
Apple moving to ARM for Mac in 2021: Analyst - turshija
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/02/24/mac-apple-designed-processor-2021/
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floatingatoll
This is an analyst's opinion, and is not supported by Apple on-record. "We
expect" != "Apple confirms". Relevant quote from the article:

> _We expect that Apple 's new products in 12-18 months will adopt processors
> made by 5nm process, including the new 2H20 5G iPhone, new 2H20 iPad
> equipped with mini LED, and new 1H21 Mac equipped with the own-design
> processor. We think that iPhone 5G support, iPad 's adoption of innovative
> mid-size panel technology, and Mac's first adoption of the own-design
> processor are all Apple's critical product and technology strategies. Given
> that the processor is the core component of new products, we believe that
> Apple had increased 5nm-related investments after the epidemic outbreak.
> Further, Apple occupying more resources of related suppliers will hinder
> competitors' developments._

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dochtman
That said, as far as I know Ming Chi Kuo has a pretty good track record on his
Apple predictions.

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floatingatoll
No disagreement here, but the title stated (now fixed) as fact something that
wasn’t known to be fact yet.

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monocasa
It's interesting that the actual quote from the investor call is that it's a
processor designed in house, and doesn't call out ARM.

IMO, an x86_64 chip makes way more sense. The patents are about to expire.
Removing nearly all of the legacy mode only cruft (which is not as much as you
might think, but tends to be in the critical data path) and making a chip that
runs at least x86_64 user mode code would align with how they removed 32 bit
support in Catalina.

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ac29
The patents for x86_64 might be expiring soon, but SSE3/4 and AVX1/2/512 are
newer. I'd imagine there is a lot of performance critical code written making
use of those extensions, and that's just vector stuff. The x86 architecture
has added a lot of other new extensions in the past 20 years as well.

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monocasa
Yeah, but for that, Apple very well might have enough patents in the CPU
design space to negotiate a license at this point.

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OrangeMango
It's just going to be a low-end Mac Mini that's really nothing but a high-end
AppleTV. The pieces are already there!

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sdan
This is huge for Raspberry Pi’s. Once ARM is more standardized, more docker
Conro arts and binaries will be available in arm as well.

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Kirby64
What isn't standardized about ARM that Apple moving their PC segment to ARM
would fix? Every single cell phone on earth uses ARM pretty much already. It's
unlikely that if Apple did move their desktop stuff to ARM that they wouldn't
use some derivative (i.e. non-standard, effectively custom) ARM instruction
set. They already do that with their phone processors.

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olliej
out of curiosity what are the non-standard instructions?

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Kirby64
Similar to how many big names change standards: if you take a look at the
instruction sets used, the Apple A13 processors seem to implement a newer
instruction set than even what Qualcomm is using.

A13 Bionic uses ARMv8.3-A. Qualcomm 865 (which is newer than A13) uses
ARMv8.2-A.

My guess is they influenced the spec to add feature deltas from v8.2->8.3 into
the spec. Sure, it's not non-standard, but it seems like most vendors pick and
choose what instructions to implement from each ARM spec.

What that means is the compiler for each processor needs to effectively be
specific to that processor. If it's not, you might not be totally optimized.

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olliej
Those versions _literally_ mean that they're part of the spec. That other
companies are shipping out of date ARM specs doesn't mean apple has magic
proprietary instructions. Hell, IIRC the first we heard about the new ARM8.3
instructions was a Qualcomm white paper.

Anyway, this is no different from targeting x86_64 - you can compile targeting
the most recent ISA, or you can run on more hardware. No one says AVX2 is a
proprietary extension, but it sure as heck won't work on an older x86_64 cpu.

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Kirby64
Alright, you're right - it is part of the spec. Non-standard is the wrong
terminology. My point being though, Apple tends to be ahead of others in terms
of adopting (for better or for worse) new standards, and their influence in
the market can sometimes make those changes happen at a spec level (i.e. tell
ARM they want a new instruction, and magically it'll be in the spec).

The original comment's point is this would be good for the RPi org... which
use comparatively ancient ARM processors (even the brand new RPi4). I don't
see how Apple entering the ARM space on desktop is relevant at all.

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olliej
oh yeah, i don't see how it impacts RPi at all.

RPi benefits from _general_ adoption of ARM in performance markets, as low
performance ARMs benefit from general improvements in compiler ARM backends.

