Apple does not currently use ARM GPUs, and GPUs are not tied to CPU ISAs in general, i.e. you can currently use Nvidia or AMD GPUs on ARM/PowerISA as well, and many people do.
As much as big ones are different from mobile devices, If they exist, they are like 1030 from NV. I REALLY doubt apple have more devs than intel, so GPU by apple that have any sense will not happen.
Nvidia has nothing to do with Apple Silicon. First of all, they still not acquired ARM and they need to get agreements from several countries including China. Also, Apple design and make their own chips so Nvidia cant touch them at all.
They don't need China's approval for the acquisition, as much as China would like to say otherwise. They have no authority over the matter, the best they can do is lobby the UK to block the deal.
you've confused cheap w/ good graphics. Mac offer existing 2x 4x Radeon GPUs w/ huge amounts of HBM2 on the high end and that radeon was always way better at compute than it was at gaming.
Other than gaming perf compared to 1080 Ti or RTX 2080 Ti macs have been quite fine w/ graphics. If you are complaining about value or price, i have bad news for you. its not just the graphics.
beside NVIDIA not owning ARM at the moment, Apple's problem was w/ NVIDIA not ARM. They had even bigger issues w/ NVIDIA than w/ qualcomm. if anything this purchase should drive apple away from ARM not drive them into NVIDIA. Not saying it will, i am saying thats the only political effect here and its not one of attraction but repellant.
Apple will not move away from ARM, as it already uses not ARM but its own architecture. The ARM ISA is fairly open and apple has permanent irrevocable license.
also in case you didnt here the news recently RDNA 2 pretty much caught up w/ nvidia even in gaming, and RDNA2 products will hit the market a lot sooner than NVIDIA ARM deal completes. if it completes at all.
Bloomberg said that these would have 12 cores (8 big, 4 little). A14 has 6 cores (2 big, 4 little).
For the ARM Macs they will swap the ratio around to use more performance cores since power constraints are relaxed, and perhaps it will be arranged in 2 DynamIQ clusters, each with 4 big, 2 little.
What I'd like to see in the ARM landscape is some 16-core DynamIQ SoCs (2x clusters with a mix of Cortex-X1+, Cortex-A78+, Cortex-A55+ in each). Not necessarily in smartphones, but maybe in tablets, laptops, single board computers, and/or "ARM desktops".
I don't understand why you need 3 different CPUs in a DynamIQ cluster?
I imagine for high performance you want something like a pair of 6/2 or a 5/3 design to balance performance and power efficiency.
So with a pair of 6/2 you get a quad core design when maximum power efficiency is needed, and 12 high powered cores and 4 (lower powered lower performance) cores going all out. If ARM's low powered cores aren't powerful enough then you have a pair of 5/3s. What benefit is it to have 3 different cores?
Die area could be a concern. The Cortex-X1 is around 50% larger than A78 for only around a 20% performance gain.
Configurations like 1+3+4 or 2+2+4 are expected. I thought there was a limit of 4 performance cores per cluster but I can't find anything to corroborate that.
Okay, but if you need X performance and that takes 6 X1 cores to equal the same performance as 8 A78, you now have a cluster of 6/2 vs 8; also, in comparing the A77, A78, and X1 integer and floating point performance the A78 only saw a 7% increase in performance at the same frequency, where the X1 saw a 30% improvement. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15813/arm-cortex-a7...
Long story short, you'd have to clock an A78 pretty high to hit the 83% performance threshold; far more reasonable to expect only a 7% boost in performance for the A78 vs the 30% boost for the X1.
Anyway, we're talking about ARM desktops; die size really shouldn't be a concern if we're comparing to Intel, AMD, and now Apple desktops. In other words: 6/2
If the implemeters want to, they can even ditch DynamIQ and impement as many cores as they want in a cluster. Especially with Apple and Samsung, they haven't been using DynamIQ at all (although Samsung likely will make the switch).
All the implementer have to do is have DynamIQ identify two groups of 4xA78 as heterogeneous, viola, 8 A78 in one cluster. There's literally nothing stopping it.
I've always come to understand ARM implementations to accompany a general dumbing down of the entire OS I.e. smartphone style. It happened to Windows on ARM as well. I'm not a Mac user so maybe I don't know, but perhaps this will lead to Macs resembling iOS? In terms of functionality will a laptop be a supersize smartphone?
This is very much a question with a TECHNICAL answer. Apple has used a common OS in the form of Darwin since iOS started. But Darwin, like any well-designed OS, distinguishes between MECHANISM and POLICY. The mechanisms are common to all the versions of Darwin, but different policy choices have been made. Next different driver choices have been made (clearly a huge factor distinguishing phones vs macs where all manner of things can be plugged in). Next the APIs have been brought closer every year, but they're still somewhat divergent. Obviously there's all the legacy stuff on Mac. Likewise obviously there are API's centered around pointing device capabilities, multiple windows, and multiple screens.
How will these be unified going forward? The dumb answer is they will all be reduced to whatever iPadOS provides. The pragmatic (ie non-dumb) answer is that things will continue like they are right now, unification where it makes sense, differences where differences are unavoidable. The interesting answer questions whether iPadOS will grow more capable, pick up more of the UI functionality of Mac. My guess is yes, but it will take a few more years. The hardline designers are still somewhat in thrall to the original iOS vision of all fingers all the time and nothing that ever has to be explained. (They still seem to believe this, even as the result of this theology is an iPadOS windowing UI that probably only ten people on earth actually understand.)
More interesting, honestly, is the OS Proper capabilities that are now opened up by Apple controlling the whole HW stack on mac. There's scope for a substantial rethink of how an OS should be designed, to simplify security, to better use many-core, to provide better reliability and the isolation of bad hardware. This is the dream -- that over the next ten years Apple gives the OS Proper the same sort of treatment that it gave the CPU. We'll see; but it may take time :-( The most aggressive changes can't be made until Macs that were sold this year (even till late next year for iMac Pro and Mac Pro?) are deprecated and no longer receive OS updates, so, what, 7 or 8 years...
"The most aggressive changes can't be made until Macs that were sold this year (even till late next year for iMac Pro and Mac Pro?) are deprecated and no longer receive OS updates, so, what, 7 or 8 years"
That's never held Apple back. They implement aggressively for (almost) all eligible / capable Macs and release either pared down packages or security updates only for older still-supported Macs.
"Support" doesn't mean "Your Mac will get all the latest features for years after initial hardware purchase," it means 'We will do our best to keep it working the same way as when you brought it, and will keep it up to date with security updates. Any new features are a bonus but not guaranteed."
That's OK for "features". It's a lot more difficult for completely rearchitecting the OS, if the rearchitected version is built on Apple/ARM only capabilities.
Based on what? People who understand nothing about Apple have been making this claim since iPhone 1. They've never been shown to be correct in a single detail (show me one case that's not security related where Mac has lost a capability, ie "been dumbed down", in the past ten years), but that doesn't this crowd. Remember their previous greatest hits include that golden oldie "Apple will replace the Mac with iPads"...
Why would the CPU architecture have any bearing on the OS architecture?
The example you bring up, Windows on ARM, was not a dumbing down of the OS, but restricting the OS because the Microsoft was trying to grow into the tablet market.
In other words, hardware limits placed constraints on what Microsoft could do, and in their case that mean designing their OS to use touch and thin and lite form factors.
Apple's hardware has no such limits, and has been, for several years now, the cream of the crop. They have the fastest ARM hardware, and as such they also have hardware faster than most recent AMD CPUs and incredibly close to Intel CPUs.
"Why would the CPU architecture have any bearing on the OS architecture?"
an OS can, in practical terms, restrict what the OS can practically do. not so much these days in the bread and butter functions, but, for instance, an ISA/CPU that lacks a hardware multiplier is at a disadvantage when it comes to the OS and compiler writers getting a decent OS and languages. for years Intel (and most everybody else) dissed RISC machines as too verbose to assembler coders and too bloated in object modules. then, of course, Intel and everybody else ditched ISA in hardware and went with micro-architecture (real ISA) on the hardware, which just happens to be die hard RISC. to the extent that current ARM ISA (been a while since I looked) is more RISCy than CISCy,
an OS that attempts to explicitly parallelize single-threaded code on the fly for a multi-core chip (it's been tried, but hasn't worked, again, last time I checked) makes no sense for cores < X, for some value of X.
That is because ARM was used on phones. It wont change Mac's like that. Its just another CPU expect nothing to change in the OS well not because its ARM or x86. They will simply compile and optimize for ARM.
There's nothing inherent to ARM that requires it. For Windows, it was just a decision by Microsoft. The early Windows-on-ARM devices were quite slow, so Microsoft didn't want to have hugely hobbled x86 emulation giving people a bad taste, so they insisted that it could only run Metro apps compiled for ARM.
The more recent Surface Pro X can run (nearly) all x86 (32-bit) Windows software in emulation just fine, it's no longer hobbled. It runs "real" Windows 10, not Windows RT. The only real limitation is graphics-based - the Surface Pro X can't run x86 GPU-intensive games that use OpenGL. And 64-bit support is coming soon.
That's cool, but I still don't really see the point in a Windows laptop that's too slow to run anything. It would be like an Atom laptop, essentially. It makes perfect sense for an iPad replacement, but I never understood the iPad thing either.
I understand phone, PC, and laptop. Tablets are like the worst of all worlds.
At Apple's Developer Conference when they announced the transition in the summer, they showed their next version of macOS running on ARM, and it was just a new version of macOS as anyone would normally expect it to be, with no missing features. In fact, they way they did it was to present the whole demo of the new OS normally, as if there were no architecture change, and then, after running through all the new user-facing features, then reveal: "Oh, by the way, everything you've been seeing so far today? It's been running on ARM, not on Intel".
Cant wait to see Mac with Apple silicon. I wonder how many cores we will see and if it will still use big.little architecture. I am hoping for at least 8 cores at 3 ghz clockspeed. With Apple single threaded performance, it will be great. Other big thing is Mini Led screen but I am skeptical we will see that this year. Probably sometime around 2022 you will see Mac with Mini Led screen.
The phones can already hit 3Ghz, even if it becomes bound by a short pipeline for much clocks, I should think it would at least be able to do several hundred Mhz higher. 3.5? 3.7? With A14 already being at the top of the single core performance charts, that would fly
Apple has already teased "advanced packaging" and "high bandwidth" cache. At the very least, we'll get system wide cache like the iOS devices already have, but moving it off chip would be even more interesting.
Since they're aiming to get integrated graphics performance that matches their current dedicated chips by AMD, I would imagine the high bandwidth cache might be something like HBM2 as a caching layer to LPDDR4 to feed the IGP enough bandwidth.
Apple were the ones who pushed Intel to make those chips with the L4 cache to improve GPU and CPU performance in the first place, starting with Haswell, because they wanted to move completely to iGPUs in most of their laptops to save on chips and space on the logic board, and Intel's GPUs weren't fast enough to satisfy Apple's demands at the time without doing so. So why wouldn't they do the same when designing the CPU and GPU as a SoC themselves? Ian mentions in his Broadwell cache article that HBM would be the modern way to implement it.
Meaning what? Will Apple run servers? (They already do) Will they run servers using THEIR silicon? Probably. Will they sell servers? Well some people use the Mac mini as a server and are happy with it. Will they sell server time like AWS or Azure? In my opinion absolutely. That's coming as soon as the ARM macs are consolidated, next step in providing a more capable, more embracing ecosystem for developers.
But is what you are asking: Will they sell commodity rack servers? To which the answer is: WHY??? Why sell something that's required to be exactly like everything else and cheap as possible, when Apple's entire reason for existence is to be different from everyone else, and if that costs more so be it.
They've said that they'll transition all Macs to ARM, so eventually there will be an ARM version of the Mac Pro as well within the next couple of years, and since they currently do a rack-mountable version of the Mac Pro, then they could also make a rack-mountable version of the ARM Mac Pro.
All signs point to no. They've been vehemently resistant to reviving the XServe, and OS X Server has been relegated to an app. The closest they've come to a server in the last decade is the rackmount case variant for the most recent Mac Pro (and that's explicitly intended for AV racks and client compute, not server usage).
No. Apple quit the server business years ago. They don't even run their own HQ on Apple hardware. I can't remember what they use, probably some form of linux back end on generic server hardware, plus their cloud services run on a mix of both in-house datacentres with generic hardware (with a linux stack) and Amazon cloud AWS (I think) filling in the gaps / peak loads.
They sell to the customer, not to the datacentre.
I hypothesise that they started quitting the server business when they were planning the inital scaleout of their own cloud offerings and realised that their own hardware was too expensive for Apple to buy at the scale required. It would have been clear that offering a server they didn't use themselves would be a foolish move.
Another important factor would have been if they wanted to mesh with Amazon / other mass cloud provider, then they needed a single server software stack that worked at vast scale. Bye bye Apple Server OS.
The OS X Server as an app doesn't even exist in its original sense any more. Some functions were moved in a limited way into System Preferences, many were just dropped all together. It really left us out to dry. The only reasons for using a Mac as a server these days is the Xcode server tool for continuous integration within teams and for mobile device management.
Email – gone Calendar – gone Web server – gone OpenDirectory – gone DNS – gone File Sharing – crippled and moved to System Preferences Update Caching – moved to System Preferences
I have to say that Apple Silicon Mac will be a historical for the computer industry itself for several reasons. It's up to Apple to succeed or not. Technically, nobody cant do that since Apple can make both hardware and software by themselves. Microsoft seems failed with ARM based computer so far.
Inherently Windows on ARM *on its own* isn't bad - but the lack of a vibrant native software ecosystem is the major pain point at the moment. The killer feature for Windows has always been its massive software library and userbase (including virtually all devices having driver support on Windows) - sadly moving to Win10 on ARM basically nukes most of that....
I reckon Apple is probably in the best place to pull this off for a few reasons: 1. iPad OS (based on Darwin, similar to IOS and MacOS - in the same way Windows 10 on ARM is based on a similar kernel to Windows 10). 2. Tbe app ecosystem - this is the killer. Apple has a huge software ecosystem with AAA titles thanks to the iPad - e.g. Adobe suite, MS Office, and the entire Apple first party libraries inc. Garage Band - I imagine porting these won't be a major issue. That covers most of the low end market space. Once the low end gets covered - then the more specialised / niche titles are more or less forced to make this transition.
M$ does not have anywhere near the rich ARM based software ecosystem around Win10 on ARM, but hopefully with MacOS on ARM the shift can finally start....
Love the entertainment for the sudden ARM is masterrace content. As expected. Some are speculating Apple Servers, Others are saying some top class stuff like Apple is going to start a chain reaction.
I wonder these people realize how much is marketshare of Mac OS and then how much revenue does Macbooks make. Well to educate the utopian citizens of Apple.
Mac accounts for 9.7% of their revenue share, shadowed by Services and iPhone is past 50%, and then the world wide distribution is also same, under 10%. So yep, Apple is going to transform the entire world.
Can't wait to see this Space Age technology beat Ryzen and Intel and also AWS juggernaut, Azure too.
Below should give some indication to Apple performance, A14 in an iPhone Vs Icelake i3 in the MacBook Air, you could probably envision the graphs Apple will show next week.
When you see the numbers laid out like that it really is remarkable. Imagine a CPU with 32 Firestorm cores. No idea if that's possible, but just imagine.
The article mention that the last thing on the list was a arm cpu on this years list. Have I missed that Apple Tv 6 isnt an option anymore? Waited for it, so I sure still Hopes the last thing on the list for this year.
Apple is not focused gaming. So a GPU focused on video rendering and having AI components are much more important in their market base. This they already have.
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ingwe - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Very interested in how the landscape will look with these. And I'm curious about Apple's trajectory for the next few years.Wreckage - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Now that NVIDIA owns ARM, maybe Apple products will finally have good graphics.GodHatesFAQs - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Apple does not currently use ARM GPUs, and GPUs are not tied to CPU ISAs in general, i.e. you can currently use Nvidia or AMD GPUs on ARM/PowerISA as well, and many people do.WJMazepas - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Apple makes their own GPU on mobile. They probably will ditch AMD in the future tooThe Hardcard - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Possibly in the present. Among the rumors is that Apple already has silicon of a discrete GPUdeil - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
As much as big ones are different from mobile devices, If they exist, they are like 1030 from NV. I REALLY doubt apple have more devs than intel, so GPU by apple that have any sense will not happen.ksec - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
They are still licensed from IMG.Mac User - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Nvidia has nothing to do with Apple Silicon. First of all, they still not acquired ARM and they need to get agreements from several countries including China. Also, Apple design and make their own chips so Nvidia cant touch them at all.wrkingclass_hero - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
They don't need China's approval for the acquisition, as much as China would like to say otherwise. They have no authority over the matter, the best they can do is lobby the UK to block the deal.name99 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
You're unaware of the quality (performance, power, capabilities) of the iPhone/iPad GPUs?azfacea - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
you've confused cheap w/ good graphics. Mac offer existing 2x 4x Radeon GPUs w/ huge amounts of HBM2 on the high end and that radeon was always way better at compute than it was at gaming.Other than gaming perf compared to 1080 Ti or RTX 2080 Ti macs have been quite fine w/ graphics. If you are complaining about value or price, i have bad news for you. its not just the graphics.
azfacea - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
beside NVIDIA not owning ARM at the moment, Apple's problem was w/ NVIDIA not ARM. They had even bigger issues w/ NVIDIA than w/ qualcomm. if anything this purchase should drive apple away from ARM not drive them into NVIDIA. Not saying it will, i am saying thats the only political effect here and its not one of attraction but repellant.Apple will not move away from ARM, as it already uses not ARM but its own architecture. The ARM ISA is fairly open and apple has permanent irrevocable license.
azfacea - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
also in case you didnt here the news recently RDNA 2 pretty much caught up w/ nvidia even in gaming, and RDNA2 products will hit the market a lot sooner than NVIDIA ARM deal completes. if it completes at all.nandnandnand - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Bloomberg said that these would have 12 cores (8 big, 4 little). A14 has 6 cores (2 big, 4 little).For the ARM Macs they will swap the ratio around to use more performance cores since power constraints are relaxed, and perhaps it will be arranged in 2 DynamIQ clusters, each with 4 big, 2 little.
What I'd like to see in the ARM landscape is some 16-core DynamIQ SoCs (2x clusters with a mix of Cortex-X1+, Cortex-A78+, Cortex-A55+ in each). Not necessarily in smartphones, but maybe in tablets, laptops, single board computers, and/or "ARM desktops".
michael2k - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
I don't understand why you need 3 different CPUs in a DynamIQ cluster?I imagine for high performance you want something like a pair of 6/2 or a 5/3 design to balance performance and power efficiency.
So with a pair of 6/2 you get a quad core design when maximum power efficiency is needed, and 12 high powered cores and 4 (lower powered lower performance) cores going all out. If ARM's low powered cores aren't powerful enough then you have a pair of 5/3s. What benefit is it to have 3 different cores?
nandnandnand - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Die area could be a concern. The Cortex-X1 is around 50% larger than A78 for only around a 20% performance gain.Configurations like 1+3+4 or 2+2+4 are expected. I thought there was a limit of 4 performance cores per cluster but I can't find anything to corroborate that.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15813/arm-cortex-a7...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11441/dynamiq-and-a...
michael2k - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Okay, but if you need X performance and that takes 6 X1 cores to equal the same performance as 8 A78, you now have a cluster of 6/2 vs 8; also, in comparing the A77, A78, and X1 integer and floating point performance the A78 only saw a 7% increase in performance at the same frequency, where the X1 saw a 30% improvement.https://www.anandtech.com/show/15813/arm-cortex-a7...
Long story short, you'd have to clock an A78 pretty high to hit the 83% performance threshold; far more reasonable to expect only a 7% boost in performance for the A78 vs the 30% boost for the X1.
Anyway, we're talking about ARM desktops; die size really shouldn't be a concern if we're comparing to Intel, AMD, and now Apple desktops.
In other words:
6/2
nandnandnand - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
Turns out I was right about the 4 per cluster limit, but it's just been thrown out of the window for a new core. The Cortex-A78C:https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/11/03/arm-cortex...
dotjaz - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
Who told you it's 4 per cluster? And who told you you were "right"? DynamIQ can do compatible cores in ANY configuration. There's no limit.dotjaz - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
If the implemeters want to, they can even ditch DynamIQ and impement as many cores as they want in a cluster. Especially with Apple and Samsung, they haven't been using DynamIQ at all (although Samsung likely will make the switch).dotjaz - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
All the implementer have to do is have DynamIQ identify two groups of 4xA78 as heterogeneous, viola, 8 A78 in one cluster. There's literally nothing stopping it.dotjaz - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
What DynamiQ? No custom core can be used in DynamiQ clusters at all.ads295 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
I've always come to understand ARM implementations to accompany a general dumbing down of the entire OS I.e. smartphone style. It happened to Windows on ARM as well. I'm not a Mac user so maybe I don't know, but perhaps this will lead to Macs resembling iOS? In terms of functionality will a laptop be a supersize smartphone?danbob999 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
ARM is a CPU ISA. It has nothing to do with the software that runs on it.danbob999 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
but yes, Apple will probably end up merging more and more parts of iOS and Mac OS, no matter which CPU they use.GodHatesFAQs - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
They're already more or less completely merged.name99 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
This is very much a question with a TECHNICAL answer.Apple has used a common OS in the form of Darwin since iOS started. But Darwin, like any well-designed OS, distinguishes between MECHANISM and POLICY. The mechanisms are common to all the versions of Darwin, but different policy choices have been made.
Next different driver choices have been made (clearly a huge factor distinguishing phones vs macs where all manner of things can be plugged in).
Next the APIs have been brought closer every year, but they're still somewhat divergent. Obviously there's all the legacy stuff on Mac. Likewise obviously there are API's centered around pointing device capabilities, multiple windows, and multiple screens.
How will these be unified going forward?
The dumb answer is they will all be reduced to whatever iPadOS provides.
The pragmatic (ie non-dumb) answer is that things will continue like they are right now, unification where it makes sense, differences where differences are unavoidable.
The interesting answer questions whether iPadOS will grow more capable, pick up more of the UI functionality of Mac. My guess is yes, but it will take a few more years. The hardline designers are still somewhat in thrall to the original iOS vision of all fingers all the time and nothing that ever has to be explained. (They still seem to believe this, even as the result of this theology is an iPadOS windowing UI that probably only ten people on earth actually understand.)
More interesting, honestly, is the OS Proper capabilities that are now opened up by Apple controlling the whole HW stack on mac. There's scope for a substantial rethink of how an OS should be designed, to simplify security, to better use many-core, to provide better reliability and the isolation of bad hardware. This is the dream -- that over the next ten years Apple gives the OS Proper the same sort of treatment that it gave the CPU.
We'll see; but it may take time :-( The most aggressive changes can't be made until Macs that were sold this year (even till late next year for iMac Pro and Mac Pro?) are deprecated and no longer receive OS updates, so, what, 7 or 8 years...
Tomatotech - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
"The most aggressive changes can't be made until Macs that were sold this year (even till late next year for iMac Pro and Mac Pro?) are deprecated and no longer receive OS updates, so, what, 7 or 8 years"That's never held Apple back. They implement aggressively for (almost) all eligible / capable Macs and release either pared down packages or security updates only for older still-supported Macs.
"Support" doesn't mean "Your Mac will get all the latest features for years after initial hardware purchase," it means 'We will do our best to keep it working the same way as when you brought it, and will keep it up to date with security updates. Any new features are a bonus but not guaranteed."
name99 - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
That's OK for "features". It's a lot more difficult for completely rearchitecting the OS, if the rearchitected version is built on Apple/ARM only capabilities.name99 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Based on what? People who understand nothing about Apple have been making this claim since iPhone 1.They've never been shown to be correct in a single detail (show me one case that's not security related where Mac has lost a capability, ie "been dumbed down", in the past ten years), but that doesn't this crowd.
Remember their previous greatest hits include that golden oldie "Apple will replace the Mac with iPads"...
michael2k - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Why would the CPU architecture have any bearing on the OS architecture?The example you bring up, Windows on ARM, was not a dumbing down of the OS, but restricting the OS because the Microsoft was trying to grow into the tablet market.
In other words, hardware limits placed constraints on what Microsoft could do, and in their case that mean designing their OS to use touch and thin and lite form factors.
Apple's hardware has no such limits, and has been, for several years now, the cream of the crop. They have the fastest ARM hardware, and as such they also have hardware faster than most recent AMD CPUs and incredibly close to Intel CPUs.
FunBunny2 - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
"Why would the CPU architecture have any bearing on the OS architecture?"an OS can, in practical terms, restrict what the OS can practically do. not so much these days in the bread and butter functions, but, for instance, an ISA/CPU that lacks a hardware multiplier is at a disadvantage when it comes to the OS and compiler writers getting a decent OS and languages. for years Intel (and most everybody else) dissed RISC machines as too verbose to assembler coders and too bloated in object modules. then, of course, Intel and everybody else ditched ISA in hardware and went with micro-architecture (real ISA) on the hardware, which just happens to be die hard RISC. to the extent that current ARM ISA (been a while since I looked) is more RISCy than CISCy,
an OS that attempts to explicitly parallelize single-threaded code on the fly for a multi-core chip (it's been tried, but hasn't worked, again, last time I checked) makes no sense for cores < X, for some value of X.
one could go on.
FreckledTrout - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
That is because ARM was used on phones. It wont change Mac's like that. Its just another CPU expect nothing to change in the OS well not because its ARM or x86. They will simply compile and optimize for ARM.The Hardcard - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
In other words, you don’t understand. Windows on ARM is not a smartphone OS at all. Even iPad OS has a host of above smartphone OS features.CharonPDX - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
There's nothing inherent to ARM that requires it. For Windows, it was just a decision by Microsoft. The early Windows-on-ARM devices were quite slow, so Microsoft didn't want to have hugely hobbled x86 emulation giving people a bad taste, so they insisted that it could only run Metro apps compiled for ARM.The more recent Surface Pro X can run (nearly) all x86 (32-bit) Windows software in emulation just fine, it's no longer hobbled. It runs "real" Windows 10, not Windows RT. The only real limitation is graphics-based - the Surface Pro X can't run x86 GPU-intensive games that use OpenGL. And 64-bit support is coming soon.
flyingpants265 - Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - link
That's cool, but I still don't really see the point in a Windows laptop that's too slow to run anything. It would be like an Atom laptop, essentially. It makes perfect sense for an iPad replacement, but I never understood the iPad thing either.I understand phone, PC, and laptop. Tablets are like the worst of all worlds.
huangcjz - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
At Apple's Developer Conference when they announced the transition in the summer, they showed their next version of macOS running on ARM, and it was just a new version of macOS as anyone would normally expect it to be, with no missing features. In fact, they way they did it was to present the whole demo of the new OS normally, as if there were no architecture change, and then, after running through all the new user-facing features, then reveal: "Oh, by the way, everything you've been seeing so far today? It's been running on ARM, not on Intel".trivik12 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Cant wait to see Mac with Apple silicon. I wonder how many cores we will see and if it will still use big.little architecture. I am hoping for at least 8 cores at 3 ghz clockspeed. With Apple single threaded performance, it will be great. Other big thing is Mini Led screen but I am skeptical we will see that this year. Probably sometime around 2022 you will see Mac with Mini Led screen.tipoo - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
The phones can already hit 3Ghz, even if it becomes bound by a short pipeline for much clocks, I should think it would at least be able to do several hundred Mhz higher. 3.5? 3.7? With A14 already being at the top of the single core performance charts, that would flybrucethemoose - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Think Ian will get his external-cache wish?Apple has already teased "advanced packaging" and "high bandwidth" cache. At the very least, we'll get system wide cache like the iOS devices already have, but moving it off chip would be even more interesting.
tipoo - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Since they're aiming to get integrated graphics performance that matches their current dedicated chips by AMD, I would imagine the high bandwidth cache might be something like HBM2 as a caching layer to LPDDR4 to feed the IGP enough bandwidth.mdriftmeyer - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
This is deluded thinking.iphonebestgamephone - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
Oh and whats the non deluded one?huangcjz - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
Apple were the ones who pushed Intel to make those chips with the L4 cache to improve GPU and CPU performance in the first place, starting with Haswell, because they wanted to move completely to iGPUs in most of their laptops to save on chips and space on the logic board, and Intel's GPUs weren't fast enough to satisfy Apple's demands at the time without doing so. So why wouldn't they do the same when designing the CPU and GPU as a SoC themselves? Ian mentions in his Broadwell cache article that HBM would be the modern way to implement it.Pinn - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Will Apple ever get in the server space? I'm doing an ARM64 assembly project and using Amazon's EC2.name99 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Meaning what?Will Apple run servers? (They already do)
Will they run servers using THEIR silicon? Probably.
Will they sell servers? Well some people use the Mac mini as a server and are happy with it.
Will they sell server time like AWS or Azure? In my opinion absolutely. That's coming as soon as the ARM macs are consolidated, next step in providing a more capable, more embracing ecosystem for developers.
But is what you are asking:
Will they sell commodity rack servers? To which the answer is: WHY??? Why sell something that's required to be exactly like everything else and cheap as possible, when Apple's entire reason for existence is to be different from everyone else, and if that costs more so be it.
huangcjz - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
They currently already make a separate Mac Pro version with a different, rack-mountable enclosure to the standard stand-alone tower version.huangcjz - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
They've said that they'll transition all Macs to ARM, so eventually there will be an ARM version of the Mac Pro as well within the next couple of years, and since they currently do a rack-mountable version of the Mac Pro, then they could also make a rack-mountable version of the ARM Mac Pro.edzieba - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
All signs point to no. They've been vehemently resistant to reviving the XServe, and OS X Server has been relegated to an app. The closest they've come to a server in the last decade is the rackmount case variant for the most recent Mac Pro (and that's explicitly intended for AV racks and client compute, not server usage).Tomatotech - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
No. Apple quit the server business years ago. They don't even run their own HQ on Apple hardware. I can't remember what they use, probably some form of linux back end on generic server hardware, plus their cloud services run on a mix of both in-house datacentres with generic hardware (with a linux stack) and Amazon cloud AWS (I think) filling in the gaps / peak loads.They sell to the customer, not to the datacentre.
I hypothesise that they started quitting the server business when they were planning the inital scaleout of their own cloud offerings and realised that their own hardware was too expensive for Apple to buy at the scale required. It would have been clear that offering a server they didn't use themselves would be a foolish move.
Another important factor would have been if they wanted to mesh with Amazon / other mass cloud provider, then they needed a single server software stack that worked at vast scale. Bye bye Apple Server OS.
senjaz - Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - link
The OS X Server as an app doesn't even exist in its original sense any more. Some functions were moved in a limited way into System Preferences, many were just dropped all together. It really left us out to dry. The only reasons for using a Mac as a server these days is the Xcode server tool for continuous integration within teams and for mobile device management.Email – gone
Calendar – gone
Web server – gone
OpenDirectory – gone
DNS – gone
File Sharing – crippled and moved to System Preferences
Update Caching – moved to System Preferences
marees - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
When did AnandTech start posting rumors 🤔 😉name99 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
So now we're calling official communication from Apple corporate rumors?https://www.apple.com/apple-events/
OK then.
marees - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
Where does Apple say that they are introducing a macbook with Arm chip?Mac User - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
I have to say that Apple Silicon Mac will be a historical for the computer industry itself for several reasons. It's up to Apple to succeed or not. Technically, nobody cant do that since Apple can make both hardware and software by themselves. Microsoft seems failed with ARM based computer so far.alumine - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
Inherently Windows on ARM *on its own* isn't bad - but the lack of a vibrant native software ecosystem is the major pain point at the moment.The killer feature for Windows has always been its massive software library and userbase (including virtually all devices having driver support on Windows) - sadly moving to Win10 on ARM basically nukes most of that....
flyingpants265 - Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - link
This has all been fixable with stuff like seamless VMs for a long while now.alumine - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
I reckon Apple is probably in the best place to pull this off for a few reasons:1. iPad OS (based on Darwin, similar to IOS and MacOS - in the same way Windows 10 on ARM is based on a similar kernel to Windows 10).
2. Tbe app ecosystem - this is the killer. Apple has a huge software ecosystem with AAA titles thanks to the iPad - e.g. Adobe suite, MS Office, and the entire Apple first party libraries inc. Garage Band - I imagine porting these won't be a major issue.
That covers most of the low end market space.
Once the low end gets covered - then the more specialised / niche titles are more or less forced to make this transition.
M$ does not have anywhere near the rich ARM based software ecosystem around Win10 on ARM, but hopefully with MacOS on ARM the shift can finally start....
Quantumz0d - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
Love the entertainment for the sudden ARM is masterrace content. As expected. Some are speculating Apple Servers, Others are saying some top class stuff like Apple is going to start a chain reaction.I wonder these people realize how much is marketshare of Mac OS and then how much revenue does Macbooks make. Well to educate the utopian citizens of Apple.
Mac accounts for 9.7% of their revenue share, shadowed by Services and iPhone is past 50%, and then the world wide distribution is also same, under 10%. So yep, Apple is going to transform the entire world.
Can't wait to see this Space Age technology beat Ryzen and Intel and also AWS juggernaut, Azure too.
Meteor2 - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
Apple is the largest company in the world. If you think the world isn't going to notice their moving their desktop hardware to ARM, more fool you.trini00 - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Below should give some indication to Apple performance, A14 in an iPhone Vs Icelake i3 in the MacBook Air, you could probably envision the graphs Apple will show next week.https://gadgetversus.com/processor/apple-a14-bioni...
Meteor2 - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
When you see the numbers laid out like that it really is remarkable. Imagine a CPU with 32 Firestorm cores. No idea if that's possible, but just imagine.Biffe46 - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
The article mention that the last thing on the list was a arm cpu on this years list. Have I missed that Apple Tv 6 isnt an option anymore? Waited for it, so I sure still Hopes the last thing on the list for this year.fteoath64 - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
Apple is not focused gaming. So a GPU focused on video rendering and having AI components are much more important in their market base. This they already have.