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

[Anarchy]

I'm interested to see some benchmarks of their new chips and see how they compare to Intel processors. Overall, this is great for Apple and not that great for their customers because it's just another vendor lock-in. The assumption by some is that Apple is going to bring in some massive performance improvement, but there's no free lunch. So, that's that. Maybe we'll see some better standby time and longer safari browsing on the laptop.

This is also unlikely to be followed by democratisation of ARM on the desktop and server. Multiple companies have tried to bring ARM in this market segment and have failed each time. Unless Apple open-sources their chip design and the patents, I suspect this won't propagate elsewhere. It takes a lot of money and effort to design a performant processor regardless of the underlying instruction set.

[Grim85]

I'm perplexed why people think that switching to arm based processors is "mobile shit" - its a just a processor architecture. The same hurdles and similar changes would be there if they switched to POWER9. arm makes more sense because they've been designing their own chips for a decade now. There is no reason you cant compile anything for these machines as you can for an x86 mac. The big changes out of this? No more hackintoshing and possibly apple being the king of battery life

a few apps will languish with lackluster x86 emulation because the dev doesn't care put the time and cost into recompiling, but realistically mac users probably lost these apps when catalina came along anyway.

[andre30correia]

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.

only in benchmarks, in real life they suck. A RISC cpu will never work like a CISC one.

Nobody cares about this transition if the apps works, most of ppl who buy apple are stupid, they only use this shit because they think is the best thing in the world

[Boland]

I'm putting on my skeptical glasses until I see trustworthy benchmarks so I know if they're working with frames per second or seconds per frame.

I also feel sorry for Michael in the near future. Having to benchmark Linux, the Windows Linux Layer, and possibly an Apple Linux Layer.

They demoed 'Shadow Of The Tomb Raider' running on their DTK...
X86 emulated on a mobile SOC running a demanding game. That's pretty damn impressive.

[pal666]

A potentially unpopular opinion: Apple's ARM implementation is the only ARM worth using in a high performance context (like, a desktop)

you should google what hpc means

. Standard ARM implementations (where you get the whole design from ARM, and you just tweak it)

are product of your imagination. arm can license either instruction set or microarch and apple was not the first one licensing just isa, there are many others(it's cheaper btw)

Modern Intel/AMD cpus maintain much higher instructions per cycle throughputs (like 3x) versus standard ARMs.

there are no standard arms, even arm produces variety of microarches

[Slartifartblast]

Good luck Applefanbois, I hope you have deep pockets as Apple are going to turn you upside down then shake you and shake you until there isn't a cent left in your pockets.

[pal666]

i was just yesterday looking at prospects of running old x86 games on $50 arm computers and they are not very bright. maybe this will give it some push, since codeweavers' target market is macos

[pal666]

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.

because all arms are mobile, and doubling frequency has much worse effect on power usage than doubling number of cores

[pal666]

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.

it was jobs who gave apple a leg up with reality distortion field, since their chips are not highest performing and not most power efficient arms

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.

all top supercomputers are gpu based, they have tiny amount of cpus for servicing gpus

[FireBurn]

So Mac gaming was just totally screwed again