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Desktops (Apple) Intel Apple Hardware

Apple Plans To Announce Move To Its Own Mac Chips at WWDC (bloomberg.com) 217

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Apple is preparing to announce a shift to its own main processors in Mac computers, replacing chips from Intel, as early as this month at its annual developer conference, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the plans. From the report: The company is holding WWDC the week of June 22. Unveiling the initiative, codenamed Kalamata, at the event would give outside developers time to adjust before new Macs roll out in 2021, the people said. Since the hardware transition is still months away, the timing of the announcement could change, they added, while asking not to be identified discussing private plans. The new processors will be based on the same technology used in Apple-designed iPhone and iPad chips. However, future Macs will still run the macOS operating system rather than the iOS software on mobile devices from the company. Bloomberg News reported on Apple's effort to move away from Intel earlier this year, and in 2018.
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Apple Plans To Announce Move To Its Own Mac Chips at WWDC More

Apple Plans To Announce Move To Its Own Mac Chips at WWDC

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  • I guess this completes their transition away from general purpose computers to cloud consumption appliances. Might as well buy a Chromebook -- they're way cheaper!

    Just like every company, they're addicted to monthly recurring revenue and paid content everything. I'm sure most people won't care, but I do wonder if the hipster web dev crowd will be upset about not being able to run VMs?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 )

      I guess this completes their transition away from general purpose computers to cloud consumption appliances.

      It was never what they wanted. When everyone else was on 32-bit x86, they were on m68k and PowerPC. Their Intel time is relatively short compared to their whole history.

      To be honest, though, it's what really grew their ecosystem.

      they're addicted to monthly recurring revenue and paid content everything.

      Their recurring revenue comes more from forced obsolescence than from subscriptions. They don't want repair and they don't want a resale market. And they want dodgy hardware with known flaws that they try to cover up and squeak past warranty expiration (long history, from Magsaf

  • RIP VMWare and Boot Camp? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kethinov ( 636034 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @09:13AM (#60163448) Homepage Journal

    If this kills VMWare and Boot Camp, I'm never buying another Mac.

    • If this kills VMWare and Boot Camp, I'm never buying another Mac.

      Nah, do not fret about it.

      You will have parallels, VMware, VirtualBox and Bootcamp. It just so happens that those will run ARM versions of Windows and Linux.

      • Which won't run apps compiled for x86 / x64 architectures which is the whole point of using them for most people who use it.

        Not to mention WINE. I use WINE on macOS too, again for running apps compiled for x86 / x64 architectures.

        • Windows 10 on Arm runs x86 software without modification.

          Ever hear of JIT compiling? Windows 10 Arm automagically JIT recompiles x86 software on first-run. Then it runs the (now native Arm) version.

          x64 support is not there quite yet; but is expected to be previewed sometime in 2020, with an actual rollout in 2021.

      • You probably won't be running VMware or VirtualBox . I don't believe ARM chips support Virtualization. The ARM version of Windows is useless at this point. ARM Linux works pretty well, but again not running in virtualization software. I guess Apple could put two A1X chips in their Macs..... One for the OS and one to support Debugging. At this point it looks my Trusty old 2015 i7 macbook Air might be my last.

        • ARM processors with EL2 modes fulfill the Popek and Goldberg requirements.

        • You probably won't be running VMware or VirtualBox . I don't believe ARM chips support Virtualization.

          I think x86 just has issues with virtualization that require extensions to work around because it is CISC core. ARM being RISC should be able to work in a hypervisor without having to keep track of the pipeline, thus no extensions for virtualization should be needed. Though I'm not a hardware expert, so don't quote me on that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        No one runs a VM so they can run another OS, they run a VM so they can run an app that requires another OS, and that app will still be for Intel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      You've heard of CPU emulation, right? How do you think something like MAME works. If there's a big enough market VMWare et al will port their apps to the new mac chip and emulate x86.

      • At dramatically reduced performance.

      • Re:RIP VMWare and Boot Camp? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @09:27AM (#60163504)

        the old ppc VPC stuff was not fast

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          Correct, and that was with the benefit of a considerably faster host CPU which would not be the case with ARM.

          • Correct, and that was with the benefit of a considerably faster host CPU which would not be the case with ARM.

            Excuse me, but ARM chips are bloody fast. And if you build something with LLVM, you can probably directly compile x86 to ARM.

            • Nobody uses a VM to run an application that was compiled with LLVM, though. They use it to run an application that was compiled with Visual Studio 2008.
      • MAME emulates hardware that's 2-4 decades old, sometimes barely. I don't think many people are interested in running modern Windows apps in an emulator running at the speed of a 300 MHz Pentium II. It's not a question of market demand. It's a question of what the new Mac CPU is (not) capable of.

      • MAME works well because the hardware it runs on is significantly more powerful than the hardware it is emulating, so it can afford to be inefficient relative to native code execution.

        Unless the new ARM hardware is significantly (eg 10x) faster than the current Intel chips Mac uses, MAME-style emulation is going to be slow.

    • Re:RIP VMWare and Boot Camp? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @09:22AM (#60163486) Homepage Journal

      The GPU might kill it for a lot of people. Stuff like video and photo editing is GPU accelerated so unless they keep the Radeon GPUs or have a pretty impressive one of their own it won't be much use to a lot of content creators.

      Those people matter a lot to Apple because they are often influencers.

      • > The GPU might kill it for a lot of people.

        I'd run out and buy a Trash Can that had a single newer GPU in it. But apparently I'm alone in wanting this.

    • Just discovered Proxmox. Runs vms in kvm on Debian. *FREE* Vmware7 has obsoleted a ton of hardware that works perfectly fine.
      Its so Dell can sell more hardware
      All the features of vmware -snapshot, clone, vmotion.
      So far so good!

  • Risky business (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dbrueck ( 1872018 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @09:15AM (#60163454)

    To me this seems like a mistake, but who knows. Some of the appeal of Intel-based Macs were that you could play in the Apple ecosystem without being 100% silo'd in it - you could use a Mac to dev for Apple desktop/mobile while also using it to dev for Linux/Windows at the same time (with varying degrees of hoops to jump through). There were a few years there where I used a Mac even though all of our code was running on Linux, but I could still run it locally.

    Don't know how much of that will go away or become harder with this, but I'd be much more wary about using Macs as dev machines anymore, unless I was at an Apple-only shop.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      My guess would be that they will start with some low end models, maybe a refresh of the Air because currently it's a very compelling alternative to the MacBook 13".

      They will have some key apps ready day 1 and wait until more get ported. Some kind of x86 emulation layer for "legacy" stuff but performance will suck.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbialac ( 320955 )

        At Microsoft's behest, Qualcomm created ARM chips with an x86 compatibility layer. It's possible Apple has done something similar with their ARM chips targeting their desktop and laptop lines... but knowing Apple, I wouldn't count on it.

        • do they have an x86 license / x86-64 license

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          They aren't going to stick an entire high end Intel core on there so whatever compatibility features it has won't be in the same league performance-wise.

          Then again Intel isn't all that great any more, AMD's Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs are superior.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dfghjk ( 711126 )

            You don't add an entire core, you add an instruction decoder, and your comment assumes that "same league" performance would be the target of such a thing. It wouldn't.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              That's the thing with x86, the instruction decoder on its own is only a small part and not that critical to performance. Most of the performance comes from stuff further down the pipeline.

              You might as well just do dynamic recompilation in software with a bit of caching.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Megol ( 3135005 )

              Adding a decoder wouldn't help much as x86 and ARM differs in several critical parts and an x86 decoder is quite complex already with an x86 execution back end.
              Software translation is a better choice - no or little extra hardware, no complications in critical execution paths, no overhead running native software.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Gabest ( 852807 )

          Remember Transmeta Crusoe? It was designed to do that, still failed.

      • My guess is the exact opposite: they'll start with the Mac Pro. It's a low volume system, it requires the least retooling (just a new motherboard), and most of the apps that people rely on are made by Apple itself (i.e., Final Cut Pro and Logic, and to an extent, XCode). It also gives the most room for yield problems, because they don't need so many chips and it won't become a bottleneck if there are troubles. Mac Pro customers are also the least price sensitive.

        That said, I won't be surprised if MacBook Ai

        • do they have ARM cpu's with pci-e lanes to cover that?

          • Presumably, they have whatever they want. If they're designing the chip for desktop computers, I'm assuming they're not just taking an A14 and slapping a 'desktop' label on it without making some changes to support whatever system they're putting it in.

          • hell, Raspberry Pi 4 has a pcie bus.

        • The Mac Pro will be one of the last to go Arm, if ever.

          I think that models that have the âoeProâ designation will either remain Intel for quite some time; or will add an Arm coprocessor.

          Appleâ(TM)s Arm chips for this will not be the familiar Ax-series SoCs. They will be far more performant.

          • I would think the last of their models to switch over would be the iMacs and Mac Minis—these are the models with the least to gain from a switch. The laptops benefit because Intel hasn't been able to deliver on lower power chips for some time. The Mac Pro benefits from actual movement in the high-end, high-core-count space, where the Xeon has been stuck and iterating slowly for years. All the stagnation is at the highest and the lowest ends of the spectrum.

            Again, because Apple controls the most import

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Megane ( 129182 )

            This. They have long experience in supporting two architectures at the same time: 68K+PPC, PPC+x86, x86+x64, now that they've just killed 32-bit x86, there's room for ARM-64. Not that they couldn't support three architectures in the OS, but they probably don't want the waste of a triple-architecture OS install, nor the load delay of the OS itself using JIT-linked clang object files.

            As I see it, they have two problems, first is that Intel stuff just isn't good enough for mobile, and that's exactly what the

      • That's what I'd been thinking about this as well, but I wouldn't be surprised if they also changed the Mac Mini since that's on the lower end as well and hasn't seen a serious update in about two years. It's also on the low-end of what they offer. The baseline processor for those is only a 4-core i3 that doesn't have hyper-threading so it wouldn't exactly be tough to beat.

        They've been working on a lot of stuff with Xcode for years to make it easy for developers to target both Mac and iOS. Unless the appl

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          Apple will want to market the new processors as "revolutionary" and in order to do that they need to claim some significant advantage to the user. It's not clear at all how they do that with the Mini and it would be a challenge with the Pro. With notebooks that path is pretty clear.

    • Re:Risky business (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @09:47AM (#60163628)

      Likewise. Most of our software development company is using Mac laptops today, with only a handful of people on Windows-only projects still using older Windows PCs as their primary machines. We do development for Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and Mac, roughly in that order of frequency, so Mac laptops with Windows and Linux VMs have served us well, but we go where our clients want us to go and make sure we have the best tools for the job, so if those tools become worse for the work we're doing, we won't hesitate to use other tools. While individuals at the company may have preferences, the company as a whole is fairly platform agnostic, so I doubt very much that we'd demonstrate any sort of loyalty towards Apple if our way of working is no longer supported.

      That said, I use Macs at home, and for home use I'm very much looking forward to this. Usually you can only pick two of the three in cheaper, better, faster, but Apple has managed to pull off all three. Their performance gains with the A-series chips these last few years have been incredible and are easily outpacing Intel's gains. Rather than simply keeping up with Intel, they're eclipsing higher and higher performance chips from Intel each year in both single and multi-threaded benchmarks, while simultaneously costing less, using less power, and producing less heat. For home use, where I expect everything I use to continue working largely without issue, this is a win all around.

      • Their performance gains with the A-series chips these last few years have been incredible and are easily outpacing Intel's gains.

        That's setting the bar pretty low - it would be much more interesting to compare the gains of the A-series chips to Ryzen.

        For home use, where I expect everything I use to continue working largely without issue, this is a win all around.

        I guess it depends on what you're doing for "home use". If that means mostly content consumption, then the new Macs will likely be great but the

        • Threads (Score:4, Interesting)

          by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @01:24PM (#60165030)

          Per-thread, Intel chips are faster, MHz for MHz, than AMD's. Not by much, but it's there. AMD's are faster overall because you get nearly twice the cores for the money.

          Per-thread, Apple's A-chips are faster at most common operations, MHz for MHz, than Intel's. You get Intel running faster in specific cases where instruction set extensions speed things up - TSX for databases, for example. But for most common use cases, the A series is faster.

          There isn't anything really stopping Apple from throwing a dozen high-speed cores in an A-series, except that they are meant for tablet and phone use, and don't make much sense there. For laptops or desktops, however...

          As for GPUs, AFAIK there aren't any inherent roadblocks for Apple to hook an ARM up to an AMD or nVidia GPU. nVidia makes their own ARM chips using their own GPUs, so it's certainly feasible on that side.

        • That's setting the bar pretty low - it would be much more interesting to compare the gains of the A-series chips to Ryzen.

          Oh, definitely. AMD has been knocking it out of the park recently. Interestingly, both AMD's Zen architecture and Apple's A-series owe much of their success to the same man: Jim Keller [wikipedia.org]. He developed Apple's first A-series chips, before moving to AMD to lead development on Zen.

          I guess it depends on what you're doing for "home use".

          Well, I already have a Ryzen-based gaming rig, so not gaming. ;)

          For us, we use iPads or various boxes connected to our TV for most of our content consumption. A MacBook Pro from 2011 gets pulled out whenever I want to do research on a

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • To me this seems like a mistake, but who knows. Some of the appeal of Intel-based Macs were that you could play in the Apple ecosystem without being 100% silo'd in it - you could use a Mac to dev for Apple desktop/mobile while also using it to dev for Linux/Windows at the same time (with varying degrees of hoops to jump through). There were a few years there where I used a Mac even though all of our code was running on Linux, but I could still run it locally.

      I run Windows and Linux enough on my 2012 MacBook

      • One wonders if this will bolster Microsoft's Windows-on-ARM strategy. It would certainly be an incredible coup for Apple to announce ARM Macs and say that you can boot Windows on day 1 and have Microsoft committed to improving their ARM rollout, even if the software catalogue isn't there initially.

        I can't imagine it will be a huge market, but it certainly strikes me as possible that Microsoft would like to be a bit more free of Intel themselves.

    • It seems like a lot of businesses are moving towards vertical integration.

      This can be a good thing or a bad thing.
      Good: The company has full control of the products being produces, what features are built in, built around tolerances and size that the company wants.
      Bad: The company may not be able to match the economy of scale. It might cost Apple 1 billion to create 1 million chips, which is enough to meet demand. While it costs Intel 2 billion to create 10 million chips, which meets Apples Demand and the

      • It seems like a lot of businesses are moving towards vertical integration.

        Yes! Interdependency is bad. Repurpose that cap to signify Make Apple Great Again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Even for shops that are not Apple only, a lot of development is already pretty OS agnostic. I imagine one of the things they looked at is what kind of development people were using macs for and found the cases where the CPU made a difference were, if not rare, at least not a common use case.

    • Sorry I have to be more precise. Would I be able to remove MacOS completely, reformat the drive, and just boot straight into Windows, as I do now?

  • This is a huge gamble on Apple's part, but in a few years, things will run on any platform....bringing it up to parity with Windows.

    I love taking photos. Lightroom has 98%+ of the marketshare. They have 2 offerings...Lightroom Classic, the only useful one, which is x86-only and Lightroom, a cloud app that can be run anywhere, is even nice, but has so many fatal flaws, you really can't use it.

    Now, Adobe will be forced to port their full versions, making it silly not to either bring Lightroom up to p

  • I take it the Mac Pro line will stay x64 because of all the expensive graphic/video software?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by laffer1 ( 701823 )

      Well they have 4+ year refresh cycles so it will be OK for awhile.

      • From the hardware perspective, yes, but that would force application developers to straddle support of both platforms for the duration of that refresh. Getting the app to run on two platforms can be enough of a pain but getting it tuned to have excellent performance on both platforms could likely prove pretty challenging for third-party developers.

    • I think the âoeProâ machines will become dual-architecture in the near-term, remaining x86/64 with an Arm coprocessor.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JackAxe ( 689361 )
      Apple will at least support it for their normal 7 year cycle. But I have to wonder what Apple is doing, because AMD changed everything -- again. The Mac Pro is pretty much dead in the water for something they must have thought was going to dominate.

  • LLVM (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dixie_Flatline ( 5077 ) <vincent.jan.goh@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @09:54AM (#60163672) Homepage

    I wonder if Apple will be able to take things submitted to the App Store and immediately recompile them to a new target from the intermediate output that LLVM generates. I'm not 100% sure about what's submitted to the App Store (like, the Mac one that everyone forgets about and which isn't very good) but I was under the impression that Apple receives the LLVM IR. Assuming the MacOS APIs don't change, it seems like they should be able to immediately release the entire App Store catalogue as available on their ARM systems without much trouble.

  • Wise naming (Score:3)

    by Vadim Makarov ( 529622 ) <makarov@vad1.com> on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @09:56AM (#60163680) Homepage

    Unveiling the initiative, codenamed Kalamata, at the event would give outside developers time to adjust

    That sounds like calamity.

  • Matter of time. (Score:3)

    by jythie ( 914043 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @10:01AM (#60163718)
    I was wondering who would be the first to do this. Lately people have just sort of taken it as a given that desktops and workstations should use scaled down versions of server processors, but as mobel tech takes on more and more of the tasks that used to be the exclusive domain of PCs, it makes sense to at least try scaling those processors up instead. This esp makes sense for Apple since it means they can unify around a single architecture across multiple product lines.

    And personally, I think it is nice to see some competition in consumer CPUs again. x86 has been the only realistic option for a while now, but those chips have so much historical baggage and have to support so many use cases, I'm kinda excited about seeing some sort of clean break, and ARM is in a really good position to deliver such a thing.

    • Interesting point, although going "up" is traditionally harder than "down", i.e. those RISC "mobile" processors (and associated architectures, motherboards & chips, GPUs etc.) lack many of the features that make the CISC Intel & AMD beasts so powerful. Of course, how often outside video editing and top-end gaming do you need all that power?

      • Interesting point, although going "up" is traditionally harder than "down", i.e. those RISC "mobile" processors (and associated architectures, motherboards & chips, GPUs etc.) lack many of the features that make the CISC Intel & AMD beasts so powerful. Of course, how often outside video editing and top-end gaming do you need all that power?

        I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. ARM chips, that is the ones designed by Apple, are bloody powerful. Core for core they beat Intel. I have written benchmarks where an iPhone XR beat my quad core iMac. With all cores running, 2 vs. 4 cores, it beat the iMac. With rumours of 8 + 4 core processors, it would beat any current MacBook or MacBook Pro. And top-end gaming uses GPUs, not CPUs.

  • Of course these ARM chips are bloody powerful. Some rumour was of eight + four cores (eight full power, four low power) which would beat about every MacBook right now.

    Of course I don't care about Windows, I don't care about Linux VMs at the moment, but if/when I do I hope it should run on ARM just fine.

  • Great (Score:3)

    by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @10:58AM (#60164140) Homepage

    So no the five games that still run on the Mac will stop working.

  • I expect Apple's marketshare to further tank again, as many pro users also run Windows at least in virtual machines. And I have seen many commercial business only running Mac's for the shiny hardware at the reception and such with even Windows natively, ..!

  • The only thing this does is prevent hackintoshes which is not significant at all.

    I don't see them gaining anything except expenses. I understand half of it was already paid for to develop processors for their phone processor but what is the advantage? Commodity hardware is cheaper.

    What it does do is prevent Windows on them both when they reach their end of life and using virtual machines such that it is a slower implementation.

    Is it because of recent security vulnerabilities? Their processors will undoubted

  • Convergence appears before our eyes as the chip is the new car. Both Tesla and Apple remain committed to software defined computerized car manufacture.

    There stands the challenge.

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