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

[Snaipersky]

Huh? You do realize that Apple’s single core performance is outstanding. Their IPC is better than many X86 chips. There are things I really do not like about Apple but you have to respect their hardware engineering teams. Hardware in this sense being the SoC.

High instructions per clock, but relatively low clock speed.

[starshipeleven]

Yes in general these two concepts are not equal, but for MS things are little bit different.
MS did not fail to take control.

Ah yes? Are you too young to remember Windows 8 and the Windows Store, their Windows Phone, and so on? The also tried a Windows 10S that is a windows that is "locked" to use only store applications a couple years ago. https://www.howtogeek.com/305363/WHA...-IT-DIFFERENT/

Obviously everyone told them to fuck off.

[starshipeleven]

Looks like it has half it's cores at 3GHz and half at 1.8GHz. So while better, there still seem to be some "easy" adjustments that could improve performance without major impact to power usage (though would mean new, bigger chips) such as 64 bit or 128bit memory controller, and L1/2/3i/d caches

Well, that's an octacore, so 4 cores at 3Ghz isn't bad for a fanless device.
If a device without fan can do that, a device big as a laptop with some form of heat sinking will do better.

[zxy_thf]

Ah yes? Are you too young to remember Windows 8 and the Windows Store, their Windows Phone, and so on? The also tried a Windows 10S that is a windows that is "locked" to use only store applications a couple years ago. https://www.howtogeek.com/305363/WHA...-IT-DIFFERENT/

Obviously everyone told them to fuck off.

No, I'm afraid I'm too old to remember Windows 8.

I was recalling Windows 9x, or earlier MSDOS days.
Apple was not a serious desktop competitor any more when Windows 8 came into being.

Also, iirc Windows Store requires UWP, and few cares porting their well established C++ application to .Net, and the store is DOA in practice.

[starshipeleven]

No, I'm afraid I'm too old to remember Windows 8.

Then why are you talking about modern things you say you don't remember? Go back to your retirement home and talk about WWII with your peers or something.

I was recalling Windows 9x, or earlier MSDOS days.

Back then the world was a bit different. Not a lot of PCs, not a lot of users, not a lot of internet. Back then you could not create a "store" for applications because it was not possible (or economical) to do so. Everyone was selling hard copies on floppies or CDs.

Apple was not a serious desktop competitor any more when Windows 8 came into being.

Are you fucking serious? The first thing you think when I mention Windows 8 is desktops?
Why do you think Windows 8 had a tablet-like touch interface? They were trying to get into the mobile device market, where they could control more the ecosystem, among other things. Also Windows Phone happened. It all happened years too late (android and iOS were already dominant) so everyone knew it was going to end badly, but still they tried.

the store is DOA in practice.

This only means that Microsoft attempts at closing the ecosystem suck, not that they are not trying.

I'm just saying that they are as evil as Apple, they are just very incompetent and slow to react, like many large companies.

[wizard69]

After checking the microarchitecture - A72 has a three wide frontend. A76 is four wide. Granted, there are other changes, but it's highly unlikely that A76 could sustain 3x the IPC of A72.

What difference does it make? We are talking about Apples ARM processors here.

[vladpetric]

What difference does it make? We are talking about Apples ARM processors here.

This was a response to another pro-ARM claim, namely that newer run-of-the-mill ARM processors sustain a much higher (3x) IPC.

I really, really doubt it.

[wizard69]

You must have been a baseball pitcher considering all the curves put on this post.

Apple are masters of shooting themselves in the foot, not masters of keynotes.

I have to give credit where due and the engineers involved in Apple SoC design are really on their game. I may hate many aspects of Apples businesses but their SoC ar top notch.

This move will basically drive any remaining macOS users away from it.

Not at all. This is actually a move to secure their future. If you watch the Keynote nothing was said about "ARM", a lot was said about Neural Engine and other specialized features. When it came to software ML techniques came up a lot. Apple didn't switch to ARM for the ARM cores they switched for the silicon space to implement their IP.

Not that Apple care, they for a long time are run by mobile eggheads who don't care about the desktop.

Maybe they don't care, one thing for sure though is that they don't understand it. The Mac Pro being a perfect example.

Same people who let OpenGL rot there, dropped 32-bit support and refused to support Vulkan.

They didn't refuse to support Vulkan, they basically ended up on two different tracks that came from the same general code base.

Dropping 32 bit support is a smart thing. If you compare it to the Windows world where old apps only work half assed, it is actually a good move. Honestly I've never understood this concern, do you still cry over the lack of support for 8 Bit CPM software, or maybe 16 bit Windows? Somebody had to make the decision.

OpenGL is an issue though, but they may have gotten feed up with the people and organizations running the OpenGL standards process. Apparently they where not adult enough to mend what ever fences got knocked down. I really don't know what the right answer is there, OpenGL is still widely used in some of the areas Apple wants to play in so yeah the move looks stupid.

[KaoDome]

I didn't watch the keynote live, but I've read about what they said. Even if Arm processors aren't up to par with Intel/AMD's offerings I don't think they would have decided to make the change without some promising R&D. I mean, a new fat binary, translation layer, hardware, ... seems way too much of a push for it to have been done on a whim.

Their SoCs are some of the most performant ones in the mobile arena of late (if not the most), with a higher power consumption that's allotted for laptops and desktops I wonder what kind of gains can be achieved with Arm architectures. I'm talking without actual knowledge of course, but seeing what the industry seems to be doing with LLVM vs GCC, could something similar happen between Arm vs AMD64?

As far as I know, LLVM being newer than GCC has been designed to be more modular, probably more maintainable and easier to expand; maybe a similar thing happens in the processor architecture arena, learning from the mistakes from the past, having alternative ways of thinking and processing, etc. Although it's not like time stops for AMD64 and new architectures are being worked on as usual, besides, Intel & AMD have the advantage of bien in the field much longer.

In my opinion it's hard to know what will come of this, I have seen Apple get away with certain things because of the religious following they have, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were able to dump AMD64 in favor of their own in 2 years. It doesn't have to perform better than AMD64, maybe just being "good enough" if people go after their offerings. Many people certainly do, and developers as well, specially for their mobile OS(es).

Now that they are going to be able to run (or modify and run?) iOS apps on macOS I see it going forward. I wonder what the penalty for the emulation or translation is, but the amount of apps in the mobile sector is just growing and growing, being able to tap into that (and earn revenue too since it'd go through their app store) can be a big big thing.

They demoed Microsoft's Office and Adobe's Creative Cloud products during the keynote running on Arm, but unless I'm mistaken they didn't specify the general characteristics of the hardware they were using, or resources usage, temperatures, etc. compared to AMD64; they only bragged how it was performing great, but nothing much. Software such as those, big, complex and with old-ish code is hard to change from an architecture to another; so that's a feat on itself (I don't think it was just changing the toolchain and that's it). Hell, I think Microsoft didn't even build Office for Windows on Arm, but I'm disconnected from how that is working out for them so I may be wrong.

Anyway, I wouldn't mind getting one of the development machines to toy with it and I mean toy because I haven't used macOS in my life haha, but I'm curious as to how it performs. Skeptic, but curious. I'm saddened that they keep pushing Metal instead of Vulkan, making it easier for everyone; but I'm not surprised, their current phones still use the lightning connector.

On the other hand it may not amount to anything and end up being a flop, like their wireless charging pad (don't remember the name), that didn't even materialize.

[wizard69]

I don't even begin to understand why anyone would want to even care about what Apple does?

Actually they have some really interesting technology. The fact that management is screwed up doesn't mean there aren't forward thinking things being done there. I can say with absolute certainty that I will be looking closely at the new processors when they come out.