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Apple Expected To Move Mac Line To Custom ARM-Based Chips Starting Next Year, Says Report (axios.com)
Developers and Intel officials have told Axios that Apple is expected to move its Mac line to custom ARM-based chips as soon as next year. "Bloomberg offered a bit more specificity on things in a report on Wednesday, saying that the first ARM-based Macs could come in 2020, with plans to offer developers a way to write a single app that can run across iPhones, iPads and Macs by 2021," reports Axios. "The first hints of the effort came last year when Apple offered a sneak peek at its plan to make it easier for developers to bring iPad apps to the Mac." From the report: If anything, the Bloomberg timeline suggests that Intel might actually have more Mac business in 2020 than some had been expecting. The key question is not the timeline but just how smoothly Apple is able to make the shift. For developers, it will likely mean an awkward period of time supporting new and classic Macs as well as new and old-style Mac apps. The move could give developers a way to reach a bigger market with a single app, although the transition could be bumpy. For Intel, of course, it would mean the loss of a significant customer, albeit probably not a huge hit to its bottom line.
If they're going to make new laptops, maybe the freaking morans will fix the keyboards at the same time.
#DeleteFacebook
... this keyboard is a bad joke.
and nothing is going to fucking work. guaranteed
Presumably it goes away. I wonder how many people will find running Windows in a VM (especially one that has to emulate the CPU) will find have problems with that solution?
https://www.brighteon.com/5830377955001 t
Doesnt really matter I suppose. I wasnt going to buy an overpriced peice of shit mac anyways. Arm is not good for most regular user tasks...
Agreed. I'm pretty much 100% Linux, and the state of desktop Linux is atrocious. Gnome 3 is an abomination, it has killed my productivity because window management is a pain and inconsistent, and features that used to work no longer do (it's now impossible to suspend while in a docking station, and this is apparently by design according to the bug report). I've just been delaying trying to switch to KDE to see if it's better, but I need to suck it up and just do it.
ChromeOS isn't that bad for a minimal UI, especially when in developer mode (so you can use Crouton, Crostini isn't quite there yet). Virtual desktops would be nice, but that's coming soon. Sadly, ChromeOS is my current preferred UI since it fights me the least.
Well, not really, but bye anyway. They're turning Macs into phones with keyboards and bigger screens, because everything is a terminal for the cloud now, right?
Gnome 3 is an abomination
Newsflash: in Debian alone there's 57 different window managers (counting packages that declare Provides: x-window-manager). They vary wildly in functionality, but you get both fully-featured/bloated ones and 1990-era alikes.
it has killed my productivity because window management is a pain and inconsistent, and features that used to work no longer do (it's now impossible to suspend while in a docking station, and this is apparently by design according to the bug report).
Aye, Gnome 3 is insane -- even Microsoft has backed out of Metro.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Man, I really hope you guys are diligently working on the ARM port as I type,
'cause, otherwise, I don't think I could live with a iMac without that amazing protection.
CAP === 'habeas' <Wow, I musta plugged into the Espaniola channel by mistake!
I'm in the same boat. I used to love Mac hardware from ~2004 (PowerPC) until around ~2010. Then it started to get really bad. MacOS went from a UNIX workstation OS to some sort of media consumer / music player thing (useless to me as I can't stand music) and it's clear Apple wants to make their products fancy televisions.
So I bought a Thinkpad (meh hardware quality, but better than anything Apple has made recently); filled it with tons of RAM (which a MBP can't do) and I'm running Linux with Xfce on it. It's not ideal and it seems to die coming out of sleep 5% of the time (thanks worthless Nvidia hardware).
I really wish there was a better professional laptop available these days. I do ASIC design and I run simulations that need ~64GB of RAM to complete in a reasonable amount of time. There aren't lots of options for me to do my job on the go (which I sometimes have to). Sadly, since some stuff I do needs to be done without an Internet connection (ugh) I can't just toss these big jobs on a server somewhere.
One of the last things people still use Macs for are development machines. And the only reason they can do that is because of the x86-64 chips in them.
Remove that, and you kill that market. And the Mac along with it. Developers are NOT going to move to ARM on Mac.
If this change happens, I won't be buying any Macs any more (and, yes, I have one) because I literally won't be able to use them. And I know I'm not alone.
Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up to witness another technology train wreck where they try to achieve the illusive singularity. Apple is going to merge iPhone, iPad, and MacOS into a single platform. Other greats like Microsoft tried to achieve the singularity between mobile and and the desktop, but they failed. Their Windows Phone is just a memory and but the strange tiles on Windows 10 still remain and, Windows 10 tablet mode is still unusable.
Now, a company which doesn't have a touch screen computer, but only a lousy keyboard that everyone hates, is going to try this amazing feat again. Using a mobile ARM processor with a touch screen UI/UX/OS called IOS, they are going to merge it with another mouse driven UI/UX called MacOS. Can they pull it off without a touch screen? How will users dual boot to Windows 10 to run their CAD software? And will it have a headphone jack? So many questions, so few answers. Without the reality distortion field of Steve Jobs this could be a headless company recycling failed ideas from other companies. Did anyone from Microsoft recently take on a leadership role at Apple?
Not matter how you slice it, it will be painful drama for users. You won't be able to look away, it will be like watching a car crash in slow motion, you know you should look away, but you just can't.
The singularity, can it be achieved? Stay tuned..
With Xeon-based iMac Pros and the upcoming Mac Pro, I doubt that Apple will move to ARM entirely at any point in the next 5 years.
There will be Intel-based Macs for some time, at least at the high end. And support will continue as well.
I think this news means we will see an ARM-based Mac Mini model and something like a Macbook Air running on ARM. The more expensive Macs will stick around for a while. I doubt we'll see the current iMacs or MacBook Pros switch to ARM any time soon.
Chances are the software transition will go smoothly. Apple has a lot of expertise in switching CPU families and their Xcode is very advanced.
I do wonder if these will be full MacOS machines. Will Apple really recompile their entire certified BSD UNIX for ARM? You have to wonder if these ARM machines might be a lot more like iOS than MacOS when you look under the hood.
But it is Sunday and a fine time to bash away on Macs. And Trump. It would be great if Trump bought a Mac so we could have some one-stop shopping for /. trolls.
Recently Linus ranted about how server class ARM development was a deadend because of the lack of sufficient "home" computers for normal use (he didn't literally mean home, but rather personal-computers). The answers that! On the otherhand for those of us who rely on libraries like say TensorFLow that doesn't look too good since a lot of that is X86.
It will be interesting to see if Developers will flock to this as the optimum ARM development platform or flee from apple due to lack of x86 in their primary laptop.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm pretty sure, this is how Apple killed the Mac the first time... History repeats itself?
I can't see this being a very happy transition, especially for developers and product support.
Looking back, it took 5+ years to end support for PowerPC Macs, I can't see it being any less and I would expect it to be twice that especially for Mac Servers.
Maybe this is why Linus made his comments about ARMs a couple of days ago: https://slashdot.org/story/19/...
If this is all a reason for having apps that work on iPhone, iPad & Macs, I again point to HTML5 and WPA. I can see that their growth could result in a downfall of Apple specific hardware and apps.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Why are you on Gnome if you do not like it? I use a decades old fvwm config that works exactly as I like. This is not windows where you have no or very little control over how your desktop looks.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I am not tied to AMD64 if I can get the same or better performance elsewhere at the same or better price. However, I expect that single-core performance will be pretty lacking and that would be a show-stopper.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In this moment of time, only justification for having a Mac and Mac OS is apps development for iOS. For something else Windows, Linux, BSD ....
Apple's own CPUs are not strictly "ARM-based", as they do not have cores developed by ARM itself.
They have their own cores that are merely using ARM's ISA.
Apple's CPU designs are likely to have lineage to P.A. Semi which Apple acquired in 2008.
Before then, P.A. Semi had made processors running the PowerPC ISA. Apple had previously been interested in using those, but opted not to in favour of x86.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I've just been delaying trying to switch to KDE to see if it's better, but I need to suck it up and just do it.
I've been running KDE Neon for more than a year now and I think it's great.
Kubuntu which I used before that I found to be crappy because it wasn't a "clean" KDE desktop, there were GNOME/Unity things here and there, two or three places to change the same settings, really confusing. Neon is a 100% KDE experience and in my experience it works very well. They've abandoned experimenting with the desktop, and you have a classic desktop experience on top of which you can place widgets if you like (but you don't have to).
...a Apple & Raspberry Pi ?
It's 2019 and there is literally no quality OS available on the market. It's a disgrace...
Same for hardware. It's so damn primitive. If we need a car analogy, our present stage of development is at about the 1915 Model T. File management is downright prehistoric!
Linus Torvalds has stated that ARM won't win the server space because developers want to run their apps on the architecture it has been developed on and almost all are developing on x86. Many application bugs are still architecture specific. Application performance optimization is also highly architecture specific, especially for database applications.
Given the Mac's popularity among developers, this argument should apply to the Macs too when looked at from the opposite angle. The vast majority of servers are x86, and developers want to run their apps on the architecture they are developing for. Running in an emulator is nowhere near the same experience. I would think a switch from x86 to ARM would decimate the number of developers calling the Mac home.
Separately, I don't see the appeal of running phone apps on my laptop or desktop. Smartphone apps do not have the feature density that I'm looking for with a desktop app and desktop apps are not generally appropriate for smartphones. On my desktop, I don't want simplicity. I want to see everything I can at once and to be able to do almost everything with my keyboard.
Say hi to no Linux, no unsigned apps and five year forced obsolence. Mac, because we have to keep our 1T market cap somehow.
Indeed. I feel your pain. The way this is going, we may in a few years see only full screen apps on our iMacs with no way of using different programs with the same data. I'll go back to Linux when my iMac dies.
-- Cheers!
If Apple is making their own ARM chips, presumably they can put them in at-cost as a co-processor along with an Intel chip on their home computer line.
Benefits of the Hybrid:
* Increase adoption of ARM as you deprecate Intel chips over a few generations
* Run iOS apps at full speed while the Intel processor handles i86 tasks
* Not be shackled by poor performance of ARM on desktop for individuals running apps that are processor-dependent and slow an Intel chip to a crawl.
* (if you choose to make hybrid a long term solution) Have apps that run in multiprocessor mode with some processes running on each chip, making your home computer faster than all other manufacturers who are not selling multi-processor solutions.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
PPC had one OS release after Intel: 10.5. Then, a last minute announcement before 10.6 shipped that PPC hardware support was being dropped. In 10.7, Rosetta was gone and you couldn't run PPC apps.
AMD64 might get two, since they release more frequently now and probably need to cover through their warranty period.
Apple customers are used to the abuse. They cheer it on!
but apple is moving to app store only so this will not help any other ARM dev's
I'm sorry but I can't take anything they say seriously since they claimed that SuperMicro servers were compromised. It's been months since that claim was made and we still haven't seen any proof.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Apple has stated repeatedly they want nothing like the singularity, that desktops are inherently different than tablets or mobile devices.
All that is happening here is a processor switch, because Intel has dropped so many balls they are more balls than company now. Apple wants to be able to control the processor so they can actually realize some gains, and avoid some of the shoddy design issues that have come to light in intel processors recently...
I for one am fine with the change, these days adding support for another architecture is not THAT bad and Apple pulled it off really well before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
switch from x86 to ARM would decimate the number of developers calling the Mac home.
On the other hand, moving developers' home/office platforms to ARM might decimate Intel in the data center. Linus' argument was that the availability of the x86 to developers was what pulled Intel into the data center.
From that summary:
Without a development platform, ARM in the server space is never going to make it.
Maybe Apple is out to provide that platform... Pure speculation, of course, but why not?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Gnome 3 is an abomination
Newsflash: in Debian alone there's 57 different window managers (counting packages that declare Provides: x-window-manager). They vary wildly in functionality, but you get both fully-featured/bloated ones and 1990-era alikes.
it has killed my productivity
Yes, this is what so many people don't get, Linux desktops are not a comparison, you can't just flip from your (once) preferred proprietary desktop that you fell out of love with... you have to invest time to find the right pieces that work best for you... but some people only want to pay money, and as a result they will suffer at the whims of what profit seeking corporations see as hip and trendy in the moment, and be disgusted at DE x of whatever distro they choose when they try Linux.
With Linux you don't pay money you pay some upfront time, and you get a lot of control and stability for the rest of your life in return.
See subject & https://apple.slashdot.org/com... which explains PART of WHY "Mr. T." is "dead-on right" & rightfully so - he's a dev himself & understands...
* Minus the compilers targetting the intended platform, what's the POINT of making something in a language that doesn't target the 'new intended platform' (that's the case for me).
APK
P.S.=> Also in MY case @ least? The ONLY reason a Linux (& soon MacOS here once I get around to it, past other "life duties") got a version (glad I did it, I like Linux a LOT now vs. in the past, it's gotten GOOD)? Was that I myself went to Linux after 27++ yrs. or so on Windows - hence, since I use hosts files myself, I needed my program (automates away the IMPOSSIBILITY of processing hosts yourself manually - would take way, Way, WAY TOO LONG to do it yourself by hand + takes away having to use a DB engine (ala select * distinct etc.))... apk
I have to give props to Google for what they did with ChromeOS in the past couple of years.
While I still have a "regular" Windows 10 PC mostly for games and odd app or two, everything else is done on Asus CN60 chromebox (Haswell i3, upgraded to 16GB RAM and 128 GB m.2 SATA HD). While this model is too old to support Crostini or virtualization (pushing 5 years now), it satisfies pretty much my every need - and as you said: it runs the OS that not actively working against me.
If only Pixel Chromebooks were not $1300, I would probably buy one tomorrow.
Basically I expect them to be laptops/desktops with the iPhone/iPad/iWatch business model and an i-name like iBook or iNote or whatever. Runs a version of iOS that's adopted Mac interfaces but is locked down with no dual boot to anything else. All applications come from the store so no backwards compatibility with Mac apps, just windowed iOS apps until developers make a store version. The question is just if Apple can resist the temptation to price it crazy, I mean their latest phones are really getting out of hand.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Naah, it will just add to the amount of crappy software available.
See subject: THAT'd be the guy(s) who do the FreePascal compiler &/or Lazarus IDE for it I used in Linux (I used Borland's Delphi for the Windows version BUT will be porting that to FreePascal also - good stuff & FREE) - FreePascal also does MacOS (x86/64-bit & I am dropping 32-bit versions even though I did one for Windows).
* ... & "there ya go"...
APK
P.S.=> "Onwards & UPWARDS!" ... apk
I personally look forward to this. I like the ARM ISA. I thought Torvalds was being short-sighted. For starters, it's a more popular platform by number of chips in the wild. These Intel and AMD CISC designs are all RISC under the hood now, anyway.
We're just doing away with the cruft of a legacy architecture that grew off track.
So everything Apple does, did, or will do is doomed to failure,
but we loves us some x86 architecture from 1979 and can't imagine an alternative.
The future has spoken.
ARM classic or ARM64? (Of course anything is better than x86 family, but that's a low bar to clear.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If you read what he wrote Linux wasn't complaining about lack of platforms. He was complaining about the lack of cheap platforms that are available to everyone.
Apple does not have that goal in mind. They are not cheap.
They already have it, and have for years. Developing for iOS means code is first compiled for x86/x64 to test on the desktop, and then its recompiled with the ARM toolchain when you deploy to a device. Their development pipeline is relatively platform agnostic. Xcode kind of sucks as an IDE though.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
No you can override the signed app protections easily, especially if you are a developer.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Numerous of my customers use Mac on Intel as development machines for Linux on Intel servers, to provide mass-market GUI tools and target-specific development tools.
Apple is about to make that unpopular.
This will put a push on Linux distros like Fedora and hardware companies offerings like Dell's XPS 13 Developer Edition, to finally deliver the year of the Linux Desktop. Well, for developers, at least (:-))
davecb@spamcop.net
Please, enough about bitching about the butterfly keyboard, $1000 phones, and the RDF.
Tell us again about how Jobs ripped off Xerox PARC. That's always a hoot.
I'm surprised it was 13 years ago that Macs left the PowerPC chips for Intel. I've seen many predictions about the desktop and the server world going to the Arm's (Sophie Wilson's if you're old enough or Roger Wilson's if you're even older) instruction set.
The "cruft" barely matters any more. On super low end chips, sure the instruction decoder matters. On laptops, it really doesn't. The out of order and wide floating point units and wide, fast memory bus are far far more expensive than three decoder.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Grey-beard here. Over the years I have used *A lot* of window managers / desktop environments. The worst I have used recently is by far Gnome. I updated an Ubuntu machine to 18.04 and said "what the hell", and let it default the window manager to the preferred new one. Gnome was the worst piece of junk I've ever used. All the other desktops I've been able to figure out how to suspend without too much difficulty. Gnome - NOPE. I look at the shutdown menu and can't find anything related to suspend. I see shutdown but no suspend. After a few minutes of googling I discover that someone decided that to suspend you should hit SHIFT or CONTROL or something similar while hitting shutdown. I could live with that, EXCEPT the idiots who designed it didn't change the icon. I TRIED pushing shift and control and alt and other things and there's ZERO feedback. There is PLENTY of space for a suspend icon, but some idiot decided that putting a suspend icon was a bad idea. At that point I seriously questioned the sanity of anyone involved. I couldn't believe they would take away a standard feature like that and hide it.
They should have stayed with them in the first place but I guess maximizing profit is mission one.
I think the chicken and egg issue will dominate though. Until a large portion of the datacenter systems are ARM, there would be no compelling reason for a developer to switch their development platform and many compelling reasons not too. And until a large number of developers are on ARM, the datacenters would be fighting the developer's platform if they switch.
Why would I buy a development system as premiumly-priced as the Macs to target a platform that might be successful in a few years? These things don't happen overnight.
I CAN play devil's advocate with myself here. I do realize that this will help front end developers, and that is almost certainly in Apple's thoughts. But, in my experience, the back end is where the real tech is. If front end developers jump to ARM-based Macs because it makes their jobs easier, we'll see the already damaging gulf between front and back end development widen. That would be a bad result for the industry. Of course, I say this as more of a full-stack guy that believes it is much harder to develop a quality product when nobody on the team fully understands both worlds.
Not exactly true. Some of us *like* the desktop user experience we get with Mac OS. I could use Linux, but I like Macs better. I also understand that Linux can be mapped to look like Mac, but with an actual Mac, I don't need to bother. And kindly don't confuse "I prefer Macs" with "I am a rabid Mac fanboy." There are degrees of difference between the two.
Everything about ARM is bloody proprietary. If Apple does this then most of us CS types will not use it. I built my Mac Pro replacement anyway. It's a Haydes Canyon NUC.. HVK series. Damn thing is fast. I've got an nvidia egpu for my CUDA and video rendering stuff. The AMD VegaM is awesome, I have not ran into any performance issues. I'm running Linux Ubuntu 18.24 most of the time with Plasma 5, and 3D acceleration. Steam runs great! Weather Modeling runs well.. My last ARM project was on a ARM64 SBC with MALI T860 support. GPU support from ARM is closed. To get the proper development kit and libraries it costs a lot of money. I ended up scrapping the idea of basing the project on arm and made a SONARR/Plex server out of the SBC.. My original ARM project migrated to a NUC Bean Canyon, and it's faster than the RK8839 with Mali T860 anyway.
Apple has done transitions before: classic MacOS to MacOS X, Motorola 68000 to PowerPC, and PowerPC to Intel. They survived all three. Given their history, they're obviously capable of handling transitions well enough.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
> (he didn't literally mean home, but rather personal-computers)
Thanks for the clarification!!!
For keeping everyone paid and ensuring Capitalism doesn't fall apart.
If you're still inside warranty, then at least that'll be free but from what I saw from the warranty process on a colleagues Macbook, that's gonna be a pain. And if your hardware is older than a year, you're SOOL?
Move to Europe, EU law guarantees 2 years of warranty.
No way Mac goes app store only. Maybe in 10 years, but not today.
Good-bye
ARM is utter shit for actual computing. Its a fucking toy. You under appreciate the inertia and gravitas x86 has. ARM is wonderful for the low end, but for development, you can fuck right off with that noise.
Good-bye
Lol. That was good for a laugh. You managed to squeeze in being an incorrect know-it all, a No True Scotsman, and damning with faint praise.
Impressive, but not subtle. Maybe a 4/10 on the troll scale.
TensorFlow is free software (Apache License 2.0) and it is not written in assembler, you can build it for (mostly) any arch. Google distributes x86_64 binaries but that is just to save people from building it.
Most Mac code doesnâ(TM)t even need fat binaries. After all on Mac, LLVM can generate IL which is 99% compatible between platforms. If they need fat binaries, they have 20 years experience in that game.
Apple also has a great ecosystem regarding their App Store. It can easily deliver the right executable to the platform.
Honestly, Apple is really fat ahead of the game here.
That said, even when working on an ARM Huawei platform for HPC, ARM is a bit of a dog with flees for tasks like compiling. I have never figured out where the massive bottleneck in ARM is. But in 20 years of extensive use of ARM, it has always had ridiculous latency problems. I wonder if it is something in the cost of task switching. I will be doing research on the topic soon for my masters, but my belief is that a branch or cache miss on ARM is just brutal.
What was the ARM's floating point coprocessor again? what chip competes against the intel 8th gen?
I'm leaning toward this future. I've switched to using a Galaxy S9+ as my daily computing device, and the Thinkpad is reserved for longer coding sessions.
But, more and more, I just use a bluetooth keyboard from Omoton and use Termius to SSH in to my servers and the laptop from my phone. File Manager+ has SFTP support, among many features. I have browsers, VNC, DroidVIM (really an excellent port), etc.. Do I need a monitor? I cast the screen to a ChromeCast.
I write code primarily. If I need horsepower, I spin up a VM from my phone and use SFTP/Git to load up some code, and SSH in to administer it. The phone fits in my pocket while I'm running around between the machines at work, too. Nice bonus there, not lugging the laptop itself.
When Apple did the huge transition over from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, it was near the height of Apple's success selling OS X based computers. Even then, there was a big fear it would hurt certain markets, like native OS X game development, as it would make an excuse to "just write a Windows only version and let the Mac users boot into Windows to play it". And that, in fact, DID happen. But by and large, Mac users accepted it as a "win" because Intel CPU development was so much further ahead and drove more competitive Macs with their Windows counterparts. Plus, it wasn't half bad being able to run Windows in virtual environments - where a bunch of processor instruction conversion between x86 and PPC didn't have to happen in the background to make it work.
This time around? It's far less clear.... Intel still cranks out great CPUs and nobody I know is complaining that their Mac is under-powered, CPU-wise. The big push seems to be Apple's continual insistence that "most people can just use an iPad and iPhone instead of a computer", and an interest in selling their own CPUs instead of giving all that money to Intel.
I think we're going to see a lot of "dumbing down" of OS X apps if they all start getting coded to run universally on iOS and OS X with ARM. If features in software don't translate well to a touch-screen UI, they'll rip them out instead of keeping "Mac only" versions with more capabilities.
RISC has been alive longer than the x86. It's nice to see a company going back to its roots. That said, I think the idea here is to synergize all platforms.
It all went to hell after [i]screen[/i]
I'm in the same boat. I used to love Mac hardware from ~2004 (PowerPC) until around ~2010. Then it started to get really bad. MacOS went from a UNIX workstation OS to some sort of media consumer / music player thing (useless to me as I can't stand music) and it's clear Apple wants to make their products fancy televisions.
Huh? As a dev my use case primarily involves zsh, Emacs, Erlang, and PostgreSQL and all that's running just fine on MacOS thanks. I'm really curious what your use case is? I mean, you make it sound like you've maximized the iTunes window and don't know how to quit the application.
I'm looking a two Mac Pros in front of me with seven drives shoehorned into the nearest one and nearly all of the PCI cards used. I've changed so many parts in it the thing has become the Ship of Theseus. They promised a new pro machine and nary a peep so far other than they've got 'top men' working on it. Well, where is it already?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
It may be popular but it doesn't mean it doesn't suck. Torvalds was right. But maybe for different reasons, many of which probably don't apply to Apple.
The main problem with ARM, at least as I as a Linux user am concerned, is the lack of any standardized, open, boot system like the much-maligned BIOS, or EFI, and the lack of a standardized, minimal device tree. There are literally dozens of of cheap single board computers you can get to run linux on. But how many of them can boot a standard distro off of a hard drive or usb stick you just plugged in? How many can run a standard, generic, Linux kernel and a standard, generic, Linux distro? I don't know of any. And it's very frustrating. Those boards that can run android can run a particular version of android, obtained from the manufacturer, limited to their whims to update it.
The promise of ARM is awesome. But so far I remain disappointed. I've got a drawer full of ARM devices that I used for short periods of time. Sheeva Plugs, a GuruPlug, several raspberry pis, and various random chinese boards. All powerful machines in their own right, but not as useful as I thought. Mostly due to the proprietary (or at least esoteric) boot systems, custom kernels, special device trees, proprietary graphics cores, etc. I just don't really want to mess with U-Boot and flashing special images to partitions just to get the latest version of Debian up and running, or install a 5.0 kernel.
If intel produced a board at the price point as these ARM boards, but could boot regular old Debian with a generic x86 kernel, supporting the GPIO that makes Pis so popular, I'd ditch ARM in a heartbeat (SBCs, not phones).
Again, none of this applies to Apple necessarily, though. They control and access every bit of the hardware to make it sing their song, so I'm sure many users won't know or care, as long as they keep buying from the Apple Store. But it's a definite step towards a completely locked-down appliance. Might take another decade, but that's where Apple seems to be heading.
Speaking from experience with actual ARM servers, both on prem and Amazon's offering, you are talking out of your backside. You do realise we're not deploying to a cluster of mobile phones, right?
The ARM instances you are toying around are to real ARM with l2 cache et al like talking shit about an i7 because you don't like Atom.
Real ARM are not that far from that i7.
According to your definition, there's no such thing as a strictly "ARM-based" CPU as ARM doesn't make any chips available for commercial use. Whenever they release a new ISA (e.g. the recently announced N1 and E1) they do release reference design to assist licensees in developing platforms and validating their own designs based on the ISA but you cannot buy _any_ device with a CPU made by ARM in it. I believe companies that license the ARM ISA are allowed to extend it and each family of ARM designs has optional features that the may or may not be implemented but the reference ISA has to be implemented to use the ARM name. So yes, Apple Bionic chips are an ARM chip, by ARM's own definition(s).
This is not to say that Bionic chips don't leverage IP from PA Semi but they're not going to be some ARM/PowerCPU/Custom hybrid. They will be ARM chips (but I wouldn't be surprised to see custom logic on the desktop chips to help with software emulation of x86 instructions).
Unfortunately, this is probably going to kill the hackintosh community.... or at least hamper it for a few years. I love mac's and macOS (yes, some would consider this a mental illness) but I despise the limited hardware choices, the paltry refreshes and the markups. If moving to their own ARM cpu means more frequent, competitive upgrades then I'm all for it. If it means an iPad with a big screen and a keyboard... I'm out.
Their next computers will absolutely stink at designing the ones after. They will also stink at working on the advertising video and renderings.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I do ASIC design as mentioned above. Even developing at RTL it still eats a ton of RAM. Spice runs can also eat a surprising amount of RAM. In many cases I find myself at customer sites and am behind enough firewalls that remotely sending off synthesize/simulate jobs is too much effort and/or legally not allowed to do that.
Keep in mind ASIC design is a bit more resource intensive than somelike thing straight Verilog or VHDL to your garden variety FPGA.
TL;DR https://www.youtube.com/watch?... will be horrible for users, as no bootcamp nor virtual machine for Windows and Linux anymore
You have clearly not implemented an ARM emulation core!
if Developers will flock to this.
Something with the noise and portability of an ipad would be ideal for me as developer. If I need real power I can remote control a local PC or cloud service, but most of the time it just needs to run some web browsers and editors with a big enough external monitor. That's not a demanding system. I don't even compile anything locally any more.
I'm currently considering making a low power fanless mini-pc to get the same thing. The macpad would beat that in everything but price.
I'm not saying it's NOT happening, but everybody should remember that we've been seeing similar reports to this every year since at least 2011, when it was reported that Apple had internal prototypes of ARM-based MacBooks running OS X. All of the current talk about a 2020 shift to ARM can be traced back to this single unverified Axios article.
and get you and your apps blocked by apple
The promise of ARM is awesome. But so far I remain disappointed. I've got a drawer full of ARM devices that I used for short periods of time.
Please pry those out of storage, and sell them to some geeks who can use them, for a reasonable price. People could use them. Unless you're keeping them for posterity?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Agreed. I'm pretty much 100% Linux, and the state of desktop Linux is atrocious. Gnome 3 is an abomination, it has killed my productivity
What's preventing you from going back to Gnome 2 via MATE?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Their development pipeline is relatively platform agnostic. Xcode kind of sucks as an IDE though.
Then use Eclipse or IDEA Intelli J
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I would have to believe the "Pro" line of MacBook's are basically dead. Given that the new MacBook has a Pentium chip downgraded from previous Core i5 or i7. One would assume Apple isn't interested in the future of Mac's other then making boutique notebooks for people who want a premium netbook. Wouldn't surprise me if we never see a new Mac Pro either. Tim Cook is driving Apple into the ground as far as being anything but offering expensive boutique products.
Linus Torvalds has stated that ARM won't win the server space because developers want to run their apps on the architecture it has been developed on and almost all are developing on x86.
Almost all are developing in Java, so the actual hardware does not matter. (*facepalm*)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
MacOS model's not done: Stop IMPERSONATING me lying & proof portfilter err's can't happen in my work https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
HILARIOUS u ADMIT u have a /. acct & STALK me by UNIDENTIFIABLE ac https://hardware.slashdot.org/... - YOU have ISSUES, lunatic.
See subject & that's the "best ya got"? It proves You WISH you were ME (as your POOR imitation = the sincerest form of flattery).
* LASTLY - the ONLY time you start IMPERSONATING me vs. STALKING me by UNIDENTIFIABLE anon posts is WHEN YOU ARE OUT OF "downmodpoints" I can easily NULLIFY by REPOSTING my posts RUNNING YOU DRY of them after you ABUSE them - I must've already, lol!
APK
P.S.=> I know WHY you do it though (out of "butthurt angst", lol): I've BLOWN YOU AWAY so many times under your MANY alter-ego SOCKPUPPET /. accounts FAKENAMES you're out for "revenge" only to have EGG ON YOUR FACE https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... yet again vs. me... apk
Why would I buy a development system as premiumly-priced as the Macs to target a platform that might be successful in a few years?
Because Macs run OS X or macOS. It is even preinstalled. A random hardware does not.
Why Mac haters don't shut up is beyond me. If you have no use/need for macOS, fine. then simply shut up, idiots.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I swear by Mate.
RISC has been alive longer than the x86.
How d'ya reckon that? The 8086's design started in early 1976, and it became available commercially in 1979. The first two major RISC projects (Standford's MIPS and Berkeley RISC, who evolved into the SPARC architecture) both started in the 1980s and became available commercially years later.
Some people point to the IBM 801 as a forerunner of the RISC concepts, but even this only became available commercially in 1980, and, as a single chip, only in 1981. It wasn't successful, but it was used as a base for the development of the RS/6000 - who, however was launched in 1990, 11 years after the x86
You know, usually you just "close" the laptop and it suspends ... unless it is a weird "brand" of linux, though.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Looking back, it took 5+ years to end support for PowerPC Macs, I can't see it being any less and I would expect it to be twice that especially for Mac Servers.
Apple doesn't have servers any more. "macOS Server" is an app in their desktop app store which costs twenty bucks, and provides some of the functionality which comes with NT server. The last time Apple had a server hardware product was 2011.
If this is all a reason for having apps that work on iPhone, iPad & Macs, I again point to HTML5 and WPA.
Ugh. What a PITA. If that's the best Apple can do, their best isn't very good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Arm is useless because it isn't web scale. No matter how many ARM chips I out in a cluster, it isn't enough to feed my need for threads. It isnt even an interconnect bandwidth thing. The spiders simply cant live off them. But give me 86 dead flies, or x86 for short and the spiders avoid resource starvation and i get a completely open bounded web.
You don't have to use GNOME. I use XFCE4 on all my machines; it's just enough of a desktop to be usable without getting in your way.
What if it's not a laptop, or you don't want to flip it shut? I mean, on a Mac you can tap the power button and there's a Sleep button there, Windows can do it from the keyboard or in the menu that appears when you hit the power/standby icon in the start menu, why did the Gnome people decide to make it so unfriendly?
Move from NeXT Obj-C to Apple MacOS was brutal code thrash. Three rewrites to the API's in a single year was a coup de grås. Best move ever. We shutdown development until Apple stabilized MacOS X revs. Bought AAPL stock at $17 and dumped the remaining funds in @ $12. AAPL surging stock price ended development.
AAPL have been here before and have the architecture, abstraction and now new silicon under it. What could go wrong? Tim Cook for one. Tim is not a bit twister (little nor big endian) and it all looks like supply pipeline in Tim's eyes.
Personally, Gung-ho for AAPL abstracting the codebase over ARM (MOTO, INTEL, et. al.). QUALCOMM taught Tim the meaning of ' detrimental reliance' as INTEL did SteveJobs. Some lessons don't slot into institutional memory banks. ARM looks like a pivot for Apple down market.
Horrible idea. Taking the whole NIH syndrome a little too far aren't they?
Newsflash: in Debian alone there's 57 different window managers
So just take a month off to try them all, and hopefully one of them works for you.
So this would be the end of the Hackintosh, no? That sucks. While I spend most of my time on my MacBook Pro, I like having my Hackintosh for really heavy lifting.
Look, moron, you're fighting a losing battle. Unlike most users, I have unlimited mod points. Your posts are no match for me. You're here because I allow you to be here. It's not that I want your presence, because I really don't. However, I know how obsessed you are with Slashdot. If I forced you to leave, you'd probably take your own life. I don't really want that on my conscience, which is why I allow you to stay. You're a loser, but I don't want to be the reason you take your own life.
Architecturally the x86 reaches back to the 8080/8085 (source compatible) and drew some inspiration from the competing Z80 when it came to encoding prefixes.
Me, too.
Linux Mint Mate is a stellar OS.
I think the folks who come on here claiming "I swear I use Linux, but it sucks for these reasons . . . " are just lying trolls. Because Linux does not suck, if you put in even just an ounce of effort.
Our entire shop uses Macs for web dev because we can easily run the back-end stuff we need in docker containers. If new Macs are on ARM, it means Docker's gone without an x86 emulator, which would seriously suck.
It's pretty obvious Apple doesn't care about any developers other than iOS.
LOL - You're the one HIDING lmao (which makes you a TOTAL LOSER no questions asked, hahahahahaha chickenshit punk you are).
* Downmod away - doesn't change facts/truth I use vs. your BULLSHIT pussy...
(I just REPOST & blow you away, lol!)
APK
P.S.=> Every SINGLE time... apk
The blind-census argument is itself extremely popular based on its relentless occurrence in the wild, at least that part of the wild with limited binocular vision.
———
Sage: You can't judge a book by its cover.
Simpleton: Uh, what else is there?
Sage: The pages inside.
Simpleton: You mean all those repetitive black marks, the ones that resemble a box of Fruit Loop alphaghetti filmed in black and white?
Sage: Their arrangement matters.
Simpleton: You mean like tea leaves?
Sage: [Takes a slow sip from his steaming mug.] Exactly right—like tea leaves filtered through a brain worth having.
Simpleton: [Thinks really hard.] Are you dissing mathematicians?
Sage: Not at all. Leaves produce more symbols at lower intensity, beans produce fewer symbols at higher intensity. You can't judge a theorem by its cover, because there's never enough pages to bind.
Simpleton: I see what you mean about not judging a book by its cover: some books don't even have covers. Very subtle, but I'm onto your koan. For example, I can still judge a theorem by it's lack of cover. That would still work out just fine.
Sage: Sure—suit yourself. Looks good on you. Now if you will please excuse me for five minutes, I need to hit the head.
———
[*] Alfred Renyi to Paul Erdos: "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
For obvious reasons, this quip probably originated in Hungarian, not German, even thought the Satz pun is pretty good.
Companies like Adobe will have to support updates for Adobe CC (LR/PS etc) for Intel CPU's for a while, while developing ARM (or whatever Apple is actually doing) versions as well (meanwhile trying to lock out Adobe PS CC etc from being run on some idiots iPhone (not the mobile version, the full version... some smuck is going to try to use the full version on their phone)
I also think Apples sour grapes with nVidia needs to end, im not an nVidia fanboy but think Apple looses a lot of potential locking out nVidia but thats my 10c
I'm an ex X86 and 8085 assembler programmer , but have a noob question.
Im presuming that binaries like Chrome, I tunes will need to be recompiled? Or as others have suggested, the same programs running java script on iPhones will be the same ones that run on iMacs?
Related, will docker programs break? Or will they run in a virtual machine emulating x86? I'm truly curious and an apple noob so don't trash me, please.
----
Unrelated, is there a market problem that moving to ARM solves?
...but take lessons from the warts in the runtime.
Moving their macs off of Intel is a terrible idea as people will then only be purchasing the cheapest possible mac as a compiler host for iOS (if they need to do so.)
I have a MacBook Pro right now because I can triple boot it between Linux, macOS, and Windows - they do this and I'd rather just have one of the new minis sitting on the corner of my test for iOS builds...
Unless that ARM chipset will support x64/x86 instructions (which is technically possible but would be weird.)
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And sealing the entrance shut with successive layers of concrete and steel plating.
Eventually, the Apple ecosphere will be COMPLETELY irrelevant.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Let me try to restate my understanding of the engine/frame analogy more rigorously:
Even if ARM cores are powerful engines, the I/O and operating system wrapped around them in virtually all such ARM CPUs and SOCs make them unfriendly to serious productive computing.
Does being immune to AIDS help you in your job of sucking and taking trucker dick in the ass at the glory hole in the Pilot Travel Center off of I-85 near your $1 house your parents gave you when your mom went back to Poland so she could live out her retirement dream of not having to deal with her retarded man child of a son?
See subject: Thought you had "unlimited downmodpoints"? Where ARE they? They're not on any of my posts - NOW:
Should you try it THAT weak bs again to "hide" my posts (when you get more by next time your 24 hr. "re-up" of them you MAY or MAY NOT get that is) on them, AGAIN??
THEN, I repost again NULLIFYING YOU easily, as always, LMAO @ U!
* See, unlike YOU who HIDES from me behind UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous & LYING imo above??? I do actually HAVE my UNLIMITED POSTING/REPOSTING ability to do the above to you...
APK
P.S.=> As always, EASILY to BLOW YOU AWAY Jealous "Lil' Jowie" (My Mom had nothing to do w/ my home - she never lived here but I did buy it from my Father + improved it tossing another, oh... 40k into it in summation since 2010 to IMPROVE it no less - which is, of course, BETTER THAN LIVING UNDER A BRIDGE like all TROLLS, like YOU, do (owning ZERO because you are, zeros, lol))... apk
because of a dusty environment (cocketiels), I use my laptop in a docking station -- always closed -- how, in your opinion, do I "close it more" to put it in suspend mode? ux people are killing me, breaking things in such creative, agile and disruptive ways
Linus "security doesn't matter" Torvalds should stick to programming and leave economics to those more educated.
It will kill more than just boot camp. When Apple went from powerpc to x86, they didn't hesitate to break compatibility with everything that came before (great way to get everyone to buy new hardware). I have no doubt they will use this opportunity to do it again.
I'm helping others declutter by storing them.
In terms of time (mainly) and money it would be cheaper for someone to buy one new than for me to wrap one up and ship it to a fellow geek.
Its back to PPC like code.
Time to learn to code again.
Ready for hours of code optimization all over again?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Take that Hackintoshians!
The logic mentioned about arch is broken. For starters most server work is in archagnostic environments like java,php,python and almost dotnet. Those env span a large percentage of server apps.
In terms of time (mainly) and money it would be cheaper for someone to buy one new than for me to wrap one up and ship it to a fellow geek.
Sell them as a bundle, and/or sell them to a local. If you leave them lying, they're just going to turn into landfill sooner or later. Many people are actively using devices like those today.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why would Apple pay any attention to Torvalds? Who at Apple gives a fuck what Torvalds thinks.
My 2nd home PC, after my BBC micro, was an Acorn Archimedes with the original ARM2 processor @ 8Mhz and 1M of memory.
You young things forget that ARM was originally developed as a desktop processor.
The fact that it was incredibly low powered was an unintended bonus which ensured ARMs survival, unlike Acorn, and rise to king of the mobiles and imbedded low powered applications.
It's a beautiful thing the ARM ISA and I think it is only right that 35 years later it gets a shot a returning to the desktop.
I sincerely hope others, and not just apple, give it one more shot breaking i386 dominance of the PC.
Haven't we been enthralled by that architecture for too long?
No. that's not how it works.
Yes indeedy --in theory-- but the optimizations are everything that makes tensorflow useful. Like SIMD or the pinning of memory for GPU transfers. So no, in reality. You might as well say that one could just compile Linux or Windows or Mac OSX for any cpu architecture just by flipping a command line arg.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What if it's not a laptop, or you don't want to flip it shut? I mean, on a Mac you can tap the power button and there's a Sleep button there
What you do is open the gnome-power-manager preferences, select the "general" tab, and then select what you'd like to happen when you press the suspend button, and the power button. This is essentially the same as on Windows. If I want to reboot Windows, I pick reboot out from the menu; if I press my power button, the machine goes to sleep. I have a hard reset button if I need it; macs used to, if you snapped the programmer's key into place. When I boot into Linux, the buttons work just the same, even though I am using gnome3. I don't spend much time in Linux these days, or I would probably install MATE.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When they release their new A12+ or A13 or whatever they're going to call it, I hope they have an Apple.dongle site where you can figure out which dongle works with it.
If someone had told you in 1978 that in 30 years you would be able to run your Unix programs on a device that fits in your pocket, would you have dismissed it as a fucking toy?
No we would have complained that it can't possibly take 30 years.
So this means no more boot camp as well?
Sure, but who wants that
Apple's market share literally doubled after switching to Intel and allowing Windows to dual boot. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to get people to switch to Mac was their need to use Windows (and before that MS-DOS) software. Once you could dual boot MacOS or Windows you no longer had to choose PC or Mac, you could have one computer that could run either software family.
... bad news for Apple.
Regarding emulation, it worked but was not practical. It barely works today where it does *not* have to emulate the CPU architecture. A switch to ARM would impose a huge burden on emulators and seriously and negatively impact performance.
While Microsoft might offer Windows on ARM you would have a lot of PC software that will not be recompiled for ARM. So dual booting ARM MacOS or ARM Windows gets you back to the bad old days of having the choose PC (ie x86) or something-not-PC. Good news for Dell, HP, etc
Torvalds is mistaken, price dictated x86 Linux replacing traditional *nix RISC vendors. The argument regarding developers wanting the same hardware in the field as in their desktop PC is erroneous. Most *nix software does not care what the underlying hardware is. They may want the same operating system and software stack but that is something quite different than the underlying hardware. If RedHat and Ubuntu offered their respective Linux distributions on ARM and the ARM servers were less expensive to buy and operate they would be used by many and their server side software would not know or care if its Intel or ARM under the hood.
Similar background :-)
... switching to a non-x86 CPU would be a return to the bad old days where people had to chooser Mac or PC. Presumably bringing back that choice would cut Apple's sales in half.
In theory apps will need to be recompiled by the developers. That is probably the best solution.
However another solution is to have software translate an x86 binary into an ARM binary. You still get native architecture speed but perhaps there is inefficiency since you started with an x86 binary, Source code would have provided more information and more opportunities to optimize the code. I'd lean towards this binary translation solution. Universal and likely good enough. To be clear I expect macOS, its bundled application and Apple's productivity applications will be recompiled and fully native. This binary translation is more for the 3rd party mac apps.
Then there is emulation. Doable but there is a big performance hit when you have to emulate the CPU architecture. When Apple switched to Intel and PC emulators no longer had to emulate the x86 architecture emulation the Windows environment became practical for some users.
The folks suggesting that iOS will replace macOS are almost certainly guessing wrong. macOS and iOS share some core operating system code and various APIs, but where their respective libraries and APIs begin to differ tends to be related to the user experience and the mobile user experience isn't going to work on a laptop or desktop. I think Apple has already made comments along these lines.
Additionally, until MS Windows on ARM is a common office and household operating system I doubt Apple will completely abandon Intel. Apple's marketshare doubled when users no longer had to choose PC or Mac, when they could run both macOS and MS Windows on the same computer. Boot into either operating system as required by the software they needed to run. Since Windows on ARM is not a common operating system, since Windows on x86 is what people overwhelmingly have and will need to be able to run
What people *might* be grossly exaggerating is a chromebook competitor. An ARM based Mac where macOS and its bundled applications and Apple's productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet, slideshow, etc) have all been recompiled for ARM. There are many users who would use nothing beyond these apps and a web browser. For them MS Windows and 3rd party Mac software are irrelevant and an ARM based Mac that has much better battery endurance would be great. Think of something like the MacBook Air moving to the ARM CPU but the MacBook Pro staying Intel.
What about Boot Camp? Presumably it goes away. I wonder how many people will find running Windows in a VM (especially one that has to emulate the CPU) will find have problems with that solution?
Look to the PowerPC era, emulation worked but it was not really practical to use. When Apple switched to Intel their marketshare doubled. With Boot Camp people no longer had to chooser Mac or PC, they could have both on the same computer. Switch to ARM and we are back having to make that choice.
Dang, I thought maybe you made the Linux version because I asked you to?!
Seriously, if they decide to do something "courageous" with the Mac Pro regarding the CPU, there will be unholy hell unleashed. If they do some BS modular cluster design where you slap on more CPU modules in some perverted NUMA config (assuming ARM can even do plug-and-play heterogeneous NUMA), it will be the end of days.
The only sane Mac pro option that will get all the early adopters salivating is a new Xeon with integrated on die Altera FPGA. Intel has been twiddling their thumbs over Xeon+Stratix integration for years now. Pushing out a FPGA equipped Xeon mac will get all the hipster data scientists to hit the buy button like it's going out of style.
Considering ALL of cloud is x86, i am not compelled by your argument.
Good-bye
Bullshit and i7s are DESKTOP SKUS
Good-bye
The news that Apple is dumping Intel has been there periodically about every 3-5 years,... Without any doubt every time they are negotiation a new deal with Intel... Sad!
In my software development company, the front end developers and graphical artists use Macs (Adobe + Sketch apps). I don't see a big issue there to move to an ARM based environment. ...) don't offer a ARM based solution, a Mac with an ARM processor is not a viable development platform for back end software. If one cannot run docker container at native speed, the efficiency of the developer is impacted significantly
But the same cannot be said about the back end developers. Ultimately the back end software is deployed on a linux x86 cloud server. As long as the major Cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP,
When you said ARM64 you most probably meant AArch64, officially there's no such thing as ARM64.
He never said "security doesn't matter'. He said security bugs is bugs, just like other bugs.
No, here is the summary, try KDE, Mate/Cinnamon, or XFCE.
Thing is, ARM isn't a system architecture, it's a processor core architecture. It's for when you want to build your own processor but don't want to have to design it from a blank piece of paper; i.e. you don't need to invent your own instruction set and all that super low level stuff. So it's not really ARM's job to produce a standard boot process and all that - that's up to the actual processor vendors like Qualcom, Samsung, Apple etc.
The poor OS is not real, though. iOS is OSX, with different libraries for making GUI applications, but with the same underpinnings.
One critical piece of the underpinnings differs: it's impossible for iOS applications to flip a page from writable to executable. Only the system executable loader can do that. The strict W^X policy on iOS makes it impossible to run a compiler like that included with Xcode or a JIT like PyPy. Any tool for programming on a device must be a full interpreter, like CPython or Swift Playgrounds, and a user ends up wasting most of the performance of a powerful ARM CPU on the overhead of this interpreter. This is what I meant by the usefulness of the iPad product being hamstrung by Apple's policies embodied in the OS.
The only good bug is a DEAD bug. /Starship Troopers
#DeleteFacebook
Wait, so the i7 in this Precision 5520 is a desktop SKU?
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
See subject: No questions asked, he's living a great life & enjoying it (spoke to him yesterday). He's 1 of a very few that make more retired than he did working in fact.
* Great guy!
APK
P.S.=> Me? Hey - I'm happy (happiest time in my life in fact since 2007 I've worked for MYSELF & made it work well enough to NOT have to work for others) too - now you UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous trolls who STALK me?? Clearly you're VERY UNHAPPY by way of comparison (that's probably your own fault too)... apk
See subject: That makes it even MORE worth doing it than my own "necessity is the mother of invention" situation I noted!
* :)
APK
P.S.=> "Onwards & UPWARDS!"... apk
No, they aren't. They officially claimed OpenGL had been replaced by Metal for more than 5 years, and no Metal-enabled app can run on x86/64 macOS.
Great point. ARM doesn't have a basic system specification like x86 PC's do. While its all kind of adhoc and a mess PC side, it does work. Originally the PC spec was just the IBM 5150 and as time went on it extended incrementally. But at least it has one. IMO the push to mass adopt ARM is not a good thing for the Linux world. Its not an open architecture and as you pointed out, the transition is fraught with technical issues. We would be much better off going to RISCV. Nobody "owns" it and the community can develop and agree upon a basic system platform spec. There is still a risk (heh) of fragmentation, one of FOSS' biggest weaknesses, but is the RISCV foundation can agree on a basic general purpose platform spec in the next few years then we can start making truly open PC's.
I've had really good luck with HP zbooks. The graphics uses mxm, so swapping the card is easy if what you have doesn't play nice, mine holds 5 hard drives, I have it at 32gb of RAM but I'm pretty sure they can do 64 without issue, and the build quality on every generation I've gotten has been really impressive.
Apple has a very old ARM license which allows them to make their own custom cores, which they do for iPhone/iPad. Most modern licensing requires using official ARM cores, to which custom SoC bits are added.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Stayed with what? Motorola wanted to make low-power embedded CPUs with 32-bit cores and pathetic front-side buses, and IBM wanted to make super-powered server CPUs that required liquid cooling. Nobody was making consumer desktop/laptop CPUs, so all Apple could do was put the toy CPUs into laptops and the monster CPUs into desktops.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
They are not going to turn computers into giant iOS devices.
They are not going to lock out 3rd party software distribution for computers.
They are probably not going to to switch all Macs to ARM.
What they are probably going to do is launch a MacBook Air that is ARM. macOS, its built-in applications and Apple's optional apps on the Mac App Store will be recompiled for ARM. Some people need nothing more than a mail client, a browser and a productivity suite like Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Such people will get along quite nicely on such a system. The MacBook Pro will remain Intel based for Windows support and legacy software support with full performance. Apple will encourage 3rd party developers to recompile for ARM but they will also probably offer an x86 binary to ARM binary conversion tool for legacy software that is not recompiled. This converted code will run better than x86 in an emulator but not as well as recompiled, in short it will probably be "good enough". Over time an ARM based Mac will become more capable for people that do not need Windows. However for the huge segment of Mac users that do need Windows some Macs will remain Intel based. Again, when Apple went Intel their marketshare doubled as people no longer had to choose PC or Mac, when people could get both on the same machine. Apple will continue to offer such machines however perhaps not at the entry level, MacBook Air, etc.
Fuck 3d modelling on arm.
Shouldn't you be using a GPU for that?
Apple has a history of painful processor transitions. I wouldn't expect this to be a smooth process. They are very much their way or the highway.
ARM is wonderful for the low end, but for development, you can fuck right off with that noise.
Development is generally highly parallelizable, so throwing more cores at it is a viable strategy. The big problem with current ARM computers when it comes to development is (yep it's that time again) not enough RAM. And, of course, not enough I/O. Both are highly solvable problems.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Apple has done transitions before: classic MacOS to MacOS X, Motorola 68000 to PowerPC, and PowerPC to Intel. They survived all three. Given their history, they're obviously capable of handling transitions well enough.
Not to mention that they've got something like FOUR variants of Darwin-based OSes (macOS, iOS, WatchOS, TVOS) that run on TWO entirely different architectures (x86, ARM) already. Add to that the fact that NeXTStep was built from the ground-up to be completely (or almost so) Processor-agnostic, and you've got the perfect combination of factors that tend to make me believe this will be very successful, and 99.8% of Mac Users will be none the wiser, overall. Not because they are clueless drones that only run Mac Store Applications; but because Apple will make the transition a nearly seamless experience, like they did with the PPC -> Intel switch.
Apple hasn't made servers in a very very long time.
Look into a NanoPC-T4 from FriendlyElec
Nifty board! As a matter of fact, I just bought 2 OrangePi PC2's with the Allwinner H5 onboard (quad-core A53). 43$ shipped for the both of them, though less powerful than this board or my phone by far.
However, I want to try them out instead of the RK3999 chipset because there's indications of OpenBSD support in addition to Armbian and Lubuntu, and I think it'd be fun to play with some ideas I have at a bare metal level. If someone got the RK3999 running OpenBSD, I'd be much more interested, because there's more powerful boards available--like the one you showed.
If you're using them to do real, professional, paid work, Apple computers are reasonably cheap. If you're using them at home for things that won't make a profit, they're expensive.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That's actually not quite right - at the time they said that web apps were a "sweet" solution - but they never claimed native apps were a bad idea.
In contract, has has said a number of times they think combining iOS and macOS is a bad idea. They can and will bring elements from one to the other that make sense, but they've always maintained keeping a difference is a good idea.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
At least Apple's own engineers will be using Mac for their own work, unlike Microsoft engineers using Dell.
If you're in an area with high geek density, posting to Craigslist and just leaving them on your front porch or equivalent may be a good way to get them in the hands of people who'd make better use of them, if that's a goal of yours.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
But, more and more, I just use a bluetooth keyboard from Omoton and use Termius to SSH in to my servers and the laptop from my phone.
That's fine if you already have a cellular data plan for other reasons or transit in your city has Wi-Fi. It's not so fine if, like me, you would have to upgrade from no data plan to a data plan in order to use the SSH client during the commute to and from the office. That's why I still carry a compact laptop for coding on transit.
Sure, that's a valid use case. The big thing I miss about current generation unrooted devices is the lack of ability to compile (to machine code) and execute directly on the hardware. That's the big showstopper, and the reason I still have a laptop and server dedicated to providing "backend" support for the phone's role as primary device/smart terminal.
The range of coding that can be done with an Android device, unrooted, right now, is in pretty rough shape. I might use QPython and QPython3 to do a few small things directly on the phone, but I run into limits pretty quick. If it's useful, that code is moved into a remote git repo and expanded with usage on a laptop, where I can more easily make use of various libraries and system resources. That's how the latest project got its start: I needed some answers on a project, and all I had handy was my phone. Later, it got a frontend for desktop usage.
But, it's rare that I don't have connectivity. I'm happy to pay for the "unlimited" data plan. Between my wife and I, we blow through 60+ GB of traffic a month on two phones alone (we both have laptops, but both use a smartphone as a primary device). And frequently, the phone *is* the WiFi for my laptop. A more typical scenario is editing directly in Vim over an SSH connection, or, less commonly, grabbing a copy of the code to to work on locally in DroidVim via SFTP/git.
As to tooling, I'm not an IDE person. I really like Vim, and that makes it very easy to be happy *and* productive on minimal systems--basically anywhere I can get a halfway decent terminal. (I'm a keyboard person all day long, so anything to avoid the mouse.) My concession to IDEs is NERDTree and a few bits of shell script. That also makes it trivial to dump my usual setup in a brand new machine, VM, headless, or otherwise, and have it be set up to do useful work.
A little off-topic, but tl;dr: We need low-level hardware access on mobile platforms to make them really viable without having to screw around trying to root phones we should own in the first place. (I've said I like ARM, but I'd also really like to see a halfway decent, $30 RISC-V board.) And... to really make them useful, they still need fast cellular radios. My primary ISP, from a usage standpoint, is my phone provider, not my home ISP.
This model isn't for everyone, but, I always remember wanting more out of my PDAs and calculators. I wanted a full-blown desktop replacement. We are nearly there, but low-level access is the big killer.
The range of coding that can be done with an Android device, unrooted, right now, is in pretty rough shape.
Did rootless GNU environments, such as Termux and GNURoot, stop working in recent versions of Android? Some Slashdot users seem to swear by GNURoot combined with XSDL.
But, it's rare that I don't have connectivity. I'm happy to pay for the "unlimited" data plan. Between my wife and I, we blow through 60+ GB of traffic a month on two phones alone (we both have laptops, but both use a smartphone as a primary device). And frequently, the phone *is* the WiFi for my laptop.
Last I checked, carriers limited "unlimited" data plans' hotspot use (what you call "the phone *is* the WiFi for my laptop") to 10 GB per month. This means that for people who cancel home Internet in order to afford a cellular data plan, semiannual feature updates in Ubuntu or Windows might have to happen at a public library.
Termux works, and I do use it, but it has weird issues with accessing parts of the filesystem and convincing tools to work right due to Android's limitations. I haven't looked at GNURoot. As to the 10 GB limit--that part is real and frustrating and stupidly artificial. I'm already using the transfer! I tried doing without the home connection, but I caved in after maybe 3 months. It does mean that any heavy duty network traffic for the laptop needs to be at home, work, or somewhere like a library, as you said.
There are real issues with the setup, but the only way I see them getting addressed is with individual effort. I find the services of many large corporations extremely convenient, and really don't want to void the warranty on the newest device I use (afterwards, who cares? I've got an original T-Mobile G1, rooted, still works just fine, if horribly out of date), but I would also prefer to see computing devices owned by the people holding them.
ARM is good for consolidating on a low-power many-core platform. Big iron, as mentioned elsewhere, still has real value. It just doesn't need to be in everything. Going forward, I'd really love to see ARM replaced with RISC-V, so that open hardware might actually be a useful thing.
Yes and there's no such thing as x86-64 either, Intel marketing decided it was to be called "IA32-T" or some other nonsense. It's best to ignore the vendor's PR names in such things, particularly when they're as inane as "AArch64".
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Just watch as end users bear the brunt of developers struggles on the new platform and millions of new bugs to make things like pro tools crap out.
Because Linux does not suck, if you put in even just an ounce of effort.
And they call Mac user mindless fanboys.