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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.
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..
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.
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
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.
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.
No less than Google has announced that Spectre vulnerabilities are here to stay and cannot be resolved in hardware or software. Researchers presented a new Spectre attack that cannot be defeated. Existing x86 and high-end ARM designs are all vulnerable and will remain broken for any kind of meaningful security.
Google: Software is never going to be able to fix Spectre-type bugs, 2/23/19
If Intel's top CPUs are unfixable, that may be influencing Apple's decision to move to ARM, especially if Apple's chip guys think they can fix those bugs in hardware.
An A13X CPU with decent cooling and high clock rate with multiple neural engines could make a very compelling MacBook Air. Even more so if it was immune to these speculative execution attacks like the various Spectre exploits.
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.
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.'"
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.