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No More Intel Inside, Apple Plans To Use Its Own Custom-Built Chips in Mac (bloomberg.com)
Apple is planning to use homegrown custom-built processors in its Mac line of computers, ditching Intel, the processors by which powers Apple's current line of computers, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The company could make the switch to its own chips as early as 2020, the report said. From the report: The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple's devices -- including Macs, iPhones, and iPads -- work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition.
The shift would be a blow to Intel, whose partnership helped revive Apple's Mac success and linked the chipmaker to one of the leading brands in electronics. Apple provides Intel with about 5 percent of its annual revenue, according to Bloomberg supply chain analysis. Intel shares dropped as much as 9.2 percent, the biggest intraday drop in more than two years, on the news.
The shift would be a blow to Intel, whose partnership helped revive Apple's Mac success and linked the chipmaker to one of the leading brands in electronics. Apple provides Intel with about 5 percent of its annual revenue, according to Bloomberg supply chain analysis. Intel shares dropped as much as 9.2 percent, the biggest intraday drop in more than two years, on the news.
If Apple switches to ARM based A-series processors then people dual booting macs with Windows/Linux will be out of luck. It would make Mac a more closed ecosystem as Apple will probably use the switch to make only App store apps run on ARM macs. Stock up on Intel macs while you can.
To date, Apple has stridently refused to incorporate a touchscreen on their notebooks, which would be the most obvious step in bridging the development/user-interface divide between iOS and OSX, yet they feel it's useful to switch to a single processor architecture to achieve the same goal?
I don't want my Mac to behave like my iPad. I don't want a dumbed-down experience where I can't do anything that Apple doesn't permit.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
...If Apple want to keep their exclusivity and a niche market, they will have to go on their own, completely.
Today, An Apple computer is nothing different from a glorified designer laptop with a PC (typical Intel based architecture) inside, which means you could basically without too much effort just run Windows or Linux on it.
What Apple has gotten much grief for, is that they often use 2-4 year old hardware, instead of bleeding edge hardware. While this is usually good for "tried and tested", meaning that it will result in a relatively stable, well supported computer - it's offering very little new to its userbase, but who are the Apple userbase, this is what you got to take a closer look at:
The Apple userbase is often designers, musicians, artists, film people and basically people working within the creative industry. They like design, and they're willing to pay for it. It may not be the latest, greatest or best - but it sure looks the part, and it gives them a sense of community as they're not "mainstream", but still like to see themselves as the ones considering the computer just a tool, an accessory - and secondary to their work.
They don't want hassle with updates, compatibility issues, endless drivers - they just want to get about their workday without getting into "the computers" themselves.
Apple GET that, but in order to stay really truly "off" the rest, they have to find their own way again...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
How well will Intel virtualization work with these? If I can't run my various VirtualBox VMs on this, no sale.
It’s not like we haven’t heard these rumors for years now... we even heard stuff like this before Apple move to Intel. But still, some things are out of their control.
- Will Adobe play along, or walk away? Much as I hate Adobe, they’re a necessary evil when it comes to doing real work on many Macs.
- How locked down will these “computers” be? Right now, I can install just about anything I want... and I have a bash/zsh shell, to boot.
- What about the few Apple pro apps which remain? They’ve already shed a huge number of customers - it seems unlikely the remaining nes will tolerate another backwards jump.
One would hope that Apple would do their homework on this, since people who still use a laptop or desktop generally have very different requirements than people who use an iPad with a keyboard. A “laptop” which is just a glorified iPad would serve no purpose.
#DeleteChrome
This has been an ongoing story fro a few years now. Anyone paying attention to Ax development has seen how fast they have become. They are putting up x86 numbers (in some cases) while running in a passively cooled no ventilation phone. Pretty amazing. But Apple has an issue using third party products. Not because they don't like the tech, but because they can't release features until someone else's silicon supports it. That isn't something a company planning on shipping 100+ million devices a year needs to worry about. Intel and AMD showed some major vulnerabilities in their chip designs, and probably lost a lot of support from companies like Apple regarding those vulnerabilities. Apple knows it can design and market its own chips now. No doubt they will take care of the backward x86 compatibility through virtualization. Imagine 2 or 3 or even four A10X chips running in a laptop, sucking almost no power, running custom GPU tech designed to work in a low power environment. Imagine 5-10 A10X chips running in a workstation spitting out 2-3 Teraflops of compute and supporting eGPUs for additional compute capacity and imagine Apple refreshing their lineup more regularly because they didn't have to wait for Intel to develop XYZ features in their chips for their custom boards. Not to mention RISC V chips are getting some attention from major companies as well. Apple knows RISC processing well. I think all of this points to the fact that x86 is starting to show its age and major companies are looking for alternatives. Apple just happens to be sitting on 20+ years of chip development experience and manufacturing acumen to pull off making it themselves.
Apple hasn't made a secret of their intentions to homogenize the experience, the OS, the apps along their product lines. iPhones drive the business, iPads are a shrinking market, Macs are still busy, and Apple TV is probably better defined as 'we wish it was viable', but they keep their feet wet in it. Speakers are an also-ran. Siri needs to be upgraded to offer value to Mac users.
Making an 'A" style CPU makes sense, and developers who can't learn iOS will find life hard for other reasons. It remains to be seen if iOS is useful for traditionally desktop apps, but this could encourage devs to start building cloud-dependent apps for Macs, and that lets Macs be lightweight and have longer battery life. Add an LTE modem and that's that.
I was at an Intel facility the day Dell announced they would sell servers with AMD processors. You would have thought people had lost their firstborn. The rumor that a team member had been fired just because they were laughing in the cafeteria was partly true; they weren't in the cafeteria. Miserable day. I wonder what's going on there today...
I'm not there any more. Completed the project.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The iPhone.
Apple has much more experience and importantly, money, now than it did with PowerPC in 1998.
And today, Apple makes ARM-instruction-set CPUs/modems/GPUs integrated system on a chip as good as, or better than long-time chip designers, Qualcomm & Samsung. Intel is not competitive here despite major investment.
It also learned from that event as well: do it yourself, if your partners don't have the same interest that you do. Motorola and IBM didn't have an interest in the medium-performance low-power consumption mass-market priced design that's central to notebook computers. And that's what Apple has concentrated on with the iPhone fiercely.
Today, Apple has 100% of the chip design ability to do this for Mac---and the manufacturing capacity, as the Mac will be certainly lower sales numbers than iPhone. It's software design & developer relations that's the hard part.
if it survives at all.
I will be a sad day if the Mac finally dies. It's the sole survivor, in name at least, from the golden age of desktops. When Amiga, AtariST, and Macs where all in a head to head battle. Then Windows came in and squished everyone but the Mac. It would be sad to see the Mac survive that only to die because of a stupid company decisions . .
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
The ARM architecture absolutely cannot match Intel in terms of running native apps designed for Windows. There are many people, me included who sometimes need to run Windows applications on their Macs. At the moment, I just run up a Windows VM or use Bootcamp. Not having that capability would force me off the Mac.
There is no Intel tax btw. You give them some money, they give you a processor. It's called doing business and if you want to call it a tax, then every business transaction involves a tax.
The only way I could see this happening is if Apple are developing or have developed an x86_64 compatible processor.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
The desktop is not dying. The industry has matured and people are simply happy with the desktop they have and not replacing as often. Mobile devices are absolutely miserable for anything other than a quick message or notification while on the go, not a good form factor for heavy duty work.
PowerPC never had a performance issue.
Apple ditched it because IBM could not provide mobile versions of it in the numbers Apple needed it.
And IBM had no real plans to improve the mobile version, that is all.
The PowerPC architecture is a really nice one and has nothing to hide versus Intel.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.