Tuesday, June 9th 2020
Apple to Announce its own Mac Processor at WWDC (Late June)
Apple is planning to launch its own high-performance processors designed for Macs at the 2020 WWDC, held in the week of 22 June, 2020. This would be the the first step among many toward the replacement of Intel processors and the x86 machine architecture from the Apple Mac ecosystem, in the same fashion as the company replaced PowerPC with x86 last decade. Apple has codenamed the process of graduating to the new machine architecture "Kalamata," and besides detailing the new processor and its architecture, the company could announce a large-scale developer support initiative to help Mac software vendors to transition to the new architecture in time for the first Macs with the new processors to roll out in 2021.
A Bloomberg report on the new processors states that the chips will be based on the "same technology" as the company's A-series SoCs for iOS devices, meaning that Apple will leverage the Arm machine architecture, and has probably developed a high performance CPU core that can match Intel's x64 cores in IPC and efficiency. Macs based on the new processors, will however run MacOS and not iOS, which means much of the clean-break transition woes between PPC and x86 Macs are bound to return, but probably better managed by software vendors. It also remains to be seen how Apple handles graphics. The company could scale up the Metal-optimized iGPU found in its A-series SoCs on its new Mac processor, while also giving them the platform I/O capability to support discrete graphics from companies such as AMD.
Source:
Bloomberg
A Bloomberg report on the new processors states that the chips will be based on the "same technology" as the company's A-series SoCs for iOS devices, meaning that Apple will leverage the Arm machine architecture, and has probably developed a high performance CPU core that can match Intel's x64 cores in IPC and efficiency. Macs based on the new processors, will however run MacOS and not iOS, which means much of the clean-break transition woes between PPC and x86 Macs are bound to return, but probably better managed by software vendors. It also remains to be seen how Apple handles graphics. The company could scale up the Metal-optimized iGPU found in its A-series SoCs on its new Mac processor, while also giving them the platform I/O capability to support discrete graphics from companies such as AMD.
79 Comments on Apple to Announce its own Mac Processor at WWDC (Late June)
Personally I'm interested in seeing the overall performance of the final product. If it'sgood enough (especialy for laptops) we might see a small surge of ARM Windoes laptops, which wouldn'tbe a bad thing.
Luckily MS turned to cloud already.
The cloud is going to keep MS afloat, as I can see a time coming where corporate IT will ask employees to BYOD for not just their smartphones (which is rather common), but also their own computers, and they will just host a remote session. My large employer is kicking that idea around right now. No doubt Windows is the most accommodating OS, but Windows machines are now just another appliance to accomplish work, not the center of the household. MS can no longer lean on Windows and Office to make its profits.
The market is clearly diversifying and this means Windows will have to evolve along with it. So far, its not really managing to turn our desktops into 'fully integrated' devices in the home ecosystem. For business, the tools are readily available but for consumer its a big mess unless you subscribe yourself to a handful of Azure services.
Now look at Apple... they got that shit locked down tight, it works flawlessly, and the user needs zero tech knowledge. Matter of fact, its not even useful because you can't control anything. Their device integration is already complete while MS is still fumbling about with 'Projects' such as Continuum / One Windows / Windows RT... all failures.
Pro users are small fraction of sales, and Apple is chasing profits stemming from consumer needs, unique / cross device ecosystem, and price points.
Aren’t they going to have to provide drivers to Docker (or expect them to build them)? Will Laravel et al work OOB? Will homebrew have to be rewritten?
Asking in all ignorance :oops:
On top of that the new Mac Pro is the first time Apple have put any serious effort into the sector since the 1st Gen Intel model in 2007. The 2012 trashcan was a joke. It lacked RAM capacity and was limited to mobile GPU variants. Now in 2019 Apple came to the party to address the RAM capacity issue but are charging ridiculous money for a cheap commodity item and still bring 100-fewer cores to the party than the competion.
If you need cores, like - actually, professionally need them, you can get a 64C/128T Threadripper for similar money to Apple's base price with a shitty 8C offering. For the sort of money Apple are asking for their 28C Xeon, anyone capable of working in Windows or Linux will have already purchased a 2P Rome solution. 28C vs 128C isn't even worth laughing about. Apple have lost that market, and burned.
On a mac you can open up a terminal and be treated to a standard shell. You can use homebrew, a package manager, to install common linux applications, without having to compile them for mac. Things like apache are installed OOB -- you just need to turn the server on and configure it as you would in any linux distribution. The unix subsystem is the whole reason developers who use macs use them (and there are a lot).
If you are a developer who uses something like laravel, how will this be supported? Will PHP be supported at all? How will you install common javascript libraries? etc.
I suppose I can answer my own question around docker (well, all of this) -- wait and see. But I can't imagine mac being as popular as it is with developers if they take the unix out of it and force users to use containers or other virtualized environments, even if being portable/system agnostic is the future of applications. The whole appeal is the glitz of the os and not having to maintain anything while still being able to configure quite a bit.
Maybe I'm answering my own question again...
The answer to your question is that the product segments are split in two. Apple does not have a 1 way and that's it. Apple has never embraced MS practices like Surface, rather they believe there is a device for purpose not 1 device to serve all. People in this thread are trying to paint a picture that Apple is going 100% ARM. That is not true, at least not for quite some time.