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Apple Considering Switch Away From Intel For Macs
concealment sends this quote from Bloomberg:
"Apple Inc. is exploring ways to replace Intel processors in its Mac personal computers with a version of the chip technology it uses in the iPhone and iPad, according to people familiar with the company's research. Apple engineers have grown confident that the chip designs used for its mobile devices will one day be powerful enough to run its desktops and laptops, said three people with knowledge of the work, who asked to remain anonymous because the plans are confidential. Apple began using Intel chips for Macs in 2005."
Apple for a while now has been moving away from performance parts. No real beefy GPU in the Mac Pro. The best GPU in a MBP is an upper-mid tier card. Their server is gone. Its not surprising to see them move more and more away from HPC parts. I'm just a little curious how this will affect people dependent on 'pro-tools' (in the future that is).
So <insert company name here> is doing research that may or may not ever see the light of day to keep its options open and avoid single-source lock-ins. This is news?
I can see the switch from PowerPC as IBM and Motorola could not keep up with supplies or advances. To switch from Intel to ARM on PC's will be suicide as performance in PC's far outweigh any negligible benefits in power savings. People using Macs are designers, programmers and heavy users. For those advocating unifying the mobile experience with the desktop, please STOP. I produce content on my desktop. I consume it on my iPad.
... It certainly isn't impossible. People already look at iPads and iPhones as "devices" and not what they really are underneath all that glass and aluminum. Just smaller, simpler "computers". I'd say it's a safe bet that 99% of the Slashdot readership at one point had a computer that looks positively ancient compared to last year's iPhone models, but most people simply don't understand the magnitude of what's been accomplished in technology over the last 30 years.
Now that people look at iDevices and their non-Apple kin as devices, it just takes some time to convince them that the idea of a "computer" really isn't what they ever wanted. They've always wanted devices, and with OSX and now Windows drawing more and more from the closed ecosystem models they spawned off for the mobile realm, people will eventually come around.
I give it around two years before Apple comes out with a new line of ARM-based Macbook Airs, though that could change depending on how effectively Intel and AMD (really, just Intel) stave off the situation by getting lower powered x86 options into the marketplace.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
The only reason why I have a Mac Mini is because you are running a modified version of UNIX. This pleases me. But be forewarned: If your future plans include replacing BSD UNIX with your shitass iOS, I am so fucking gone. Your shitty phones are already on my do not buy list, and I have no qualms with dumping your PCs.
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Linux works fine on ARM.
Not on a device whose bootloader cryptographically prevents you from installing it.
Right now, Apple's ARM stuff isn't powerful enough for anything above the Air, and even that's a stretch. Sure, long-term they might want to push for it, but it will be a long, long time before they even replace their laptop chips with their own design, let alone their desktops (unless they ditch their desktops completely, which isn't beyond possibility).
However, they'd lose market share doing so. The PPC->Intel transition was fueled by PowerPC being increasingly slow and power-hungry, while Intel was getting their shit together with Core. It was difficult for consumers to survive through the switch, but it was tolerable because you were getting a more powerful system, and the emulation capability was good.
Now, though, Intel is working just fine. And between ARM being less powerful, and x86 being painful to emulate, you'll have an even rougher transition. The only reason for Apple to switch away is for pure profit - they don't want to be giving Intel money. While some customers might go along with The Great Apple, most won't. It'll be especially bad for Apple, as they brand themselves as "the best, regardless of cost" - switching to weaker processors to save money goes completely against that.
As critical as I am of Apple on occasion, I see this as a smart idea. Staying limber by making sure your kernel and toolset can compile on multiple platforms only makes sense. It's a wonder that, four decades after Unix lead the path to portability, now commercial outfits like Apple and Microsoft are seeing the value as well (well, to be fair, MS saw the value back in the early 1990s but guys like DEC and MIPS priced their stuff into the stratosphere thus guaranteeing x86's continued dominance).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Apple would be stupid not to explore alternatives that may only become viable years down the road. Every tech company does it. Bloomberg is just trolling.
What! How can you say Bloomberg is trolling? Didn't you read the article? It's printed right there that "some engineers say" this might happen! How can you doubt the sureness of such a quote and the technical expertise of any engineer?
To be blabbing about so-called "confidential" work @ Apple.
I'm no Apple fan at all but that's just rude to disclose competitive secrets like that.
I can't decide if it's better or worse than leaving a prototype (iPhone) at a bar. Unless it's an intentional "leak". Then it's probably no different.
Then you also get alternative/thin boot of iOS.
That or Apple will follow Microsoft's lead with Windows RT's lack of sideloading and use the transition to ARM ISA as a chance to remove the option to run software that's not signed with an Apple Developer ID. This means Apple would get to charge owners of ARM Macs $99 per year to rent the ability to run Xcode or any other compiler on their own hardware, just as Apple presently does with iOS.
At the earliest... maybe. A lot can happen in five years.
Wonder how their processor map is looking ...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
64 A9 quad-core CPUs with 64 on-die GPUs would likely provide more computing power than any Intel x86 chip at lower power usage than frugal modern laptop CPUs (64x0.25W = 16W). Apple would just need to cut the cost and make software to drive it. They'll have longer life and more power than Intel.
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I'm totally not going to do it again.
68k to PPC was a disaster, applications that didn't need to be just PPC were just PPC. Everyone who had a recent 68k at the time was boned very quickly. If it wasn't for CodeWarrior (I loved the sh*t out of that back in the day) that transition would have been even more disastrous.
PPC to x86 Apple just turned around and spit in everyone's [existing ppc userbase] face. They promised more updates that they never delivered and the patches they pushed out just made the platform slower and slower. My PowerBook would run like greased lightning with a clean OS install, HD videos and the works. Let MacOS update it self and it suddenly grew 10 years older with a few patches. I did try formatting it and starting from scratch but it ended up with the exact same behavior.
I'm not going through another architecture migration because Apple just doesn't care about their existing user base, they already have their money.
My current iMac x86 doesn't have firmware to reinstall the OS, so after the HDD failed I found I was totally screwed. The Apple store I visited told me I would have to purchase apple care to reinstall MacOS since it's now physical media free (I already had a new drive in it). After this attempt to bend me over, I'm not taking another slap to the face.
Not to knock ARM, but A: I don't know that they have a design for a desktop processor yet (most of their designs seem to be in the Atom/Bobcat realm tops) B: With the absolutely massive amounts of money Intel put's into their Tick-Tock development cadence they have both pretty much the most optimized desktop/laptop architecture their is, and probably the most significant process advantage in the history of semiconductors. Honestly given the way both Intel and AMD have been able to use out-of-order execution and pipelining to achieve multiple Instructions Per Clock and multi-gigahertz clocks on a CISC-backed-by-microcode architecture I'm not convinced RISC actually has an advantage in practice. In addition Apple is stuck with the foundries, the same as pretty much anybody but IBM, and so pretty much CAN'T begin to produce a chip that will compete with Intel's best when comes to raw performance or performance-per-watt. For those reasons this would be pretty foolish any time in the next several years. Even if a decade from now they can work past it they will still be stuck fighting off the suspicion that they don't have the advantage they claim to, the one that more or less was true at the end of their use of PowerPC chips.
According to Ars Technica, Apple's R&D budget is 3.4 BILLION dollars (3.4x10^9). That's enough money to "explore" all kinds of crazy stuff. Just because they're spending money looking into something, doesn't make it part of their business plan.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Seriously. Like we need another set of hardware stuck on some unsupported version of OS X.
ARM chips are still slower than the PowerPC chips Apple moved away from in 2005.
This is rumor is pure BS.
2013 is bringing out an all new OOO execution Intel Atom core on 22nm process. Intel might start dominating Android phones leading to next years rumor that Apple will be moving iOS to Intel.
I don't see either move as likely in the foreseeable future. Beyond that is pure 100% BS.
Samsung is the biggest investment competitor to Intel in the chip market, right? [ http://tinyurl.com/samsungintel ] What does Apple need Intel for, give the guys at Samsung a call. What could go wrong?
Gently reply
In no reasonable sense of the words does ARM "freely run ... Windows". It's true that Microsoft is releasing Windows on ARM, but there isn't really a way for consumers/hobbyists/individual custom PC builders to install Windows on ARM. Maybe someday the wider hacker community will distribute heavily modified builds of Windows RT that can be run in various very specific ARM environments. But it would be a huge effort and Microsoft would try hard to prevent it.
In many ways, Apple moving to ARM would complete the circle of their locking out PC builders in general by soldering everything fast and discouraging upgrades. Full disclosure: I run a virtual Hackintosh in a PC I built myself, and strongly despise the trend of cookie cutter, disposable computers.
Even that probably would not be enough to win if floating point performance was needed.
You would also be a huge disadvantage for anything that is difficult or plain impossible to to parralelize.
Just like project "Marklar", for those with longer memories...
Remember history. When Apple shifts, it is dramatic and FAST. (64000, PPC, x86).
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Remember numeric co-processors?
That's now why you have a GPU.
Float away, baby.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I meant "68040". :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
> at lower power usage
That's just a nice way of saying that x86 parts will mop the floor with ARM in terms of performance when it's actually time to do some work.
You fixate on power usage because it's the only area where ARM doesn't look laughable and pathetic.
x86 is what you use when an ARM solution can't do the job.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Rumor has it that Apple is very interesting in AMD so it can own the whole vertical supply of it's machines. They tried to make their own x86 and intel said no. They almost used AMD APU for the mac book air but backed at hte last minute.
It doesn't make performance sense for an ARM. With AMD they can own the ATI graphics market too.
Unfortunately for us that is bad news with less competition. But I could see the appeal. They can put DRM into the cpu's and do custom configurations for their tinkering.
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Where you see a prison, I see an zombie-proof enclave.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Of course it's already compiled; they've had the OSX kernel and most of the userspace running on ARM since 2007 with the iPhone.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Nothing to write home about, either.
And how many parallel memory buses will you need to keep that fed? The more cores you throw behind a single chip, the more bottleneck pressure is on the edge of the chip.
This is one of the reasons why GPGPU only really shows benefit for certain types of problems; the memory throughput is optimized only for particular configurations.
"My guess is it's just to fuck with people"
I'm glad you still categorize Intel as "people". :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It could get weird and cool. Like Plan9 in a box...
You surely meant Plan 9 from Cubic Space. :-)
Ezekiel 23:20
OS X applications are still single threaded, like 99% of all applications. You ever tried writing code for multi-core? Thought not.
Between GCD and blocks and various graphics frameworks, any modern Mac (or iOS) developer has been writing for multiple cores for years now. It's just that most of the tricky work is hidden away.
Developers? What OS X developers!?
Well first of all there are the 500k+ iOS developers, who run on Macs. And then there are hordes of Ruby/UNIX/Java developers, who often use Macs to develop on.
Perhaps you just meant "what developers are writing apps for OS X". I guess someone is, since there are thousands of apps on the OS X App Store now...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
..and I can attest all the self-trained amateurs who permeate software engineering waste most processing power because they are, well, Clueless Idiots. They don't know how to efficiently implement hash tables, they don't know that allocating objects on heap in large numbers and destroying them almost immediately is inefficient. They don't care to pass a reference when they can use the copy constructor. They perform idiotic low-level "optimizations" when they should re-think their processing concept. They don't understand what it means when the disk light is bright while the CPU is idle.
I steadily replace all that crap with sane code and I incrementally parallelize the program. Yes, it's risky as that can bring problems which are extremely hard to track to the root cause. One thread damages memory and some random other one hits the problem at a random place in the code. But the results are dramatic - speedups of 10 are quite frequent.
If all software engineers in this industry had a clue, we could do the same things on ARM as we currently do on the hot, heavy and battery-draining x86 machines. Get yourself an algorithms book and learn some actual concepts instead of The API Of The Day.
basing that on a slashdot posting about an article on what apple MIGHT do in the future? you're a dumb-ass.
hell, you don't know if the standard office desktop will be windows on ARM five or seven years from now....
Agreed. That leaves the question... Is the market for software/computers that need x86 big enough that it makes sense for Apple to worry about it?
Sounds like a win-win for Apple. They don't have to pay for Intel, and all their users are forced to upgrade to new hardware. And all the OSX software vendors get to sell new versions of their software for the new platform.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Yes.
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It is a generation old now, and has been for many months. Also, the parent said 'no real beefy GPU' - GPU, not CPU. Both are true, though, and the fact the Mac Pro hasn't been updated in a long time now underscores Apple's apparent move away from performance computing.
William George
And no dual boot, and they can continue with the plan to make OSX into desktop iOS, complete with walled garden.
They'll migrate back to Windows just like they did when Apple ruined Final Cut Pro. The mass exodus to Adobe Premiere running on Windows left FCP as pretty much a non-player at this point for serious video editing.
Word. I've seen them migrate with other Adobe products too, just because they have to use windows for one purpose, so they start using it for others.
Thankfully the Xserve debacle caused some higher ups to realize that Linux on cheaper servers is a better option anyway.
Well, Macs have always been associated with graphical artists. I personally love working on my Cintiq on Windows/Linux and wouldn't touch a Mac with a 10-foot pole (Something big needs to happen before I give any money to something so anti-freedom as Apple), but... yeah. Most people using advanced drawing programs or 3D rendering/sculpting software will need a lot of CPU and GPU power. Some apps lean on one more than the other, but I don't think any 3D artist these days will look at his rendertimes and say "welp, that'll forever be fast enough for me!"
Programmers are traditionally more Unix/Linux folks, and a lot of programmers use compilers that write bytecode rather than actual executables, so I don't think they will be of much concern to Apple.. but this does mean that multi-OS support will fall behind again. And given that Windows (about 80%?) and Linux (maybe another 5%?) serve a huge share of the desktop users, that probably means that the Mac will be left behind. Beside that, a large share of FOSS software seems to be mostly developed on Linux anyway, so..
I don't think this'll affect non-Mac users much. It may hurt Apple's bottom line a bit, but the forced upgrades will compensate and probably cause a bit of a jump in profits even. It'll just further segregation between Mac and non-Mac.
I wish that Apple would support emulation for all past Macintosh software all the way back to MacOS1.0. Heck, they should go all the way back to the AppleI. There is a tremendous amount of educational software that was created during the 1990's that has never been redone for Intel and MacOSX. It used to run under Classic but Apple abandoned it. They are destroying both cultural heritage and educational resources. There is also a lot of small business and graphic tools that were made then and never released for MacOSX. I need these tools as do many other people I've spoken with. Apple has the money to keep up the emulation and it would vastly expand the media available to run on their machines which would make more people interested in upgrading to the latest and greatest hardware thus promoting more Apple sales and more money for Apple's pocket. Heck, they could even offer full Windows, DOS and CPM emulation and take over the whole market.
While true, the difference between 1 ghz and 3 ghz per core (all other factors being equal) means that those tasks would be slowed by only 1/3rd. I find it somewhat difficult to come up with anything that needs to be done in realtime but can't be parallelized. Non-casual games come up, but they haven't really been CPU-constrained until fairly recently. A cascaded model (each frame's state is passed down between threads in turn) would give a tiny bit of lag, but make it possible to use 3 cores for the graphics and the game logic rather than 1. Non-essential things could be put in separate threads.
Maybe in cases where the computer can't parallelize, the user should. Run those tasks while the computer's not doing much else anyway. Or even in the background because there's cores not being used otherwise anyway.
Can you tell me some examples of inherently-serial tasks that need to be done in realtime, -and- are actually of interest to even the most hardcore of consumers?
Given the defaults on Mountain Lion, I absolutely expect this... And it'll be the day my MBP is running Linux
Until the day your MBP breaks, and all Apple sells are ARM-based products without any concept of Boot Camp. These won't boot Linux because Linux isn't signed by Apple.
Because who the fuck knows what Apple is going to do in the future, I'm keeping my ProTools and Cubase licenses up to date with current versions of the software. At some point, Apple will probably fuck Logic up beyond recognition, then I'll have no choice but to switch back to a PC (or just use old, outdated Macs like I'm doing now).
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Steve Jobs was pissed at Adobe for screwing Apple by not releasing Photoshop for OSX and working on Microsoft Windows versions of their products, so Apple developed Aperture. Steve was honked off at Avid for focusing development on the Windows platform instead of OSX, so Apple developed Final Cut Pro. I'm not sure Tim Cook is as angry as Jobs, but judging by the shit-tastic Pages / Numbers / Keynote on the Mac & iDevice platform, Apple will never develop a threat to important products like Microsoft Office, and they've already pushed away their pro customers to Avid Media Composer & Adobe Premiere so Logic is probably the next product to be dumbed down like Final Cut Pro X was.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
And no dual boot, and they can continue with the plan to make OSX into desktop iOS, complete with walled garden.
With such impressive "features" they might as well name it Alcatraz.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Apple has discovered that the X86 instruction set is a trap they don't have to trip. The only reason that old dog still hunts is that Windows props it up. Even Microsoft is wandering away from it now.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
that's trivially disprovable if you actually try using one for the minute or so that it takes to enable sideloading
I was under the impression that sideloading using a developer certificate would disable itself after a month, and Microsoft had ways to detect "fraudulent use of a developer license" as a sideloading method. What other method of sideloading were you talking about? The one that involves buying a 100-seat sideloading license for $3000?
The problem is the graphics GPU, not the CPU. The Mac Pro desktop has a ATI Radeon HD 5770 card. If you look at ATI's 5000 series list, you'll see that's right in the middle of the product line. Considering how much the system as a whole costs, some people feel that's not good enough.
The "Retina" MacBook pros have an even worse problem. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M is also nowhere near the top of their mobile line. But the resolution being driven is one of the highest available. A fair number of people pushing it hard have discovered it's really not capable of keeping up with that system's 2880 x 1800 display very well.
Dual boot with Windows RT, if MS ever open it up to public sale. Although the way things are going with MS, I wonder if you'll be able to buy any Windows off the shelf in the future- it MS ditch the OEM model, we might see the OS software going the same way as Apple Mac.
But hey, there's always Linux.
Uhhh... well of course it has, iOS and Mac OS use the same kernel (and for the most part, the same userland). The only significant difference is the installed apps, and AppKit being replaced with UIKit.