Mike Wuerthele said: Bootcamp is the most friction-free solution of the above for most users, and delivers the most performance to users. Even if you assume 5x the amount of people are using other virtualization solutions, that's still about one in 10.
I do have other data, but it is a small data set. It isn't even close to 5x the number of Bootcamp users using virtualization solutions, it's not even another 2%. But, for the sake of argument, I'm happy to use the 5x number.
Will a shift to ARM antagonize these people? Sure.
It is anywhere near to a majority? Not even remotely.
Will it disproportionally affect AI readers versus the the larger Apple consumer and enterprise user base? Also yes. The "but what about me?" argument that gets tossed around here is valid, for that use case, and that use case alone. It isn't valid for the larger user base, yes, including enterprise, and that gets forgotten a lot around here.
Thanks for the response, and I see where you're coming from. I suppose my view about Bootcamp is a bit skewed, as with my eGPU, it was anything but friction-free. Parallels was many, many times easier. Also, unless you need the performance for certain reasons, Parallels based Windows is just much better behaved with the peripherals, trackpad, etc. And, I've been pleasantly surprised with how well Parallels performs in the few things I've tried (Autodesk Revit, Minecraft), though it doesn't have direct access to the GPU (ie. can't do Folding@home). I'm mostly just using Parallels now, but keeping the Bootcamp partition around, just in case.
I guess the question is at what point the percentage matters? Apple seems to be going more generic all the time in terms of satisfying the needs of the customer base (with a couple exceptions, like the Mac Pro), so maybe they won't care about anything not in majority use. And, I suppose it won't matter for quite some time as the entire lineup won't go non-Intel.
I just think the impact is going to be bigger than some seem to be indicating.
Mike Wuerthele said: No hunch required -- this is addressed in the article.
FTA: "According to AppleInsider data gleaned from our relationships with service departments, approximately 2% of Macs brought in for servicing at Apple have Windows installed on Boot Camp."
Yeah, but that's what I mean. Not that it's baloney in the sense of inaccurate data (as far as it goes), but in meaning for this discussion. So, say the 2% is accurate for Bootcamp. And, then what another X% (6, 12, 23?) that run Windows via Parallels, VMware, etc.? We'd have to know both and add them together for it to be relevant. If anything, only counting Bootcamp and then making a point based on that might lead us to the wrong conclusion.
The Parallels site says they have over 7 million users:
Some of those users will also use Bootcamp. I'd expect fewer VMWare users but maybe a couple of million users on top. As people have mentioned earlier, 2% of 100 million+ Mac users is still over 2 million users.
If this dual-boot and virtualization capability went away due to switching to ARM, it would impact a few million people. How much of an impact depends on what people are using the solutions for. If a lot of people are using them for accounting software, small Windows utilities, some kind of corporate things that need Windows, these could potentially be satisfied by running an ARM version of Windows that has x86 emulation.
The ARM chip there is the Snapdragon 835, which is < 5W, similar to the native Intel N3450 listed there and the Snapdragon's emulated performance ran faster than that in some cases. There's a GPU test of an ARM chip running Windows here:
That GPU is listed as being 2TFLOP in a 7W chip but that figure seems to be FP16 so 1TFLOP FP32:
That would still be impressive if it was 1TFLOP in 7W of power. The games being emulated didn't run amazingly well but if Apple was to switch to ARM, I expect they'd try to improve performance over existing models and they have some of the fastest mobile chips. If the chip could go to 15W instead of 5W, it can be up to 3x faster than what we see in iOS devices and if it's on 5nm, that could take it to 5x faster. Even in cases of a 10x slowdown due to emulation, a 5x speed increase would make up a lot of it.
If the options were still unusable for high performance tasks, worst case people can buy some PC hardware and run it over a network.
A switch to ARM isn't essential for Apple, it's not like the PPC days where not switching could have severely impacted the company. All the chip makers will run into fabrication limits soon anyway. But it makes sense for Apple to simplify their manufacturing and software across all their products. I doubt Apple would lose many users from the platform because of it, Windows is still a headache to use every day. Even the most basic things like removing items from the explorer sidebar needing registry changes:
the default fullscreen alerts every time you need to authorize the system to do something, the wait dialog that pops up when an app crashes and it tries to find the problem and doesn't but you have hit cancel to stop it doing it every time ( https://techviral.net/disable-error-reporting-in-windows-10/ ). The system is still full of these bad designs after all these years. If moving to ARM is coming and it means slower, emulated Windows, so be it, it just means more reason not to use Windows but I actually think the available options would cover most use cases.
It could make products like the Mac Pro much more affordable, the lower end products would save maybe $100-200 but it can be thousands in the Mac Pro. There's an ARM workstation tested here against AMD and Intel and it holds up pretty well:
If moving to ARM is coming and it means slower, emulated Windows, so be it, it just means more reason not to use Windows but I actually think the available options would cover most use cases.
It could make products like the Mac Pro much more affordable, the lower end products would save maybe $100-200 but it can be thousands in the Mac Pro. There's an ARM workstation tested here against AMD and Intel and it holds up pretty well:
My bet is Apple wants to have emulated performance of macOS/x86 and Windows/x86 (on Macs) to be no worse than the x86 Macs that the ARM Macs are intended to replace. Ie, if Apple has a 2021 MBP with ARM, its emulated x86 performance will be the same as the 2020 equivalent MBP with Intel.
Will be pretty tough to do with 10nm Intel chips, but for the 14nm Intel chips, it's viable imo.
If moving to ARM is coming and it means slower, emulated Windows, so be it, it just means more reason not to use Windows but I actually think the available options would cover most use cases.
It could make products like the Mac Pro much more affordable, the lower end products would save maybe $100-200 but it can be thousands in the Mac Pro. There's an ARM workstation tested here against AMD and Intel and it holds up pretty well:
My bet is Apple wants to have emulated performance of macOS/x86 and Windows/x86 (on Macs) to be no worse than the x86 Macs that the ARM Macs are intended to replace. Ie, if Apple has a 2021 MBP with ARM, its emulated x86 performance will be the same as the 2020 equivalent MBP with Intel.
Will be pretty tough to do with 10nm Intel chips, but for the 14nm Intel chips, it's viable imo.
With Apple's push to 64-bit, I also expect they'd want to wait until x64 emulation was in place, the following suggests this might come sometime next year:
Hopefully AMD's RDNA2 GPUs this year come with a decent boost too, AMD is suggesting 30-50% improvement and it has hardware-accelerated raytracing and variable rate shading. This could mean up to 6TFLOP GPUs in the MBPs.
5nm chips with built-in low power GPU + AMD RDNA2 dedicated GPUs + x64 emulation support (Apple could potentially have some hardware virtualization tech in their chips) + USB4 to support TB devices
That sounds like it would be a decent replacement for existing models.
If moving to ARM is coming and it means slower, emulated Windows, so be it, it just means more reason not to use Windows but I actually think the available options would cover most use cases.
It could make products like the Mac Pro much more affordable, the lower end products would save maybe $100-200 but it can be thousands in the Mac Pro. There's an ARM workstation tested here against AMD and Intel and it holds up pretty well:
My bet is Apple wants to have emulated performance of macOS/x86 and Windows/x86 (on Macs) to be no worse than the x86 Macs that the ARM Macs are intended to replace. Ie, if Apple has a 2021 MBP with ARM, its emulated x86 performance will be the same as the 2020 equivalent MBP with Intel.
Will be pretty tough to do with 10nm Intel chips, but for the 14nm Intel chips, it's viable imo.
With Apple's push to 64-bit, I also expect they'd want to wait until x64 emulation was in place, the following suggests this might come sometime next year:
Hopefully AMD's RDNA2 GPUs this year come with a decent boost too, AMD is suggesting 30-50% improvement and it has hardware-accelerated raytracing and variable rate shading. This could mean up to 6TFLOP GPUs in the MBPs.
5nm chips with built-in low power GPU + AMD RDNA2 dedicated GPUs + x64 emulation support (Apple could potentially have some hardware virtualization tech in their chips) + USB4 to support TB devices
That sounds like it would be a decent replacement for existing models.
Emulating x64 in the GPU? I guess that'd mean that your virtualised environment wouldn't have the full scope of the GPU, which would be an annoyance to those who are currently dual booting for games, or if there are GPU intensive Windows-only applications they want to use.
If moving to ARM is coming and it means slower, emulated Windows, so be it, it just means more reason not to use Windows but I actually think the available options would cover most use cases.
It could make products like the Mac Pro much more affordable, the lower end products would save maybe $100-200 but it can be thousands in the Mac Pro. There's an ARM workstation tested here against AMD and Intel and it holds up pretty well:
My bet is Apple wants to have emulated performance of macOS/x86 and Windows/x86 (on Macs) to be no worse than the x86 Macs that the ARM Macs are intended to replace. Ie, if Apple has a 2021 MBP with ARM, its emulated x86 performance will be the same as the 2020 equivalent MBP with Intel.
Will be pretty tough to do with 10nm Intel chips, but for the 14nm Intel chips, it's viable imo.
With Apple's push to 64-bit, I also expect they'd want to wait until x64 emulation was in place, the following suggests this might come sometime next year:
Hopefully AMD's RDNA2 GPUs this year come with a decent boost too, AMD is suggesting 30-50% improvement and it has hardware-accelerated raytracing and variable rate shading. This could mean up to 6TFLOP GPUs in the MBPs.
5nm chips with built-in low power GPU + AMD RDNA2 dedicated GPUs + x64 emulation support (Apple could potentially have some hardware virtualization tech in their chips) + USB4 to support TB devices
That sounds like it would be a decent replacement for existing models.
Emulating x64 in the GPU? I guess that'd mean that your virtualised environment wouldn't have the full scope of the GPU, which would be an annoyance to those who are currently dual booting for games, or if there are GPU intensive Windows-only applications they want to use.
Interesting info though, thanks.
No, the x64 would be emulated on the CPU, possibly with some custom hardware support like Intel has for virtualization. The faster AMD GPU just means that it can help offset more of the performance drop from the emulation.
Marvin said: The Parallels site says they have over 7 million users:
... If this dual-boot and virtualization capability went away due to switching to ARM, it would impact a few million people. How much of an impact depends on what people are using the solutions for. If a lot of people are using them for accounting software, small Windows utilities, some kind of corporate things that need Windows, these could potentially be satisfied by running an ARM version of Windows that has x86 emulation.
This emulation performance has been tested here: ... If the options were still unusable for high performance tasks, worst case people can buy some PC hardware and run it over a network.
... I doubt Apple would lose many users from the platform because of it, Windows is still a headache to use every day. Even the most basic things like removing items from the explorer sidebar needing registry changes ...
Thanks for all the info! Is that ARM Windows software compatible with everything, or does it need apps made for it?
But yeah, I suppose most people don't need it to be max performance, just compatibility issues. I'm more in a different camp, needing to run Windows-only versions of pro CAD/3D software. Yes, we'd probably just have to get a Windows PC box to add under the desk.
For sure, Windows is still a pain, and at best, not as pleasurable to use. Enough so that I don't want to deal with it any more than I have to.
Most of my background is in IT work on Windows and Unix, though I often used a Mac to control them and for my day-to-day work (ie. the Windows and Unix boxes were in the server racks). Unfortunately, almost every job opportunity I can find is quite Windows-centric, and more in terms of managing/planning user systems, so I'm actually switching careers into CAD/3D (or back, in some ways, as I did a lot of that for a half-decade in the late 90s). I can sorta stomach using a pro app on a Windows PC if someone else has to deal with all the baloney. (Though, I'd rather use Mac apps on a Mac if possible.)
Marvin said: ... Hopefully AMD's RDNA2 GPUs this year come with a decent boost too, AMD is suggesting 30-50% improvement and it has hardware-accelerated raytracing and variable rate shading. This could mean up to 6TFLOP GPUs in the MBPs. ...
Yeah, things are getting interesting, so long as you don't depend on CUDA. I haven't followed all this as closely as I should, but was kind of shocked at both PS5 and Xbox going AMD, seeing how much promotion Nvidia is getting with Minecraft RTX (and other RTX stuff).
Marvin said: No, the x64 would be emulated on the CPU, possibly with some custom hardware support like Intel has for virtualization. The faster AMD GPU just means that it can help offset more of the performance drop from the emulation.
I've always seen this note about eGPUs and Parallels and wondered why Apple doesn't support this or if they ever will?
"It is not possible to connect an eGPU device directly to VM, as they are being connected to Mac via PCIe interface which requires VT-d technology support to make virtualization of such connection possible, but VT-d on Mac can't be used for passing an external GPU to a virtual machine."
Marvin said: The Parallels site says they have over 7 million users:
... If this dual-boot and virtualization capability went away due to switching to ARM, it would impact a few million people. How much of an impact depends on what people are using the solutions for. If a lot of people are using them for accounting software, small Windows utilities, some kind of corporate things that need Windows, these could potentially be satisfied by running an ARM version of Windows that has x86 emulation.
This emulation performance has been tested here: ... If the options were still unusable for high performance tasks, worst case people can buy some PC hardware and run it over a network.
... I doubt Apple would lose many users from the platform because of it, Windows is still a headache to use every day. Even the most basic things like removing items from the explorer sidebar needing registry changes ...
Thanks for all the info! Is that ARM Windows software compatible with everything, or does it need apps made for it?
Ideally software would be recompiled but for existing software, it's compatible with 32-bit Windows apps, not 64-bit yet. 64-bit support could arrive next year.
cgWerks said: I'm more in a different camp, needing to run Windows-only versions of pro CAD/3D software. Yes, we'd probably just have to get a Windows PC box to add under the desk.
That kind of software could work ok but if there was a CPU rendering engine, that part would be much better ported to ARM native. Real-time shaders get compiled by the GPU so don't need to be ported.
Marvin said: ... Hopefully AMD's RDNA2 GPUs this year come with a decent boost too, AMD is suggesting 30-50% improvement and it has hardware-accelerated raytracing and variable rate shading. This could mean up to 6TFLOP GPUs in the MBPs. ...
Yeah, things are getting interesting, so long as you don't depend on CUDA. I haven't followed all this as closely as I should, but was kind of shocked at both PS5 and Xbox going AMD, seeing how much promotion Nvidia is getting with Minecraft RTX (and other RTX stuff).
There's a few factors to consider with consoles. AMD makes high performance CPUs, Nvidia just does low power ARM CPUs so they'd have to source a CPU from somewhere. They could use AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU but it increases costs. Older consoles that used Nvidia had PPC chips and it makes it harder on developers to maintain cross-platform titles. The margins are low on consoles, especially XBox/PS because they try to put as high-end hardware in at as low a price point as possible:
When price is a concern, AMD is willing to undercut everyone because they are financially much worse off than everyone else. Nintendo uses Nvidia hardware in the Switch, which is likely much better margins because that console can sell at premium prices with fairly low-end hardware.
cgWerks said: I've always seen this note about eGPUs and Parallels and wondered why Apple doesn't support this or if they ever will?
"It is not possible to connect an eGPU device directly to VM, as they are being connected to Mac via PCIe interface which requires VT-d technology support to make virtualization of such connection possible, but VT-d on Mac can't be used for passing an external GPU to a virtual machine."
They might support it eventually. It took forever for them to support eGPUs but they did in the end. Things that have a small audience aren't high priority for them though.
I don't think there are much resistant from consumer market when Apple introduce consumer level Mac with ARM.
So Apple will divide completely consumer and pro line up with ARM.
The pro line up model will be more expensive and consumer line up will be cheaper compare to the pro line up.
Most of school(not college) using either Google G-suite or MS office 365.
So it does not need Intel CPU at all.
Most of Google cromebook price range from $300-$1000.
I would buy Apple iOS macbook with A13 or higher with price tag around $500-$700.(RAM should be bigger than 4GB, SSD starting from 256GB, Apple can solder the RAM, but hopefully SSD can be replaceable. SSD is not need to be PCIe base. NVMe or lower still be good.)
Most A12-A13 device can play the game in app store without much problem.
Unless they can keep all the features that are currently in place including Bootcamp it would be the worst mistake Apple could do.
I don't think so. Once upon a time, the Mac gave the halo to the iPhone. It hasn't been that way in 10 years, and is instead the other way around. The new Mac user doesn't care. Boot Camp installs are a very small percentage of the overall user base, as the article discusses.
We'll all see together.
I’m concerned about the software base. Just as in the article, I’ve noticed an appreciable shrinkage from Catalina alone, and that’s just a move to 64 bits. I’ve also noticed other problems more recently. The problem of creating a bootable cloned drive, which many of us use. Problems with third party pref panels not working. Are these bugs, or are they Apple moving more and more to a sandboxed macOS more in line with iOS? If the latter, it will be a major problem. There used to be many more apps in the Mac App Store, and many more safari extensions.
Unless they can keep all the features that are currently in place including Bootcamp it would be the worst mistake Apple could do.
I don't think so. Once upon a time, the Mac gave the halo to the iPhone. It hasn't been that way in 10 years, and is instead the other way around. The new Mac user doesn't care. Boot Camp installs are a very small percentage of the overall user base, as the article discusses.
We'll all see together.
I’m concerned about the software base. Just as in the article, I’ve noticed an appreciable shrinkage from Catalina alone, and that’s just a move to 64 bits. I’ve also noticed other problems more recently. The problem of creating a bootable cloned drive, which many of us use. Problems with third party pref panels not working. Are these bugs, or are they Apple moving more and more to a sandboxed macOS more in line with iOS? If the latter, it will be a major problem. There used to be many more apps in the Mac App Store, and many more safari extensions.
this should be a concern.
While the backup utility manufacturers haven't chimed in on the new macOS beta yet, they have already dealt with the bootable cloned drive thing in their latest updates. The third-party pref panels isn't a new thing, and Apple said a year ago that this was going to happen, and again in January.
I'm pretty sure that macOS is going to be more sandboxed, the more we move forward. Windows is heading in a similar direction.
And, like I said in the iPhone halo thing above, the haloed iPhone users buying a ARM Mac aren't going to care about stuff from even two years ago.
Mike Wuerthele said: I'm pretty sure that macOS is going to be more sandboxed, the more we move forward. Windows is heading in a similar direction.
And, like I said in the iPhone halo thing above, the haloed iPhone users buying a ARM Mac aren't going to care about stuff from even two years ago.
That is concerning, though. At what point does Apple (for those of us with history) become no longer so many of the things we depend on anymore? Maybe it will still be better than the rest? But, at some point, if it becomes too much new, different, not in alignment with our needs and workflows, why not just switch to something different?
A decade or so ago, I used to love and use almost the entire Apple eco-system. I used Mail, their photo and music apps, etc. They've slowly broken all those and pushed me to 3rd party solutions. It seems like we'll see a similar exodus over a lot of the pro graphics/3D tools in the near future. Then, if apps start going away, to be replaced by iOS'ized versions... pretty soon we're left with just an OS, that increasingly is becoming frustrating as well.
I'm really glad Apple seems back on track with the hardware, but I'm not sure that will be enough if the software side continues to erode. I suppose if they pull in enough of those halo'd crowd, we just don't matter anymore. But, we've had conversations already about what happens to brands that let go of their 'performance pusher' arm. Let's hope Apple doesn't go there.
If I were Apple, I would make a x86 instructions compatible processor with ARM core. Modern Intel processors used the same technique with RISC-like core and x86 microcode. This way, no transition issues, if not 100% compatible with existing software.
This is not possible as the instruction sets is in place and X86 is not compatible in anyway nor could it be without compromising the design and benefits of the ARM chip. Most people will never know the difference for what they do once the software has been ported. Those using VM's will have to wait and see, which is fine because they older Macs will continue to work.
Unless they can keep all the features that are currently in place including Bootcamp it would be the worst mistake Apple could do.
I don't think so. Once upon a time, the Mac gave the halo to the iPhone. It hasn't been that way in 10 years, and is instead the other way around. The new Mac user doesn't care. Boot Camp installs are a very small percentage of the overall user base, as the article discusses.
We'll all see together.
I’m concerned about the software base. Just as in the article, I’ve noticed an appreciable shrinkage from Catalina alone, and that’s just a move to 64 bits. I’ve also noticed other problems more recently. The problem of creating a bootable cloned drive, which many of us use. Problems with third party pref panels not working. Are these bugs, or are they Apple moving more and more to a sandboxed macOS more in line with iOS? If the latter, it will be a major problem. There used to be many more apps in the Mac App Store, and many more safari extensions.
this should be a concern.
While the backup utility manufacturers haven't chimed in on the new macOS beta yet, they have already dealt with the bootable cloned drive thing in their latest updates. The third-party pref panels isn't a new thing, and Apple said a year ago that this was going to happen, and again in January.
I'm pretty sure that macOS is going to be more sandboxed, the more we move forward. Windows is heading in a similar direction.
And, like I said in the iPhone halo thing above, the haloed iPhone users buying a ARM Mac aren't going to care about stuff from even two years ago.
Actually, that’s not true, at least about the latest macOS update. I forget his name, but the guy who had CCC is the one who brought up the worry that Apple might have done this on purpose, and that maybe it’s not a bug. We’ll have to see. The work-around are very clumsy. I can tell you that from my own experience. It’s not what we would want. And if Apple is doing this on purpose, you can be sure they’ll try to undo these fixes.
Several companies I’ve contacted about the pref panels tell me they have been surprised at this action, and that Apple hasn’t been forthcoming. In fact, at least three had released new updates to specifically work with Catalina, and they—don’t.
Unless they can keep all the features that are currently in place including Bootcamp it would be the worst mistake Apple could do.
I don't think so. Once upon a time, the Mac gave the halo to the iPhone. It hasn't been that way in 10 years, and is instead the other way around. The new Mac user doesn't care. Boot Camp installs are a very small percentage of the overall user base, as the article discusses.
We'll all see together.
I’m concerned about the software base. Just as in the article, I’ve noticed an appreciable shrinkage from Catalina alone, and that’s just a move to 64 bits. I’ve also noticed other problems more recently. The problem of creating a bootable cloned drive, which many of us use. Problems with third party pref panels not working. Are these bugs, or are they Apple moving more and more to a sandboxed macOS more in line with iOS? If the latter, it will be a major problem. There used to be many more apps in the Mac App Store, and many more safari extensions.
this should be a concern.
While the backup utility manufacturers haven't chimed in on the new macOS beta yet, they have already dealt with the bootable cloned drive thing in their latest updates. The third-party pref panels isn't a new thing, and Apple said a year ago that this was going to happen, and again in January.
I'm pretty sure that macOS is going to be more sandboxed, the more we move forward. Windows is heading in a similar direction.
And, like I said in the iPhone halo thing above, the haloed iPhone users buying a ARM Mac aren't going to care about stuff from even two years ago.
Actually, that’s not true, at least about the latest macOS update. I forget his name, but the guy who had CCC is the one who brought up the worry that Apple might have done this on purpose, and that maybe it’s not a bug. We’ll have to see. The work-around are very clumsy. I can tell you that from my own experience. It’s not what we would want. And if Apple is doing this on purpose, you can be sure they’ll try to undo these fixes.
Several companies I’ve contacted about the pref panels tell me they have been surprised at this action, and that Apple hasn’t been forthcoming. In fact, at least three had released new updates to specifically work with Catalina, and they—don’t.
Mike Bombich is his name. What I said seems plenty true based on what he's said, and I've used the update that fixes the problem. There's no funky workaround in the update. I'm not sure what you're talking about "undoing the fixes" as the previous blog entry to this discusses what Apple specifically said that they should use instead of the method that they were using in the first place to get it to work.
Unless they can keep all the features that are currently in place including Bootcamp it would be the worst mistake Apple could do.
I don't think so. Once upon a time, the Mac gave the halo to the iPhone. It hasn't been that way in 10 years, and is instead the other way around. The new Mac user doesn't care. Boot Camp installs are a very small percentage of the overall user base, as the article discusses.
We'll all see together.
I’m concerned about the software base. Just as in the article, I’ve noticed an appreciable shrinkage from Catalina alone, and that’s just a move to 64 bits. I’ve also noticed other problems more recently. The problem of creating a bootable cloned drive, which many of us use. Problems with third party pref panels not working. Are these bugs, or are they Apple moving more and more to a sandboxed macOS more in line with iOS? If the latter, it will be a major problem. There used to be many more apps in the Mac App Store, and many more safari extensions.
this should be a concern.
Well, question is always how many people(consumer level) use that way?
Even boot camp usage is around 2% or so.
I am not talking about professional such as programmer or corporation level. They will continue to use Intel base Mac.
Boot able colon drive maybe issue with T2 chip? I was tested new Mini with external SSD require T2 chip security disabled. Because Apple removed SATA port from new Mini.
64bit app is 3rd party issue. Not Apple. Under iOS, all apps are fine as long as publisher keep up with newer iOS level certification.
I guess big publisher should not have much issue with that..
As I said, ARM Mac is replacement for iPad Pro for consumer who does not want to pay $1000 for tablet + keyboard + mouse(or track pad).
It may not have touch capability but as long as price is right, this will start to take over Chromebook market soon.
"Then, too, there are Windows virtualization options, such as Parallels. These tend to be clunkier than the hardware Boot Camp, but then if you weren't prepared for clunkiness, you wouldn't be using Windows."
Why are you pushing Parallels when VMware is a much better product? I run Fusion and it's not clunky. Running Boot Camp is easier because you simply boot into it but running a virtual OS, or multiple virtual OSes, is the way many server farms are running today. Why worry about Boot Camp when there's a good product that replaces it?
I've been watching some youtube videos showing Hackintosh running on AMD Ryzen CPUs that are half the price of the Mac Pro and are faster. Yes, there are a few limitations but they use a motherboard that includes the following, very friendly to Mac, capabilities: DDR4, PCIe 4.0, SATA 6Gb/s, M.2, USB 3.2, AX Wi-Fi 6, 10G Super LAN. If these "PC" motherboards and the Ryzen CPU are both more or less Mac compatible then Apple surely can build their own AMD CPU, motherboard and everything else while adding full software capability. I see it as when, not if.
We're not "pushing" anything. Parallels is more public-facing than VMware, and was presented as an example.
Wow... I'm actually baffled that you've managed to follow the "argument" being made! English is not my first language, so I'm taking my own judgement with more than a grain of salt, but that did not read like a functional use of language. The thread of thought is all over the place.
If I were Apple, I would make a x86 instructions compatible processor with ARM core. Modern Intel processors used the same technique with RISC-like core and x86 microcode. This way, no transition issues, if not 100% compatible with existing software.
It is just for a historical mishap that x86 got to be the de facto standard that it has been, for about 42 years now! There were better architectures, with less compromising choices, from its very introduction. That it managed to hobble through 2020 (and far beyond, outside Apple hardware) is not a testament to its foresighted engineering, but to Newton's first law—inertia!
Also, a little more than 2 years ago, we had another global pandemic of serious x86 exploits, that were inherent in the way the architecture was built. To this day, even macOS have only mitigated the risks, with performance affecting measures. Besides, Intel is slumping, just as PowerPC was slumping towards 2004–2005. When I think of contemporary x86 revisions, I can't fail to recall the infamous Gill Amelio's keynote (the very one where Jobs got back to Apple) comparing a new jet plane and a cobbled single-engine aircraft. From time to time, it does come to either start from scratch, or slip away to irrelevancy!
Nobody will die, from any reason whatsoever, due to Apple moving away from Intel. Some developers will surely have to migrate their workflows, as they are always doing to some scale — at least the ones that survive at our technological pace. If some user, professionals, and/or developers decide that this move is not in their best interest, that's fine and reasonable. Just don's expect all of us to hold out going forward on behalf of them!
Comments
I guess the question is at what point the percentage matters? Apple seems to be going more generic all the time in terms of satisfying the needs of the customer base (with a couple exceptions, like the Mac Pro), so maybe they won't care about anything not in majority use. And, I suppose it won't matter for quite some time as the entire lineup won't go non-Intel.
I just think the impact is going to be bigger than some seem to be indicating.
https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
Some of those users will also use Bootcamp. I'd expect fewer VMWare users but maybe a couple of million users on top. As people have mentioned earlier, 2% of 100 million+ Mac users is still over 2 million users.
If this dual-boot and virtualization capability went away due to switching to ARM, it would impact a few million people. How much of an impact depends on what people are using the solutions for. If a lot of people are using them for accounting software, small Windows utilities, some kind of corporate things that need Windows, these could potentially be satisfied by running an ARM version of Windows that has x86 emulation.
This emulation performance has been tested here:
https://www.techspot.com/review/1599-windows-on-arm-performance/page2.html
The ARM chip there is the Snapdragon 835, which is < 5W, similar to the native Intel N3450 listed there and the Snapdragon's emulated performance ran faster than that in some cases. There's a GPU test of an ARM chip running Windows here:
That GPU is listed as being 2TFLOP in a 7W chip but that figure seems to be FP16 so 1TFLOP FP32:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-Adreno-685-GPU.436915.0.html
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-sq1-processor-surface-pro-x,40537.html
That would still be impressive if it was 1TFLOP in 7W of power. The games being emulated didn't run amazingly well but if Apple was to switch to ARM, I expect they'd try to improve performance over existing models and they have some of the fastest mobile chips. If the chip could go to 15W instead of 5W, it can be up to 3x faster than what we see in iOS devices and if it's on 5nm, that could take it to 5x faster. Even in cases of a 10x slowdown due to emulation, a 5x speed increase would make up a lot of it.
If the options were still unusable for high performance tasks, worst case people can buy some PC hardware and run it over a network.
A switch to ARM isn't essential for Apple, it's not like the PPC days where not switching could have severely impacted the company. All the chip makers will run into fabrication limits soon anyway. But it makes sense for Apple to simplify their manufacturing and software across all their products. I doubt Apple would lose many users from the platform because of it, Windows is still a headache to use every day. Even the most basic things like removing items from the explorer sidebar needing registry changes:
https://www.techspot.com/guides/1703-remove-3d-objects-shortcut-windows-file-explorer/
the default fullscreen alerts every time you need to authorize the system to do something, the wait dialog that pops up when an app crashes and it tries to find the problem and doesn't but you have hit cancel to stop it doing it every time ( https://techviral.net/disable-error-reporting-in-windows-10/ ). The system is still full of these bad designs after all these years. If moving to ARM is coming and it means slower, emulated Windows, so be it, it just means more reason not to use Windows but I actually think the available options would cover most use cases.
It could make products like the Mac Pro much more affordable, the lower end products would save maybe $100-200 but it can be thousands in the Mac Pro. There's an ARM workstation tested here against AMD and Intel and it holds up pretty well:
https://kinvolk.io/blog/2019/11/comparative-benchmark-of-ampere-emag-amd-epyc-and-intel-xeon-for-cloud-native-workloads/
Will be pretty tough to do with 10nm Intel chips, but for the 14nm Intel chips, it's viable imo.
https://www.neowin.net/news/exclusive-microsoft-is-working-to-bring-64-bit-intel-app-emulation-to-windows-on-arm
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-reportedly-working-x64-app-emulation-arm-pcs
Hopefully AMD's RDNA2 GPUs this year come with a decent boost too, AMD is suggesting 30-50% improvement and it has hardware-accelerated raytracing and variable rate shading. This could mean up to 6TFLOP GPUs in the MBPs.
5nm chips with built-in low power GPU + AMD RDNA2 dedicated GPUs + x64 emulation support (Apple could potentially have some hardware virtualization tech in their chips) + USB4 to support TB devices
That sounds like it would be a decent replacement for existing models.
Interesting info though, thanks.
But yeah, I suppose most people don't need it to be max performance, just compatibility issues. I'm more in a different camp, needing to run Windows-only versions of pro CAD/3D software. Yes, we'd probably just have to get a Windows PC box to add under the desk.
For sure, Windows is still a pain, and at best, not as pleasurable to use. Enough so that I don't want to deal with it any more than I have to.
Most of my background is in IT work on Windows and Unix, though I often used a Mac to control them and for my day-to-day work (ie. the Windows and Unix boxes were in the server racks). Unfortunately, almost every job opportunity I can find is quite Windows-centric, and more in terms of managing/planning user systems, so I'm actually switching careers into CAD/3D (or back, in some ways, as I did a lot of that for a half-decade in the late 90s). I can sorta stomach using a pro app on a Windows PC if someone else has to deal with all the baloney. (Though, I'd rather use Mac apps on a Mac if possible.)
Yeah, things are getting interesting, so long as you don't depend on CUDA. I haven't followed all this as closely as I should, but was kind of shocked at both PS5 and Xbox going AMD, seeing how much promotion Nvidia is getting with Minecraft RTX (and other RTX stuff).
"It is not possible to connect an eGPU device directly to VM, as they are being connected to Mac via PCIe interface which requires VT-d technology support to make virtualization of such connection possible, but VT-d on Mac can't be used for passing an external GPU to a virtual machine."
That kind of software could work ok but if there was a CPU rendering engine, that part would be much better ported to ARM native. Real-time shaders get compiled by the GPU so don't need to be ported.
There's a few factors to consider with consoles. AMD makes high performance CPUs, Nvidia just does low power ARM CPUs so they'd have to source a CPU from somewhere. They could use AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU but it increases costs. Older consoles that used Nvidia had PPC chips and it makes it harder on developers to maintain cross-platform titles. The margins are low on consoles, especially XBox/PS because they try to put as high-end hardware in at as low a price point as possible:
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-ps4-because-console-margins-are-terrible
When price is a concern, AMD is willing to undercut everyone because they are financially much worse off than everyone else. Nintendo uses Nvidia hardware in the Switch, which is likely much better margins because that console can sell at premium prices with fairly low-end hardware.
They might support it eventually. It took forever for them to support eGPUs but they did in the end. Things that have a small audience aren't high priority for them though.
this should be a concern.
I'm pretty sure that macOS is going to be more sandboxed, the more we move forward. Windows is heading in a similar direction.
And, like I said in the iPhone halo thing above, the haloed iPhone users buying a ARM Mac aren't going to care about stuff from even two years ago.
A decade or so ago, I used to love and use almost the entire Apple eco-system. I used Mail, their photo and music apps, etc. They've slowly broken all those and pushed me to 3rd party solutions. It seems like we'll see a similar exodus over a lot of the pro graphics/3D tools in the near future. Then, if apps start going away, to be replaced by iOS'ized versions... pretty soon we're left with just an OS, that increasingly is becoming frustrating as well.
I'm really glad Apple seems back on track with the hardware, but I'm not sure that will be enough if the software side continues to erode. I suppose if they pull in enough of those halo'd crowd, we just don't matter anymore. But, we've had conversations already about what happens to brands that let go of their 'performance pusher' arm. Let's hope Apple doesn't go there.
https://bombich.com/blog/2020/05/27/bug-in-macos-10.15.5-impacts-bootable-backups-weve-got-you-covered
And regarding the pref panels. This was discussed at WWDC last year.
The Adreno 640 was 0.95~1.0 TFLOPS FP32.
https://www.highperformancegraphics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/hot3d/mobile_gpu_power_and_performance.pptx
For comparison, an Xbox One S is 1.4 TFLOPS.
Also, a little more than 2 years ago, we had another global pandemic of serious x86 exploits, that were inherent in the way the architecture was built. To this day, even macOS have only mitigated the risks, with performance affecting measures. Besides, Intel is slumping, just as PowerPC was slumping towards 2004–2005. When I think of contemporary x86 revisions, I can't fail to recall the infamous Gill Amelio's keynote (the very one where Jobs got back to Apple) comparing a new jet plane and a cobbled single-engine aircraft. From time to time, it does come to either start from scratch, or slip away to irrelevancy!
Nobody will die, from any reason whatsoever, due to Apple moving away from Intel. Some developers will surely have to migrate their workflows, as they are always doing to some scale — at least the ones that survive at our technological pace. If some user, professionals, and/or developers decide that this move is not in their best interest, that's fine and reasonable. Just don's expect all of us to hold out going forward on behalf of them!