Intel Officials Allegedly Say that Apple Could Move to ARM Soon

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
Staff member
Joined
Mar 3, 2018
Messages
1,713
A recent report from Axios claims that Apple is "widely expected" to move their Mac lineup to custom ARM chips in the next few years. The publication cites a Bloomberg report claiming that Apple plans to merge their software stack and app ecosystem across all platforms, though that could theoretically be achieved with ARM ISA emulation on existing x86 processors. However, Axios also said "Although the company has yet to say so publicly, developers and Intel officials have privately told Axios they expect such a move as soon as next year." Thanks to AppleInsider for the tip.

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. History lesson: Apple has already made several big shifts in the 25-year history of the Mac, moving from Motorola chips to PowerPC processors and then to Intel. It's also moved from the classic Macintosh operating system to the Unix-based Mac OS X.
 
I would think that apple users would benefit more from a move to AMD since their chips are so studio application focused. Seems like a lot of development money to be throwing around on consumer products. Seems like it also would be that much more difficult to support even after they get past the stage where they're supporting two different user bases on two different OS.
 
And they'll most likely get increasingly more expensive, as well, to re-coup all these development dollars. Plus the Apple Tax (tm). Say hello to 15" Mac Book Pros starting at $3k. 13" starting at 2k.
 
I would think that apple users would benefit more from a move to AMD since their chips are so studio application focused. Seems like a lot of development money to be throwing around on consumer products. Seems like it also would be that much more difficult to support even after they get past the stage where they're supporting two different user bases on two different OS.
Apple moving to their own thing. They proven they don't give two fucks about their computer performance. Companies been ditching apple cause Apple has been lacking in the professional market. The professionals have already moved on to PC and all Apple cares about is the iSheep.
 
Apple moving to their own thing. They proven they don't give two fucks about their computer performance. Companies been ditching apple cause Apple has been lacking in the professional market. The professionals have already moved on to PC and all Apple cares about is the iSheep.
They made this very clear when they really stopped refreshing their computer lineup every year. They are clearly focused on the iPhone crowd even though that's starting to wane as well.
 
They made this very clear when they really stopped refreshing their computer lineup every year. They are clearly focused on the iPhone crowd even though that's starting to wane as well.

The "What's a PC?" ad with the IPad should have probably clued everyone in as to how they are shifting, this is just cheaping out, ARM processors aren't really that expensive, especially when bought in bulk and like it or not The A-series is just another specialized ARM product similar to NVidia's Tegra line and Samsung's Xy series, this is just another method of removing overhead to increase profits. I mean they only have 10% of the overall marketshare worldwide, PC is the rest Windows I believe last I checked was 86% with the other 4% being Linux and Custom OS.
 
Apple moving to their own thing. They proven they don't give two fucks about their computer performance. Companies been ditching apple cause Apple has been lacking in the professional market. The professionals have already moved on to PC and all Apple cares about is the iSheep.

A lot of people myself included have moved to Surface pro tablet/desktop. While the original surface wasnt so hot I think Microsoft made a really smart decision attacking apple studio user base.
 
SO, how they are going to use AMDs GPU for video acceleration?
Not that it matters, it will be glorious to all their fans.
 
Apple moving to their own thing. They proven they don't give two fucks about their computer performance. Companies been ditching apple cause Apple has been lacking in the professional market. The professionals have already moved on to PC and all Apple cares about is the iSheep.

Pretty much that and for typical user they probably don't care what platform. If they do move to ARM it will become a glorified iPad (more so than it already is). Businesses are dumping apple as it's nearly impossible to support in enterprise environment and I cannot wait for the day folks get blocked form purchasing them at work.
 
Pretty much that and for typical user they probably don't care what platform. If they do move to ARM it will become a glorified iPad (more so than it already is). Businesses are dumping apple as it's nearly impossible to support in enterprise environment and I cannot wait for the day folks get blocked form purchasing them at work.

Final nail in the coffin for Mac use in the business world - Apple is going to destroy themselves in the enterprise environment. The borrowed goodwill from that 90s-00s time period is running on fumes, especially in the creative / marketing world. A friend who works for multinational marketing firm told me last year they moved all non-designer/creative staff from macbooks to dell laptops . I try to imagine if all those macbooks were ARM / iOS based in the first place... I don't believe any large company would risk going that route for their employee's primary computer when iOS MDM / device management is pathetically bad compared with Android, not to mention Windows or Linux.
 
I hope they do this. Will make their hardware even more of a laughing stock.
 
MS will follow, it all points to ARM.

X86 is dead
MS will follow to where exactly? They have no mobile anything, since Nadella has bet the entire company on the buzzword of the moment (cloud).

Only reason anyone cares about MS outside of Azure is x86 inertia. Everything MS has tried post Windows 7 has been DOA.
 
I hope they do this. Will make their hardware even more of a laughing stock.

Not so sure.

Looking at my new, ARM driven, cell phone, it outclasses many of the PC's I come across in daily life, from a CPU power perspective.

X86 is not getting more efficient anymore. Adding circuits is not an endless option, and with 5 or latest at 3nm the end of the pole has been reached, what then ?

ARM keeps pulling and I would not be surprised to see a megashift ahead. Apple is well know to be the first to cut old tails off. I wouldnt be suprised to see ARM driven desktop devices by 2020 from Apple, hell no.
 
Not so sure.

Looking at my new, ARM driven, cell phone, it outclasses many of the PC's I come across in daily life, from a CPU power perspective.

X86 is not getting more efficient anymore. Adding circuits is not an endless option, and with 5 or latest at 3nm the end of the pole has been reached, what then ?

ARM keeps pulling and I would not be surprised to see a megashift ahead. Apple is well know to be the first to cut old tails off. I wouldnt be suprised to see ARM driven desktop devices by 2020 from Apple, hell no.

IDK man, I'm very happy with my Dell 7285 tablet. Core issue with ARM as well as mobile devices is gimped OS and no real work software. They have their purpose but they cannot replace a real computer. ARM is definitely doing well but it isn't a performance processor by any comparison, their best CPU is getting to a lowest end i3 performance so they have a long way to go. Different instruction set also means all software has to be redone. Outside Apple ecosystem where they don't give a fuck about their users and do what they way, this switch likely will never happen or is very far away from even being remotely viable. Apple switching to ARM isn't marker leadership but cost cutting since their users don't really do anything on these devices other than social networking and taking selfies (as has been evident with many of their software updates being going in that direction too).
 
Not so sure.

Looking at my new, ARM driven, cell phone, it outclasses many of the PC's I come across in daily life, from a CPU power perspective.

X86 is not getting more efficient anymore. Adding circuits is not an endless option, and with 5 or latest at 3nm the end of the pole has been reached, what then ?

ARM keeps pulling and I would not be surprised to see a megashift ahead. Apple is well know to be the first to cut old tails off. I wouldnt be suprised to see ARM driven desktop devices by 2020 from Apple, hell no.

Its hard to see for many people here but the A series SoC's from Apple are already so powerful that it is more than adequate as a daily driver for most users. I don't know if ARM and Apple can keep up this leap frog in performance every year. However if they made a full sized version (6-8 big A1x cores, look at the new iPad pros with just 4 Big cores and 4 little cores) for Macbook's in a year or two I can see it being competitive, especially since Apple can control everything and fine tune performance. Plus ARM so far has proven to be more power efficient. Lots of advantages for Apple and very few disadvantages.
 
Current Apple ARM muarchs are better than anything Intel has in the pipeline. The move is natural.

Add the recent N1/E1 announcement from ARM Holdings and x86 is just in a death spiral.

It certainly looks that way. We'll have to see how N1/E1 actually compares to Ice Lake and Ryzen 2, but there's no reason to think ARM won't match Intel/AMD performance eventually. I'm not sure how much faster it can be, fundamentally IPC is limited by the application, compiler, execution units, etc and those should more or less apply equally to ARM vs x86.
Intel's margins going forwards are likely screwed though. I don't see how they can charge enterprise pricing for Xeons in a couple years once competitive ARM servers show up. Even this year will be rocky once Ryzen 2 servers show up.
 
Apple has been sitting on the world's best mobile CPU and GPU architecture for the past five years. It's always been a question of "when will it happen," rather than "will it happen."

But it still takes time to build all the chips, and the emulation libraries, so these rumors have always said it's coming "next year." And knowing Apple's love for silence, we won't know for sure until about a month before it happens (then there will be multiple leaks that all sound the same).
 
Last edited:
It certainly looks that way. We'll have to see how N1/E1 actually compares to Ice Lake and Ryzen 2, but there's no reason to think ARM won't match Intel/AMD performance eventually. I'm not sure how much faster it can be, fundamentally IPC is limited by the application, compiler, execution units, etc and those should more or less apply equally to ARM vs x86.
Intel's margins going forwards are likely screwed though. I don't see how they can charge enterprise pricing for Xeons in a couple years once competitive ARM servers show up. Even this year will be rocky once Ryzen 2 servers show up.

Someone took Anadtech reviews data and compared integer performance and IPC of last Apple and Intel cores

37838_8.jpg


Even an Icelake core with an 20% higher IPC is outdated per Apple standards. We also know that Zen2 cores aren't competitive for N1/E1

106740.png


As the report mentions:

A more fair comparison would be AMD’s upcoming Rome with 64 CPU cores, here even if AMD manages to outright double multi-threaded performance and match Arm’s projected MT numbers, I don’t see them be able to at the same time lower the TDP to match Arm’s estimated 105W target.
 
Apple devices are just going to be a means to get to the cloud. Apple = Chrome Book.
 
Maybe they don't want to deal with patching every spectre vulnerability that comes out while making outdated CPUs even slower
 
wow just imagine how fast all those crappy apps will launch ... and maybe jus maybe but i doubt it youll be able to simultaneously multi task on it too...

i shake my head when ever watch these mac and arm fans demonstrating the Photoshop app zooming through pictures saying WOW this is so much faster than a computer ...

all the while for years maybe even a decade even with the appropriate program and a free scroll wheel i was zoooooming through pictures faster than what they are doing now with their lil swipes.


These people irk me, they wont spend a grand on a computer but they will damn sure spend twice that much on an inferior device and then go to lengths to state how superior it is over a desktop computer.


In short, in your dream X86 is dead you can play with you appy lil apps and pretend your getting real work done, however the real world will continue producing and creating the content and products we all use on X86.
 
Higher performance, less power consumption than the Intel chip currently in my MacBook Air? Bring it! Something that runs faster, cooler and with better battery life - sounds great to me.

And I don't expect Apple to switch all Mac's - there is no reason to. They have run simultaneous architectures in the Mac before and their dev tools currently support ARM and x86 right now with iOS and macOS. Supporting two architectures at once with the Mac won't be that big a deal.

I don't think it's an if, but when question at this point. Would love to see ARM on the MacBook Air before I need to replace mine. A keyboard that works would be nice too but that's another thread...
 
INTC stock does not need this to happen.
Not that I have any knowledge, but my .02. I see Apple introducing a Macbook with their processor. It will be under $1000 (entry level of course, fully equipped might set you back $3000ish :) ). The MB Pro's will continue to use X86 processors.
I heard a rumor that their is a version of Xcode that runs on an iPad. Developers need Xcode to make Mac software - once they crack this nut, they are home free.
I used to be an iOS developer - the frameworks for iOS and macOS are similar in some areas, but far apart in others. As they keep updating the SDK's, they are getting closer. Don't be surprised if macOS starts running iOS type apps. (I think Daring Fireball has an article on this right now - interesting read.) If you were a developer, why not support macOS as another potential revenue source?
 
Someone took Anadtech reviews data and compared integer performance and IPC of last Apple and Intel cores

View attachment 143674

Even an Icelake core with an 20% higher IPC is outdated per Apple standards. We also know that Zen2 cores aren't competitive for N1/E1

View attachment 143675

As the report mentions:
It's possible, but you also have to efficiently transport data between the cores, each-other, and memory. Latency in the bus will reduce performance scaling to a degree, and the bus will also increase power consumption somewhat (depending, of course, on how well the chip is designed). But even assuming 30% less performance than their "simulated" 64 core processor, that's still over 900 on that test.
 
Its hard to see for many people here but the A series SoC's from Apple are already so powerful that it is more than adequate as a daily driver for most users. I don't know if ARM and Apple can keep up this leap frog in performance every year. However if they made a full sized version (6-8 big A1x cores, look at the new iPad pros with just 4 Big cores and 4 little cores) for Macbook's in a year or two I can see it being competitive, especially since Apple can control everything and fine tune performance. Plus ARM so far has proven to be more power efficient. Lots of advantages for Apple and very few disadvantages.

Indeed, now give the ARM equal TDP and 2 years time. ARM has many more options to adopt it's design, X86 hasn't. Love my Xs btw.
 
I guess its concession time...?
It used to be 'Apple could use AMD as soon as next year!!!'.
What happened, that doesn't work anymore? Intel told them FU you pay same price as everyone else? At this point I would tell them that, in the end they will move on.. cheap price or not...
 
Hmmm I wish ARM hadn't been bought out a couple of years ago. I could imagine my £1 a time shares would now be worth £50+ each...

I got bought out at £17 so, not too bad.
 
wow just imagine how fast all those crappy apps will launch ... and maybe jus maybe but i doubt it youll be able to simultaneously multi task on it too...

i shake my head when ever watch these mac and arm fans demonstrating the Photoshop app zooming through pictures saying WOW this is so much faster than a computer ...

all the while for years maybe even a decade even with the appropriate program and a free scroll wheel i was zoooooming through pictures faster than what they are doing now with their lil swipes.


These people irk me, they wont spend a grand on a computer but they will damn sure spend twice that much on an inferior device and then go to lengths to state how superior it is over a desktop computer.


In short, in your dream X86 is dead you can play with you appy lil apps and pretend your getting real work done, however the real world will continue producing and creating the content and products we all use on X86.

What are you on?

It seems you don't understand that you can port any code from x86 to ARM. The reason why you have mobile-kind apps on a phone or tablet is because it is a mobile device, not because it is build over ARM.

Desktop workstations, developer kits, servers, and supercomputers based in ARM aren't executing mobile apps.

E.g. scientists using Isambard are running high-performance code to solve compressible Navier-Stokes equations for shock-boundary layer interactions. And they are doing that on ARM hardware because the code run faster than on any Broadwell or Skylake Xeon.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DocNo
like this
Introducing the 2020 Macbook Pro... It's actually a chromebook, but with "iOS Pro" and unnecessary aluminum unibody construction with 4x higher price tag of a chromebook because our customers will pay for the same product or worse but "Apple-fied" without hesitation. XD

(I'm not an Apple hater, I've been a AAPL shareholder since 2003.)
 
Last edited:
SO, how they are going to use AMDs GPU for video acceleration?
Not that it matters, it will be glorious to all their fans.

I believe (yes just my opinion so take with a grain of salt), that the next few years we'll see a shift in how things are processed and whether things are done locally or remotely. Of course this spells a certain kind of doom for us hardware enthusiasts, but for mass market it makes sense to store, process, etc. via the cloud. The tech companies want this way more than selling us more powerful hardware now. They'd rather hold us hostage by having our data, etc.

I look at my experience with Geforce Now running on an old Thinkpad X230. It plays games as well as my systems with discrete GPUs, etc. Of course I notice there's a hint of lag when I pay competitive stuff, but whatever most mass market folks won't care. (I know the streaming services are sorta blurry vs. a true local gaming PC, etc.)

If you extrapolate and apply cloud based processing to other things like content production, etc. It would allow for these devices based off of ARM processors, etc. to be viable. Even the next gen xbox willl have a streaming only model.

From Apple's point of view they'll be like, "let us do all the heavy lifting, get iCloud Pro for $299 per year, or if you're a content producer get iCloud Pro Plus for $599 per year" then produce these "thin client" chromebook internals, but macbook pro externals products, sell for $999 and make more money overall than selling $1500-3000 computers. Their customers will keep using their services because that's where all their data is located, etc.

It's actually pretty genius.
 
I believe (yes just my opinion so take with a grain of salt), that the next few years we'll see a shift in how things are processed and whether things are done locally or remotely. Of course this spells a certain kind of doom for us hardware enthusiasts, but for mass market it makes sense to store, process, etc. via the cloud. The tech companies want this way more than selling us more powerful hardware now. They'd rather hold us hostage by having our data, etc.

I look at my experience with Geforce Now running on an old Thinkpad X230. It plays games as well as my systems with discrete GPUs, etc. Of course I notice there's a hint of lag when I pay competitive stuff, but whatever most mass market folks won't care. (I know the streaming services are sorta blurry vs. a true local gaming PC, etc.)

If you extrapolate and apply cloud based processing to other things like content production, etc. It would allow for these devices based off of ARM processors, etc. to be viable. Even the next gen xbox willl have a streaming only model.

From Apple's point of view they'll be like, "let us do all the heavy lifting, get iCloud Pro for $299 per year, or if you're a content producer get iCloud Pro Plus for $599 per year" then produce these "thin client" chromebook internals, but macbook pro externals products, sell for $999 and make more money overall than selling $1500-3000 computers. Their customers will keep using their services because that's where all their data is located, etc.

It's actually pretty genius.
Sadly, it does make a lot of sense from a busine$$ standpoint. And I agree this is almost guaranteed where we are going. Not saying I like though hehe.
 
Back
Top