Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

[Uvaman2]

I think you mistake ARM as low end chips. ARM is just an architecture. The Apple A11 is 5-10x faster then the chips you find in the cheapo $100 chromebooks. The A11 in the current iphones is actually faster then the mid range 4 core i5s. If Apple does switch their laptop/desktop machines they won't be using A11s. They will be using A12x or A13 with custom ASIC designed for those machines. Yes Intel should be very worried, even if Apple doesn't switch in the next few years to their own custom ARM chips. ARM is with out a doubt starting to gain serious traction in Servers and even Super computing.

I hear the claim of apple super arms chips and don't really have anything to deny it, however, can testing be really oranges to oranges? Is an iphone chip being challenged by the same demands as a chip in a desktop?

 

[ChadD]

I hear the claim of apple super arms chips and don't really have anything to deny it, however, can testing be really oranges to oranges? Is an iphone chip being challenged by the same demands as a chip in a desktop?

You can run identical synthetic tests sure.

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-benchmarks-fastest-phone,review-4676.html

https://www.geekbench.com/

Of course it doesn't tell the entire story... just like a GPU kicking synthetics in the nuts doesn't mean that will translate into X or Y real world game.

Still it gives you a very good idea of how much math it can crunch and how fast. When giving identical math to do yes. The A11 is a real screaming chip vs most mid range x86 chips. Give them another generation or two and the ability thanks to ARMS architecture to add custom ASICs and yes I believe apples arm machines could easily out perform x86 not counting things like threadrippers and i9s.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Nothing wrong with a Chromebook, they're undoubtedly growing in popularity. The Google Pixelbook is upwards of $1000.00.

They are great, as long as I can flash them with a bios and install Linux, or Windows.

My Chromebox was a great little device with Linux on it.

Otherwise? No thanks!

 

[IdiotInCharge]

Honestly, math crunching ability is pretty meaningless. It's not what x86 does, we have SIMD units for that.

x86 is used as an interface, and the CPU's that Intel and to a lesser extend AMD produce are very good at running branching code.

You wanna crunch numbers use an SIMD unit or boot it to GPU compute.

 

[Neo_East]

I hear the claim of apple super arms chips and don't really have anything to deny it, however, can testing be really oranges to oranges? Is an iphone chip being challenged by the same demands as a chip in a desktop?

Check this out, AMD's ARM flavor of ZEN, K12, reportedly outperforms ZEN x86-- https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...r-than-their-x86-one-ditch-bulldozer.2395754/

Another source, Jim Keller, former Apple/AMD engineer genius that designed Apple A7 and K12 and Ryzen, speaks to the innate architectural efficiencies of ARM that translate into performance advantage over x86:



ARM's disruption of x86 across all computing categories is academic now.

Server win over x86 will come from business model, customizability, and supplier ecosystem more than anything else.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Check this out, AMD's ARM flavor of ZEN, K12, reportedly outperforms ZEN x86-- https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...r-than-their-x86-one-ditch-bulldozer.2395754/

Another source, Jim Keller, former Apple/AMD engineer genius that designed Apple A7 and K12 and Ryzen, speaks to the innate architectural efficiencies of ARM that translate into performance advantage over x86:



ARM's disruption of x86 across all computing categories is academic now.

Server win over x86 will come from business model, customizability, and supplier ecosystem more than anything else.

Those are four year old speculations based on pre-production information from Keller.

I wouldn't treat them as reliable in the slightest.

 

[WorldExclusive]

This move will also bring BootCamp to an end.
I would never buy a Mac computer with a proprietary CPU.

 

[Red Falcon]

This move will also bring BootCamp to an end.
I would never buy a Mac computer with a proprietary CPU.

Not necessarily, and "proprietary CPU"?
Apple has run MOS 6502, m68k 68000 to 68040, and PowerPC 601 to 970MP processors in their systems since 1976-2005 - hardly proprietary.

It has only been in the last 12 years that one could run Windows or other x86/x86_64 based operating systems on their computers.
At a minimum, I'm almost positive one could boot into GNU/Linux or NetBSD operating systems using Apple's in-house ARM ISA.

As for dual booting Windows on their systems, it all depends on whether or not they include an x86_64 core in their future SoCs, or if emulation of x86_64 code will be used or allowed.
It is understandable how and why they are going to do this, and is much more advantageous for them to do so than it was in the m68k and PowerPC days, since those CPUs were neither developed in-house or, in the case of m68k, having the ISA come to a physical end.

You might end up being right about BootCamp, but I would be very surprised if they did this completely so as to lock out all other operating systems.

 

[ChadD]

Well seeing as we are taking about things that don't quite exist at this point... boot camp loading windows arm doesn't sound completely insane. Not sure why you would want to boot windows anyway. But I guess people are in fact doing that. Booting Linux ARM builds should work assuming Apple doesn't do something crazy to their arm chips anyway.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Well seeing as we are taking about things that don't quite exist at this point... boot camp loading windows arm doesn't sound completely insane. Not sure why you would want to boot windows anyway. But I guess people are in fact doing that. Booting Linux ARM builds should work assuming Apple doesn't do something crazy to their arm chips anyway.

Yeah, but that mostly defeats the purpose of bootcamp.

The only people I have seen regularly using bootcamp have done so for some light games or specialty software, none of which are likely to have windows ARM builds..

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

As for dual booting Windows on their systems, it all depends on whether or not they include an x86_64 core in their future SoCs, or if emulation of x86_64 code will be used or allowed.

I'd imagine this would require some sort of x86 licensing from intel, so I'm betting against this

 

[Red Falcon]

I'd imagine this would require some sort of x86 licensing from intel, so I'm betting against this

That's a very good point, and I didn't think of that.
Even so, it may still be possible to boot into other ARM-based operating systems outside of x86_64-based ones, but only time will tell for sure.

As for Windows, other than RT (or whatever is out in 2020), it might not be possible outside of emulation if your assumptions are indeed correct.