
Apple's move to ARM-based Macs creates uncertainty - msh
https://www.axios.com/apple-macbook-arm-chips-ea93c38a-d40a-4873-8de9-7727999c588c.html
======
gumby
This is a super link bait title for a very short, speculative article.

Who knows if Apple will switch to ARM for their laptops. Even Apple may not
know yet. We can be sure they are making some, just as they had various x86
efforts under way for many years during the PPC era.

This article only cites Intel sources, Of course this is something Intel
should be concerned about, and causing some uproar in the press is a good way
to lobby a large customer.

~~~
TheOperator
As much as Apple has neglected pros moving to ARM would definitely put video
editors using Final Cut in the lurch. Its only really their macbook/macbook
air lineups where a move to ARM/RISC looks truly appealing. I don't really
think Apple wants to completely abandon creative Pros.

Yet if you aren't going to move the ENTIRE lineup off of Intel CPUs you're
really limiting any potential benefit.

~~~
gumby
First of all the ARM chips Apple ships are designed for iOS workloads (check
out the dominance of graphics in area and internal bandwidth on the iPad Pro
chips -- it calls to mind the Alto's explicit tradeoff of bus bandwidth and
screen refresh). Apple's ARM parts have been smokers for the past few
generations but they aren't designed for the sustained performance and
instruction mix targeted by Intel.

But that doesn't have to be true. MacOS CPUs need not be the same as the ones
in iOS devices (after all they aren't today either).

Apple could very well design ARM instruction set chips with special pipelined
or SIMD instructions that support, say, the kind of transforms Final Cut
needs. They could make sure Photoshop was a barn burner on their machines if
they thought that mattered. Etc.

The real question is the rest of the silicon (peripheral controllers like TB
etc which they also get from their Intel deal).

As for the tired trope of "As much as Apple has neglected pros" \-- I'm tired
of hearing that. Yes of course their mix isn't perfect for everyone but holy
cow, my MacBook Pro has _4_ 40GPS TB ports! Hell, I get a lot of work done on
their smaller devices, and the ever increasing portability is a huge plus. I'm
a pro, not prosumer, and it works for me.

I know my needs aren't the same as _everybody_ else's, but I would bet that
Apple knows the usage profile of everyone willing to share analytics,
including how often people plug what sort of device into their machines. And
I'm sure that informs their designs.

Every design will fail to be a perfect match for some set of pros, and of
course they should complain. Maybe it's just that they are designing machines
for me? (in which case: fix the damned touch bar).

~~~
consp
You are basically talking about the A76 core[1] and modified derivatives and
its successors (e.g. neoverse[2]).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A76](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A76)

[2]
[https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm_holdings/microarchitectures...](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm_holdings/microarchitectures/neoverse_n1)

~~~
close04
The N1 is actually expected to be on par or faster than a Zen core in single
threaded applications. Overall it would be a match for both Zen and Skylake-
SP. Add to this Apple's specific brand of control over their software stack
and you've got some exceptional potential to deliver high performance in a low
power envelope.

And all this while giving Apple full control over every aspect of their
product (whether it leads to good or bad outcomes). Which could mean actual
yearly refreshes instead of forgetting about a product for years because Intel
had nothing in the pipeline.

I mean if you're going to pay a hefty price premium you probably want
something only Apple can give you. Not just a more expensive version of the
same thing shipped by every other OEM out there.

~~~
speedplane
Moore's law is dead. Switching architectures to something that is more
customizable to your current process is one of the only ways to squeeze more
performance out of a given chip. It's why companies are increasingly building
their own ASICs. If Moore's law was alive, they wouldn't need to, they'd just
wait for the next general purpose chip to come out.

~~~
close04
This isn't just a matter of Moore's law. The lack of competition over the past
decade also played a major role. Intel didn't feel pressed to deliver anything
and instead decided to milk the market.

It doesn't even matter if tomorrow we find a way to bring back Moore's law
(performance increase, not necessarily transistor density). Apple probably
doesn't want to be back here 10 years from now if competition is dwindling.

And again, if they want to charge a lot more than the competition they have to
justify it. This is the justification. Give me a super optimized CPU for which
major software companies optimize their software and you've got my attention.
I imagine Adobe would make sure their SW gets tha last drop of performance on
Apple's machines. May not be the case with the competition's run of the mill
ARM core.

~~~
speedplane
It all comes back to Moores law. Today, there is more competition between chip
fabs than ever. ARM is beating Intel in a number of markets. They are able to
do so, because Intel is slowing down. Intel is slowing down because of Moore's
law.

The idea that a company would optimize a chip to their specific purpose is
also a consequence of Moore's law. If performance did exponentially increase,
there would be no point in optimizing for a task, because by the time you
finished that, the general purpose solution would be faster.

------
icanhackit
Given how smooth Apple's transition from PPC to Intel was, and how much
experience Apple has with ARM in their portable lines -- if/when the complete
transition to ARM happens it'll probably be a brief blip on everyone's radar
and likely increase competition both price and performance-wise in the desktop
sector.

What's stopping Apple from adding hardware-level emulation to their SOC's,
even if it's only partial functions, to ensure cross-compatibility doesn't
take a serious toll on performance? x86 would be patent-encumbered but I'm
sure there are a few creative ways to reduce that burden.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
At the time that Apple went from PPC to x86, x86 had a significant performance
advantage such that emulation wasn’t a big deal. Currently, there is no such
advantage. In addition, many professional Mac programs make use of SIMD
instructions such as AVX. Trying to emulate these will further increase the
performance penalty. In addition, x86 has relatively strong memory ordering
compared to ARM. There may be code that get away with stuff on x86, that will
cause subtle bugs on ARM. Again, it is likely professional programs that do
this.

~~~
jdietrich
It's worth bearing in mind the phenomenal level of expertise that Apple have
in ARM SoC design. The A12x is in many respects competitive with u-series i7
processors, despite a significantly lower TDP. The A12 Bionic has a vast
performance advantage over any other mobile SoC. We don't know what they could
do with a much bigger die and a much bigger power budget, but my expectations
are high.

It's pure speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be hugely surprised if the
first ARM-based MacBook could match the performance of the previous Intel-
based machines when running emulated x86 code and substantially outperform
them when running native code.

~~~
teknopaul
Qemu performance when emulating other cpu arch. is not good. A lot of fast
virtualization we are used to is done by the CPU and is all x86. I think it
would be harder to get comparative performance software emulating x86 on arm.

Pure speculation on my part too.

------
mpweiher
"the first ARM-based Macs could come in 2020, with plans to offer developers a
way to write a single app that can run across iPhones, iPads and Macs by 2021"

Although this may very well be true and somewhat beneficial (see the related
story about "unified Mac/iOS Apps from Ars Technica), the existence of "fat
binaries" on Mach means that having multiple CPU architectures does not
prevent shipping single combined binaries (for some definition of "single")
today.

NeXTstep shipped single binaries for 4 architectures (68K, Intel, HP PA and
SPARC), and due to the app-wrapper architecture, you could actually add the
binaries for different OPENSTEP platforms as well, for example Yellow Box for
Windows and OPENSTEP for Solaris.

Not sure anyone actually did this, but you could easily have had an actual
single program supporting 3 operating system and 4-6 CPU architectures (if you
include the 88K and PPC systems they had in the lab).

~~~
wodenokoto
Just imagine the ire once HN finds out that the Slack client contains the
binaries for the Chrome engine not just one, but 3-4 times over!

~~~
OldHand2018
That would be humorous for sure. Unfortunately (fortunately?), the App Store
already deals with multiple architectures seamlessly. Apple mobile devices are
a mix of arm7, arm8 and arm64.

The Swift Playground app on the iPad has for years allowed you to save,
compile and run files containing any arbitrary Swift code you've felt like
writing (though no access to Frameworks of course): the arm-based compiler
must be very solid by now.

Really, it seems that success or failure hinges on how open the platform is
(and if they have hardware virtualization).

~~~
imtringued
Unfortunately no ARM vendor is interested in open platforms. Therefore a move
to ARM laptops or desktops will be a step back in my opinion. Google's
chromebooks can only run chrome. Windows on ARM can only run UWP apps and
win32 only under emulation. It wouldn't surprise me if the new "iOS" on the
macbook will only run iOS apps.

Another thought: The move to higher level frameworks (UWP etc) as official
APIs makes it harder for languages to interoperate compared to a simple C api
and therefore vendors have even more power over their platform.

~~~
Marsymars
> Windows on ARM can only run UWP apps and win32 only under emulation.

You can compile C++ Win32 apps to ARM64 for WoA:
[https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/11/15/official-s...](https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/11/15/official-
support-for-windows-10-on-arm-development/)

------
andr
The A12X is already comparable to some Intel CPUs in terms of performance. Yet
its power and thermal budget is tiny. The Macbook Pro 13" has an 83 Wh battery
[1], while the iPad Pro 12.9" only has 36 Wh.

What I like to imagine is an ARM Macbook with the equivalent of two A12s. That
will give you an outstanding performance with better battery life. You'll also
get further growth potential that Apple has demonstrated year over year,
compared to Intel CPUs, which have stagnated.

I'm terribly excited about this. And yes, getting your Docker images to run on
ARM will be a bit of a drag, but in the long term, this sounds like the
future.

[1] [https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/apple-
produc...](https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/apple-product-
information-sheet.pdf)

~~~
tyingq
What if they start rolling the locked down sandbox features into MacOS?

~~~
_ph_
Then a large part of the Mac userbase, especially anyone doing any kind of
development, is going to drop the Mac platform. This is also the main reason
the iPad Pro doesn't make larger dents into the laptop market. Development and
even file transfer between apps is very limited.

~~~
interpol_p
It's getting better. I wrote a piece on immediate file transfer between apps
to simulate "live painting" from one app into another. I can see iPad getting
there, but productivity app developers are slow to adopt the iOS file system
introduced some time ago.

[https://codea.io/blog/whats-next-for-ipad-
creativity/](https://codea.io/blog/whats-next-for-ipad-creativity/)

------
protomyth
My only worry is if they will lock down the Macintosh to only allow signed or,
worse, apps from the App Store. If its just a move to ARM then cool, but I
still want to have 32GB of memory and some decent storage. That ship has
sailed, I guess, but I really want a Mac Pro worthy of the name. I miss the G4
case.

~~~
chongli
That would mean disabling the ability to use all command line tools not
included with the base system. What would Apple gain from doing that? They
would certainly alienate a large number of power users in the process.

~~~
bangonkeyboard
By default, macOS Mojave does not let you so much as _ls_ many folders in your
own home directory.

~~~
evanslify
Can you elaborate more?

~~~
bangonkeyboard
For example:
[https://i.imgur.com/hB4pPZd.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/hB4pPZd.jpg)

------
ksec
They promised Mac Pro successors in 2019, and Mac to ARM transition in 2020.?

I still think all these are negotiating tactics. The Mac is now primarily a
prosumer and pro devices only. Apple should milk it for as long as possible
with spec update now and then. The message to Intel's new CEO if you don't
give us better pricing, we will move to ARM ( along with our own 5G Modem ).
My guess is that since Intel's new CEO is a Finance Guy, lowering prices isn't
something he will do. And 5G Modem is also one of those business that makes
little to no margin from Intel's perspective. Intel's ex CSO Aicha Evans, the
person responsible for getting the Modem business moving despite internal
pressure against it, has also left Intel.

Or may be Apple really do have a Grand plan. Apple is one of the largest buyer
of servers. May be the ARM N1 allows them to go top to bottom ARM. From
Devices to Servers. ( And the return of XServe... I can only dream of it )

~~~
stupidcar
I don't think it's negotiating tactic, or any complex strategy. I just think
Apple look at the MacBook and Air and see them as mobile devices far closer in
market fit to the iPhone/iPad than the MacBook Pro. And given that they're
already manufacturing their own chips with the power/perf profile as needed
for mobile devices, why not use them?

~~~
ksec
It make perfect sense for MacBook and MacBook Air, but neglecting MBP, Mac
mini, iMac, iMac Pro, and Mac Pro. Creating a Platform which support ARM in
the low end and x86 in the high end is far more expensive than whatever BOM
cost that is saved from using their own designed SoC. That is unless Apple
goes back to Universal Binary.

------
hs86
I fear a fast deprecation for x86 support like in [1].

After releasing the first Intel Macs in 2006 we already saw the last OS X
release with PowerPC support only one year later in 2007. I believe a Mac has
a longer lifetime than a smartphone or tablet and I hope that the Apple
ecosystem will not leave the Intel devices behind so fast.

The other uncertainty is the upcoming move to Marzipan apps. If its full
release becomes somewhat ARM-exclusive, we might have the same risks as with
Windows 8 and their Metro disaster. In the case of an unified iOS/macOS-Hybrid
these ARM Macs might have no fallback anymore to the already established macOS
ecosystem. (like Windows RT)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_processors)

~~~
lugg
Personally speaking I hope they go faster.

The faster they rip the band-aid off the better. Apple only does this because
they can. They can only do this because they control so much of the ecosystem.
This is a good thing. This is a benefit of them holding control over so much
of the apple ecosystem. This moves the industry forward.

I don't even use apple stuff because I don't like the monopoly. But that
doesn't mean I can't reap the rewards and f a faster moving industry.

~~~
octorian
Apple also doesn't think twice about giving the finger to anyone who actually
depends on old hardware, peripherals, or software... or software/peripherals
that only begrudgingly update to explicitly support the latest and greatest
platforms. These are often the kinds of things with a far longer useful life
than the computer itself, and/or things that work fine for their purpose and
don't actually need upgrades.

This is one area that Microsoft has generally done far better, though that may
not hold true forever.

------
jarjoura
I've been playing with a Windows ARM64 laptop and it's weirdly sluggish mainly
because I think ARM IO and GPU cannot compete with Intel's offering. You can
run benchmarks and the CPU seems decent for a laptop, but it's all the other
things that make a great user experience.

I'm skeptical that Apple would do this to replace Intel as an option,
especially in the Pro line-up. This is either a move for a co-processor to aid
in better battery, or a lightweight, LTE/5G connected laptop that exists on
its own. _shrug_

~~~
tracker1
I'm not sure it will work for some tasks at all. Specifically A/V editing may
suffer, adobe tools in general likely won't see the light of day, and the day
to day software won't be a clean migration most likely.

It could actually be a great opportunity for Adobe to pair with a Linux vendor
(IBM, Canonical) to create a first class supported environment, if they have
to do the architecture migrations anyway. I also think that Apple should
probably create a gui toolkit as an alternative to electron for mac supported
apps, or possibly a react native option.

It will be interesting, but if they kill their pro lineup, I don't know they
can compete, too many are already using 6-7 year old mac pros, and this will
kill hackintosh which is what a lot of pros have gone to.

~~~
akeck
I may be mis-remembering, but I thought Adobe was re-mangling all their apps
to use web tech under the covers?

~~~
tracker1
There's a lot that can use web tech... I think we're at a point where image
editing is probably an option, I don't think we're anywhere near there for
video editing or computer generated 3d graphics.

------
aerotwelve
Doesn't this kill Boot Camp entirely?

Back when I used to encourage people to buy Macbooks (2010-2016), the ability
to boot into Windows natively to run programs with no OS X equivalent usually
gave them the level of comfort necessary to jump ship.

Losing Boot Camp is going to be a big loss.

~~~
MBCook
Windows 10 can run on ARM. So they could keep it around.

Obviously it wouldn’t run most of the software people actually care about.

But they could keep it.

~~~
MikusR
Windows on Arm runs most software people actually care about. The only thing
it can't run is 64bit x86 apps. And those can be ported to arm64.

~~~
saagarjha
How's game compatibility?

------
jasonjei
I think, for me, the biggest fear is using an ARM-based Mac to build cloud-
based software that runs on Linux x86.

Much of my development environment emulates production in Docker x86, but an
ARM-based development environment would have to emulate x86, no?

Alternatively, this could make for building apps in ARM cloud more viable...

~~~
tedivm
If you're doing everything on Docker anyways it kind of doesn't matter, as
Docker already runs on top of a linux virtual machine on OSX. As long as Apple
puts in the effort to bridge their hypervisor framework[1] this should
continue to work.

[1]
[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor)

~~~
bluedino
If you’re using Docker you’re probably not using a Mac anyway, performance is
already terrible.

~~~
bluegreyred
Agreed, Docker on Mac performance is abysmal. Writing from a container to a
shared volume yields sub-10MB/s write speeds and full load on at least two
cores via hyperkit. I get that translating I/O between file systems is
expensive but even Windows does this better. It's the number one reason why
I'm looking into switching away from macOS right now.

------
ianai
“For Intel, of course, it would mean the loss of a significant customer,
albeit probably not a huge hit to its bottom line”

ARM could well become a huge breakthrough for tech. For the first time, it’s
possible to license and customize silicon to purpose with much less overhead.
We’re used to the usual combination of specialized processors (cpu/gpu), but
this will open up further specialization - crypto (proc-bound), file systems
(possibly some parallelism, need for gobs of flash), AI, UI (proc-bound,
benefits from high frequency and no interrupts), who knows what else.

~~~
GuiA
It has already started - most flagship phones these days have a litany of
specialized coprocessors (for biometrics, neural networks, imaging, etc).

~~~
Waterluvian
Don't they have special chips just for decompressing specific video formats?
Ie. Why I noticed some time ago that suddenly phones stopped chugging power
just to watch YouTube.

~~~
solarkraft
Yes. Those "coprocessors" are special circuits on the SoC, typically somewhere
on the CPU sillicon.

------
RantyDave
Despite having said for years that ARM based macs will be a thing, I no longer
think this is the case.

For Apple, it's simply not worth it. They've been conspicuously moving
development resource from the mac to iDevices for the last ten years and the
mac is increasingly becoming an (actually very good) development platform for
the iDevices in question. I mean, c'mon, the big feature for the last release
of macOS was a 'dark' skin ... and from the hardware side all we want is a
keyboard that doesn't shit itself.

On the other hand the iPhone on it's own is one of the largest businesses on
earth, and is under sustained attack by Google/Samsung/Huawei - the latter two
of which are prepared to openly 'cheat' by any means possible. Under such
circumstances would you throw significant resource at a dying market, ~10%
revenue, where Intel are quite prepared to do the majority of the heavy
lifting for you?

~~~
jarjoura
This is actually an argument for Apple to switch entirely to ARM. If they
could consolidate engineers, it could continue to invest in Mac without
needing crazy growth numbers to justify it.

~~~
copperx
True, but the initial cash outlay is immense. Sure, Apple can deal with it.
But is it worth it?

------
grandinj
Why would they do this? They'd need a new line of ARM variant CPUs to meet the
various performance points of the different macbooks and imacs. And they'd be
amortizing those costs over a rather small (for them) number of units.

And that would do very little to address the costs of maintaining the OSX
software stack, very little of which is CPU specific. Most of those costs are
in maintaining a rather different model of UI interaction, software
installation, and backwards compatibility.

My guess is that they have developed this capability in-house as a form of
insurance, and will keep it around and alive as a way of keeping their Intel
costs reasonable.

------
sjwright
Given the success of the last CPU arch transition, there's honestly no reason
why the transitional state couldn't be _semi-permanent_ with powerful desktops
sporting top Intel chips and ultra-light laptops running souped-up A-series
chips from Apple. All it takes is for developers to be producing multi-
architecture binaries, something macOS is already good at and something
developers were doing for years not that long ago.

Remember the WWDC 2020 keynote when they said: "Almost all of your Mac apps
will compile for the A14 chip with zero code changes!"

------
glangdale
The pricing improvements that they get on another round of Intel processors
might well be worth the entire chip design cost, especially when they are
using their ARM chips in the iPad line anyhow. Although by now, the "give us
good prices or we'll leave" factor might already be priced-in.

------
deca6cda37d0
For who it creates uncertainty?

~~~
saagarjha
Application developers and users?

------
benj111
So what's stopping Intel from going ARM?

Modern Intel processors aren't X86 internally anyway, so why can't you just
slap an ARM decoder on an Intel core?

------
JudasGoat
I'm curious, could we expect Linux support for Apple designed Arm?

~~~
solarkraft
With Bootcamp: Very likely.

I'm not so sure if they'll include it this time, though (still I tend towards
yes, but it also will depend on Windows ARM's success).

~~~
opencl
Current Macs with Bootcamp are already basically useless for running Linux. It
is not technically impossible to run but might as well be. The T2 SSD
controller actively prevents access by any OS that is not either MacOS or
Windows, even with secure boot disabled.

------
jpalomaki
ARM based Macbook running iOS might be something to start with.

As travel companion Macbook style device is better than tablet (IMO). Proper
keyboard and design which allows it to be used on lap.

I would really like to see Apple’s take on Lenovo Yoga style device.

------
georgebarnett
This really is a non-story.

The future is by definition uncertain.

