Why?
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Apple to Announce its own Mac Processor
- Thread starter erek
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Why?
I quote: "The shift to ARM will eventually include the entire Mac lineup"
We have seen ARM workstations.
Apple "mobile cores" are desktop class. AMD killed K12 and the chief architect left.
D
Deleted member 243478
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and they are desktop class with no active cooling and minimal power draw. Oh and they have a decent GPU built in.
Apple have proved time and again that you don’t need to throw raw numbers at a problem. Being very efficient can be just as effective.
There will always be those spec sheet snobs who only buy garbage because it has the most cores, the most ram, the most mhz. Hows having the most ram in the Android camp working out?
I was talking about workstations
https://www.servethehome.com/gigabyte-thunderxstation-using-cavium-thunderx2-launched/
![Zarathustra[H]](https://cdn.hardforum.com/data/avatars/m/9/9298.jpg?1714700655){kind=avatar}
Zarathustra[H]
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Wasn't there an Itanium version too?
They bought Intel's top mobile chips, but their infantile insistence on making sleek thin devices made them throttle-monsters as I recall, as there just was not enough space for decent cooling.
That's the problem I have with Apple computers. Too much focus on aesthetics in silly ways that compromise performance and usability.
I also have some gripes with OSX. Overall it is a strong operating system, and I like it, but there are some serious flaws. Biggest among them to me is how Apple handles bugs, security and patching. They really need a more transparent process, and they need to patch more often. They leave way too many vulnerabilities open for very long times and only address them with the next major OS Update, which is unconscionable. And the apple users perception that "Mac's are secure" is extremely naive.
That and the whole "people want an easy user interface that just works" argument is getting tired. I can only assume that people using this argument haven't used anything but a Mac since the 90's OSX really does not have an edge in the "ease of use" department anymore. It's not the 80's anymore.
I probably would lean towards not buying a Mac if they cost the same as the PC's because of these design compromises and other problems if there was not a price premium. The fact that they cost 2-3x more for the same core hardware, means that I am extremely unlikely to.
Zarathustra[H]
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You might have. I haven't.
I've never seen or heard of a head to head benchmark/test of desktop class ARM and x86.
Zarathustra[H]
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There's nothing stopping Apple from providing their own Windows drivers
Much like Qualcomm also provides their own Windows drivers, or those notebooks wouldn't wok!
Just because you have to roll-your-own custom drivers doesn't mean it won't happen (all these things run the same fucking ARM architecture). And Apple has always used outdated Intel/AMD GPU drivers for their Bootcamp ports (so it wouldn't take all that much effort to do the same once-a-year Windows driver update)
The question - however - is why would you want to? Windows 10 on ARM exists, yes, and you might be able to pull this off, and then you can run all six pieces of software released for Windows 10 on ARM. It's not like with x86 bootcamp where it instantly opens you up to a vast existing software catalog.
Zarathustra[H]
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There will always be those spec sheet snobs who only buy garbage because it has the most cores, the most ram, the most mhz. Hows having the most ram in the Android camp working out?
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Apple does have the fastest mobile chips right now, and it is very impressive how they have built that capability in house. That said, unless you are peering at benchmark numbers, you'd never notice the performance difference.
There is honestly a lot to hate on both platforms.
Biggest among them are as follows:
iOS is a walled garden. Unless you are able to Jailbreak, they control what you can and can't run on your device, and strictly control the types of apps allowed in the app store. I refuse to buy into a walled garden, no matter how pretty or how much performance.
Android is a platform built around data harvesting. I absolutely hate this.
The distinctions in available hardware between the two camps are mostly irrelevant. My email and mobile browsing work just as well on any well made device from either camp released in the last 5 years.
Halon
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They'll probably get over the very worst of the first problem now that they've distanced themselves from Jony Ive. I still foresee dumb, self-inflicted problems like an excess reliance on USB-C with no other connectors. At best these moves seem "visionary" a half decade after the affected model is no longer manufactured. More realistically it results in Apple selling a ton of dongles to facilitate a base level of functionality. At worst, you get the laptop keyboard woes of the last several years.
MacOS's lack of transparency has been a problem for a long time. It also feels like a lot of the old magic tied to the OS has been moved to other, more profit-generating parts of Apple. And the issue I feel like I've gotten monotonous in repeating is that the platform has increasingly been pared back to a superset of iOS, with very little to distinguish the Mac. Even its new features are mostly migrated from iOS now. I don't know what I'd do with a new Mac Pro that didn't involve immediately slapping Linux or Windows onto a secondary SSD and firing that up instead. The Mac's long-heralded advantage for scientific computing has eroded - the cross-platform compute frameworks are going away, macOS no longer features CUDA support, the loss of OpenGL takes away a huge amount of the ability to visualize data, and momentum's shifted to Linux because of its ubiquity. It's become a hermit kingdom for 2D multimedia and whatever percentage of the market's willing to take work done on Vulkan and thump it through MoltenVK. With the move to ARM, I don't imagine there will be anything there for me at all, full stop.
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Not sure why I was tagged. I never said that above, but the guy replied to me with that. I also agree, that he isn't correct. I personally don't have the time to get into a e-argument with him, so I see the others have taken care of that.
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because apple benefitted greatly by dropping power pc and adopting underlying architecture that was functionally the same as the market, they will be undoing that by going to ARM. Apples software arm was losing quality control when i left macs. Apple has a history of selling aged components at a massive price to people who generally value style over substance. lastly they lack the overall drive theybhad under Jobs and it appears they are on a Sony like trajectory now.
idk, just seems like a bad combo. I could be wrong.
Zarathustra[H]
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Windows on ARM is a completely useless product.
The reason one might run bootcamp in order to run x86 Windows is because you instantly gain access to the vast software catalog x86 Windows provides.
It would be an understatement to say that Windows on ARM lacks that software catalog, and likely would have na even smaller one than OSX on ARM, so the entire reason to run bootcamp is suddenly gone. (Unless you use it to run Linux, which already has a pretty decent ARM offering due tot eh open source nature of it all...)
Which is one of the reasons the MBP 16 replaced the MBP 15, new fan designs with larger exhausts flow 28% more air. The Mid 2018 15 did initially have throttling issues that couldn't be fully mitigated with software.
jeremyshaw
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The saddest part of the MBP15 8core? It may have started out as the worst throttling 8core, but after a few OS updates, it ended up outperforming the XPS 15, which had initially embarrassed it. Dell just sat still while Apple tried to mitigate the problems in software.
Oh yeah, Apple at least tried to address the issues the best they could and then they made a great hardware update in the end to the new 16.
Halon
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Given a choice between someone who delivered a product whose performance remained consistent and a premium brand who bungled an initial release, then managed to fix it in software after multiple iterations, I'd go with the first one, every time.
There was an Itanium version of Windows XP called Windows XP 64 bit for Itanium Systems. It was a complete port of the 32 bit version of Windows XP to the IA64 architecture, not to be confused with Windows XP x64 Professional Edition, which is basically Windows Server 2003 64 bit with a Windows XP GUI.
The Itanium version of Windows XP was unique in that it had a software x86 emulator built in to work around the Itanium's hardware x86 emulator which was horribly slow. This version of Windows XP was discontinued in 2005 and all support was dropped because of the waning interest in the IA64 architecture. I had a chance to use this version of XP on a quad Itanium server over a decade ago, it was painfully slow owing to the crap 800 MHz Itanium CPUs.
GoodBoy
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What's the point of anything Apple does... greed? This supposedly a move to make their mac's more secure? (spectre/meltdown reaction) Not like any of the past ones haven't been hackable.. But if it was to make them secure, you would think they would move to AMD. Does OSX suck at multithreading, or the apps on mac's in general? If not the AMD solution makes more sense.
No, this isn't about performance and probably not about security. It's about them squeezing as much profit margin into everything they make as possible. While that is what businesses are expected to do, doing it at the expense of compatibility and performance with your installed user base, is pretty shitty. Apple doesn't give a fuck about any of that or their customers, they have demonstrated that for some time. They know there are millions who will buy their shit in any event.
No, this isn't about performance and probably not about security. It's about them squeezing as much profit margin into everything they make as possible. While that is what businesses are expected to do, doing it at the expense of compatibility and performance with your installed user base, is pretty shitty. Apple doesn't give a fuck about any of that or their customers, they have demonstrated that for some time. They know there are millions who will buy their shit in any event.
They changed to x86 because it was a higher-volume architecture than PowerPC. They are doing the same now. Moreover, they can reuse/share a lot of funtionality and eliminate redundancies by unifying their product stack around a single architecture.
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Something tells me people buying Mac Pros cutting 8k footage ect are not going to be ok with Apples current iphone/ipad cores. I am looking forward to seeing what Apple is cooking cause I doubt they want to alienate their high end market... there are some core creative fields where Apples macs are still highly regarded. They aren't going to piss that away so I am expecting something more interesting then just a clock bumped iphone chip.
On AMD ya I don't really expect them to unmoth ball K12... AMD is better off focusing on hammering Intel into the ground over the next few years. Still K12 is the sister chip of Zen 1. They where designed at the same time and used much of the same tech. The Instruction set was different but the design philosophy was the same. If (and I don't expect it to be) making consumer desktop ARM parts made sense... I don't think it would take AMD long to basically take Zen3/4 designs and change the core instruction set. Obviously pre fetch layouts ect would need to change... but I have a feeling plugging ARM based chiplets into a current zen package wouldn't be the massive R&D outlay some may believe. Of course I doubt it happens and honestly hope it doesn't... AMD just got themselves solidly into the Black again its time to go hard where there winning and not let Intel up for any air.
I love how people will whine that Apple is about "greed," as if other companies are in it purely out of the goodness of their own hearts. You do know that Dell (or HP, or...) would screw over your entire family for pennies, right? They're all focused on making as much money as possible -- it's just a question of whether the company does so through profit margins or volume. And volume carries its own problems, like the crappy build quality and sub-par tech support that are commonplace for lower-end Windows PCs.
MacOS (it hasn't been called OS X for years, by the way) is exceptional at multithreading and has been for decades; Power Mac G4s had dual-core chips in the early 2000s. Also: AMD chips have been vulnerable to Spectre/Meltdown and other intrinsic security flaws, you know.
The boring truth is that any ARM transition will likely happen for the same reason that Apple makes its own phone chips: the company feels held back by using standard chips from someone else. Apple has a long history of building its own solutions or embracing true standards if it thinks it's chained too closely to another company's fate, because it knows all too well the consequences if that partnership is stagnant or goes south (see Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola). And you might suggest going to AMD, but remember that AMD only recently started outpacing Intel across the board -- there were several dark years where it was hopeless. Going to ARM lets Apple completely avoid the boom-and-bust cycles of AMD and Intel, and might just give it clear advantages in key areas.
pendragon1
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he acknowledged that but rant on.
who cares, you know what he meant.
its about money and control.
But control isn't necessarily a bad thing. Remember, many Android and Windows device makers struggle to stand out precisely because they're forced to use the same chips and baseline software as everyone else in that ecosystem. They often have to resort to gimmicks (hi, LG and Sony) or low prices to get your attention. Apple? Because it took control of its own destiny, it can comfortably say that a $399 iPhone outperforms a $1,400 Android phone in most respects. If Apple manages that with computers (it's a very big "if," to be clear), its fate won't be tied to what AMD or Intel is doing.
Zarathustra[H]
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It's also a risk.
As Intel has shown, one bad node is all it takes to throw everything off. Keep x86 and you can pick and choose between Intel and AMD's offerings every generation.
Because unifying a product stack has always been a great idea, and never ever backfired.
Also theres more to the PowerPC change than higher-volume architecture, like power profile, GHz, etc. I don't care to re-educate myself on events from over a decade ago, but I recall they where hitting a wall with powerpc.
Halon
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macOS has had a long history of multithreading going back to its NeXTStep roots, but has also had a history of performance issues related to the construction of its hybrid kernel. For general multithreaded workloads I'd generally assume Linux would be fastest, followed by Windows, with macOS/Darwin bringing up the rear. Also, AMD's hardware security flaw record looks better than some other vendors - Meltdown was specific to post-Pentium Intel and ARM Cortex-A75, and even POWER9 got thumped by Spectre. The fundamental speculative execution paradigm appears to give rise to most of these bugaboos. Apple's documentation suggests they were proactive in dealing with the problem, but also indicates Meltdown fixes were applied to iOS. Whether that means a hardware-level exploit was available on their ARM chips wasn't clear to me, but probably won't affect desktop-class Apple ARM chips. Anyway...
They possess the highest-performing members of a family of CPUs that's become ubiquitous. It could be a good thing for spurring ARM adoption and development for use cases where they haven't held much sway historically. But Apple is not a commodity brand, as you pointed out - anyone hoping that ARM will surge and take over the world as a result of a premium mediocre lifestyle brand removing a middleman to gain further control over engineering and profits is probably a little deluded.
The MBP 16 was a huge backtrack, like the Pro Tower. They killed their 17's back when they killed off the rest of the pro grade stuff. When they broke dual screen, when the dropped nVidia, when they stuck with only 8-bit support forever...
They might actually try to be competitive in the pro space again, like the Rack Pro is a really good indication. However they might just as easily decide to say fuck off again.
Rockenrooster
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Well if the iPhone is any indication I would think that its going to be very difficult (not feasible).
Ever heard of an iPhone with Android flashed on it and it work well? I don't think so, and I imagine that an ARM based OSX "Desktop" would have similar problems.
Why would Apple write custom drivers for ARM Windows??? They want people to run OSX not Windows...
If you design and manufacture your own chips, no one else can write drivers for it.
Apple didn't write drivers for Intel CPUs, GPUs for Windows. They don't write drivers for their A12, A13 chips for Android either.
Once Apple designs and manufactures their own CPUs for their devices, they tend to be locked down because no one else has access to the source code to create drivers for other OSes.
If they do plan to continue to support Bootcamp, they will have to write their own drivers that can be installed on ARM Windows which they NEVER had to do before, then they will have yet another OS to keep up with driver updates because no one else can write then. Also, people who run Bootcamp want access to the vast x86 Windows as pointed out by other users. Take that away, and who would want to use Bootcamp??? They already got MS Office on macOS and iOS..
Not saying it isn't possible, I just don't think it will be worth it for them, and if its not worth it for them, then they usually don't do it.
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Zarathustra[H]
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I agree with most of this.
But not this:
Many of the hardware drivers in the Linux kernel were reverse engineered and created without any help from the hardware vendors.
It would certainly be a massive undertaking, but if there is enough reward there, someone (or rather a large team of someone's) could certainly do it.
Rockenrooster
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Lol reverse engineering drivers sounds like fun. Totally feasible...
Zarathustra[H]
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I'm sure it's a real drag, but that's how a very large segment of the open source Linux kernel drivers for a lot of hardware are made.
In some cases they have access to manufacturers documentation, in other cases nothing.
Yeah, I'm not expecting ARM to suddenly become the de facto architecture for computers if and when Apple switches. I do, however, think it'll make Intel even more nervous if Apple has success with the switch. Not to mention leave Microsoft tearing its hair out... if Apple does well, it'll manage in a couple of years what Microsoft hasn't managed since the Surface RT in 2012.
The first dual core Macintosh was the G5. There were dual processor versions of the G4, but saying Mac OS was good at multithreading at that point is incorrect.
Apple before that point historically had just two multiprocessor machines, the Power Macintosh 9500 and 9600, and it was an optional upgrade. Classic MacOS was terrible at multiprocessing because from its inception, it was designed solely for a single processor. Like with all other features in classic Mac OS, SMP was a bolted on hack as an afterthought. Mac OS X also was primarily designed for uniprocessor configurations because there was not a single dual processor Apple machine in the OS X era until a year after the first version was released. It wasn't until well into the Intel era that Mac OS X started to be optimized for SMP.
cybereality
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The problem is that Apple is hostile to developers.
They make decisions like this, that literally would break 100% of apps on the platform overnight, and then just expect every developer to update and recompile (maybe with significant effort).
And then stuff like deprecating OpenGL support, not supporting Vulkan. I bet this new Mac will only support Metal. Killing Flash. The list goes on.
You can disagree with a lot of what Microsoft is doing, but they do value maintaining compatibility and supporting develoeprs on their platform.
They make decisions like this, that literally would break 100% of apps on the platform overnight, and then just expect every developer to update and recompile (maybe with significant effort).
And then stuff like deprecating OpenGL support, not supporting Vulkan. I bet this new Mac will only support Metal. Killing Flash. The list goes on.
You can disagree with a lot of what Microsoft is doing, but they do value maintaining compatibility and supporting develoeprs on their platform.
D
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Yes and Microsofts way breeds lazy developers who never update their software to support unified standards and fragment everything.
It is Apples platform and they like to do spring cleaning to get rid of the dead wood, focus their platform and ensure a smooth experience for the end user.
Microsoft give 0 shits about the end user and are too scared to step on any developers toes. Meanwhile they don’t have a whole hardware ecosystem to support also and abandon pretty much everything they try leaving users in the dust.
Vulkan is not viable for Apple as it doesn’t run on iOS. They are unifying all their platforms under METAL making things simple for developers and AMD have had no problem adopting it.
So sick of everyone expecting Apple to support every standard just like Microsoft, if you love the Windows experience so much then keep using it. Apple focus their work on consolidated features which goes a long way to “it just works” feeling many users have. You don’t create a good user experience by letting every developer do whatever the hell they want and other companies bringing in their own APIs to fight your own in your platform.
Rockenrooster
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Lol wow.
Vulkan doesn't run on iOS because Apple doesn't want to support it, not the other way around.
Also supporting open standards is a plus as it is cross platform, it allows developers to reach a wider audience with less effort. I do some simple software development in my personal time and if I wanted to start selling my software, I wouldn't bother with macOS as why would I want to limit my potential user base and revenue. I would hate to be a software dev for Apple products, no wonder everyone wants boot camp on their MacBook..
cybereality
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Right. Apple forces you to use their APIs (like Metal) making cross-platform games more complex.
They also make it really hard or impossible to cross-compile, meaning if you want to publish on iOS (for example) you need to use a Mac computer, macOS, and Xcode.
It's hostile.
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Zarathustra[H]
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Then just don't develop for Mac, and let it become even more of a application desert than it already is.
D
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No, Apple doesn’t support it because its their own dam platform! All their software and hardware (including their own chips) are built around their own software (those monsters!).
By allowing other companies to run their own API’s, the OS gets more bloated, fragmented and unstable with more bugs and more patches. It is what separates Apple from Android and Microsoft and allows them to be a more solid consumer product.
Meanwhile the majority of mobile apps are written for iOS first...why? Because you can deliver a more polished product faster with limited hardware and software skews.
Cry baby developers just don’t like being told what to do, they can’t deal with Apple calling the shots for their own platform and think they have a right to dish out any sort of shit they want on someone else's products with minimal work. Don’t like it, don’t write for Apple products, lets see how your market share fares.
If Microsofts way is so superior, explain why their ARM and Windows mobile were both complete and utter train wrecks.
cybereality
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Good point. I mean, for macOS that could be an okay stance, but the iOS market is too big to ignore.
So, as a developer, you do what you have to do. I also don't want to be part of the problem, so I plan to support all major platforms.