
On Apple Announcing the ARM Mac Transition at WWDC This Month - jmsflknr
https://daringfireball.net/2020/06/on_apple_announcing_the_mac_arm_transition_at_wwdc
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ianamartin
I'm excited about this. Can't wait to see what performance looks like. As for
the effect on sales, it's probably a wash. For people who know and care about
these things, I'd imagine a 50/50 split between people racing to get the last
rev of Intel macs to wait out the transition until things stabilize and the
other half waiting for the new stuff. macOS app devs won't really have a
choice, but iOS devs will.

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hnjim
I believe this will enable new form factors given PPW and higher performant
systems free of power and thermal constraints on desktop. It may take some
time, but I think this will lead to significantly greater long term sales and
market share. Apples lead is rather significant in this space and the only
computer with that soc will be a Mac.

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protomyth
I really believe that the lack of x86 is going to be a big buying problem for
a lot of people who need to run software on Windows. Without Boot Camp or x86
virtual machines its going to be a problem to justify the machine with a large
group of people.

~~~
hnjim
I suspect that for every customer they lose for someone needing to boot
natively they will gain more than one from performance, cost and form factor
flexibility enabling much more desirable machines. Batteries add both size and
weight so you can get thinner and lighter and _still_ have a functional
keyboard.

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protomyth
Why do people believe Apple will price these machines cheaper than their Intel
offerings?

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sfifs
I wonder if the image, video and audio processing software vendors will make
of this - I would assume a lot of optimizations are tied to the underlying
hardware and written in assembly?

This seems to be a golden opportunity for Adobe pay back in some way what
Steve Jobs did to them by not supporting flash on iPhone

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hnjim
For vendors using metal it could be seamless. There would also be gains had
through ML and neural engine in image, video and audio processing. Not to
mention dedicated video hardware decode. Time will tell, but I don’t see adobe
being punitive there. They make money on software subscriptions and are
already bringing native photoshop to iOS.

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jasonhansel
Why not just require apps to be distributed as LLVM bitcode, as is done for
the Apple watch? That would give Apple the flexibility to change architectures
--or even to create its own instruction set, now that it's making its own
chips.

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p_l
LLVM bitcode is not that portable in reality. Just like Plan9 assembly
intermediary bitcode files are pretty much single architecture, due to
containing lots and lots of low-level assumptions about the target
architecture, not to mention possible incompatibilities in extended intrinsics
(for example for vector units).

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Scaevolus
Most of the portability problems for retargetting to another little endian
64-bit architecture aren't the easy ones of bit widths and integer types, but
rather more subtle things like a more relaxed memory model and different
performance characteristics.

It's not worth the overhead of attempting to ship bitcode. Apple has shipped
products on 6502, 68000, PPC, x86, x86-64, ARM, and ARM64. The transitions
have been annoying for the lost software, but that's not an unusual occurrence
for an OSX upgrade either.

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philistine
What was the Newton using ?

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portlander52232
They were also ARM.

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GeekyBear
I sincerely doubt this will show up on anything but entry level products until
developers have time to migrate their apps.

In the past, there has always been a period where the current and future
architectures were both sold.

The interesting thing going forward is the question of working with Microsoft
to get Windows on ARM ported over (assuming Microsoft finally gets the
promised x64 app compatibility working) or to fork something like QEMU to
allow for x86 virtual machines.

Or both, I guess.

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CapriciousCptl
Can they source enough chips to do this in the near term? Meanwhile, another
major fabless designer (AMD) is ramping up too.

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cmsj
Apple ships close to 200 million iPhones a year all with their custom ARM
CPUs, fabricated by TSMC. They ship about a tenth as many Macs. I'm pretty
sure they can handle that growth, especially as one of TSMC's biggest
customers.

~~~
hnjim
And the move to 5nm for the A14 (sampling since 2019) will yield more chips
per wafer. Either way, Apple is very forward looking on supply chain and has
been planning this for a decade. Remember when they owned the majority of the
nand market due to long term supplier contracts?

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CapriciousCptl
Interesting thought. Will the functional yield really be much higher? Because
there could be more wasted chips?

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c-smile
Smart move...

How would you otherwise convince existing customers to throw away working
systems and buy new ones?

I don't think that we should expect new ARM64 to be 10 times better than
x64...

The only idea I can think of is if chip will have bult-in hardware-accelerated
OpenVG or any other 2D API to replace severely outdated CoreGraphics ...

