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

[sheldonl]

I'm always reminded of Why I owned a Macbook Pro for a day — and what it says to me about the future of Apple.

(Spoiler: The guy is a loyal Apple customer, and he's talking about abusing Apple's return policy to get a loaner machine while they fix his near-brand-new defective one... and receiving a second defective one... and the insane level of stonewalling he was faced with before finally talking to a manager who said "Yeah, we've been receiving reports of this for months but we're not allowed to admit it until enough of them come in.")

IIRC, that year was the debut of the touchbar, meaning that it was a new design for the macbook. Also, you can't take one dude's blogpost as gospel, maybe - despite his protestations to the contrary - he did cause some issues. Even so, nobody is issue to design/manufacturing issues. This is particularly true on something that been newly designed and according to apple this was a new 'groundbreaking' design (yeah right) that was supposed to be the thinnest and lightest. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/...w-macbook-pro/ We all know about this in the auto world, never buy the a vehicle in the first year of it's model year. Heck, we know that in the Linux world, particularly back in the 90's, 2000's - never run a .0 release of a redhat distro (b/c it usually had big changes.) Anyone remember that? I for one will not be buying a new MBP with "Apple Silicon" for at least a couple of years after it comes out. I'll be sticking with my second hand 2016 MBP.

[torsionbar28]

I'm worried about the build quality, not the feature set. A Toyota won't give you the same comfort, style, or fun-to-drive experience as a Lexus, but it will get you where you want to go. I don't expect a $400 Motorola phone to look as good, run as fast, or take pictures as nicely when compared to an iPhone. But I would expect it to last as long - and in my experience, it does not.

Nonsense, your brother was gifted a used car presumably because he cannot afford a new one. So even that new Toyota you speak of is out of reach for him. Likewise, while a new smartphone may be above his budget, there are plenty of vendors selling used ones in excellent condition. I know this, because I'm using an original (2016) Pixel phone. I didn't want to spend $700 in 2016, so I didn't. Instead, I bought a used pixel in 2019 for $90. It was in like-new condition and works great. I even bought a high end otterbox case to keep it safe - $9 brand new on ebay. Second hand goods are where its at when you're on a budget. FWIW my wife and I together earn a very comfortable income, and we both drive cars older than 15 years, both have used ebay smartphones, and I buy my clothes at Wal Mart. It doesn't matter how much you earn, the key is to ignore all the flashy product marketing, and avoid the trap of living above your means.

But also, I do not want a caste system in technology. If someone asks me, "What kind of computer and smart phone should I buy?" I do not want to answer: "If you can afford it get Apple products, and everything will be fine. If not, you can get Windows, Linux, or Chromebook for your computers and a cheap Android phone, but your life is going to suck." So even though I can afford to join the Apple fan club, I never will for that reason (and also because I believe in free software).

This is a democracy and market economy we're talking about, the caste system has nothing to do with it. The fact that you're conflating these concepts tells me you need to re-read your history text books, as you have some fundamental misunderstanding about how the world works. I cannot help you with that.

PS. Go look at how lower class people live in an actual caste system country, India for example. When you see people bathing, brushing their teeth, and washing laundry in the Ganges river, with rotting human corpses floating nearby, you'll understand how horribly wrong you are.

[Michael_S]

Nonsense, your brother was gifted a used car presumably because he cannot afford a new one. So even that new Toyota you speak of is out of reach for him. Likewise, while a new smartphone may be above his budget, there are plenty of vendors selling used ones in excellent condition. I know this, because I'm using an original (2016) Pixel phone. I didn't want to spend $700 in 2016, so I didn't. Instead, I bought a used pixel in 2019 for $90. It was in like-new condition and works great. I even bought a high end otterbox case to keep it safe - $9 brand new on ebay. Second hand goods are where its at when you're on a budget. FWIW my wife and I together earn a very comfortable income, and we both drive cars older than 15 years, both have used ebay smartphones, and I buy my clothes at Wal Mart. It doesn't matter how much you earn, the key is to ignore all the flashy product marketing, and avoid the trap of living above your means.

I agree with all of that, save I would add that if your income and wealth are low enough then living within your means may be impossible.

Your used Pixel has adequate battery life? That was my reason for not buying used smart phones. I bought a used LG G6 for myself and a used OnePlus 2 from Ebay for my oldest child, and though everything else worked fine for the first few weeks the battery life for the OnePlus 2 was poor and for the LG was horrific. The LG G6 has glass all around, so I paid a shop to replace the battery. That was fine, but the phone ceased to function about eight months later. For the OnePlus 2, we replaced the battery ourselves - and the phone stopped working after a week.

(Also, I get most of my clothes at Walmart except for footwear - my Adidas sneakers look better and support my ankles better after a year of hard use than any of my Walmart, Target, or Pay-Less Shoe Source sneakers looked and functioned after the first month.)

This is a democracy and market economy we're talking about, the caste system has nothing to do with it. The fact that you're conflating these concepts tells me you need to re-read your history text books, as you have some fundamental misunderstanding about how the world works. I cannot help you with that.

PS. Go look at how lower class people live in an actual caste system country, India for example. When you see people bathing, brushing their teeth, and washing laundry in the Ganges river, with rotting human corpses floating nearby, you'll understand how horribly wrong you are.

I didn't mean to downplay the horrors of an actual caste system with the comparison. Please allow me to choose a better term, 'tier'.

I accept that all markets function with tiers. But what I don't want, in any market, is a tiered system in which only the luxury tier works. To return to the car example, even used cars still take you where you want to go. Used mowers still cut grass. Walmart clothing still works.

"Apple products are nice" is fine. "You have to buy Apple if you want an acceptable consumer computing experience" is not fine, it indicates a broken market.

[starshipeleven]

Is not appimage platform agnostic?

It can be if those that are constructing it are bundling all dependencies when building it, down to xorg and other system libraries. In many cases it isn't because it would be a tiny distro-in-a-distro like Steam's "runtime" (aka a folder were they just drop a few GBs of an old Ubuntu LTS system libraries) and waste a lot of space.

Most appimages I've seen only work decently only on Ubuntu, or Arch or whatever is the Linux OS it was generated on.

Flatpak standardizes this "distro-in-a-distro" thing by providing runtimes, so multiple flatpacked applications can share the same OS libraries from a specific runtime, so while yes you still have a "distro-in-a-distro" situation, you only have ONE runtime for multiple applications so you are saving space.

[starshipeleven]

This is a democracy and market economy we're talking about

Where is this mythical place? asking for a friend

[vladpetric]

Basically arm chip coherence is the AMBA not the L2.

http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index...846798627.html

This is part of the documentation for A72's cache system. It says:

<<
The L1 data caches support the MESI protocol. The L2 memory system contains a Snoop Tag array that is a duplicate copy of each of the L1 data cache directories. The Snoop Tag array reduces the amount of snoop traffic between the L2 memory system and the L1 memory system. Any line that resides in the Snoop Tag array in the Modified/Exclusive state belongs to the L1 memory system. Any access that hits against a line in this state must be serviced by the L1 memory system and passed to the L2 memory system. If the line is invalid or in the shared state in the Snoop Tag array, then the L2 cache can supply the data.
>> (emphasis added)

I totally get it that there's significant design trade-offs when you design a highly configurable micro-architecture. But according to this page, A72 is perfectly capable of doing coherency in the L2 cache. Are you reading this page differently?

[Guest]

If you read the rest of my post, my point was that for smart phones anything below a Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy, or iPhone breaks very quickly. So you can spend $700 or more on a good phone every three to five years, or you can spend $200 on an average phone every year and a half.

Well, I spend 250€ on phone every almost 3 years. However, the previous one could have lasted longer, if the display wasn't destroyed by iPhone's 7 camera (company phone)... The issue is, that after ~3 years, the CPU is slow and RAM is not big enough... Current software tends to be much more demanding every year. And,... These software isn't any better. Still serves the same purpose as in the past - communication.

[Michael_S]

Well, I spend 250€ on phone every almost 3 years. However, the previous one could have lasted longer, if the display wasn't destroyed by iPhone's 7 camera (company phone)... The issue is, that after ~3 years, the CPU is slow and RAM is not big enough... Current software tends to be much more demanding every year. And,... These software isn't any better. Still serves the same purpose as in the past - communication.

In my experience, Android passed into 'acceptable performance' territory with version 6 or so and 3GB of RAM, and that still holds. More memory is nicer, but the cheap phones we had worked fine before the hardware failed, and some of them 'only' had 3GB of RAM.

[uid0]

[...]it is pretty rare to saturate the memory bus, even with an RPi4. The reason is that the cache subsystem tends to work really well ...

Care to elaborate? Well, you did elaborate in the post (sort of), but it seems like the message is that RAM throughput is not so important, because of caches. I do not follow.

Caches are meant to reduce the effects of memory latency, not lack of throughput. And if you have multiple cores, doing streaming data processing (for example), slow memory bus can easily have a hard time feeding those wide, data-hungry AVX units (or even ALUs/FPUs) in each core. Networking is another example: if your system's RAM is too slow to move data, no amount of caches will let you reach 100 Gbps.

[vladpetric]

Care to elaborate? Well, you did elaborate in the post (sort of), but it seems like the message is that RAM throughput is not so important, because of caches. I do not follow.

Caches are meant to reduce the effects of memory latency, not lack of throughput. And if you have multiple cores, doing streaming data processing (for example), slow memory bus can easily have a hard time feeding those wide, data-hungry AVX units (or even ALUs/FPUs) in each core. Networking is another example: if your system's RAM is too slow to move data, no amount of caches will let you reach 100 Gbps.

A request satisfied in the L1 or L2 caches does not end up on the memory bus at all. Vast majority of requests should be. If they don't end up on the memory bus at all, then throughput is also improved. And yes, caches do that.

Right, but Neon is only 128 bits, not 512 like AVX512. And yes, you need good bandwidth for high speed DMA. If your benchmark is I/O intensive, that could be a problem.

BTW, the 100Gbps in the context of Rpi4 made me chuckle ... Actually I don't think you can saturate 100Gbps networking from CPUs if you have to do any reasonable processing of your data. If all you do is lift data out of your RAM (so, the data is already in RAM) and send it on the network, then sure. But if you have to, say, encrypt your data before sending it out, the CPU is going to be the bottleneck as well.