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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.
Wouldn't that be funny. Imagine a world where Apple buys Intel and then for whatever reason tells Intel to stop supplying other PC makers.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Only problem is that Apple would have to finally pay taxes on the cash to use it when purchasing Intel, at which point, Apple wouldn't have enough cash to do so anymore.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
ARM has only been doing 64-bit out-of-order execution and branch prediction for two generations, the first of which (A57) seemingly had worse IPC than Intel's Netburst architecture. They may catch up one day but for now they are no closer to besting Intel than Transmeta was back in the days of Crusoe. Let's just hope their revenue stream lasts long enough for that to happen.
My understanding is a significant percentage of Intel dies are supporting ancient x86 instructions.
Apple doesn't care about backward compatibility If they can deliver a next gen chip with zero support of existing apps, they may have the money to pull it off.
If Intel could write off the x86 instruction set I'm guessing it's benchmarks would at least double. .
That would be a terrible move on Apple's part. They would squander a fortune to buy a company, and then implode that company's primary source of revenue. Intel focuses heavily on server chips, components like network interface cards for datacenter applications, and motherboard chipsets, built-in graphics, etc... . However, they are not the only game in town. This wouldn't damage so much the PC industry and prop up Apple, so much as hand a huge segment of the market over to AMD. Then, intel would be worth peanuts.
I doubt most people know what it actually takes to design and manufacture a CPU like an i7. There is huge investments in R&D, and then even bigger investments in the foundries to make said chip. It would significantly increase the cost of a CPU to something like $4000/pop if the only customers were about 20,000,000 Macs a year. Even if Apple managed to double their sales as being the only "Intel computer" available, their margins would topple and the stock would crash.
Sounds like a great way to lock OS X, or macOS or whatever they call it these days, solidly back to Apple hardware and preclude any possibility of running on stock x86 hardware. Though there's less and less reason to run a hacintosh all the time (it was always a maintenance nightmare). Though virtualization might be a way of getting around that. I've often thought Apple should sell a complete OS X (excuse me, macOS) vm for Windows users as it would provide an easy way to woo users to the platform. However the VM on your average Windows machine would probably outperform the Mac Pro, given Apple's commitment to high end users these days.
What really blew my mind was reading that Apple's biggest desktop customer is now IBM. That should tell you something when big blue is distancing themselves from Microsoft.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Windows is terrible because it's Windows.
Linux is a great server/workstation OS--but it's a pain on a consumer device. I'm long past the point in my life when I'm okay with recompiling a kernel to fix my sound. My intra-family IT work has gone down by about 95% since I've moved family members over to Macs.
So, yeah, if you want to use an un-terrible OS where everything basically works--then OSX is a pretty good choice. If you'd rather spend your life reading stackoverflow to figure out how to print to a wireless printer--then please feel free to use Linux. And if what makes you happiest is installing anti-virus software while Microsoft logs your every keystroke--then please, by all means, install Windows 10. Actually--just leave your Windows 8 computer plugged in and Microsoft will install it for you.
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.
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.
It won't happen, and mainly for the exact reasons you stated. Phones and tablets have already taken over the "I don't do much other than browse the internet/watch youtube/update facebook/snapchat/twitter/email" jobs that low performance CPUs can handle. The only reason someone has a need to purchase a real computer now is because they have a real need for processing power (gaming, photo/video editing, developing software, running simulations). Everything else is already being done by the lightweight CPUs.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Posting as AC for a damned good reason.
Apple already has several ARM powered laptops drifting around internally. I've seen several of them with my own eyes. There's at least five different prototypes, all constructed in plastic cases with varying degrees of complexity (some are literally just a clear acrylic box, others look more like 3D printed or milled parts designed to look like a chunky MBA or iBook). There's a few that literally recycled the chassis and case from an MBA, just with a different logic board (which was coloured red for some reason), and others sporting a radically different design than anything Apple currently sells (not going anywhere near the details on those because of NDA).
All of them boot encrypted and signed OS images, which are fully recoverable over the internet so long as you've got WiFi access (similar to how their Intel powered systems do it). You cannot chose a version of the OS to load, you get whatever the latest greatest one is and that's it. They've completely ported OS X to ARM (including all of Cocoa and Aqua), however a ton of utilities that normally come with OS X are missing (there's no Disk Utility, Terminal, ColorSync, Grapher, X11, Audio/MIDI setup, etc). A lot of that functionality has been merged into a new app called "Settings" (presumably to match the iOS counterpart), which takes the place of System Preferences.
Likewise, App Store distribution appeared to be mandatory. I didn't see any mention of Gatekeeper or any way to side load (unsigned) binaries, presumably because Gatekeeper is simply part of the system now. The systems I saw could all access an internal version of the MAS that was specifically designed for the ARM systems (and under heavy WIP, judging by the broken page formatting and placeholder elements). The filesystem seemed a bit... peculiar, to say the least. Everything was stored in the root of the disk drive- that is to say, the OS didn't support multiple users at all, and everything that you'd normally see in your home directory was presented as / instead. I don't think the physical filesystem was actually laid out like this, it's just that the Finder and everything else had been modified to make you believe that's the way the computer worked. There was no /Applications folder anymore, your only option for launching and deleting apps was through Launchpad. Drivers (now called "System Extensions") were handled 100% automatically by the OS. If you plugged anything into the computer that it didn't support, it would automatically launch the MAS and take you to a page where you could download and install the relevant stuff. Those things would show up in Settings.app where you could manage them by way of customized preference panels or uninstall them completely. The rest of it more or less looked like a modern day version of 10.12 without some of the historical features accumulated over the years (for example, Dashboard was nowhere to be found).
From what I was told, there's a huge push to get this stuff out the door as soon as they think the market will accept it. That might be in a year, or two years, or three or four, but that's where Apple is inevitably heading. Custom hardware, custom software, total vendor and user lock in. They want to own everything, everywhere, at all times, and ARM is going to let them do exactly that. They're not stupid though and they're not going to commit suicide by releasing this stuff tomorrow, but they will sometime in the future. I guess in that regard the summary is correct- they don't have any "near term" plans to abandon Apple, but they've sure as shit got some long term ones, and I'm assuming Intel knows about it since a lot of the chips on the transparent prototypes had Intel marketings on them.
And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
It wasn't really a battle of RISC vs CISC. It was a battle between incumbents and upstarts.
In the workstation arena, the CISC incumbent was Motorola with they 68k series. Despite being better CISC architecture than Intel, 68k lost to the RISC upstarts. Motorola had more resources than MIPS and Sun but not enough more and their customers were nimble enough to take advantage of the performance advantages the RISC upstarts offered.
Intel's had a much larger customer base and those customers were much more dependent on binary compatibility. It took a little while. Neither the 386 or 486 were a match for their RISC competitors. But Intel was able to outspend their RISC competitors on R&D, holding their ground until chips became complex enough that process and ISA independent features dominated. If Intel's architecture were also RISC, they would still have won, even sooner if the upstarts were CISC. Actually, with Intel RISC and CISC upstarts. there would not even have been a battle. Without a short term advantage to exploit, the upstarts would have not have gotten off the ground.
I can't see an Apple only processor wining over Intel, either. At minimum, Intel's process advantage would have to be nullified and I can't see that happening until scaling comes to a full stop.
Device makers choosing to roll their own chips is a direct effect of the end of Moore's law. If Intel could keep up with their original promise of doubling transistor count (or performance, or power savings, or whatever metric) every 18 months, then Apple would not need to invest in their own chips. I fear that for Intel, the death of Moore's law means the death of independent chip makers, and to get the most performance, you'll have to go the custom ASIC route.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
While I honestly would like to see more of these comparisons (and the A9X IS a beast, esp. re. IPC and Perf/W) - could everyone please stop using Geekbench scores for cross-arch comparisons, especially 3 or older.
The codepaths and compilation flags are wildly arbitrary and the author has shown time and again his lack of understanding of cross-platform benchmark caveats and pitfalls. Especially GB3 has been shown as useless for that regard, among others by Linus Torvalds himself no less. (just look up his forum conversations on RWT with the author)
Face it, they suck.
They really do. They just suck less than the alternatives.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Put down the bong. It'll make it much easier to type.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
> when the rest of the world (Linux and Windows) is still on x86?
Linux has supported ARM since 1994. Today, the vast majority of Linux kernels running are running on ARM processors.
For years, there was a shift towards avoiding expensive coprocessors and related by having more and more work done by the CPU. The massive growth in single core speeds in e.g. Intel chips made this sensible. Now that single core speeds are not getting faster, and we are having to go multi-core, and now that power consumption is becoming more of an issue, rethinking is becoming more pertinent. Way back when, mainframes would have things like I/O done by independent hardware subsystems, to avoid using expensive time on the main CPUs, and now it seems this is being rediscovered.
Firstly, especially in something like MacOS, there has been progress towards offloading more and more of Quartz to the GPU. Many GUI things could quite happily be handled by a low-power ARM chip on the GPU itself. Already with programmable shaders, and now Vulkan, we are getting to the place where, for graphics, things are accomplished by sending programs, request and data buffers over a high speed interconnect (usually the PCIe bus). To some degree, network transparent graphics are being reinvented, though here the 'network' is the PCIe bus, rather than 10baseT. Having something like an ARM core, with a few specialised bits, for most drawing operations, and having much of the windowing and drawing existing largely at the GPU end of the bus, is one step towards are more efficient architecture: for most of what your PC does, using an Intel Core for it is overkill and wasteful of power. Getting to a point where the main CPUs can be switched off when idling will save a lot of power. In addition, one can look to mainframe architecture of old for inspiration.
Another part of that inspiration is to do similar with I/O. Moving mounting/unmounting and filesystems off to another subsystem run by a small ARM (or similar) core, makes a lot of sense. To the main CPU you have the appearance of a programmable DMA system, to which you merely need to send requests. The small I/O core doing this could be little different to the kind of few-dollar chip SoC we find in cheap smartphones. Moreover, it does not need the capacity for running arbitrary software (not should it have: since its job is more limited, it is more straightforward to lock it down).
This puts you at a point where, especially if you do the 'big-core/little-core' thing with the GPU architecture itself, the system can start up to the point where there is a useable GUI and command line interface before the 'main processors' have even booted up. Essentially you have something a bit like a Chromebook with the traditional 'Central Processing Unit' becoming a coprocessor for handling user tasks.
I'd also go so far to suggest that moving what are traditionally the kernel's duties 'out-of-band', namely on a multi-core CPU, have a small RISC core handling kernel duties, and so far as hyperthreading is concerned, having this 'out of band kernel' able to save/load state from the inactive thread on a hyperthreading core. (Essentially if you have a 2-thread core, the chip then has a state-cache for these threads, where it can move them, and from there save/load thread state to main memory: importantly, much of the CPU overhead for a context switch is removed.)
John_Chalisque
What really blew my mind was reading that Apple's biggest desktop customer is now IBM.
And according to this 3 year old article it was Google before them: "Google staff now can use Windows PCs only with a business case making the company the world’s biggest Apple shop with 43,000 devices."
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
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.
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IBM, the company that has invested more in Java and Linux than almost any other company, is distancing itself from Microsoft? Tell me more!
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Export to Word and pay a monkey to review formatting.