Apple Silicon - finally an alternative to x86 on desktop

[Tommi]

Link to that laptop (which has dimensions and battery life specified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eMZzMjBR4

I've linked to the laptop, which shows teardown and shit. Notice it's a desktop replacement, designed to sit in one place most of teh time, with the ability to move it rather easy, should need arise.

Anyways, I'm out of this. Not gonna fall for the bait any longer, it's like talking to my mother.

[ldev]

I've linked to the laptop, which shows teardown and shit. Notice it's a desktop replacement, designed to sit in one place most of teh time, with the ability to move it rather easy, should need arise.

Anyways, I'm out of this. Not gonna fall for the bait any longer, it's like talking to my mother.

Sooo totally apples to oranges. Completely different thing. Cool. I'm proud of you. You gave your best. Cheers.

[Stormspark]

ARM on desktops isn't anything new....

Right. Acorn Archimedes says hi - ARM on desktop in 1987. That said...I don't give a shit what Apple does. I don't use Apple products, and I never will, for any reason.

[Rennadrel]

MS has had a version of Windows on ARM for 10+ years now, internal yes, but still. Fuck, with a little bit of tinkering, you can run Windows 10 on a Raspberry Pi. I, myself, have done so on my Pi3, and with the Pi4, I've read its totally useable now.

Apple going to ARM on desktops isn't new news either, it's been in works for a few years. ARM is a great choice for mobile solutions, but it's also hitting same issues X86 has now; not much in way of pure improvements power wise, both in consumption and gains.

I just cannot get behind anything Apple does anymore, the Macbook "pro" is a pathetic machine, not even worthy of the Pro name. And you can bet they'll still charge a major premium, with no user ability to fix the machine. Apple has fast become the most anti-consumer company on the planet. All in the name of pure control.

Ah yes, the Microsoft Surface RT, if I recall correctly. It was an abysmal failure due to its lack of software. x86 will continue to be Microsoft's bread and butter platform, especially considering the demand is still there for it on both the desktop and laptop platforms. And since the Surface series is technically a laptop platform, I don't see them committing to it 100% for a long time.

[Linkedblade]

So, pretty big deal - ARM will soon be on desktop https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...ay-from-intel/
And this is not a hobby project like the ones from Microsoft or Google, it's the real deal. Apple's software is on ARM, Microsoft's Office is on ARM and... Adobe's CC is on ARM. Wow.

My thoughts - well, you can judge performance on their FCP demo - three streams of 4k playback. Now, 2019 MBP with Intel can easily do four streams and can do five streams of 4k. So initial reaction was very disappointing. Buuuut - they are demoing this on A12Z, which is basically A12X - 2018 CPU for... a tablet - iPad Pro. While I bet my ass that this version was overclocked, it is still impressive for a tablet CPU. For desktop - well, A12Z has only 4 big cores. So I'm pretty optimistic - they will put 8 big cores for Macbook Pro CPUs - that's 6 streams of 4k playing back. Now that's good. And it's a 2018 CPU fabricated on 7nm, next year they will have more powerful CPUs and on 5nm.

So yea, what are your thoughts?

Of course we will have to wait for benchmarks, but I'm pretty optimistic. My main concern - whether Blender and Davinci Resolve will get ported to ARM.

Let the Apple bashing begin.

ARM is junk compared to x86-64. ARM is great for low power devices like phones and tablets because they use batteries. For a desktop that isn't going to move, or move often, it's junk. I will concede that when it comes to ARM based silicon that Apple has the best. The A series has outdone the competition in the mobile space. Qualcomm Snapdragon, MediaTek, Intel Atom, nVidia Tegra and a few others are not as good performers.

[PtrN]

ARM is junk compared to x86-64. ARM is great for low power devices like phones and tablets because they use batteries. For a desktop that isn't going to move, or move often, it's junk. I will concede that when it comes to ARM based silicon that Apple has the best. The A series has outdone the competition in the mobile space. Qualcomm Snapdragon, MediaTek, Intel Atom, nVidia Tegra and a few others are not as good performers.

It's not good right now but there is is an argument for a chicken and egg type reason for that.

Currently the "highly performant" ARM implementations value energy efficiency highly due to being used in mobile devices. This doesn't mean that's all ARM is good for, just that it has a niche and is implemented to it.

If the market starts demanding "desktop" versions of ARM then we'll see what plops out. Currently there isn't really a market for it so no one is doing much R&D into it.

We'll see what Apple does with its pro lines. Many computer manufacturers are trying to get their lower powered machines on something like ARM. This market segment doesn't need all the power they can get, they just need a phone with a larger screen and a keyboard, enough power to do email/word/facebook.

[Thunderball]

I dont see how they plan to get it to scale to any kind of performance that's good for professional application. Low power solutions - sure, but tbh I'm more excited for Lakefield than this. Probably good for Apple to diversify but they're still going to be dependant on someone for GPUs and in the end I just dont see this being any good for consumers.

[Temp name]

Going to be interesting to see how other devs handle the transition.. I'm willing to bet there are those who will only put minimal effort into the port until for as long as possible.


Also, I thought Apple wanted to get more games on their systems? Running ARM is going to severely limit the amount of games you can port over..

[Yayeet]

They're not going fully ARM, they are likely going ARM on the very thin devices: MB Air, MB Pro 13.

The rest is still going to be Intel because ARM is nowhere near the level of the i7, i9 and XEON processors.

- - - Updated - - -

"arm" is the company that designed the core technology of those CPUs. They just don't make actual physical CPUs themselves, instead they license those designs out to companies like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm etc to make CPUs out of them in various configurations.

https://www.arm.com/

The company is called "arm" (they re-branded to lower case for some reason), the instruction sets typically have a version, like ARMv8 for the current one, or ARMv9 which is rumored to be used for Apples A14.

Calling it "Apple Silicone" is entirely marketing buzzwords. The chips are manufactured by TSMC based on core technology licensed from arm. Sure, Apple developed this specific CPU, based on those licensed technologies, but its a farthrow from a comparison like AMD Ryzen, who developed the entire CPU from the ground up (with some cross-licensing with Intel to remain compatible. AMD owns a few patents Intel needs, and Intel has a bunch that AMD needs)

Apple's ARM silicon was also made from the ground up. You should probably learn a bit more about tech before making things up.

Otherwise snapdragon wouldn't need two new snapdragon generations to finally tie with a 2 year old apple silicon.

[Gaidax]

They're not going fully ARM, they are likely going ARM on the very thin devices: MB Air, MB Pro 13.

The rest is still going to be Intel because ARM is nowhere near the level of the i7, i9 and XEON processors.

- - - Updated - - -



Apple's ARM silicon was also made from the ground up. You should probably learn a bit more about tech before making things up.

Otherwise snapdragon wouldn't need two new snapdragon generations to finally tie with a 2 year old apple silicon.

They are doing full transition within 2 years. Full, as in everything.

I do expect great things there because Apple's ARM implementation is strong, they really have some great chips there and if energy requirements are loosened they may spread their wings there.

It remains to be seen how it will turn out, but this definitely is big news there. I would not be surprised if majority of laptops shipped will be ARM based in a ballpark of 6 years from now if that succeeds.

[Thunderball]

Apple's ARM silicon was also made from the ground up. You should probably learn a bit more about tech before making things up.

Otherwise snapdragon wouldn't need two new snapdragon generations to finally tie with a 2 year old apple silicon.

Well the person you quote is a bit misinformed, but the only reason Qualcomm is behind Apple ARM silicon is because they're playing by the same rules but Apple started 3 years early. So yeah the design was made from the ground up back when Apple started developping their own ARM-based SoC, this thing they announce right now is not - it is scaled up mobile hardware.

[Bethanie]

As a gamer in order to consider buying an Arm based Mac (or PC) my questions are:

• How well does it perform compared to a similarly priced Intel / AMD based system?
• Will it run my existing games?
• Will it attract mainstream games releases?
• What gaming benefits does it offer that traditional systems don't?

[Thunderball]

As a gamer in order to consider buying an Arm based Mac (or PC) are:

• How well does it perform compared to a similarly priced Intel / AMD based system?
• Will it run my existing games?
• Will it attract mainstream games releases?
• What gaming benefits does it offer that traditional systems don't?

Those chips are gonna be shit for gaming. Simply not made for it. Games need a lot of fast cache and ARM chips are designed for different stuff.

[ldev]

As a gamer in order to consider buying an Arm based Mac (or PC) my questions are:

• How well does it perform compared to a similarly priced Intel / AMD based system?
• Will it run my existing games?
• Will it attract mainstream games releases?
• What gaming benefits does it offer that traditional systems don't?

This is not for you, you shouldn't even consider Mac or ARM PC for gaming.

[dope_danny]

its nice in theory but i've been using apple hardware for work for like 12 years and the quality has noticeably declined in favour of selling them as something more like fashion accessories. They have been struggling to find some tactic to boost sales again and the "uptrade your phone every 6 months and treat it like a car" shit didn't work out and then we got stupid things like that "metal stick: 200 dollar!" that brand drones bloody cheered for. The Macs are 'fine' nowadays but compared to the 2007-8 models overheating and crashing is far more common as is. Try to push some significant new hardware without solving the increasing baseline issues just makes me wary.

[Sunderella]

I don't really like Apple products and probably will never buy any of their products, but I'm genuinely interested on how this pans out for them. Porting their stuff to ARM as well as some of the big software that is mostly used on macs should be rather easy for them but what happens to the software from smaller companies or individual dev? Will they port everything to ARM or will Apple offer some kind of emulation platform to run x86 software?

In any case, this could make very big waves IMO

[ati87]

As a gamer in order to consider buying an Arm based Mac (or PC) my questions are:

• How well does it perform compared to a similarly priced Intel / AMD based system?
• Will it run my existing games?
• Will it attract mainstream games releases?
• What gaming benefits does it offer that traditional systems don't?

1)Nobody knows to be honest, you can have some expectations based on what's currently available but there are no hard benchmarks so it's all speculation for now. Don't expect to much though, ARM is currently used for low power devices hence phones, tablets and watches comments.
2) Probably not, unless developers decide to port there old games.
3) Probably not/hard to say, gaming on MAC isn't a thing with intel CPU's let alone ARM Cpu's. It might attract mobile game developers though, so it could create an entire new market for developers for mobile games who now could port there games to a device that has more capability than a mobile device.
4) At best if your a laptop gamer you might see more games become available if developers decide to support Apple's new CPU and if the performance exceeds Intel CPU's/IGPU.

Lets be clear though, Apple doesn't care about gamers and most of it's current customers probably only use there expensive laptops for email, word and youtube, so for this group it can be really nice because it's expected that the battery life of Apple's future laptop will greatly increase.
A small group of Mac user actually need the raw power of an Intel CPU and they are probably better off going for Windows or even Linux Desktops anyway.

- - - Updated - - -

its nice in theory but i've been using apple hardware for work for like 12 years and the quality has noticeably declined in favour of selling them as something more like fashion accessories. They have been struggling to find some tactic to boost sales again and the "uptrade your phone every 6 months and treat it like a car" shit didn't work out and then we got stupid things like that "metal stick: 200 dollar!" that brand drones bloody cheered for. The Macs are 'fine' nowadays but compared to the 2007-8 models overheating and crashing is far more common as is. Try to push some significant new hardware without solving the increasing baseline issues just makes me wary.

Apple was always aesthetics instead of raw performance though.
There really isn't that much money in the pre-build market if your selling point is performance, the moment you decide to sell mainstream level desktops you are going up against custom PC's which you can never really win from.
Alternative is to make your products look more beautiful for the mainstream crowd and then sell some high powered devices for the absolute premium price. This keeps the profits up and you can justify the ridiculous price for your ''top'' product.

[Leouch]

As a gamer in order to consider buying an Arm based Mac (or PC) my questions are:

• How well does it perform compared to a similarly priced Intel / AMD based system?
• Will it run my existing games?
• Will it attract mainstream games releases?
• What gaming benefits does it offer that traditional systems don't?

• worse
• no
• not in near future
• none

[Cracked]

Please no, life was so simple when all you had to do was compile software for x86_64 and it just worked..

[Wries]

These news are exciting indeed!

I don't really like Apple products and probably will never buy any of their products, but I'm genuinely interested on how this pans out for them. Porting their stuff to ARM as well as some of the big software that is mostly used on macs should be rather easy for them but what happens to the software from smaller companies or individual dev? Will they port everything to ARM or will Apple offer some kind of emulation platform to run x86 software?

In any case, this could make very big waves IMO

This was adressed in the keynote. Rosetta 2 is included, x86_64 apps are recompiled upon installation. Seems it works quite well too if Apple are to believed on the topic. But we will have to wait and see of course.