Slashdot Mirror
Apple Developing Custom ARM-Based Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role (bloomberg.com)
According to Bloomberg, Apple is designing a new chip for future Mac laptops that would take on more of the functionality currently handled by Intel processors. The chip is a variant of the T1 SoC Apple used in the latest MacBook Pro to power the keyboard's Touch Bar feature. The updated part, internally codenamed T310, is built using ARM technology and would reportedly handle some of the computer's low-power mode functionality. From the report: The development of a more advanced Apple-designed chipset for use within Mac laptops is another step in the company's long-term exploration of becoming independent of Intel for its Mac processors. Apple has used its own A-Series processors inside iPhones and iPads since 2010, and its chip business has become one of the Cupertino, California-based company's most critical long-term investments. Apple engineers are planning to offload the Mac's low-power mode, a feature marketed as "Power Nap," to the next-generation ARM-based chip. This function allows Mac laptops to retrieve e-mails, install software updates, and synchronize calendar appointments with the display shut and not in use. The feature currently uses little battery life while run on the Intel chip, but the move to ARM would conserve even more power, according to one of the people. The current ARM-based chip for Macs is independent from the computer's other components, focusing on the Touch Bar's functionality itself. The new version in development would go further by connecting to other parts of a Mac's system, including storage and wireless components, in order to take on the additional responsibilities. Given that a low-power mode already exists, Apple may choose to not highlight the advancement, much like it has not marketed the significance of its current Mac chip, one of the people said. Building its own chips allows Apple to more tightly integrate its hardware and software functions. It also, crucially, allows it more of a say in the cost of components for its devices. However, Apple has no near-term plans to completely abandon Intel chips for use in its laptops and desktops, the people said.
They moved to Intel because the Mac doesn't have enough sales volume to drive its own CPU R&D. The Macs started on Motorola, but switched to PowerPC when they started to fall behind Intel. Unfortunately the Macs (home and office PCs) accounted for something like 1% of PowerPC sales, so IBM didn't give a damn what Apple wanted. Their meat and potatoes was in the server market so that's what they tuned the PowerPC CPUs for, when the PC market was clearly moving towards low-power consumption laptops. That's what drove Apple to Intel in the first place.
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs, while revenue from phone, tablet, and other small device sales (e.g. Apple TV) will be enough to sustain R&D to keep it progressing as rapidly as Intel CPUs. That could happen, but I'm not convinced it will. The tablet market is already floundering after reaching saturation. I'm guessing phones will soon join them once 5G arrives (5G data will be fast enough there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your phone for 5-10 years). In a saturated marketplace, the Mac commands so little of the PC market it wasn't able to keep Motorola competitive nor sway IBM. And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
Intel (and Microsoft) is successful because they managed to find a market with consistently large annual sales (and profit margins) even after reaching saturation. So far Apple has been riding a growing mobile market to success - basically coasting downhill. It remains to be seen whether they can continue that momentum once the hill levels out, people stop upgrading every 2 years, and they're forced to really, truly innovate to create demand to sustain their sales.
I'm long past the point in my life when I'm okay with recompiling a kernel to fix my sound.
Does anyone do that any more? I've not compiled a custom kernel in a very long time. I dunno, I guess if you wander into pea-sea world and pick up the latest shitbox that got released yesterday for $200, then you might be in for some pain, but I don't know. I expect my laptops to last a long time (my 8 year old eee900 says hi), so I've generally stuck to decent brands like Thinkpad and Asus. I can't recall having to recompile a kernel to deal with hardware issues ever.
On my work laptop (runs ubuntu LTS), I can't ever remember anything ever breaking either. I basically set it up (installed a bunch of packages, program preferences, my bashrc) and it ran more or less maintenance free until I upgraded it to the next LTS, after which it continued the same maintenance free running to the present day.
My home laptop runs Arch, so it takes a bit more fiddling, but that's me choosing a distro known to be explicitly fiddly, just for fun. Remarkably stable though considering. The funniest though was when xorg split apart things from one monolithic distribution into a package tree. Arch cheerfully upgraded x to the newer x, which meant replacing the old monolithic package with just the minimal xserver. No keyboard or mouse drivers included. Thankfully, you can browse the arch website in a terminal based browser...
Anyway TL;DR, if you're recompiling kernels to fix hardware in this day and age, you're doing it wrong.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
ARM is owned by SoftBank, they are not a standalone company any longer. Softbank can afford to take the long view. I was sorry to see them bought out.
For me this would mean I would drop Apple entirely. I dropped their iPhone line already after I had to deal with shoddy quality in my old iPhone 5. I dropped the Mac Minis because of disinterest from Apple to provide decent machines (the NUCs are better nowadays).
I dropped the Airport line after apple kicked it off their products list. I am a happy Fritzbox customer now, way better in any regard.
The Ipad 3 was replaced by a Sony tablet after apple patched the performance out of the thing with their third annual software update.
The last remaining piece of Apple hardware I still use is the Macbook Pro but Apple makes it harder every year to stay with those as a customer.
There are some real costs to x86. It's more fair to call the decoder a parser for x86 - instructions are between one and 15 bytes long, they map to between one and a few dozen micro-ops. You need to keep the decoder powered almost all of the time (and when it's unpowered, you need to have the trace cache, which contains decoded micro-ops, powered) that you're executing instructions. ARM (AArch64 and Thumb-2) instruction sets are tuned to give good cache usage, so the typical win of CISC over RISC in i-cache usage doesn't really apply.
That said, when you get up to desktop or server power consumption levels, the power consumption is dominated by the register rename engine and the ALUs. Here, Intel has an advantage over ARM because they control their process and integrate their chip design very closely with the fab technology. This lets them put analogue components for monitoring power consumption and power / clock gating throughout the chip. Dark Silicon (i.e. the end of Dennard Scaling) means that you keep getting more transistors to put in the IC, but you can't power more of them at a time. Being able to switch off parts of the chip faster than the competition means that Intel still has some advantages. Some of the ARM partners who design their own cores and control their own fabs could do this, but ARM licenses IP cores that are produced by multiple vendors with different processes. Apple is in a similar situation, as they're careful to have a second source for fabbing their ARM cores.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News