This is a super link bait title for a very short, speculative article.
Who knows if Apple will switch to ARM for their laptops. Even Apple may not know yet. We can be sure they are making some, just as they had various x86 efforts under way for many years during the PPC era.
This article only cites Intel sources, Of course this is something Intel should be concerned about, and causing some uproar in the press is a good way to lobby a large customer.
As much as Apple has neglected pros moving to ARM would definitely put video editors using Final Cut in the lurch. Its only really their macbook/macbook air lineups where a move to ARM/RISC looks truly appealing. I don't really think Apple wants to completely abandon creative Pros.
Yet if you aren't going to move the ENTIRE lineup off of Intel CPUs you're really limiting any potential benefit.
Given how smooth Apple's transition from PPC to Intel was, and how much experience Apple has with ARM in their portable lines -- if/when the complete transition to ARM happens it'll probably be a brief blip on everyone's radar and likely increase competition both price and performance-wise in the desktop sector.
What's stopping Apple from adding hardware-level emulation to their SOC's, even if it's only partial functions, to ensure cross-compatibility doesn't take a serious toll on performance? x86 would be patent-encumbered but I'm sure there are a few creative ways to reduce that burden.
At the time that Apple went from PPC to x86, x86 had a significant performance advantage such that emulation wasn’t a big deal. Currently, there is no such advantage. In addition, many professional Mac programs make use of SIMD instructions such as AVX. Trying to emulate these will further increase the performance penalty. In addition, x86 has relatively strong memory ordering compared to ARM. There may be code that get away with stuff on x86, that will cause subtle bugs on ARM. Again, it is likely professional programs that do this.
I can't honestly accept that the transition was "smooth". Devices that used to work and used to get updates simply stopped at one point. Because Apple likes to couple OS updates and app updates, and also believes backward compatibility is for [not their customer], I had to talk a grad student down when he sent his thesis to a department chair who opened it, saved it in a non-compatible version of Pages, and sent it back. He could not open that file without upgrading his...2 year old computer?
The transition wasn't smooth unless you had a corporate backer who paid for your milti-thousand-dollar hardware regularly.
"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"
Although this may very well be true and somewhat beneficial (see the related story about "unified Mac/iOS Apps from Ars Technica), the existence of "fat binaries" on Mach means that having multiple CPU architectures does not prevent shipping single combined binaries (for some definition of "single") today.
NeXTstep shipped single binaries for 4 architectures (68K, Intel, HP PA and SPARC), and due to the app-wrapper architecture, you could actually add the binaries for different OPENSTEP platforms as well, for example Yellow Box for Windows and OPENSTEP for Solaris.
Not sure anyone actually did this, but you could easily have had an actual single program supporting 3 operating system and 4-6 CPU architectures (if you include the 88K and PPC systems they had in the lab).
The A12X is already comparable to some Intel CPUs in terms of performance. Yet its power and thermal budget is tiny. The Macbook Pro 13" has an 83 Wh battery [1], while the iPad Pro 12.9" only has 36 Wh.
What I like to imagine is an ARM Macbook with the equivalent of two A12s. That will give you an outstanding performance with better battery life. You'll also get further growth potential that Apple has demonstrated year over year, compared to Intel CPUs, which have stagnated.
I'm terribly excited about this. And yes, getting your Docker images to run on ARM will be a bit of a drag, but in the long term, this sounds like the future.
The A12X is a ten billion transistor 10 watt 7nm chip. The Intel chips have fewer transistors, a 10nm or 14nm process, and some of them have a similar power budget.
The A12X is amazing but you cannot have your cake and eat it too.
>The Macbook Pro 13" has an 83 Wh battery [1], while the iPad Pro 12.9" only has 36 Wh.
What has the size of battery in Mac and iPad got to do with its SoC / CPU. The A12X is only comparable to Intel under a sustained Sub 10W workload. We have yet to see how it will perform in the higher TDP range. Scaling CPU TDP up or Down is not a simple task.
My only worry is if they will lock down the Macintosh to only allow signed or, worse, apps from the App Store. If its just a move to ARM then cool, but I still want to have 32GB of memory and some decent storage. That ship has sailed, I guess, but I really want a Mac Pro worthy of the name. I miss the G4 case.
That would mean disabling the ability to use all command line tools not included with the base system. What would Apple gain from doing that? They would certainly alienate a large number of power users in the process.
Macs are heavily used as development machines, so it won't be locked down for programming. It will be the first machine with programming capabilities with awesome battery life.
What's even more fun is that it can mean that some companies switch to ARM servers if their environment works well for development (just what Linus told that it won't happen)
I wonder why this is perceived to be a problem in the first place. Company A (apple microsoft google) wants to move to ARM from x86. x86 has all the applications that existing users want. When they move to ARM they have 0 applications. As a response they try to offer you to use ARM apps from their existing store but then they lock down the APIs that made the x86 apps possible in the first place. In other words they aren't even giving the platform a chance to grow. They expect it to be usable from the first day on. In my eyes this doesn't make any sense at all. It only took 12 years for the app market to become this big and the vast majority of apps were developed in the latter half. Why shouldn't it take less than 6 years to completely transition the old apps to the new ARM platform? However no one is willing to wait that long for some reason.
They promised Mac Pro successors in 2019, and Mac to ARM transition in 2020.?
I still think all these are negotiating tactics. The Mac is now primarily a prosumer and pro devices only. Apple should milk it for as long as possible with spec update now and then. The message to Intel's new CEO if you don't give us better pricing, we will move to ARM ( along with our own 5G Modem ). My guess is that since Intel's new CEO is a Finance Guy, lowering prices isn't something he will do. And 5G Modem is also one of those business that makes little to no margin from Intel's perspective. Intel's ex CSO Aicha Evans, the person responsible for getting the Modem business moving despite internal pressure against it, has also left Intel.
Or may be Apple really do have a Grand plan. Apple is one of the largest buyer of servers. May be the ARM N1 allows them to go top to bottom ARM. From Devices to Servers. ( And the return of XServe... I can only dream of it )
I don't think it's negotiating tactic, or any complex strategy. I just think Apple look at the MacBook and Air and see them as mobile devices far closer in market fit to the iPhone/iPad than the MacBook Pro. And given that they're already manufacturing their own chips with the power/perf profile as needed for mobile devices, why not use them?
One more stone into their garden - they got Infineon's modem business for truckloads of money, despite it already being dead. Then, they sank even bigger amounts of cash into it for nothing. They all wanted to get "megaclients," ignoring the fact that nobody of them will use a standalone modem. They only had chance to get it off the ground in China, but they never seemed to even acknowledge the existence of Chinese domestic market.
I don't think they ever did promise that. They made the original announcement in 2017 and only announced "not 2017", they never actually committed to a date.
I fear a fast deprecation for x86 support like in [1].
After releasing the first Intel Macs in 2006 we already saw the last OS X release with PowerPC support only one year later in 2007. I believe a Mac has a longer lifetime than a smartphone or tablet and I hope that the Apple ecosystem will not leave the Intel devices behind so fast.
The other uncertainty is the upcoming move to Marzipan apps. If its full release becomes somewhat ARM-exclusive, we might have the same risks as with Windows 8 and their Metro disaster. In the case of an unified iOS/macOS-Hybrid these ARM Macs might have no fallback anymore to the already established macOS ecosystem. (like Windows RT)
I think that's overstating what happened. What I'd look at is the first release of MacOS that didn't support the old hardware. That was Snow Leopard in 2009. At that point, PowerPC users couldn't upgrade to the newest OS. Apple released the last security update to Leopard August 13, 2009. If you had bought a Powerbook May 15, 2006, the day before they announced the MacBook, you would have gotten three years and three months out of it before you stopped getting security updates. These days people wait longer than that to replace their computers, but the computer was definitely not a brick after a year.
The faster they rip the band-aid off the better. Apple only does this because they can. They can only do this because they control so much of the ecosystem. This is a good thing. This is a benefit of them holding control over so much of the apple ecosystem. This moves the industry forward.
I don't even use apple stuff because I don't like the monopoly. But that doesn't mean I can't reap the rewards and f a faster moving industry.
I've been playing with a Windows ARM64 laptop and it's weirdly sluggish mainly because I think ARM IO and GPU cannot compete with Intel's offering. You can run benchmarks and the CPU seems decent for a laptop, but it's all the other things that make a great user experience.
I'm skeptical that Apple would do this to replace Intel as an option, especially in the Pro line-up. This is either a move for a co-processor to aid in better battery, or a lightweight, LTE/5G connected laptop that exists on its own. shrug
I'm not sure it will work for some tasks at all. Specifically A/V editing may suffer, adobe tools in general likely won't see the light of day, and the day to day software won't be a clean migration most likely.
It could actually be a great opportunity for Adobe to pair with a Linux vendor (IBM, Canonical) to create a first class supported environment, if they have to do the architecture migrations anyway. I also think that Apple should probably create a gui toolkit as an alternative to electron for mac supported apps, or possibly a react native option.
It will be interesting, but if they kill their pro lineup, I don't know they can compete, too many are already using 6-7 year old mac pros, and this will kill hackintosh which is what a lot of pros have gone to.
That laptop doesn't have an Apple CPU. Apple ARM silicon is competitive with Intel today. In a few years it simply won't be possible to buy a PC that's performance competitive with an ARM-based Mac.
Back when I used to encourage people to buy Macbooks (2010-2016), the ability to boot into Windows natively to run programs with no OS X equivalent usually gave them the level of comfort necessary to jump ship.
I actually wonder what a big loss it would be. I was one of those who switched because of the availability of Boot Camp and have long since left Windows behind. But how many native apps do people really use these days, compared to web sites? I genuinely wonder.
If you're doing everything on Docker anyways it kind of doesn't matter, as Docker already runs on top of a linux virtual machine on OSX. As long as Apple puts in the effort to bridge their hypervisor framework[1] this should continue to work.
I know on Linux, you can use qemu as a compatibility layer to run binaries for different architecture. I would expect that it would be relatively simple to do something like that on Darwin. Possibly even literally using qemu; I don't use Apple products personally, so for all that I know support could already exist.
Docker is fully arm compatible, so it should be very easy to run these apps on ARM cloud servers. In fact, as ARM begins to take over the cloud, this could sell a lot more MacBooks for developers.
“For Intel, of course, it would mean the loss of a significant customer, albeit probably not a huge hit to its bottom line”
ARM could well become a huge breakthrough for tech. For the first time, it’s possible to license and customize silicon to purpose with much less overhead. We’re used to the usual combination of specialized processors (cpu/gpu), but this will open up further specialization - crypto (proc-bound), file systems (possibly some parallelism, need for gobs of flash), AI, UI (proc-bound, benefits from high frequency and no interrupts), who knows what else.
Despite having said for years that ARM based macs will be a thing, I no longer think this is the case.
For Apple, it's simply not worth it. They've been conspicuously moving development resource from the mac to iDevices for the last ten years and the mac is increasingly becoming an (actually very good) development platform for the iDevices in question. I mean, c'mon, the big feature for the last release of macOS was a 'dark' skin ... and from the hardware side all we want is a keyboard that doesn't shit itself.
On the other hand the iPhone on it's own is one of the largest businesses on earth, and is under sustained attack by Google/Samsung/Huawei - the latter two of which are prepared to openly 'cheat' by any means possible. Under such circumstances would you throw significant resource at a dying market, ~10% revenue, where Intel are quite prepared to do the majority of the heavy lifting for you?
This is actually an argument for Apple to switch entirely to ARM. If they could consolidate engineers, it could continue to invest in Mac without needing crazy growth numbers to justify it.
Why would they do this? They'd need a new line of ARM variant CPUs to meet the various performance points of the different macbooks and imacs. And they'd be amortizing those costs over a rather small (for them) number of units.
And that would do very little to address the costs of maintaining the OSX software stack, very little of which is CPU specific. Most of those costs are in maintaining a rather different model of UI interaction, software installation, and backwards compatibility.
My guess is that they have developed this capability in-house as a form of insurance, and will keep it around and alive as a way of keeping their Intel costs reasonable.
Given the success of the last CPU arch transition, there's honestly no reason why the transitional state couldn't be semi-permanent with powerful desktops sporting top Intel chips and ultra-light laptops running souped-up A-series chips from Apple. All it takes is for developers to be producing multi-architecture binaries, something macOS is already good at and something developers were doing for years not that long ago.
Remember the WWDC 2020 keynote when they said: "Almost all of your Mac apps will compile for the A14 chip with zero code changes!"
The pricing improvements that they get on another round of Intel processors might well be worth the entire chip design cost, especially when they are using their ARM chips in the iPad line anyhow. Although by now, the "give us good prices or we'll leave" factor might already be priced-in.
But until there is more information, most users and application developers won't really have to worry. This is all still very speculative at this stage.
[+] [-] gumby|7 years ago|reply
Who knows if Apple will switch to ARM for their laptops. Even Apple may not know yet. We can be sure they are making some, just as they had various x86 efforts under way for many years during the PPC era.
This article only cites Intel sources, Of course this is something Intel should be concerned about, and causing some uproar in the press is a good way to lobby a large customer.
[+] [-] TheOperator|7 years ago|reply
Yet if you aren't going to move the ENTIRE lineup off of Intel CPUs you're really limiting any potential benefit.
[+] [-] icanhackit|7 years ago|reply
What's stopping Apple from adding hardware-level emulation to their SOC's, even if it's only partial functions, to ensure cross-compatibility doesn't take a serious toll on performance? x86 would be patent-encumbered but I'm sure there are a few creative ways to reduce that burden.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calciphus|7 years ago|reply
The transition wasn't smooth unless you had a corporate backer who paid for your milti-thousand-dollar hardware regularly.
[+] [-] mpweiher|7 years ago|reply
Although this may very well be true and somewhat beneficial (see the related story about "unified Mac/iOS Apps from Ars Technica), the existence of "fat binaries" on Mach means that having multiple CPU architectures does not prevent shipping single combined binaries (for some definition of "single") today.
NeXTstep shipped single binaries for 4 architectures (68K, Intel, HP PA and SPARC), and due to the app-wrapper architecture, you could actually add the binaries for different OPENSTEP platforms as well, for example Yellow Box for Windows and OPENSTEP for Solaris.
Not sure anyone actually did this, but you could easily have had an actual single program supporting 3 operating system and 4-6 CPU architectures (if you include the 88K and PPC systems they had in the lab).
[+] [-] wodenokoto|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andr|7 years ago|reply
What I like to imagine is an ARM Macbook with the equivalent of two A12s. That will give you an outstanding performance with better battery life. You'll also get further growth potential that Apple has demonstrated year over year, compared to Intel CPUs, which have stagnated.
I'm terribly excited about this. And yes, getting your Docker images to run on ARM will be a bit of a drag, but in the long term, this sounds like the future.
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/apple-produc...
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|7 years ago|reply
The A12X is amazing but you cannot have your cake and eat it too.
[+] [-] jiadsngunuio|7 years ago|reply
It's plausible it's competitive with modern x86 stuff. I just haven't seen any evidence one way or the other.
[+] [-] ksec|7 years ago|reply
What has the size of battery in Mac and iPad got to do with its SoC / CPU. The A12X is only comparable to Intel under a sustained Sub 10W workload. We have yet to see how it will perform in the higher TDP range. Scaling CPU TDP up or Down is not a simple task.
[+] [-] tyingq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chongli|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiphias2|7 years ago|reply
What's even more fun is that it can mean that some companies switch to ARM servers if their environment works well for development (just what Linus told that it won't happen)
[+] [-] imtringued|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apostacy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|7 years ago|reply
I still think all these are negotiating tactics. The Mac is now primarily a prosumer and pro devices only. Apple should milk it for as long as possible with spec update now and then. The message to Intel's new CEO if you don't give us better pricing, we will move to ARM ( along with our own 5G Modem ). My guess is that since Intel's new CEO is a Finance Guy, lowering prices isn't something he will do. And 5G Modem is also one of those business that makes little to no margin from Intel's perspective. Intel's ex CSO Aicha Evans, the person responsible for getting the Modem business moving despite internal pressure against it, has also left Intel.
Or may be Apple really do have a Grand plan. Apple is one of the largest buyer of servers. May be the ARM N1 allows them to go top to bottom ARM. From Devices to Servers. ( And the return of XServe... I can only dream of it )
[+] [-] stupidcar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Marsymars|7 years ago|reply
I don't think they ever did promise that. They made the original announcement in 2017 and only announced "not 2017", they never actually committed to a date.
[+] [-] sjwright|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hs86|7 years ago|reply
After releasing the first Intel Macs in 2006 we already saw the last OS X release with PowerPC support only one year later in 2007. I believe a Mac has a longer lifetime than a smartphone or tablet and I hope that the Apple ecosystem will not leave the Intel devices behind so fast.
The other uncertainty is the upcoming move to Marzipan apps. If its full release becomes somewhat ARM-exclusive, we might have the same risks as with Windows 8 and their Metro disaster. In the case of an unified iOS/macOS-Hybrid these ARM Macs might have no fallback anymore to the already established macOS ecosystem. (like Windows RT)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_...
[+] [-] cameldrv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lugg|7 years ago|reply
The faster they rip the band-aid off the better. Apple only does this because they can. They can only do this because they control so much of the ecosystem. This is a good thing. This is a benefit of them holding control over so much of the apple ecosystem. This moves the industry forward.
I don't even use apple stuff because I don't like the monopoly. But that doesn't mean I can't reap the rewards and f a faster moving industry.
[+] [-] jarjoura|7 years ago|reply
I'm skeptical that Apple would do this to replace Intel as an option, especially in the Pro line-up. This is either a move for a co-processor to aid in better battery, or a lightweight, LTE/5G connected laptop that exists on its own. shrug
[+] [-] tracker1|7 years ago|reply
It could actually be a great opportunity for Adobe to pair with a Linux vendor (IBM, Canonical) to create a first class supported environment, if they have to do the architecture migrations anyway. I also think that Apple should probably create a gui toolkit as an alternative to electron for mac supported apps, or possibly a react native option.
It will be interesting, but if they kill their pro lineup, I don't know they can compete, too many are already using 6-7 year old mac pros, and this will kill hackintosh which is what a lot of pros have gone to.
[+] [-] bitwize|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerotwelve|7 years ago|reply
Back when I used to encourage people to buy Macbooks (2010-2016), the ability to boot into Windows natively to run programs with no OS X equivalent usually gave them the level of comfort necessary to jump ship.
Losing Boot Camp is going to be a big loss.
[+] [-] untog|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MBCook|7 years ago|reply
Obviously it wouldn’t run most of the software people actually care about.
But they could keep it.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jasonjei|7 years ago|reply
Much of my development environment emulates production in Docker x86, but an ARM-based development environment would have to emulate x86, no?
Alternatively, this could make for building apps in ARM cloud more viable...
[+] [-] tedivm|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morpheuskafka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianai|7 years ago|reply
ARM could well become a huge breakthrough for tech. For the first time, it’s possible to license and customize silicon to purpose with much less overhead. We’re used to the usual combination of specialized processors (cpu/gpu), but this will open up further specialization - crypto (proc-bound), file systems (possibly some parallelism, need for gobs of flash), AI, UI (proc-bound, benefits from high frequency and no interrupts), who knows what else.
[+] [-] RantyDave|7 years ago|reply
For Apple, it's simply not worth it. They've been conspicuously moving development resource from the mac to iDevices for the last ten years and the mac is increasingly becoming an (actually very good) development platform for the iDevices in question. I mean, c'mon, the big feature for the last release of macOS was a 'dark' skin ... and from the hardware side all we want is a keyboard that doesn't shit itself.
On the other hand the iPhone on it's own is one of the largest businesses on earth, and is under sustained attack by Google/Samsung/Huawei - the latter two of which are prepared to openly 'cheat' by any means possible. Under such circumstances would you throw significant resource at a dying market, ~10% revenue, where Intel are quite prepared to do the majority of the heavy lifting for you?
[+] [-] jarjoura|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandinj|7 years ago|reply
And that would do very little to address the costs of maintaining the OSX software stack, very little of which is CPU specific. Most of those costs are in maintaining a rather different model of UI interaction, software installation, and backwards compatibility.
My guess is that they have developed this capability in-house as a form of insurance, and will keep it around and alive as a way of keeping their Intel costs reasonable.
[+] [-] sjwright|7 years ago|reply
Remember the WWDC 2020 keynote when they said: "Almost all of your Mac apps will compile for the A14 chip with zero code changes!"
[+] [-] glangdale|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deca6cda37d0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmwelt|7 years ago|reply
But until there is more information, most users and application developers won't really have to worry. This is all still very speculative at this stage.
[+] [-] benj111|7 years ago|reply
Modern Intel processors aren't X86 internally anyway, so why can't you just slap an ARM decoder on an Intel core?
[+] [-] JudasGoat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpalomaki|7 years ago|reply
As travel companion Macbook style device is better than tablet (IMO). Proper keyboard and design which allows it to be used on lap.
I would really like to see Apple’s take on Lenovo Yoga style device.
[+] [-] mahgnous|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]