Apple Confirms Their Future Desktops + Laptops Will Use In-House CPUs

[StarterX4]

On the WWDC20 Live the performance looked really cool. At the beginning, they plan to sell ARM Mac Mini to developers, and the transition will take two years.
The thing that is worrying me is the impact on the PC market – I really hope i won't ever see Win10 MediaTek-based PCs/laptops without UEFI.

[zxy_thf]

Microsoft already tried it and it works as a technology but isn't successful as a product. I hope apple can do better but it doesn't seem promising. It feels more like it's competing with Chromebook rather than laptops

That's because Microsoft, no matter how unpopular it is in OSS community, is more friendly to an open eco-system.
MS simply is unable to enforce every developer to adopt ARM, according to its business model.

However, for Apple the game is simple: you're gonna get banned from Appstore if your app doesn't suppose ARM-based mac. Case closed.

[torsionbar28]

Sounds like the beginning of eco-computing movement,...

There is nothing "eco" about the Apple company or its products. Let us count the ways... planned product obsolescence, non replaceable batteries, poor repairability, lack of support for 3rd party or DIY repair, frivolous fancy packaging, economic support of oppressive communist regimes with abysmal human rights records (China), sweatshop slave labor conditions in their offshore factories. Did I miss any? I'd wager that Apple is responsible for an outsize portion of global e-waste and human suffering.

[vladpetric]

To pile on about concerns with ARM, I've yet to see an ARM chip hit 3GHz. They're more than happy to keep slapping more cores in a chip, but there's little attention paid to single core performance.

Yeap, but it's not just frequency, it's IPC as well (Instructions per cycle). For a few of my workloads I get roughly 1 instruction per cycle with RPi4 and ~3 with my 5-year old Haswell.

[vladpetric]

To pile on about concerns with ARM, I've yet to see an ARM chip hit 3GHz. They're more than happy to keep slapping more cores in a chip, but there's little attention paid to single core performance.

The thing about Apple is that they did their own microarchitecture (under the initial leadership of Jim Keller) - much much better than standard ARM.

[shmerl]

Good riddance. This will increase the number of macOS refugees to Linux. macOS was already half dead. Now it will be completely dead.

[Jumbotron]

Like this is a big shock. Apple under Steve Jobs had always prided itself on two things. Total control of it's supply and technology chain so as to retain the ability to extract very high profit margins compared to the larger, more commoditized Wintel/PC world AND to push the boundaries of said technology they controlled in order to achieve performance and design goals that left the competition in the dust and help to justify a higher retail price point which led to higher profit margins. Apple lost that control when the AIM alliance which had developed the PowerPC chips broke up as IBM and Motorola wanted to go in different directions with the PowerPC architecture for their own purposes and not necessarily Apple's. Thus Apple's humiliating transition to Intel CPU's and architecture thus making every Apple computer nothing more than an overpriced PC that just so happened to run UNIX. But Steve Jobs and Apple had an "Ace up their sleeve". Right before the Intel transition by Apple, Steve Jobs had come very close to continuing the PowerPC architecture in Apple Products with a company called P.A. Semi (Palo Alto Semiconductor). P.A. Semi had been working with the Power ISA and had actually come up with a 16 core PowerPC chip design seperate from the original AIM PowerPC. However they couldn't meet the design and power goals for both Apple desktop and laptop designs so Steve temporarily benched that idea to quickly go with Intel. However, during the design phase of the iPhone and iPod Steve decided to actually buy P.A. Semi outright in 2008 even though Apple had already decided to go with the ARM architecture for their iThings instead of the Power ISA. Why? Because one of P.A. Semi's strengths was designing low powered versions of the PowerPC chip while keeping performance high. This was not as easy to do with a PowerPC chip than already starting with a power sipping architecture as the ARM chip already was. P.A. Semi's engineers gave Apple a leg up in the ARM world by producing the highest performing as well as the most power efficient ARM chips in the world. This also held true with the GPU's used in Apple's custom ARM cores. 14 years later since the Intel transition and 12 years since the P.A. Semi acquisition with over a decade of real products and ARM ecosystem improvements not to mention Apple innovations to that ecosystem partly due to P.A. Semi, we now see Apple back in the position of controlling its entire technological destiny again and perhaps setting the stage for a wider shift away from X-86 to ARM. This began in the Mobile space. Apple is throwing down the gauntlet in the Desktop space. And Japan has thrown down the ARM gauntlet in the Supercomputer space as it now is #1 in the TOP500 Supercomputers with an ARM based Supercomputer. The next 10 years in the Personal Computing space has just gotten a whole lot more interesting.

[Slartifartblast]

I don't blame Apple, Intel have been flogging the same dead horse since Broadwell and still can't get their finger out of their ass to produce a decent and reasonably priced 10nm offering for laptops let alone desktops while the World and it's dog has passed them by. Besides Apple already sell far more propriety ARM system variants with x86 being a very small portion of their sales, for most iTards ARM laptops is all they will need.

Interesting times.

[aht0]

Wish they had gone the way of POWER instead of ARM.

[Slartifartblast]

Apple moving to ARM is a really big thing but for some reason I don't care. Likely because I've never owned anything Apple.

I owned an Apple III (3 not 2) once but that was another lifetime ago and have owned nothing of theirs since as I don't buy into the hype.