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chuckula
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Thu Apr 05, 2018 12:10 pm

DancinJack wrote:
Just gonna leave this here because we don't really have another active Mac thread.
“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year,” Tom Boger, Apple’s senior director of Mac hardware product marketing, told TechCrunch. “In addition to transparency for pro customers on an individual basis, there’s also a larger fiscal reasoning behind it.”

Apple understands that its new iMac Pro has a substantial crossover with the customer that might purchase the updated Mac Pro, and so the company wants to give some timeline clarity to help those pro users better grasp where the products stand in the pipeline. “We know that there’s a lot of customers today that are making purchase decisions on the iMac Pro and whether or not they should wait for the Mac Pro,” Boger added.



ARM IN 2019 MACS CONFIRMED!!! BYE BYE ICE LAKE!

Here are three guarantees:
1. It's RISC so it's faster (oh, and because it's RISC it's designed for WorkGroups and Multimedia... you know, the future)
2. It will run DOS and Windows and all existing Mac software faster.
3. It will be CHEAPER!

AS WAS PROPHESIED! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bks3kdFDhbg
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whm1974
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Thu Apr 05, 2018 12:41 pm

chuckula wrote:
DancinJack wrote:
Just gonna leave this here because we don't really have another active Mac thread.
“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year,” Tom Boger, Apple’s senior director of Mac hardware product marketing, told TechCrunch. “In addition to transparency for pro customers on an individual basis, there’s also a larger fiscal reasoning behind it.”

Apple understands that its new iMac Pro has a substantial crossover with the customer that might purchase the updated Mac Pro, and so the company wants to give some timeline clarity to help those pro users better grasp where the products stand in the pipeline. “We know that there’s a lot of customers today that are making purchase decisions on the iMac Pro and whether or not they should wait for the Mac Pro,” Boger added.



ARM IN 2019 MACS CONFIRMED!!! BYE BYE ICE LAKE!

Here are three guarantees:
1. It's RISC so it's faster (oh, and because it's RISC it's designed for WorkGroups and Multimedia... you know, the future)
2. It will run DOS and Windows and all existing Mac software faster.
3. It will be CHEAPER!

AS WAS PROPHESIED! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bks3kdFDhbg

Well to be fair, Apple wasn't alone in pushing the PowerPC or for that matter RISC CPUs in general. Anybody remember the MIPS based Advance RISC Computer(ARC) back in the late 80's/early 90's?
 
derFunkenstein
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Thu Apr 05, 2018 3:26 pm

chuckula wrote:
1. It's RISC so it's faster (oh, and because it's RISC it's designed for WorkGroups and Multimedia... you know, the future)
2. It will run DOS and Windows and all existing Mac software faster.
3. It will be CHEAPER!

Let's go back to PowerPC. I want my MacOS 9 again.
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chuckula
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Thu Apr 05, 2018 3:29 pm

derFunkenstein wrote:
chuckula wrote:
1. It's RISC so it's faster (oh, and because it's RISC it's designed for WorkGroups and Multimedia... you know, the future)
2. It will run DOS and Windows and all existing Mac software faster.
3. It will be CHEAPER!

Let's go back to PowerPC. I want my MacOS 9 again.


For all the grief I give ARM, you'll never see me claiming that high-end PowerPC systems are slow. They definitely ain't slow. However, when you look at their price tags you suddenly realize that what Intel charges for Xeons isn't really that crazy.
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Thu Apr 05, 2018 4:19 pm

whm1974 wrote:
Well to be fair, Apple wasn't alone in pushing the PowerPC or for that matter RISC CPUs in general. Anybody remember the MIPS based Advance RISC Computer(ARC) back in the late 80's/early 90's?

I had a MIPS based workstation (SGI Indigo) on my desk at my day job back then. Really sweet desktop system for its time.

MIPS also lives on in the embedded world still. I was still programming MIPS-based embedded devices as recently as 2014-ish. Many of today's embedded devices have comparable CPU horsepower to an early 1990s desktop workstation. And by "embedded" I don't mean smartphones, tablets, etc... I mean thermostats, coffee makers, RGB lighting controllers in "gamer" keyboards, and stuff like that. :lol:

(The last MIPS system I worked on had the MIPS processor monitoring a bunch of physical knobs and switches on a control panel, and reporting the knob/switch states to another device over Ethernet.)
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just brew it!
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Thu Apr 05, 2018 4:21 pm

chuckula wrote:
For all the grief I give ARM, you'll never see me claiming that high-end PowerPC systems are slow. They definitely ain't slow. However, when you look at their price tags you suddenly realize that what Intel charges for Xeons isn't really that crazy.

Yup, POWER9 is even a thing now. In all likelihood it will end up being a small niche market, but it exists, and apparently doesn't suck.
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SuperSpy
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Fri Apr 06, 2018 8:15 am

From what I read ages ago (and I presume is still true) Xeons have a huge perf/watt advantage over POWER, but if you are looking for performance/socket, POWER wins by a mile, as long as you are willing to cool a 300+w chip.
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derFunkenstein
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Thu May 31, 2018 8:19 am

Maybe ARM-based Macs will be able to build and sign iOS packages faster than their x86-64 brethren, and if that's the case I might just buy one. :lol:
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just brew it!
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Thu May 31, 2018 10:23 am

SuperSpy wrote:
From what I read ages ago (and I presume is still true) Xeons have a huge perf/watt advantage over POWER, but if you are looking for performance/socket, POWER wins by a mile, as long as you are willing to cool a 300+w chip.

The current gen is likely similar. I really should be following this more closely, given that we're supposedly porting our product to run on it.

Anyhow, my point was that POWER chips are still around and still being actively developed. They haven't quite gone the way of Itanium yet...
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Waco
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Thu May 31, 2018 11:52 am

just brew it! wrote:
SuperSpy wrote:
From what I read ages ago (and I presume is still true) Xeons have a huge perf/watt advantage over POWER, but if you are looking for performance/socket, POWER wins by a mile, as long as you are willing to cool a 300+w chip.

The current gen is likely similar. I really should be following this more closely, given that we're supposedly porting our product to run on it.

Anyhow, my point was that POWER chips are still around and still being actively developed. They haven't quite gone the way of Itanium yet...

Even ARM in the HPC space is looking at multi-hundred watt chips. :) It's not an efficiency play for idle power, that's for sure.
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Wed Jun 27, 2018 5:23 pm

Marzipan as a Path to ARM Based Macs

“OK then, what about a new architecture?

Oh. Hello 64 bit ARM.”
 
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Wed Jun 27, 2018 6:04 pm

There's been 64bit ARM chips around for the better part of a decade.

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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Wed Jun 27, 2018 8:29 pm

This argument of "UIKit on Mac makes it so easy to go ARM" is a popular (yet kinda dumb) argument. If Apple went ARM, they'd still have to port the existing APIs to ARM. You can't not do that, or else your ARM platform can't run 99% of the software out there. It's like Mac OS X 10.0, except worse, because at least 10.0 has Classic. I can't believe people are making this argument, because it's just moronic. I expect better out of the technically-inclined.

This unified API is something I've expected for a long time, even if the two platforms weren't mashed together. Having one set of target APIs that works on all the platforms in ways that fit their strengths is smart. It's Xamarin Forms or Cordova on a much larger scale.

What UIKit on Mac really means is that it'll be easier to just compile your iOS apps for use on the Mac platform. Which is exactly what Apple is doing with apps that nobody uses (Home and Stocks). It's the lowest of risks. Next year they'll roll it out to the rest of us. And they might also roll out ARM (which I am still doubtful) but if they do you can bet your ass that they won't be limited to UIKit-based apps. Holy crap, that's a stupid line of reasoning. It really can't be understated.
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Pancake
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Wed Jun 27, 2018 8:54 pm

just brew it! wrote:
(The last MIPS system I worked on had the MIPS processor monitoring a bunch of physical knobs and switches on a control panel, and reporting the knob/switch states to another device over Ethernet.)


I'm guessing 99.99999% of the CPU was used to service the Ethernet stack and operating system? In days gone by even a lowly PIC chip would have been seen as extravagant for something like this. Nowadays even a disposable microcontroller will include a full Linux OS with WiFi stack and you could do all your "embedded development" using node.js. Kids these days, I tells ya.

Now what's funny is an old friend of mine signed me up to one of those fangled "hackathons". She thought it'd be good for me and I never could resist her smile. In a few weeks I'll be in a room with a bunch of kids doing whatever "Web 2.0" dev stuff they do. I'll be the grey hair in the corner with Eclipse running my Java stack banging out code the way I've been doing since for never!
 
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Wed Jun 27, 2018 9:37 pm

Pancake wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
(The last MIPS system I worked on had the MIPS processor monitoring a bunch of physical knobs and switches on a control panel, and reporting the knob/switch states to another device over Ethernet.)

I'm guessing 99.99999% of the CPU was used to service the Ethernet stack and operating system? In days gone by even a lowly PIC chip would have been seen as extravagant for something like this. Nowadays even a disposable microcontroller will include a full Linux OS with WiFi stack and you could do all your "embedded development" using node.js. Kids these days, I tells ya.

Actually, it was almost certainly 99.something% idle. It was in fact a PIC, from Microchip's 32-bit MIPS-based PIC product line! Probably cost all of $3. No OS, bare-metal coded in C.

Pancake wrote:
Now what's funny is an old friend of mine signed me up to one of those fangled "hackathons". She thought it'd be good for me and I never could resist her smile. In a few weeks I'll be in a room with a bunch of kids doing whatever "Web 2.0" dev stuff they do. I'll be the grey hair in the corner with Eclipse running my Java stack banging out code the way I've been doing since for never!

Heh, have fun with that.

I'm one of the dozen or so grey hairs in a large organization where most of the developers code in Java. I'm a C/C++ guy going way back. Ironically, the current project has me working in Python; it seems like there's a bit of a "there's Java, and there's everything else" mindset.
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Wed Nov 28, 2018 7:52 am

Turns out it's not just Apple working on ARM chips- Amazon have just rolled out custom made ARM chips on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec ... rocessors/
 
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Wed Nov 28, 2018 8:04 am

NTMBK wrote:
Turns out it's not just Apple working on ARM chips- Amazon have just rolled out custom made ARM chips on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec ... rocessors/


Probably for the upcoming "Alexa - Black Mirror Edition."
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Re: Apple working on ARM chips for Macs

Wed Nov 28, 2018 10:27 am

Rene Ritchie recently posted a video on the topic of "a third great Apple silicon transition":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VObg5BiXx6I

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