of software all updated/converted to ARM if this was the case surely? Hell of a lot of work just to move away from x86. I'd say it's not worth the time or investment.

[Taf the Ghost]

12 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

This has been rumoured for years, I'll believe it when I see it.

 

There's zero chance of Apple ditching X86 entirely, it would cause far to many problems for a company whose raison d'etre is ease of use for customers.

Apple has been poaching CPU design staff in both the Northwest and Texas for the last two years at least. They've also been acquiring up a lot of GPU talent for something, eventually. It's not a question of "if" with Apple, but it is a question of "how far?". They don't produce enough Desktops to be worth leaving x86 for a long time. However, their Macbooks are a different issue. That's far more likely what they're going to replace, with Intel/AMD for workstations.