Mac Using AMD??

[Guest]

 

macOS 10.15.4 Catalina Beta Contains References To AMD Processors

Source: https://ioshacker.com/news/macos-10-15-4-catalina-beta-contains-references-to-amd-processors 

Quote

Apple is rumored to shift from Intel Processors to those that feature AMD architecture. The mention of AMD processors have appeared multiple times in macOS code suggesting Apple is internally testing them.

 

Today new references to AMD processors have been found in macOS Catalina code. The references were found in the recently released macOS Catalina 10.15.4 beta 1. If true, then Apple will go beyond just using AMD for graphics in its Macs and use AMD processors for its MacBooks, iMacs and even perhaps the Pro lineup.

 

The references found in macOS Catalina 10.15.4 beta’s code mention AMD APUs (APU is a marketing term for CPU and GPU on a single chip notes MacRumors). In the references multiple AMD APUs such as Picasso, Raven, Renoir and Van Gogh have been named.

Perhaps a Mac Mini refresh with APUs, or perhaps a APUs for the 13" lineup  - or even a MacBook refresh (which would be more than probable). 

 

Not sure how to copy an embed twitter link, but its on the source with the code mentioning the APUs. 

 

My Opinion:

- Yes please. This has been an ongoing issue where you buy the expensive MacBook and you just don't have the graphics capabilities you deserve. In the higher end MacBooks this just isn't necessary. 

- Could this open up to Ryzen for MacBooks?

- Or Threadripper for the iMac - more profit overhead for the same performance just makes sense to replace the Xeons in the iMac Pro. 

- Weren't we talking about moving to ARM in 2020?

 

 

[Crunchy Dragon]

[Hackintoshers liked that]

 

Ryzen in MacBooks would be amazing, in all honesty. I'm rocking a 3500U in my current laptop and it's an amazing little CPU for how little power it draws.

[RejZoR]

Well, if they want to ramp up margins, this is the best way. AMD is way cheaper than Intel, but performs just as good. Apple will charge the same for their devices, but will have to pay less for their components. Makes perfect sense.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, RejZoR said:

Well, if they want to ramp up margins, this is the best way. AMD is way cheaper than Intel, but performs just as good. Apple will charge the same for their devices, but will have to pay less for their components. Makes perfect sense.

I think it more shows their contract is up with Crazy Intel - and Intel will lose a huge chunk!

 

This opens their options up with fitting their low-end laptops with their A-series SoCs - even cheaper and potentially faster. 

[TempestCatto]

Imagine the markup on the CPU options of the Mac Pro if they had Threadripper in them..

[mr moose]

We had this discussion a few months ago, I was told there was no way because of contracts and code and some other random reasons.  It makes perfect sense they would be doing this, getting things ready in case they want to make the move.

[GDRRiley]

4th gen ryzen mobile seems like it should make a new macbook pro scream.

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, TempestCatto said:

Imagine the markup on the CPU options of the Mac Pro if they had Threadripper in them..

currently there is not markup on the macPro (For the CPU) they are charging intels list price.  (they are selecting very costly chips from intel that is true)

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

We had this discussion a few months ago, I was told there was no way because of contracts and code and some other random reasons.  It makes perfect sense they would be doing this, getting things ready in case they want to make the move.

There is not Code reason they could not switch, apple have more than enough skilled low level compiler geeks to be able to get LLVM to compile well to Zen. And on that point AMD have been putting a lot of work into LLVM over the last year so... 

Contracts is the point here there were rumors back when apple moved to intel that apple signed some exclusivity deal with them to only use their chips and not AMD. But that contract might well have expired? 

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, RorzNZ said:

 

- Weren't we talking about moving to ARM in 2020?

 

 

Moving to Zen2+ also opens the door for an ARM translation, AMDs Chiplet solution would let apple have a hybrid system with both x86 and ARM chiplets with a unified memory controller, intel cant offer that to apple. And jumping directly to ARM without any x86 support would but a lot of pressue on x86-64 emulation (something that apple don't realy have a license to do in hardware).

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, hishnash said:

There is not Code reason they could not switch, apple have more than enough skilled low level compiler geeks to be able to get LLVM to compile well to Zen.

That was my argument all along. 

 

1 hour ago, hishnash said:

And on that point AMD have been putting a lot of work into LLVM over the last year so... 

Contracts is the point here there were rumors back when apple moved to intel that apple signed some exclusivity deal with them to only use their chips and not AMD. But that contract might well have expired? 

 

Nah, it's all internet myth and fud.  Majority of what we read is founded on Chinese whispers and sensationalized articles.     Apple will do whatever makes their bottom line better, if that means using AMD then that's what we'll see on the shelves.

[xtroria]

Seems like we are going to see the end of apple doing thunderbolt.

 

This might be a good thing, knowing AMD has a tendency of doing thing in an open-platform.

 

Thunderbolt 3 / USB4 still has a pretty big data bandwidth for most users perhaps other than the needed higher power limit

[hishnash]

14 minutes ago, xtroria said:

Seems like we are going to see the end of apple doing thunderbolt.

 

This might be a good thing, knowing AMD has a tendency of doing thing in an open-platform.

 

Thunderbolt 3 / USB4 still has a pretty big data bandwidth for most users perhaps other than the needed higher power limit

Apple can still support THundberbolt, they just need to get certification from intel. Also apple have been one of the key members of the USB groups since it started. (they were the first major produces to use USB)

[Bombastinator]

MacOS is famously portable.  It doesn’t even have to run on amd64.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s ARM or risk5 or power9 references in there too.

[Orangeator]

I have a laptop with a 2500U and I love it! Great performance for it's power consumption.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Well, if they want to ramp up margins, this is the best way. AMD is way cheaper than Intel, but performs just as good. Apple will charge the same for their devices, but will have to pay less for their components. Makes perfect sense.

That's not why.

 

They use AMD GPU's in all their PC-class devices. It's likely they are being tested with unreleased AMD APU's in order to release a gaming model that is at least at parity with the PS5. Since the PS5 is also an AMD APU, they only need to exceed it by a few cores to get there. It would be kinda hilarious if Apple released a proper "console" for Apple Gaming that could play all the iOS/iPadOS games in addition to the PC games. All they have to do is mandate that games that target the iOS/iPadOS also have an x86-64 binary for best performance since the A12X has 8 cores.

 

Apple could also build a proper gaming Mac, however I'm more inclined to believe that if they're going to, it's going to be in the form of a MacMini rather than a iMac.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, xtroria said:

Seems like we are going to see the end of apple doing thunderbolt.

 

This might be a good thing, knowing AMD has a tendency of doing thing in an open-platform.

 

Thunderbolt 3 / USB4 still has a pretty big data bandwidth for most users perhaps other than the needed higher power limit

Don't bet on it. Apple is not going to abandon Thunderbolt, not after building Mac Pro's with lots of them. TB serves a purpose, and just because the average end user does not see a point, high-end gamers absolutely do, as many have asked about eGPU's.  Though there's pushback about eGPU's as well since they basically suck for gaming.

[Bombastinator]

16 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Don't bet on it. Apple is not going to abandon Thunderbolt, not after building Mac Pro's with lots of them. TB serves a purpose, and just because the average end user does not see a point, high-end gamers absolutely do, as many have asked about eGPU's.  Though there's pushback about eGPU's as well since they basically suck for gaming.

They don’t have to.  They do on thunderbolt though.  I reitterate my idea for a Mac gaming machine: tiger lake Mac mini with two m.2 ports accessible from the back with a custom egpu that snaps on to it.  Run 5(6?) lanes to the gpu and the remaining lanes to an m.2 storage drive in the device.  Boom.  Gaming.  They don’t even have to put a pcie slot on the thing they can control everything.  Including what kind of card it is.  Make it one that can’t do vega stuff and it keeps the art and video people out.

[hishnash]

 

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

MacOS is famously portable.  It doesn’t even have to run on amd64.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s ARM or risk5 or power9 references in there too.

Given apple are the main development team behind LLVM apple is well able to target anything under the sun if they want to.

[hishnash]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

Make it one that can’t do vega stuff and it keeps the art and video people out.

You mean an RDNA card.. yer simple.

[Bombastinator]

4 minutes ago, hishnash said:

You mean an RDNA card.. yer simple.

How nice.  One of those semi polite words for stupid.  Bless your heart.  Did I say rdna?  No?  
 

So who is simple?

 

  I take it you are saying that RDNA does compute just fine and won’t keep the workstation people away.  I don’t know what people have done to make rdna work for video or rendering or whatever workstation stuff Apple would want to lock that market.  I don’t care.  It doesn’t matter.  There is going to be something.  Apple can figure it out.  They’ve got smart people.  8 bit color only is one thought.  Maybe even 6 bit.  Want to render that video on a TN monitor you can’t color correct?  Thought not.
 

There is an argument that segregation and price control for the workstation market is stupid from the get go.  I might agree with it. It has been their habit for 20 years or so good idea or not, so expecting them to change it now is doubtful.  Work with what is there.  Apple could do a reasonably priced gaming machine with very little additional engineering.

[hishnash]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

I take it you are saying that RDNA does compute just fine and won’t keep the workstation people away.  I don’t know what people have done to make rdna work for video or rendering or whatever workstation stuff Apple would want to lock that market.  I don’t care.  It doesn’t matter.  There is going to be something.  Apple can figure it out.  They’ve got smart people.  8 bit color only is one thought.  Maybe even 6 bit.  Want to render that video on a TN monitor you can’t color correct?  Thought not.
 

There is an argument that segregation and price control for the workstation market is stupid from the get go.  I might agree with it. It has been their habit for 20 years or so good idea or not, so expecting them to change it now is doubtful.  Work with what is there.  Apple could do a reasonably priced gaming machine with very little additional engineering.

RDNA does do compute but does not do very well at 64bit or 16 and 8bit compared to vega that scales much better in these cases (not needed for games of course but useful in pro situations)

[GDRRiley]

2 hours ago, xtroria said:

Seems like we are going to see the end of apple doing thunderbolt.

apple if anything will push for amd to have a built in thunderbolt controller.

they will push for more manufactures of thunderbolt chips

[hishnash]

10 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

i wonder how many first party programs made by Apple (FCPX, etc) heavily utilises AVX-512 ._. because if that's an issue i don't see this being used in their pro machines

 

less so a cause for consideration for intel iris since they have machines that have a CPU without an iGP. also considering they exclusively deal with AMD GPUs, i'm sure they'd be able to fork hardware optimisation for something more involved than an intel iGP

 

basing off AMD's work for custom Zen implementations (MS Surface, the next xbox and PS5), i'd imagine Apple would want waaaaay more than a 10CU Vega in their mobile chips. maybe for their high-end mac minis

Apple ask developers to dynamicaly link to there https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate rather than target AVX directly. Apple then ship diffrent versions of this on diffrent machines.

They optimise this for the given machine, most users of that framework dont have AVX512 already since that frameworks is also for iOS devices.

[hishnash]

13 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

apple if anything will push for amd to have a built in thunderbolt controller.

they will push for more manufactures of thunderbolt chips

Yep, apple will push AMD or apple would build their own. But given how the MCM system works on these Zen2/2 cpus it makes most sense to add that to the IOdie. 

That said apple could be working with AMD to build an Apple/AMD only hybrid IO-die, AMD's IO-die is already an ARM cpu so could benefit from apples team to make it more power efficient.