Apple Mac computers make jump to its own chips

[cptgone]

Wow!
Was that BBC Editor app already migrated to the new ARM architecture

[dermage]

Apple Mac computers make jump to its own chips

Can we just take a moment to appreciate what a charmingly nonsensical piece of writing this is?

(Written by BBC editors, not OP)

Lol, yeah, a strange text.
And it reads as it was Intel's fault because they could not deliver in time (what?).
So much strange info and (made up) correlations in that text. Partly it's just copy-paste from Apple's presentation/PR stuff probably.

Apple could've gone AMD easily, but obviously the decision was to make them independent from CPU manufactures. Still they need an external plant to make the chips like TSMC, wonder why they did not built something like that. But I guess the process is just too volatile, complex and far away (in distance) for Apple to control from the US and too expensive to do themselves (for now).

Anyway on the CPU market itself this will create a new player which (if powerful enough) will challenge AMD/Intel. This is not bad at all in these terms.
My wild guess is, that they won't be powerful enough right now and only do weaker models (like AIR) with the ARM chips. Later in 2-3 years they'll try to reach into the more powerful stuff, but they're not yet entirely sure if they can hit that mark. (as someone mentioned before).

[Urs]

As a developer you might have to invest about 2-5 days, depending on the complexity of your application, to get it all working on ARM.

I would love to hear for example U-he's or any other devs opinion on this.

I was a one-guy shop when I did PowerPC -> Intel. Back then all I had to do was map all the AltiVec code to SSE. I actually did it the other way round: As SSE was a mere subset of AltiVec back then, I created a mapping for SSE code onto AltiVec and rewrote the few parts that were AltiVec with this new abstraction layer. It came in handy when we did Rack Extensions, because those had neither SSE nor AltiVec. So we added a fully scalar mapping to SSE and AltiVec and that part of the transition was done in two days. So, now we have to add a NEON layer if we wanted to. But now we also have LLVM instead of GNU, so maybe we just scrap all of the above and simply use LLVM's built-in vector format and forget about it for whatever comes next, whenever.

tl;dr: I'm not concerned about the processor architecture itself.

a lot of plugin developer lost much time to make them catalina compatible. So it would be best decision to leave apple, and to focus on new plugins, such as zebra 3.

Funny enough, the Catalina update has forced us to update Diva and discard off some legacy code. Now Diva has vastly improved performance and we're selling about twice as many than before. I'm sure that's one of the reasons we're getting through the current crisis rather well, and which hopefully keeps us going until Z3 emerges.

But yeah, we surely wouldn't be sad if Apple didn't force us to deal with such things, but otoh we have learned to be on the ball. The demise of deprecated technologies such as OpenGL or AUv2 won't make us flinch - we've known it was coming and we're prepared.

If however the App Store was forced onto us, we'd probably change our product strategy.

[v1o]

The Rosetta 2 performance seemed pretty decent for what it is. They showed x86-64 Maya running a complex scene with 5 million polygons and the latest Tomb Raider game. I remember running PPC apps on Intel Macs for years with Rosetta 1, I believe this was only possible because the Intel Core chips were more performant than older chips they replaced. If Apple can make the huge annual performance gains they do with their mobile chipsets on the desktop class chips, then I'm sure any short term inconvenience for developers will be worth it in the long term.

[v1o]

Apple could've gone AMD easily, but obviously the decision was to make them independent from CPU manufactures. Still they need an external plant to make the chips like TSMC, wonder why they did not built something like that. But I guess the process is just too volatile, complex and far away (in distance) for Apple to control from the US and too expensive to do themselves (for now).

AMD don't make their own chips they are fabless like Apple. The reason why Intel is now behind companies like AMD and Nvidia (Intel also designs GPUs) is because they are struggling with an outdated process compared to the competition. That's the advantage of using external fabs, you dont get stuck with outdated process nods, you can pick and choose who gets to make your chips. AMD even owned a fab at one point (Global Foundries) but then spun it off when they realised its inefficient for a chipmaker to own a fab.

[aMUSEd]

No offense but who the hell is buying Macs to play games right now? Nobody.

Maybe no one buys a Mac as a games machine but some of us who have Macs do also like to play games so performance when doing so is still a concern. I'm not going to buy a new hi spec PC as well just for games (although I do also have an X-Box).

[dermage]

Apple could've gone AMD easily, but obviously the decision was to make them independent from CPU manufactures. Still they need an external plant to make the chips like TSMC, wonder why they did not built something like that. But I guess the process is just too volatile, complex and far away (in distance) for Apple to control from the US and too expensive to do themselves (for now).

AMD don't make their own chips they are fabless like Apple. The reason why Intel is now behind companies like AMD and Nvidia (Intel also designs GPUs) is because they are struggling with an outdated process compared to the competition. That's the advantage of using external fabs, you dont get stuck with outdated process nods. AMD even owned a fab at one point (Global Foundries) but then spun it off when they realised its inefficient for a chipmaker to own a fab.

Yes, know that. Still they make quite good designs currently and would easily fit for MacOS (compared against an architectural switch). Also Apple is already using AMD Gpus I think in their big Macs ( )

AMD had and still has some contractual things with GF going on, although not for their top line CPUs. I think this was needed for them to extract GF from their company.

The popular opinion on Intel is not because they own the fabs having problems, but they not investing as much/being sleepy for a time when AMD was struggling. It seems in the CPU market the decisions are very long term affecting the design/production process. AMDs Ryzen was designed before 2016 and still they're improving the architecture. Intel, whilst having the money, slept on the process node jump and maybe made some wrong decision postponing everything at least 2 years now.
The difference between AMD and Intel is, that Intel has (or had) enormous amounts of market share and money available, but didn't use this power to process their node. AMD acknowledged their bad Bulldozer etc. CPU performance and hired the legendary CPU designer who did the Athlon XP (which was their previous strike against Intel). AMD is a far smaller company having only a fraction of personnel but deliver chip/designs to both XBOX and PS and recently gained the crown in parallel CPU processing.
In the meantime Intel bought off AMDs GPU management division. (Just a side rant from me )

[rezoneight]

Amazing. Mostly marketing bullcrp throughout the whole WWDC.
Funny to see the claims of "innovative" and "new" and claims that other platforms copy what Apple does. When other platforms have had the same features for years! Quite funny, are Apple users so unaware of the platforms around that they believe anything Apple says?

Let me guess...you're just here to troll right?

What makes you say that? Did you read my whole post? You didn't watch the WWDC did you?

Both, and the platform state of the union, which lets me know you're not serious.

[rezoneight]

Pretty sad day for developers of music software.

Personal opinion:
I mean I'm still on my quite strong 9 year old i7 2600k (overclocked@4,5ghz on air) on Windows and upgraded several single items without trashing the whole system. Apple in the meantime ended to support this CPU for Mojave in 2018 already. In the studio I have an i7700k which is only about 20-30% faster than the 9 year old, so it's running quite well and Microsoft does not deprecate Software all the time.
I'm no MS fanboi, but their system just makes more sense for professionals IMO (at least after they fixed several real-time/low latency problems about 10 years ago)

So the Windows user is here "worried" about the Mac users. Oh how sweet. If you're running on Windows and happy there why the hell do you even care about any of this other than to troll?

How sweet that you don't have anything of value to add in this discussion but to attack other users here? If you want to contribute with your point of view, just do so.

I work with a vast number of systems on a daily basis, all of them has to support "all" platforms. About 30% of them being Apple products (about 6000 out of 20000 devices). I make sure our enterprise environment is compatible with ALL platforms, from Windows, Linux, MacOS, ChromeOS, Android, etc. Guess what users and what OS that has brought most trouble expecting everyone else to use specific non-standard proprietary protocols?
I also help music and video production studios, they mostly go full Apple because they are used to it and they also want all the major industry standard DAWs and programs in the same studios (Protools, Cubase and Logic). They sure pay extra $$$ for that decision. My own studio is 100% Windows based and I can run much more complex and large projects than they can in their Apple setup. But good for them if they are happy.

I have no issue with the actual quality of Apples products. But it's emberrasing to see how Apple tries to take control over the narrative based on some lies and wishful thinking - and hiding of real facts. Of course, I can be totally wrong about the ARM silicon! Can you please tell me how good Apples ARM CPU's are based on facts, any benchmarks available?

And... maybe, just maybe, YOU are the one acting like a troll here? Where are your own opinions, insights, viewpoints.. anything to add to the discussion?

Dude, give me a break. You're the one who came in here guns blazing about how bad this all is, how Apple isn't serious, blah blah blah. It was dripping with trollspew. Sorry its hard to hear.

If Apple wasn't serious they wouldnt be doing it. They didnt get where they are about not being serious.

One only need do a simple Google search, and the fact that you a) dont know any of the details at all and b) didn't bother to even look again tells me where your interests lie, and its not on the facts. Lets look at this article from 2018 when the A12X was released:

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/2799 ... -geekbench

At the time the A12x used in the ipad pro very close in both single AND multicore performance to the 13" Macbook Pro of the time. The author notes that when you dig in to the benchmarks there are areas where Intel is definitely faster. But if you think that Apple is simply sitting around not driving their own designs forward I've got a bridge in New York to sell you. Its a multi-year process and as of yet we have no idea what they've got in the pipeline to get where they need to be. Do you have any idea how tech products like this are developed? I can guarantee you its a multi-year process. Doesn't mean Intel is going away tomorrow. It also doesnt mean that Apple isn't going to continue supporting their Intel machine for years to come. I have a 2013 machine that is running Catalina right now just fine.

So when you're really serious and want to have a rational discussion get back to me. Until then you're just a troll.

[Googly Smythe]

Interesting to note that the article claims that Apple is the 4th largest vendor of PCs. Who knew?

[rezoneight]

And for the view from a former MS employee of some repute check out this thread:

https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1275311056672325633

[Haptix]

And for the view from a former MS employee of some repute check out this thread:

https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1275311056672325633

Is the former MS employee perhaps working now for..Apple? For some reason the first sentence gave it all away..

[MadDogE134]

i am just wonderin' if the ARM chips will need a LEG up

[nix808]

i am just wonderin' if the ARM chips will need a LEG up

If ya wanna drive Macs, u'll need the right to bear ARMs,
then see the ARMs dealer

[TS-12]

"Apple successfully made the switch from IBM-Motorola's PowerPC processors to Intel's x86 family in 2006."

that wasnt completely successful, since applications made for powerPC didn't work on intel based Macs.

I also wonder how many years it will take for apple to start using intel cpus again