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

[Coaxialgamer]

15 hours ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

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

Apple has gone through no less than 3 seperate changes in ISA. If anyone can do it, they can. 

[indrora]

15 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

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. 

 

They in fact did. It's called a Universal Binary, which (confusingly) also refers to 32-bit and 64-bit fattened binaries. From wikipedia:

Quote

A universal binary is, in Apple parlance, an executable file or application bundle that runs natively on either PowerPC or Intel-manufactured IA-32 or Intel 64-based Macintosh computers; it is an implementation of the concept more generally known as a fat binary.

 

The universal binary format was introduced at the 2005 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as a means to ease the transition from the existing PowerPC architecture to systems based on Intel processors, which began shipping in 2006. Universal binaries typically include both PowerPC and x86 versions of a compiled application. The operating system detects a universal binary by its header, and executes the appropriate section for the architecture in use. This allows the application to run natively on any supported architecture, with no negative performance impact beyond an increase in the storage space taken up by the larger binary.

 

[...]

 

Apple previously used a similar technique during the transition from 68k processors to PowerPC in the mid-1990s. These dual-platform executables were called fat binaries, referring to their larger file size.

MacOS 10.0 didn't ship with Intel support. by the way; it wouldn't be until 10.4 that Intel support would be a thing. In 2006, they were seeding out $1k developer devices called the Developer Transition Platforms to select developers, PCs shoved into PowerMac G5 cases with a custom TPM. They were almost all returned within the year, as per the Apple agreements.

 

For software from the 68k era that didn't have the same fat binary format, Apple included the Mac 68k emulator in OSX up until 10.5, which was mostly known as Classic Mode. in 10.4 for Intel macs, the emulation layer you're referring to was released, called Rosetta. Later in the PowperPC life cycle, there were articles about trimming out the PowerPC (and later 32-bit) versions of the executables, as well as removing non-native language support.

 

It's not all that hard to move from one architecture to another when the underlying OS stays the same in terms of programming interfaces for a vast majority of software. For a vast majority of software written in ObjectiveC on the platform, it'll be a matter of "recompile and done".

 

15 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

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? 

When moving to a new platform with a standard interface in place, you don't need to rewrite things in the vast majority of cases. It's a matter of checking that you're not doing anything ultra-specific to the processor (e.g. hand-rolled assembly) and that you're not making any major assumptions about the architecture. The reason that Office isn't 64-bit native is because Word documents pre-DOCX are literally dumps of the Word memory structure with some numbers fixed up, then un-fixed when you load them later. Backwards compatibility sucks some days, doesn't it?

 

The fact something was on Windows made no difference during the Apple transition from PowerPC to Intel. It was the fact that Apple released a compiler that they could just go "in Xcode change this line and boom you get intel and PowerPC support if you aren't touching any funny hardware, which you shouldn't and you should be using the OS provided things." For stuff that was really heavily AltiVec-reliant, there was some work to rework that into Intel, or just turn off the AltiVec support and use the non-AltiVec version, or release a non-universal binary that suffered performance hits.

Microsoft already made it just as easy; For the vast majority of software that needs native performance, the change is just "target ARM not x86" under the compiler options, and for everything else, you'll have to replace your silly "we wrote it in x86 assembler so it's like 3% faster" hack with something in ARM assembler or rewrite it in C so you're letting the compiler do the work.

 

[Guest]

On 10/18/2018 at 10:58 AM, 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.

IDK I'm on board with this, but only because ill need to upgrade in 2020. It'll be annoying at first, but I don't use any applications that can't be run on ARM, apart from Excel needed certain R^2 and graph equations etc. and XY Scatter. Can't be done on my iPad. People who buy the last years model, or few years before won't want to upgrade so quickly, but I imagine by 2020 ARM will have caught up in performance completely. 

[FPSwithaWacomTablet]

Software support... I am scared for third-parties that have to deal with it, considering the castrated versions of Photoshop/Premiere on iOS devices.

 

Not hard for Apple though; Apple can handle it since they've been doing macOS and iOS for years. 

[MandoPanda]

On 10/18/2018 at 6:51 AM, indrora said:

move to their higher end professional workstations

The ultimate pro-sumer: arm powered 'professional' devices...

[mr moose]

Ignoring the armchair experts,  both MS and apple keep coming back to this,  so there must be something in either the design stage that look astoundingly good or their market research keeps sending them to ARM.

[Master Disaster]

15 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Ignoring the armchair experts,  both MS and apple keep coming back to this,  so there must be something in either the design stage that look astoundingly good or their market research keeps sending them to ARM.

Cost. ARM devices are significantly cheaper than X86 equivalents and both MS & Apple have identified a way of reducing their own overheads without having to drop MSRP therefore increasing profit margin significantly.

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

Cost. ARM devices are significantly cheaper than X86 equivalents and both MS & Apple have identified a way of reducing their own overheads without having to drop MSRP therefore increasing profit margin significantly.

 

what about many of MS efforts being on third party hardware? Do you think Asus, HP etc have been requesting it?

[Master Disaster]

30 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

what about many of MS efforts being on third party hardware? Do you think Asus, HP etc have been requesting it?

Can't say however what corporation wouldn't want to save ~50% on the cost of what's probably the most expensive component of the hardware while still being able to sell it for the exact same price?

 

Tbh I'm pretty sure the entire industry would swap to ARM tomorrow if they could.

[BuckGup]

On 10/17/2018 at 5:03 PM, Curufinwe_wins said:

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

Macs used to use IBM Power PC CPUs so it's not really that new for Apple.

[mynameisjuan]

8 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

Macs used to use IBM Power PC CPUs so it's not really that new for Apple.

They use it until what, 2006? Before Macs became as popular as they are today and when development was really only done by Apple. 

 

Now the number of devices with the amount of programs that shot up for Mac in the past few years. It would be a developmental nightmare. 

[BuckGup]

4 minutes ago, mynameisjuan said:

They use it until what, 2006? Before Macs became as popular as they are today and when development was really only done by Apple. 

 

Now the number of devices with the amount of programs that shot up for Mac in the past few years. It would be a developmental nightmare. 

Not if Apple creates a compatibility layer. I imagine a trillion dollar company could hire some great software engineers

[Terryv]

2 hours ago, BuckGup said:

Not if Apple creates a compatibility layer. I imagine a trillion dollar company could hire some great software engineers

If Apple is really looking at 2020 for arm rollout, they likely are well on their way to having all that sorted.

 

Also, any 3rd party making Apple apps would be crazy not to make an arm port of their apps ASAP.

[BuckGup]

47 minutes ago, Terryv said:

If Apple is really looking at 2020 for arm rollout, they likely are well on their way to having all that sorted.

 

Also, any 3rd party making Apple apps would be crazy not to make an arm port of their apps ASAP.

Seeing how ARM is moving I wouldn't be surprised to find it coproccesing on motherboards soon enough

[Monkey Dust]

Not sure about the desktop (whatever Apple calls them), maybe they will just drop them completely. They didn't seem keen to update it from the previous gen, I suspect they don't sell in large enough numbers to be worth Apples while. But it could make sense for the Macbooks from a power consumption and heat point of view.

 

[DrMacintosh]

On 10/17/2018 at 3:19 PM, Drak3 said:

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

No, the idea that Apple would be making its own processors is fairly new and Apple has never denied that. They have only denied that they would be merging iOS and macOS. 

[Drak3]

On 10/17/2018 at 11:32 PM, Ja50n said:

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

Except that emulating PowerPC on x86 is and always was trivial. x86 in ARM, on the other hand, is a colossal task to even get working in a half assed manner.

[Ja50n]

7 hours ago, Drak3 said:

Except that emulating PowerPC on x86 is and always was trivial. x86 in ARM, on the other hand, is a colossal task to even get working in a half assed manner.

When has it ever been trivial? My understanding was that PowerPC on x86 was a massive pain with large performance penalties... Just take a look at what Apple managed at the time, where it took a quad core Xeon to beat a single core iMac G5: https://www.macworld.com/article/1053814/rosetta.html

Windows on ARM meanwhile, is bad but not any worse: https://www.techspot.com/review/1599-windows-on-arm-performance/page2.html

[williamcll]

maybe they can update xcode to make it more compatible on ARM

[NinerL]

Ming Kuo is almost always spot on, this was rumored a year ago looks like it is really happening. Hopefully the ARM chips come close to Intels offerings.

[LAwLz]

On 10/17/2018 at 11:53 PM, Master Disaster said:

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.

It wouldn't necessarily cause any problems for their users. They have done it rather seamlessly before, and they can do it again.

 

On 10/17/2018 at 11:54 PM, 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

It's not beating i5s. It might do it in some tests but certainly not for all around performance.

 

 

On 10/17/2018 at 11:58 PM, 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.

No it wouldn't require rewriting all software.

Software could quite easily be recompiled for it, and compatibility layers for software that hasn't been recompiled.

 

 

On 10/18/2018 at 12:03 AM, Curufinwe_wins said:

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

Patrick had no idea what he was talking about half the time. He just made shit up to sound smart.

 

On 10/18/2018 at 12:19 AM, Drak3 said:

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

They never said it wasn't happening. What they said was that they wanted to keep MacOS and iOS separate things, because they didn't think you could make a once-size fits all OS like that.

 

 

'

On 10/18/2018 at 12:19 AM, Master Disaster said:

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.

What makes you say that?

We already have full versions of After Effect and Photoshop running on ARM processors which are far weaker than what Apple already builds.

ARM processors doesn't have to be small and power efficient. Make the chip larger and throw more transistors at it. I am confident that Apple could make a really fast ARM processor which could run x86 programs through compatibility layers well. But besides that, Apple has a really tight grip around their developers, and if they made this move developers would fairly quickly move along with them.

 

On 10/18/2018 at 8:05 AM, Curufinwe_wins said:

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.

I'd argue that Apple is in a far better position than Microsoft when it comes to this.

1) Apple has from what I know more experience than Microsoft when it comes to porting their OS to different architectures.

2) A lot of the underlying systems in MacOS already support native ARM because they follow and use POSIX standards.

3) Apple has a quite different userbase compared to Windows. There is less backwards compatibility bagage that needs consideration (primarily from the fact that MacOS isn't as widely used, especially not in slower moving corporate environments) and their developers are usually quicker to adopt to the changes Apple makes (for examples of this, see support for high DPI in programs, support for the touchbar, fingerprint authentication and so on).

4) The ARM processors Apple has access to are far more powerful than what Microsoft have access to. Not only that, but Apple are not tied to what someone like Qualcomm provides them. What did Microsoft get when they asked for a custom laptop oriented SoC? They got a slightly overclocked Snapdragon 845. It's still basically a chip made for phones. Apple could easily double core count and increase clock speeds to make a laptop-oriented chip.

 

 

On 10/18/2018 at 9:50 AM, Master Disaster said:

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.

Ehm... Apple did have dual binaries. They packaged both PPC and x86 programs into a single installer so that the users didn't have to think about it. They could easily do the same again but with x86 and ARM. Hell, they wouldn't even have to do that because they could just make it so that the app store detected CPU version and downloaded just the correct version. That is how the Microsoft store does it.

 

On 10/18/2018 at 9:50 AM, Master Disaster said:

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?

I take it you don't write much code, do you?

The Windows programs using x86 does not really help with porting it to MacOS. The standard libraries all use the same APIs regardless of platform so in that regard it doesn't matter if you're programming for ARM or x86.

The proprietary libraries (which Windows is full of) needs to be rewritten for MacOS anyway, regardless of which architecture it runs on.

 

Unless your program is written in assembly, which architecture your program on doesn't matter much.

Just because programs use x86 on Windows doesn't mean it is easier to port to MacOS.

Porting from one OS to another is usually a far greater task than porting from one architecture to another. We're talking, changing 50% of your code (changing OS) compared to maybe changing a few variable lengths and then set a compiler flag (changing architecture).

 

 

On 10/25/2018 at 12:15 AM, Drak3 said:

Except that emulating PowerPC on x86 is and always was trivial. x86 in ARM, on the other hand, is a colossal task to even get working in a half assed manner.

Excuse me but what are you smoking?

What made you think that emulating PowerPC on x86 was trivial?
What makes you think that it was easier than emulating x86 on ARM?

[DrMacintosh]

On 10/17/2018 at 2:58 PM, 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.

Well Apple is building in UIKit to the next version of macOS which should also allow iPhone apps to run on macOS. 

 

Its a shitty end goal, but that might be their end goal. Though if anyone can pull it off, it’s Apple. 

[Eroda]

so the Current  A Chip in the new Mac Mini but clocked higher due to less heat restructions

[Curufinwe_wins]

7 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

Patrick had no idea what he was talking about half the time. He just made shit up to sound smart.

 

Which mainly was a comment about his rants being amusing.

 

Anyways, while yes, A fair bit / hyper-majority of non-proprietary binary code wouldn't 'need to be rewritten', I have done enough coding to feel fairly confident that if they don't want it running like molasses in Antarctica, a plenty high enough proportion should be (or at least massaged enough to have to do more than just recompile anyways).

 

And yes. Without a shadow of a doubt jumping from PPC to x86-64 is dramatically easier than from x86-64 to ARM. Esp since the emulation layers that were occasionally used in the interim back in the day... well they were the best people could come up with and they pretty much sucked. 

 

But more than anything, I think the biggest deal is that pure processing power is a dramatic reduction with design basis processor swaps at the moment, which was unequivocally the opposite 'back in the day'.

[warrenr]

13 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I'd argue that Apple is in a far better position than Microsoft when it comes to this.

1) Apple has from what I know more experience than Microsoft when it comes to porting their OS to different architectures.

2) A lot of the underlying systems in MacOS already support native ARM because they follow and use POSIX standards.

 

Ehhh, that's not really true.  Windows has been shipping for multiple architectures since the release of NT 3.1, 25+ years ago.  MIPS, Itanium, ARM, Alpha AXP, PowerPC... they've kinda done it all.  Plus, the original Xbox and the 360 are PowerPC systems that run a customized OS that is architecturally very similar to Windows.  Even today, you can get a free version of Windows 10 that runs on ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi.  Microsoft may not be building their own ARM CPUs like Apple is, but they've got the cross-platform story pretty much 100% figured out already.
 

Also, POSIX isn't really relevant here.  It's an application programming interface... it presents no opinions about how the hardware should work.  macOS works with ARM because Apple has spent the last 13 years working with ARM CPUs, and ensuring that, at minimum, all the shared code between iOS and macOS can be compiled into efficient AArm64 code (+ a ton of proprietary extensions, I'm sure.)  There's going to be a bunch of stuff missing, like optimized graphics drivers.  What, you think Intel is going to be super-cooperative about making Intel Iris work great with ARM?