

Why Apple will move away from Intel and towards ARM 64 bit - mtgx
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/09/24/an-update-on-apple-moving-away-from-intel/

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archgrove
I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusions, but

"Next up is the OS. Have you noticed that OSX releases of late, well, to be
blunt, suck? It’s not that they suck as a stand alone OS, but they take away a
lot of the freedoms and flexibility that the Mac desktop OS user has come to
expect. Bit by bit Apple is removing all of the parts that make OSX something
other than a phone class OS"

Is nonsense. "Suck" is a matter of opinion, but there's nothing you can do on
a 5 year old Mac that you can't do on a new Mac (and several things more).
People keep confusing attempts to make the OS easier to use with "closing" it.
When I can't run my own software, and drop to a terminal with the standard
UNIX tool chain, I'll but the argument. But there's no sign of this so far.

~~~
maratd
> When I can't run my own software, and drop to a terminal with the standard
> UNIX tool chain, I'll but the argument. But there's no sign of this so far.

You can run your own software and drop to a terminal with the standard UNIX
tool chain on your iPhone, too. You just have to jailbreak it first.

So Apple is really one flip of the switch away ...

~~~
archgrove
That's true of every computational device in the world. Windows, Ubuntu,
Android, etc. Everyone could flip that switch, and lockout non-jailbreakers
(or Kernel recompilers). It's not an argument for it happening.

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bryanlarsen
I'm sure that Apple has a plan in place to do this, but whether they pull the
trigger on this plan is another question. It's quite likely that Clover Trail
is faster than A6, and Clover Trail is Intel's low end chip. Ivy Bridge is
almost an order of magnitude faster than Clover Trail. Most of the PA Semi
guys at Apple will be working on chips for the next iPads and iPhones, but I'd
be willing to bet lots of money there's a skunk works project to design a chip
that could go into the Air. Apple loves squeezing the margin out of their
suppliers, and Intel's margin is very juicy.

~~~
mtgx
Unlikely, especially on the GPU side. But let's say Clover Trail is slightly
faster than A6. That's not really relevant, because Apple would care much more
about using their own chip. It's not like Apple hasn't used slower CPU's than
the competition. Heck, for the entirety of the iPhone 4S' and iPad 3's life,
both had slower CPU's than the competition. And they didn't care.

Plus, Clover Trail is not used in smartphones for a reason - it uses too much
power. That's why they are only using it for $800 Windows 8 tablets with big
batteries. So for this chip, the A6X, or whatever they call the chip inside
the next iPad, will be its competition anyway.

As for "ARMbooks", I'm pretty sure Apple will wait until they have an 64 bit
ARM chip first, but I also wonder if they will make a "higher-end" chip, that
uses say 5-10W of power and is specifically made for those ARMbooks - not for
iPads or iPhones, while in parallel continuing the development of A7, A8, etc.

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nilsbunger
Being able to run Windows applications with Fusion or Bootcamp was one of the
big draws for me for the Mac. Not sure if I'm ready to give up running x86
applications yet (or ever?).

~~~
pooriaazimi
A valid point. However, Microsoft is betting heavily on ARM too, with Win8 RT
(if I'm not mistaken and RT is the ARM one). So, Win8 and a lot of Win8 apps
are going to support ARM, and those who don't can be virtualized!

(Note that I'm not saying it's a good plan)

~~~
trotsky
Wait, you're suggesting that you're going to be running an x86 emulator on
winrt for apps access? That is pretty unlikely to be a realistic solution
unless you're only looking for very old apps - try running an arm emulator on
x86 to get a taste, and then slow it down by 5x or more.

~~~
pooriaazimi
You're right :) It probably would be unusably slow.

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Zenst
Interesting read with some good points albiet biased towards the aspect they
will move. But does show that it is not impossible, though nothing soon and
I'd agree that laptops would be there first target area. I also liked the
aspect that OSX is becomming more and more phone OS like and that could indeed
also be said of the upcomming win8 due to metro. Overall I see both Apple and
Microsoft going for consumer level devices, remember calculators are computers
as well, only biased for the application and in that both apple and microsoft
are transitioning towards a unified interface and standard making computers
more and more consumerised. Thats ok as there will always be Linux and many
other operating systems to play with if you need that level of interaction and
in that whilst its a change I don't like, I can understand it.

One aspect not touched upon in this article is the whole area of a server, one
which apple walked away from and is a whole empty cavity that could become one
which a 64bit version of ARM chips down the line could end up making that area
viable for Apple again. Though it would probably be a solid white cube called
iPortal j/k.

Either way, even if they do move they can still brow beat Intel for even
better prices milking every avenue of options along the way. Though any move
to a ARM base for OSX would at the earliest be 2 years away and relisticaly
4-5. Though for servers and processing farms it does become a whole new
avenue.

~~~
xradionut
"Overall I see both Apple and Microsoft going for consumer level devices,
remember calculators are computers as well, only biased for the application
and in that both apple and microsoft are transitioning towards a unified
interface and standard making computers more and more consumerised. Thats ok
as there will always be Linux and many other operating systems to play with if
you need that level of interaction and in that whilst its a change I don't
like, I can understand it."

A huge chunk of Microsoft revenue comes from business customers, pros and the
ilk, who run applications that can't all be distilled down to a touch
interface. There's still a CLI in Windows 8 and much of the MS new server
products are driven with CLI in the form of Powershell. You can pick your
level of interaction that you need.

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trotsky
It seems like Apple would be a pretty good candidate for the "Heterogeneous
System Architecture" work AMD has been doing, x86_64 and ARM on the same SOC.
Leave the x86 cores off when you don't need them.

~~~
twoodfin
If anyone has both the technical know how to come up with a "good enough"
development scheme to make that work, and the leverage with their developers
to ensure support, it's Apple. But yikes that sounds like a hard problem. How
do you migrate a process from one ISA to the other? Some kind of compiler-
enforced "safe points" where there's a sensible mapping of the IP and other
instruction stream-sensitive state?

~~~
geon
Lots of systems have been buils with multiple processor architectures,
including the early Macs, the Nintendo DS, the PS3, and every PC the last
decade (cpu+gpu).

You would usually write your code to use one specific cpu, rather than trying
to balance the load automatically like on a heterogenous system.

~~~
twoodfin
I thought trotsky was suggesting an ARM/x86 mix along the lines of ARM's
big.LITTLE, which allows process migration between two very differently
implemented (though ISA-compatible) cores.

~~~
trotsky
While they haven't announced any of it in public, it does seem hard to believe
they'd be migrating running applications. It's much more likely that they're
targeting nx page sharing, you'd still have build the os for both isas, but
it'd allow you to run many tasks on the low poer cores and only spin up the
hot ones when the application required the performance or binary
compatibility. Think more like switchable graphics than big.little, though the
low power architecture would stay usable all the time.

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protomyth
Bootcamp sells a lot of Macintoshes.

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sswezey
OS X sells more.

~~~
dagw
I was at a talk recently about some C#/.Net framework aimed at .Net developers
and half the laptops in the room where Macs running Windows. Even the lead
developer giving the presentation had a Mac.

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nachteilig
Seems pretty silly to claim it's "obvious" as this guy does repeatedly. I'm
not sure you can claim that the move from being able to upgrade and service
computers to not being able to is a move toward being an iOS device. Seems
more likely that Apple just makes those sacrifices because they're required to
make thin and light products, and at today's speeds few people need to upgrade
things anymore. (Not that it wouldn't be _nice_ to be able to upgrade things,
but we've seemingly moved to a time when a lot of people don't mind the lack
of this as a feature)

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buster
Yay, great. Apple go. The day Apple moves to ARM on the Macbook will be the
start of the downfall of Apple.

Also, when is Apple moving to Intel on the iPhone?

Actually, i can imagine running a server farm on ARMs, that'd be great (and
there is ARM server hardware available). BUt for the desktop? nope.

~~~
rbanffy
ARM started as a desktop platform and, at the time, it was much faster clock
for clock than what Intel offered. I believe you can find benchmarks of that
time comparing the Archimedes to high end PCs.

Current ARMs are designed to save power, but there is nothing preventing Apple
(or anyone else) from designing one for speed.

~~~
buster
haha. Yeah, because a benchmark from the 80s means something today.

So you honestly think Apple will forsake the x86 ecosystem, all the apps,
maybe put another emulator approach to it AND lose the benefit of running
windows on a macbook? For what? What's the benefit? It's just fucking over
customers. Well, as always. So maybe, they'll just do it. Opportunity to take
even more control of the users, yay.

~~~
rbanffy
Apple has done it on the Mac now three times with ISAs (68K to PPC to Intel,
with multi-ISA binaries) and once with operating system architecture (MacOS
classic to OSX). NeXT has ported their OS from the original 68K implementation
to x86, HP-PA, POWER and SPARC before making it run on Macs. Their IDE, the
predecessor of Xcode, also ran on Windows NT.

Apple has also shifted its strategy from "we build really fast computers"
(PPC, MacPros) to "we build tools you love" (current Mac line). I see not big
problem to gradually moving again to a new ISA, in special if it promises very
long battery lives and even lighter machines.

~~~
buster
I'm not saying they can't do it. And not saying they never did it. Does it
mean that they should constantly switch the architectures? Why?! It's just
some stupid "ARM is cool, let's do ARM, it's different" sentiment more then
for technical reasons.

Again: If ARM would build a speed equivalent (in major important benchmarks)
processor, why do you think that the battery life would increase
significantly? Your battery life would _not_ double or triple or whatever. You
would maybe get.. i don't know.. 30% more? And why would the machine be
lighter?!

So again, where is the real benefit here. Keep in mind that you would likely
lose Windows support (that'd even make sense in closing up the Apple ecosystem
even more!) and most legacy app (except Apple does another crappy emulator
support multibinary thing).

Anyway. As i said in the original post: I hope Apple does this. I hope Apple
abandons Windows/Bootcamp and goes further along the road of the Apple
ecosystem. If they do, Apple will fall. History repeated :)

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jakeonthemove
They're moving away from x86 - maybe. I remember Intel's XScale ARM processors
were the best around at the time. But Apple without x86 = suicide...

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onetwothreefour
Anyone who says something like this deserves to be laughed at and shown the
door out of technology.

Intel is light years ahead of ARM for desktop CPUs, where power usage is
irrelevant.

Do you really think Apple is going to run ALL THE APPS EVER WRITTEN FOR OS X
on an x86 to ARM emulation layer?

Really?

Well, then I have a bridge to sell you.

~~~
wmf
Apple already dropped Rosetta, abandoning PPC apps. Gatekeeper is doing away
with apps compiled before 2012. 10.9 may drop 32-bit. Perhaps 10.10 will be
App Store only with fat x86-64/ARM apps. Then 10.11 can drop x86-64.

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lbcadden3
Maybe.

Based on the current revenue breakdown I think the only reason Apple still
makes computers is the margins they get. If they got the margins a lot of
other pc makers get they would have killed the computer side already.

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digitalengineer
Nobody here's a wee bit worried about the direction Apple is going with
Gatekeeper? Only signed and sandboxed apps in a few years? Only to be dl and
purchased in the App Store with Apple receiving 30%?

~~~
jimktrains2
As long as the user can disable it, it's not a problem. Android does the exact
same thing.

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eckyptang
I disagree. They will either hang themselves with x86-64 or make it a success
as it is now. They won't go near ARM as a mainstream CPU.

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bluthru
Will Windows 8 be able to run on that chipset as well?

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freehunter
One thing about ARM is generally ARM chips need SoC specific drivers. If
Windows 8 has drivers for this chip, Windows 8 will run. Chances are, if Apple
does this and wishes for Boot Camp to continue, they will package the drivers
for Windows 8. If they wish to discontinue Boot Camp, they won't.

~~~
recoiledsnake
Not going to happen, Windows RT will ship only with devices just like Windows
phone, there will be no standalone software that you can buy and install.

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programminggeek
It reminds me of this: <http://apc.io/>

At some point, we have enough power in a small space that the hardware
powering your computer or laptop is basically the size of a credit card and it
doesn't matter if it's ARM or Intel.

Apple can save money and get better battery life by making their own chips (as
they do in phones now) so why not move that up the hardware food chain once
the performance is "good enough".

Apple is about selling mobile devices to consumers and probably the #1 thing
the average buyer wants is longer battery life, even at the expense of
performance.

Also, Apple knows the power of controlling their own destiny and inevitably
when they partner with a company, the same company tends to turn around and
resell the innovation as their own products - Microsoft Windows, Google
Android, and Intel Ultrabooks. Apple is big enough now they might not need to
partner for such innovations much longer.

That could lead to an even bigger and more sustainable competitive advantage.

