Apple May Ditch Intel CPUs In Favor Of Their Own Chips

[sazrocks]

3 hours ago, Ryujin2003 said:

I know the basic differences.  These articles don't really answer the question.

 

You said you don't think Intel would allow them to use x86. So what would stop them from using AMDx64 if that were the case?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Licensing (The page I linked you)

There is a cross-licensing agreement. AMD licenses x86 from intel, adds to it to create x86-64, and licenses x86-64 to intel. Therefore if one wishes to make an x86-64 based CPU one must at least license x86, and then probably license amd64 from AMD (IDK about VIA though, there's like no information on how they got a x86-64 arch.).

[captain_to_fire]

4 hours ago, oneeyedlittleman said:

Bloomberg

Guys, how many times has Bloomberg proven to be fake news in this forum? There’s a time Bloomberg reported that Apple is decreasing the security of the Face ID sensor to meet demand. Apple quickly responded by saying Bloomberg’s reports aren’t true. Then Bloomberg also reported before that China is completely banning and might criminalize the use of VPNs but China responded as well as VPN vendors saying those Bloomberg reports are not true and sensationalist. 

 

[Godlygamer23]

4 hours ago, oneeyedlittleman said:

Id imagine they'll start with the 13in macbook air, which is only a 1.8Ghz dual core, and work their way up as they further engineer their chips

Another thing they can do is heavily optimize their code for the operating system and apps from the Mac App Store so that they can run natively. So even if they lose some performance, it won't be noticeable and in this way, they can have even more control of their hardware.

[asus killer]

7 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Controlling more of the product. Less vendors they have to count on for parts and they can control costs better by doing stuff in house. If they succeed or fail well thats another story. I too am not impressed with Tim Cook. Steve Jobs is turning in his grave. 

that's not true. That's like saying Ford would be better by building all parts of their cars. By outsourcing to other companies that specialize on the production of certain components they don't have to do research or handle manufacturing on every single component. That would bring the cost of a car insanely higher.

[RotoCoreOne]

12 hours ago, TheGlenlivet said:

Is it not possible that Apple could have x86 chips in development?  They do have like a million billion dollars....

 

EDIT:  After reading the article more thoroughly, I guess not.  It doesn't specifically say they are NOT developing x86 chips, but they are the ARM masters. It wouldn't make sense...

 

12 hours ago, sazrocks said:

No, its not. Unless apple managed to collect enough unicorn horns and magic fairies I don't see any way that apple could ever obtain an x86 license.

If apple buys VIA maybe...?

[LAwLz]

7 hours ago, sazrocks said:

(IDK about VIA though, there's like no information on how they got a x86-64 arch.).

Not sure how they got the 64-bit extension, but they got the x86 part because they bought Cyrix (or most of it at least).

 

The reason why Cyrix was allowed to make x86 was because, well, they just started making Intel-compatible chips through reverse engineering. Intel and Cyrix sued each other back and forth until a court finally ruled that Cyrix were allowed to product their own x86 designs as long as they were manufactured in a foundry that had a license for x86.

Cyrix then filed an antitrust case against Intel, and Intel ended up settling that out of court (Intel paid Cyrix 12 million dollars).

 

A few years later Cyrix sued Intel for infringing on some of their patents, and that case resulting in a cross-licensing agreement.

 

There are actually quite a few companies that have agreements with Intel. IBM is one of them. Texas instruments might be allowed to use Intel's x86 patents as well (National Semiconductor had an agreement with Intel, and they were acquired by TI, which is why I am unsure if that carried over).

[LienusLateTips]

They can buy VIA Technologies out

[hishnash]

Just now, JDE said:

They can buy VIA Technologies out

They could buy AMD out if they wanted.

[hishnash]

8 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

That actually seams reasonable: just a "special recipe" Ryzen with some Apple specifications for good measure, creating their chips from the ground up seems very unfeasible but made to order variant of Zen2 would work out.

What i see as a possible direction here is apple might do more and more of these companion arm cpus (like the T1 and T2 that are already in macs) the will move more and more of the core kernel code base to run on these. 

And yes i see it possible that as some point they build a hybrid die with AMD with 2 x86-64bit cores and a bunch of thier own arm cores (they use the same fabs as AMD after all) so that the OS can run on arm and any newly compiled apps as well (with much lower power demands this also means less heat so less thermal throttling) and they keep the amd cors there for a few years to make the transition smooth, on some platforms (the high end ones) they have more x86 cores around.

apple are already managing a code base the is split between arm and x86 on the current generation mac book pro and imacPro with the imac pro having a rather large part of the kernel's disk IO code running on the designated arm chip (is includes a load of IO system calls being run there and not on the xeon cpu).  

[Castdeath97]

Getting really sick of this rumor. Gets spread almost every year...

[LienusLateTips]

39 minutes ago, hishnash said:

They could buy AMD out if they wanted.

AMD x86 license has non-transferable parts, don't know if VIA also has

[hishnash]

1 minute ago, JDE said:

AMD x86 license has non-transferable parts, don't know if VIA also has

so if AMD merged with apple, or apple became a majority shareholder and AMD created chips for apple (with a mix of apple tec/amd tec) this would be an issue? AMD already do a lot fo semi-custom work.

[LienusLateTips]

6 minutes ago, hishnash said:

so if AMD merged with apple, or apple became a majority shareholder and AMD created chips for apple (with a mix of apple tec/amd tec) this would be an issue? AMD already do a lot fo semi-custom work.

If Apple merged or acquired AMD, their x86 license is dead, afaik

[hishnash]

2 minutes ago, JDE said:

If Apple merged or acquired AMD, their x86 license is dead, afaik

ok so they partner with them and get AMD to do semi-custom

[Eroda]

Apple likes Thunderbolt connectors right? there is no controller for thunderbolt 3 on ARM as of yet is there? so if Apple if the first thats just free money until someone else makes one

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, Eroda said:

Apple likes Thunderbolt connectors right? there is no controller for thunderbolt 3 on ARM as of yet is there? so if Apple if the first thats just free money until someone else makes one

a) that is not true a lot of Thunderbolt devices you connect to your laptop may well have arm CPUs in them, even some screens contain arm cpus these days.
b) apple forced as of Jan this year Intel to release the spec to be open so anyone can use Thunderbolt 3 given apple jointly developed this with Intel there is nothing stopping apple using it with an ARM (or even an AMD) cpu even before this opening of the spec in jan.

[Donut417]

5 hours ago, asus killer said:

that's not true. That's like saying Ford would be better by building all parts of their cars. By outsourcing to other companies that specialize on the production of certain components they don't have to do research or handle manufacturing on every single component. That would bring the cost of a car insanely higher.

It is true when they already R&D a chip anyway. The fact is if Apple is investing all this money in R&D to begin with then using it on more products reduces cost. Plus it does help them get better control, especially over quality, who's to say that a 3rd party has the same quality standards as Apple? 

[asus killer]

2 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

It is true when they already R&D a chip anyway. The fact is if Apple is investing all this money in R&D to begin with then using it on more products reduces cost. Plus it does help them get better control, especially over quality, who's to say that a 3rd party has the same quality standards as Apple? 

what are the CPU's that apple has that can compete with the i7 8700k for example, or even some xeons that Apple uses on some of it's desktops?

[Donut417]

45 minutes ago, asus killer said:

what are the CPU's that apple has that can compete with the i7 8700k for example, or even some xeons that Apple uses on some of it's desktops?

If you have been reading. You would have seen what @DrMacintosh has stated. Most likely this is for cheaper machines, more entry level. Also, when the fuck has Apple ever cared about performance. You thinking like a PC guy not a Mac Guy. The use of Apple chips will most likely be for a lower cost machine, Apple even stated they wanted to develop something cheaper to increase market share. 

 

On a second thought, they dont cater to us, they cater to the masses. The masses want light weight and good battery life. Intel cant supply that, ARM can. Simple. If you dont like their business strategy then dont buy an Apple machine, thats the reason Ive never owned one. But in the business stand point, what Apple is doing is good. If they can lower the costs for themselves, then they can lower the costs to consumers. While giving consumers what they want, Not all consumers, just the bulk. Performance based consumers like PC gamers and such are not the mainstream market, they dont need to target us to get the masses to buy their products. 

 

Oh and if your all hissy and pissy about Apple using ARM chips, what about Microsoft? Because I clearly seen that Microsoft is actively doing Windows on Snapdragon. Last I checked Microsoft sill had the largest market share, so they too have seen the writing on the wall. 

[asus killer]

21 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

If you have been reading. You would have seen what @DrMacintosh has stated. Most likely this is for cheaper machines, more entry level. Also, when the fuck has Apple ever cared about performance. You thinking like a PC guy not a Mac Guy. The use of Apple chips will most likely be for a lower cost machine, Apple even stated they wanted to develop something cheaper to increase market share. 

 

On a second thought, they dont cater to us, they cater to the masses. The masses want light weight and good battery life. Intel cant supply that, ARM can. Simple. If you dont like their business strategy then dont buy an Apple machine, thats the reason Ive never owned one. But in the business stand point, what Apple is doing is good. If they can lower the costs for themselves, then they can lower the costs to consumers. While giving consumers what they want, Not all consumers, just the bulk. Performance based consumers like PC gamers and such are not the mainstream market, they dont need to target us to get the masses to buy their products. 

 

Oh and if your all hissy and pissy about Apple using ARM chips, what about Microsoft? Because I clearly seen that Microsoft is actively doing Windows on Snapdragon. Last I checked Microsoft sill had the largest market share, so they too have seen the writing on the wall. 

i guess you didn't read the first post and the links he provided. It clearly states that this may be for some low end in the beginning but it should be planned for high end as well. At least that's the rumor we are commenting. 

[Razor01]

5 hours ago, JDE said:

If Apple merged or acquired AMD, their x86 license is dead, afaik

 

Not dead, needs to be renegotiated as with Intel's 64 bit contract with AMD too.

[LienusLateTips]

Just now, Razor01 said:

 

Not dead, needs to be renegotiated as with Intel's 64 bit contract with AMD too.

No, they have a clause in there to cancel it

[Razor01]

1 minute ago, JDE said:

No, they have a clause in there to cancel it

Its cancelled both ways, the x86 and x64 is a cross license agreement, if either company is bought out, the entire contract is null and void.

 

https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clarifies-cross-license-with-intel-change-of-control-terminates-agreement-for-both/

[hishnash]

3 hours ago, asus killer said:

what are the CPU's that apple has that can compete with the i7 8700k for example, or even some xeons that Apple uses on some of it's desktops?

3

That will not be that hard for them, one of the key things to remember there is not an apple system that does not suffer from thermal constraints and most of them also have power limits (due to battery)

apple are not trying to beat a i78700k on a custom water loop with a full balls to the wall overclock but rather an already unclocked thermally limited cpu. 

Apple arm cpus use much less power for the given computer they provide.  So will not be thermally limited (most macbookpros will only run close to bost for a few seconds before dropping down to 2Ghz best case)

Also apple is much less worried about single core applications, unlike other platforms they have a lot of control over the libs that are used by the apps. if an app is native for macOS the kernel knows exactly which threads are `UI` and witch other one are lower priority.

Also compared to other platforms doing multi-threaded programming tasks on macOS (and iOS) is easy (in swift and Obj-C).

add to that the fact that Apple loves to optimise their scheduler down to the wire for each cpu they use, if they can have more control on this expect them to get the same general performance as Intel with much less power draw. 

they are very likely to do a lot of tricks like the mixture of high speed and lower speed cores. (since in macOS/iOS for all the normal APIs when you create a mutli threaded task you need to say what priority group it is in it is rather easy for the OS to know what tasks belong were)

[Notional]

On 2/4/2018 at 11:50 PM, Notional said:

I wonder if they mean AMD custom chips here? If not, well Apple has the power to force whatever they want, through. But it will also make all software obsolete, and I doubt Apple would actually survive that. Then again, they could introduce it through laptops that are mostly used to online/work stuff, so it might work that way through.

According to bits and chips, Apple will not abandon the x86 chipset. So I think that adds weight to my point.