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
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79 Comments on Apple to Announce its own Mac Processor at WWDC (Late June)

#76
R0H1T
Well close to a decade now & my reason was simple ~ margins! Admittedly though the iPhone, then iPad, Mac & services boom pushed Apple to delay the transition but I'm nearly 100% sure if say this pandemic hit last year or the year before Apple would most certainly have moved quicker & the transition, to ARM, would probably be over by now :toast:
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#77
windwhirl
I personally didn't have any opinion on whether Apple would actually do it or not, although I did think that Apple had the financials and a suitable motive (more control over the ecosystem) to do it, should they choose to do so. That's half the battle, the other half being the market (both users and developers) and having qualified engineers and other staff/personnel to pull off a design/product that meets the desired goals.
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#78
Ravenas
windwhirlI personally didn't have any opinion on whether Apple would actually do it or not, although I did think that Apple had the financials and a suitable motive (more control over the ecosystem) to do it, should they choose to do so. That's half the battle, the other half being the market (both users and developers) and having qualified engineers and other staff/personnel to pull off a design/product that meets the desired goals.
They claim 50-100% faster than the Intel supplied chip; with no supply delays, no design limitations set by Intel, and 40-50% cheaper.
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#79
R0H1T
They didn't say all of that, unless you meant some edge cases like browsing on the latest Safari?
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