Apple planning to move away from Intel chips PCs

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple...g-idUSKCN1H91N5

Read a few articles and the PC portion of their product line needs to be redesigned/upgraded when Intel releases new chips. To get more control on product releases, they intend on moving to chips designed in house, like the ones in the Iphone, Ipad etc. It is a small portion of Intel's market and it maybe very difficult for them to move their high end stuff away from Xeon chips.

As a recap

6502 -> 65C816 -> 68000 > powerpc > intel

Not much difference these days as to what is inside, but it is interesting they find Intel a hinderence to making a more homogenous computing landscape.
 
The iPhone and iPad have ARM processors not x86. It wouldn't make sense for a third party to get into x86 design with the two giants Intel and AMD already in tough competition.
 
Seems like the article makes the case to stick with an existing commodity processor. Computers are a small part of the overall business and are probably the lowest margin part of the business. That seems to lend itself to using an existing processor and not rolling your own.

What am I missing?
 
Originally Posted By: WyrTwister
Makes me no difference . I have no plan to own an Apple device . Over priced cult product .


Believe it or not, the post is not about you.

javac, probably best to look @ some tech sites, i thought the reuters article was a bit too focused on the business decision and not enough on the tech part.
 
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Originally Posted By: javacontour
Seems like the article makes the case to stick with an existing commodity processor. Computers are a small part of the overall business and are probably the lowest margin part of the business. That seems to lend itself to using an existing processor and not rolling your own.

What am I missing?

Computers are a small margin business - for everyone except Apple. They're still charging premium prices in a commodity market, and are still making a killing. If anyone can afford to design their own processors in-house, it's them.
 
Originally Posted By: WyrTwister
Makes me no difference . I have no plan to own an Apple device . Over priced cult product .


As I type this from my 2010 MacBook Air that still runs like new, Im happy to say that your opinion matters not.

Ive been through three PC laptops in the same timeframe, and each slows and performs poorly as time goes by.


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Given that laptops are all trending towards being smaller and thinner at all costs, and as more and more gets integrated onto the motherboard (including soldered RAM and SSDs), I guess it is sensible for processing to become more holistically integrated.
 
Originally Posted By: JHZR2
Originally Posted By: WyrTwister
Makes me no difference . I have no plan to own an Apple device . Over priced cult product .


As I type this from my 2010 MacBook Air that still runs like new, Im happy to say that your opinion matters not.

Ive been through three PC laptops in the same timeframe, and each slows and performs poorly as time goes by.


--------------

Given that laptops are all trending towards being smaller and thinner at all costs, and as more and more gets integrated onto the motherboard (including soldered RAM and SSDs), I guess it is sensible for processing to become more holistically integrated.




Yep. I also have a 2012 MBP plus a iPhone 6. Both still running well.

Apple has the economies of scale to make this happen. It also would simplify their OS plans across the board.
 
Apple does make great products, had a few iPads and iPhones at my job.

Since I need basic personal computer and cellphone, they are not Apple products.
 
If Apple is heading towards designing desktop class ARM processors it would drastically simplify things on the software side for them.

Also, if Apple has success with desktop class ARM processors, the rest of the market will soon follow.

ARM has limited success in Chromebooks, but some proof of concept higher end machines seem promising.

ARM is the future.
 
Interesting.....most interesting.

I wonder if they plan to abandon users & their OS releases as well? I've seen it happen with the switch from PPC to Intel. I still have two iMacs running on the former and a black book running on the later. Actually....I still have a much older Power Computing mac-clone running OS7. I was abandoned then when Jobs decided to kill the clone computers. We weren't very happy.........

PROGRESS DEMANDS SACRIFICE! Uh huh....but it also gets expensive and frustrating! The black book is used daily and still has a functioning battery. I think it's a 2007 or so. The PPC iMacs still work fine but are a bit dated for the web. Fortunately for me, I paid $0 for these newest three machines. They were given to me due to faults the owners didn't want to pay to fix. Fixing electronics is a major hobby of mine. So I didn't take the financial hit. Their owners did though....thousands and thousands.
 
Another way this will probably help Apple... confusing consumers. Right now its easy to say "well this Macbook has an Intel I5 2.5ghz, that Dell has an I7 3ghz". But as soon as the processors are different, it becomes much more difficult to compare. Some Apple consumers wont care either way, they'll just want an Apple (fair enough, design/software play a roll).

And of course they'd need to rework things to work with an updated CPU architecture... Thats how it goes.
 
As a consumer brand Jobs produced a seamless computing landscape that Gates envisioned but wasn't remotely capable of delivering since Gate was primarily concerned with locking customers in while Jobs decided "if you build it, they will come"

I'm sure this is just a refinement of the drive to seamlessness.

I believe it is another good time to bring out this ole gem.



Interesting fact, when Zune was released, the mgmt software didn't run on their recently released premier OS, Vista.
 
As a dyed in the wool Apple fanboy, I will be watching this with great interest.

I think it's important to note that-while Mac sales are small compared to iDevices-they still serve a critical role both inside and outside Apple as development platforms for iOS.

If this is true, it will make app development even easier since they can run natively and not in an ARM emulator.

With that said, I haven't liked the overall direction of Macs over the past few years. The focus seems to be on smaller, thinner and lighter at the expense of useful things like ports. I don't want to carry a dongle just to be able to plug in a flash drive, and I think Magsafe is the greatest thing since sliced bread. So, for now, I'm gladly still sitting on a mid-2012 15" non-retina MBP. It has a full complement of ports, including ethernet and Firewire. It has 16gb of RAM-which I upgraded myself from the 4gb it came with-and a Samsung EVO SSD(also self installed). I have the matte "anti glare" screen, which I much prefer to the glass screen and is no longer available on any computer. It serves my needs well, and I expect it to continue doing so.

Also, the Mac Pro is grossly outdated as well as being outdated and overpriced for what it is. Plus, the computer has only minimal internal expandability. I have upgraded my 2010 Mac Pro(5,1) to where it beats the 2013 Mac Pro(6,1) in every measurable processor metric. I fitted dual hex core 3.46ghz(turbo boost to 4ghz) Intel Xeons, which beat the single 12-core offered on the top end model in clock speed and in raw processing power as measured by Geekbench. I COULD put a much better GPU than is available in the 6,1 in my Mac Pro(I haven't done so to retain legacy compatibility). The computer boots and runs off a PCIe SSD that came from a Mac Pro 6,1. I have USB 3.0 via a $20 PCIe card. I have 32gb of RAM, which is plenty for me, and it's a lot cheaper to put a whole lot more in it since I have 8 slots rather than the 4 in the 6,1.

All of that aside, most 80s computer companies that underwent a processor transition went under. Apple has switched architectures twice now, and in both cases the transition was as seamless as possible. Apple maintained 68K emulation up to the last version of the "classic" OS(and it was invisible unless you looked for it), although to be fair OS 9 had become a bloated disaster and some core parts of the OS were still written for 68K and run through the emulator. PowerPC emulation was also essentially invisible in OS X 10.4-10.6 but worked great just as long as you weren't running software that required G5-specific instructions. If any computer company can pull off a full blow transition, Apple can.

With that said, ARM WOULD present its own set of challenges. Windows would run fine as it is now ARM native. x86 programs could be interesting, though, as Intel has traditionally been reluctant to allow emulation. There's also the fact that there are a lot of 64 bit programs now, and AMD would have to agree to allowing -64 emulation.

I'd also have some concerns about macOS becoming the "walled garden" that iOS has been from day 1. Apple has locked down OS X/macOS more in the past few years, but its easy enough to bypass if you know what you're doing(you don't even have to do Unix magic in terminal-they just hide some of the security settings pretty well, and since they're overall good I tend to only lessen them long enough to do what I'm trying to do).

Everything is speculation at this point, though. It might not happen, but then the rumors are strong enough that it PROBABLY is.
 
One factor may be converging iOS and MacOS, Apple would rather not maintain two operating systems.

Intel and Microsoft have a long legacy to support, ugly as some it may be. Back in the day of the Motorola 68k, the 680x0 was IMO a much nicer CPU to program than a 386. But Apple ditched it anyway, because the motivation was to marry the winners. Motorola was not a winner.

Now Apple may feel they are close enough to making high performance ARM CPUs, given the years of experience they have with iOS hardware. So they are happy to drop the legacy that Intel is bound to and merge their two operating systems in one big swoop. This is just my speculation.
 
Originally Posted By: BearZDefect

Intel and Microsoft have a long legacy to support, ugly as some it may be. Back in the day of the Motorola 68k, the 680x0 was IMO a much nicer CPU to program than a 386. But Apple ditched it anyway, because the motivation was to marry the winners. Motorola was not a winner.


It's worth noting that Apple didn't exactly ditch Motorola completely. They went in with Motorola and IBM to develop and produce the POWER architecture and PowerPC CPUs. Although Apple has no vested interest in it anymore and Motorola spun off all their semiconductor manufacturing to Freescale, IBM has continued to develop POWER. At any given time, there are usually a few POWER based systems on the top-10 supercomputer list.

At least in Apple's time with POWER, Motorola's biggest contribution was the Altivec FPU as used on the G4. The G4 was ALMOST exclusively a Motorola product(IBM made a few early on when Motorola had some teething pains with getting yields in the quantities Apple needed-I pick up IBM G4 cards when I see them on Ebay cheap just for the curiosity factor), but otherwise IBM made most of the other PowerPCs that Apple used.

When they originally switched, it was clear that the writing was on the wall for 68K. There really wasn't even any competition between the first-gen Pentium and the 68060(which Apple never used). The PPC 601 at least remained competitive, and could beat the Pentium in some tasks. That pretty much stayed true at least into the early 2000s-PPC could beat a comparable x86 in many tasks especially with software properly coded for it despite usually having a lower clock speed.

Still, though, things really began to sour over the G5. IBM promised 3ghz within a few years, and Steve Jobs repeated that when he introduced the processor. They never managed to get past 2.7ghz, and that needed liquid cooling(I have a dual 2.7 G5 that's in active use and has been for a while, although the LCS pump is making sounds that scare me and it's probably going to be replaced with a Quad G5 that I have sitting ready in the next few hours). I don't think a mobile G5 ever came close to fruition. The last G4s were decent enough, but in 2005 it was hard to justify continuing to charge premium prices for the previous generation architecture.

The move to x86 was right at the time Apple did it, but at the same time it's hard to ignore the fact that x86 has been somewhat stagnant in the last few years. I'm typing this from my main, 14+ hour a day laptop, which has a quad i7 Ivy Bridge. The current Macbook Pro line uses Kaby Lake processors, and a comparable one to mine doesn't really offer a huge increase in raw processing power. It DOES give more performance per watt, which translates directly into better battery life. Most of the perceived speed improvements in newer models have to do with using faster I/O(specifically PCIe storage).
 
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