My point is that Qualcomm is going to remain behind Apple in SOC performance, both in mobile and in notebook/desktop. The fact that Qualcomm has an architectural license yet has waited for Cortex X is telling, all the while Apple is innovating in the SOC space with the ARM ISA license. Apple's advantage is that it can provide synergy between its OS, development system and SOC designs, and other hardware.
Bzzt! Wrong!
Apple has held an ARM Architectural License since at least 2008. One of about 15 such licenses in the world.
Both Apple and Qualcomm have an ISA, Instruction Set Architecture, also known as an Architectural license. I shouldn't have mixed the terms, but, if Qualcomm is waiting for Cortex X instead of designing their own core, then they are in fact behind Apple on ARM.
This assumes Apple has the best parts, integration and ecosystem. That's not always the case. Other manufacturers have done considerable work on integration and the major productivity ecosystem is not with Apple. The point of the Cortex X program allows partners to have custom ARM solutions made for their need. This is not a roadmap product and is not something everyone has access to and isn't restricted to a product roadmap or the current ISA version being used by ARM's mainstream designs.
Apple has an Arm Architectural License.
With little exception (they may license some simple Peripheral subsystems from Arm), Apple’s Arm-based SoCs are 100% designed in-house from the ground-up. No one designs them but Apple.
I believe the first one or two Ax SoCs were designed in conjunction with Samsung (who also holds an Arm Architectural License); but that hasn’t been the case for over a decade, at least.
They could have touch-based Macs on Intel if they wanted. Whether they add touch or not is not dependent on the processor.
They could have, but it would have been touch like on Windows. On Apple Silicon they can let the iPad apps run at native speed. That wouldn't be possible on Intel.
Apparently you haven't heard of Catalyst which already allows them to port iPad apps to Mac. Regardless of apps, they could've implemented touch at any point already. It DOES NOT require a different processor, that's absurd.
It might help on your keyboard rage to read it in full. Catalyst does allow developers to port apps. With macOS 11 users will be able to just run any app. Huge difference. On Apple Silicon the performance will be native.
My point was none of that has any bearing on whether a Mac is touch-based or not. You don't need an Arm processor to enable touch. You do not need a native-running iPad app to enable touch. They could've done touch screen Macs ten years ago on Intel with existing Mac apps. None of this has any bearing on enabling touch-based Macs, which was specifically what the OP said, and you hijacked that go in whatever direction you're taking this (Windows, what?).
I should've just stuck with "they're Apple-designed chips". The Intel chips were wholly Intel products. These are Apple products and consumers do not care what the underlying architecture is.
It's not the Worldwide Consumer Conference though.
I knew you were going to say that. Regardless, branding is important whether they're telling it to millions of developers OR consumers. You want to read about architecture specifics, the rest of the week is for stuff like that.
Nah! RAM is a commodity -- and Apple avoids getting involved with that stuff. Until there can be a meaningful performance boost, it much easier, cheaper and more productive to simply buy it.
In a way, that's why they stuck with Intel for all those years: Intel was doing as good a job as could be done -- Apple could not improve on it significantly -- so they stuck with Intel until they could do it better.
Jobs once asked a CEO: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?". Tim Cook is thrilled with selling sugar water like animojis, widgets, and UI skins. He is not moving us forward on how we work or gather/structure/validate our knowledge.
Despite this being a ridiculously flawed analogy, It's intellectually dishonest to reduce this entire historic WWDC Keynote and everything that we saw down to widgets and Animoji. You completely invalidate your points by doing this.
I’ve already read comments from music professional stating a lot of their old legacy plugins etc will no longer work. And the developers are either not in business anymore or too small to worry about Apple and spending money if an Apple silicone dev kit.
My point is that Qualcomm is going to remain behind Apple in SOC performance, both in mobile and in notebook/desktop. The fact that Qualcomm has an architectural license yet has waited for Cortex X is telling, all the while Apple is innovating in the SOC space with the ARM ISA license. Apple's advantage is that it can provide synergy between its OS, development system and SOC designs, and other hardware.
Bzzt! Wrong!
Apple has held an ARM Architectural License since at least 2008. One of about 15 such licenses in the world.
At the moment, this is little more than a loss of prestige for Intel.
The problem will come if Microsoft decides to put some effort into its own ARM strategy.
Apple doesn't have close to the silicon team that Apple has to pull this off. What we saw yesterday was how central Apple's silicon team is to Apple's competitive advantage. MS would have to buy a major silicon company to pull this off. Who knows, maybe they'll buy AMD (*sarcasm*).
Microsoft can participate in ARM's Cortex X program, or work with a company that is.
The Cortex X1 and next year's ARMv9 Matterhorn core (Cortex X2?) are being designed without previous constraints that are on cores like the Cortex A78.
The Cortex-X1 here is projected to use 1.5x the power of an A78. This might end up slightly lower but I’m being overly cautious here and prefer to be on the more pessimistic side. Here’s the real kicker though: the X1 could very well use up to 2x the power of a Cortex-A77/A78 and it would still be able to compete with Apple’s cores in terms of energy efficiency – the core’s increased performance largely makes up for its increased power draw, meaning its energy efficiency at the projected power would roughly only be 23% worse than an A78, and only 11-14% worse than say a current generation Snapdragon 865. Arm has such a big leeway in power efficiency at the moment that I just don’t see any scenario where the X1 would end up disappointing.
...
Meanwhile the Cortex-X1 is a big change for Arm. And that change has less to do with the technology of the cores, and more with the business decisions that it now opens up for the company, although both are intertwined. For years many people were wondering why the company didn't design a core that could more closely compete with what Apple had built. In my view, one of the reasons for that was that Arm has always been constrained by the need to create a “one core fits all” design that could fit all of their customers’ needs – and not just the few flagship SoC designs.
The Cortex-X program here effectively unshackles Arm from these business limitations, and it allows the company to provide the best of both worlds. As a result, the A78 continues the company’s bread & butter design philosophy of power-performance-area leadership, whilst the X1 and its successors can now aim for the stars in terms of performance, without such strict area usage or power consumption limitations.
In this regard, the X1 seems really, really impressive. The 30% IPC improvement over the A77 is astounding and not something I had expected from the company this generation. The company has been incessantly beating the drum of their annual projected 20-25% improvements in performance – a pace which is currently well beyond what the competition has been able to achieve. These most recent projected performance figures are getting crazy close to the best that what we’ve seeing from the x86 players out there right now. That’s exciting for Arm, and should be worrying for the competition.
That quote makes no sense. The latest Qualcomm chip is well behind Apple’s chip of two years ago in performance and efficiency. If this will be 10% behind that, then it’s no competition to Apple at all. That’s according to Anandtech testing. The chart you see here shows, not an actual Cortex-X1 chip test, but an estimated number, which is indicated by the word—projection. That means nothing. It’s also an estimate of what it will be on 5nm. Useless.
It's not useless. It's based on what ARM presented from someone with an excellent track record.
Again, as a big note – these figures are largely my own projections based on the various data-points that Arm has presented. This can end up differently in actual products, but in the past our predictions of the A76 and A77 ended up extremely close to the actual silicon, if not even pessimistically worse than what the real figures ended up at.
Another key point from Arm:
Cortex-X1 is the very first example of a Cortex CPU that the CXC program can produce. It extends the digital immersion capabilities of smartphones through new levels of performance, making Cortex-X1 Arm’s most powerful CPU to date.
As part of the CXC program, subscribed partners collaborate with Arm to define custom CPUs that push performance at an envelope outside of the Cortex-A PPA. As a result, partners will have a CPU that is specific to their market needs and shows differentiation beyond roadmap Cortex-A CPUs. Through the CXC program, we are meeting the needs of the ever-expanding ecosystem, taking the best of Arm and applying it to the next level.
This is not simply a roadmap product. The Cortex X program allows partners to get the product they want for their needs.
It’s just a chart. Until we see actual silicon, it’s just a roadmap.
My point is that Qualcomm is going to remain behind Apple in SOC performance, both in mobile and in notebook/desktop. The fact that Qualcomm has an architectural license yet has waited for Cortex X is telling, all the while Apple is innovating in the SOC space with the ARM ISA license. Apple's advantage is that it can provide synergy between its OS, development system and SOC designs, and other hardware.
Bzzt! Wrong!
Apple has held an ARM Architectural License since at least 2008. One of about 15 such licenses in the world.
Both Apple and Qualcomm have an ISA, Instruction Set Architecture, also known as an Architectural license. I shouldn't have mixed the terms, but, if Qualcomm is waiting for Cortex X instead of designing their own core, then they are in fact behind Apple on ARM.
Qualcomm stopped designing their own cores several years ago, after their disaster.
Jobs once asked a CEO: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?". Tim Cook is thrilled with selling sugar water like animojis, widgets, and UI skins. He is not moving us forward on how we work or gather/structure/validate our knowledge.
Despite this being a ridiculously flawed analogy, It's intellectually dishonest to reduce this entire historic WWDC Keynote and everything that we saw down to widgets and Animoji. You completely invalidate your points by doing this.
These people are insane. The new platforms are adding and doing so much. Even this 2 minute summary video is clear proof of this.
Jobs once asked a CEO: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?". Tim Cook is thrilled with selling sugar water like animojis, widgets, and UI skins. He is not moving us forward on how we work or gather/structure/validate our knowledge.
Despite this being a ridiculously flawed analogy, It's intellectually dishonest to reduce this entire historic WWDC Keynote and everything that we saw down to widgets and Animoji. You completely invalidate your points by doing this.
Eh... this thread is about 1 thing - the impact of moving the Mac to Apple Silicon. Apple hasn't cared about timely upgrading the Mac to new silicon in a decade it seems odd that silicon is now going to save the mac. As you correctly stated... they could go touch without. Is Apple Silicon really going to solve the problems with Apple not caring for 5 years about keyboards and for 10 years about Mac Pro/Mini?
And the animoji/skins/sugar water is only related to the Mac. Apple is doing amazing stuff with Watch - giving up on fashion and going for health is super smart. iOS is stronger than ever and the use of AI to organize stuff is great. The Home features are starting to make sense. All fine - for another thread.
Instead of pushing the Mac forward with tools that transform how we find, gather, structure, validate, and share knowledge, they will switch to new silicon - not that they even cared upgrading on the old one. That is simply not the answer to the question of the relevance of the Mac.
Jobs once asked a CEO: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?". Tim Cook is thrilled with selling sugar water like animojis, widgets, and UI skins. He is not moving us forward on how we work or gather/structure/validate our knowledge.
Despite this being a ridiculously flawed analogy, It's intellectually dishonest to reduce this entire historic WWDC Keynote and everything that we saw down to widgets and Animoji. You completely invalidate your points by doing this.
Eh... this thread is about 1 thing - the impact of moving the Mac to Apple Silicon. Apple hasn't cared about timely upgrading the Mac to new silicon in a decade it seems odd that silicon is now going to save the mac. As you correctly stated... they could go touch without. Is Apple Silicon really going to solve the problems with Apple not caring for 5 years about keyboards and for 10 years about Mac Pro/Mini?
And the animoji/skins/sugar water is only related to the Mac. Apple is doing amazing stuff with Watch - giving up on fashion and going for health is super smart. iOS is stronger than ever and the use of AI to organize stuff is great. The Home features are starting to make sense. All fine - for another thread.
Instead of pushing the Mac forward with tools that transform how we find, gather, structure, validate, and share knowledge, they will switch to new silicon - not that they even cared upgrading on the old one. That is simply not the answer to the question of the relevance of the Mac.
You assume that they are simply trading Intel Silicon for Apple Silicon. But that is only a part, a small part of it.
By going to their own silicon, they open the door to increased integration of System on a Chip to their own infrastructure and ecosystem so that both are enhanced and, in typical Apple fashion, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is what has always set Macs apart from the competition and has the potential to take it to a giant leap forward.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it.
No, instead it sounds like a realistic estimate, rather than useless marketing-speak.
But it is hardly an insurmountable development effort; even for a one-person shop.
So what was your point, again?
Yeah I’m sure the Parallels team won’t mind rebuilding their programme to work with ARM as despite what I thought I saw, support for X86 based virtualisation software is officially dropped from Apple silicone machines. This will be the start I think of programmes that will lose support, that’s my point in case you didn’t get it the first time:
Maybe that team will rebuild it for a market share in single digits, but I know that Parallels is on Windows so guess it’s an X86 platform, and by the looks of it will need to be rewritten for Apples hardware right? I do believe a lot of folks use virtualisation software to run Windows for work purposes on their Macs, and as stated above currently that support is no longer offered in Apples processor based machines.
If the road this ends up going down means the same apps on a Mac are the same apps on an iPad, then surely Apples PC market share is going to shrink even further, everyone will just buy a much cheaper iPad.
I’m not questioning Apples silicone prowess here, I’m questioning if developers will follow them down the path.
Ummm, there’s over a hundred million Mac users. Developers will follow - it’s not a “hire a new team and rewrite all your code” obstacle. It’s a click-a-button and recompile inconvenience for 99% of developers.
Marketshare is not a metric you use to decide if you’re going to take time and develop software for a particular platform - what’s more important is user base and which versions of the OS is being used the most.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it. And the user base is minuscule hence my comment:
I have to say that I don’t think that market share equates to hundreds of millions of Mac users. I’ve already read comments from music professional stating a lot of their old legacy plugins etc will no longer work. And the developers are either not in business anymore or too small to worry about Apple and spending money if an Apple silicone dev kit.
For most it is a click. And legacy plugins can run in Rosetta.
If the road this ends up going down means the same apps on a Mac are the same apps on an iPad, then surely Apples PC market share is going to shrink even further, everyone will just buy a much cheaper iPad.
I’m not questioning Apples silicone prowess here, I’m questioning if developers will follow them down the path.
Ummm, there’s over a hundred million Mac users. Developers will follow - it’s not a “hire a new team and rewrite all your code” obstacle. It’s a click-a-button and recompile inconvenience for 99% of developers.
Marketshare is not a metric you use to decide if you’re going to take time and develop software for a particular platform - what’s more important is user base and which versions of the OS is being used the most.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it. And the user base is minuscule hence my comment:
I have to say that I don’t think that market share equates to hundreds of millions of Mac users. I’ve already read comments from music professional stating a lot of their old legacy plugins etc will no longer work. And the developers are either not in business anymore or too small to worry about Apple and spending money if an Apple silicone dev kit.
For most it is a click. And legacy plugins can run in Rosetta.
So you stating the Parallels team can convert X86 bases paralleled into ARM based Parallels with a single click.. really? And no if you read the article I linked to you will see Rosetta won’t support X86 based VM, that’s the point of the support being dropped:
“Rosetta can translate most Intel-based apps, including apps that contain just-in-time (JIT) compilers. However, Rosetta doesn't translate the following executables:
To me that doesn’t sound like something that can be fixed with ‘a single click’.
And reading the posts in the forums there, it would mean a VM machine will have to ‘emulate’ my Windows and it’s apps to work not Virtualise them, I don’t enough about it to know if that’s true but it makes sense, virtualising X86 programmes on X86 platforms. And emulation doesn’t tend to work as well or perform as well.
If the road this ends up going down means the same apps on a Mac are the same apps on an iPad, then surely Apples PC market share is going to shrink even further, everyone will just buy a much cheaper iPad.
I’m not questioning Apples silicone prowess here, I’m questioning if developers will follow them down the path.
Ummm, there’s over a hundred million Mac users. Developers will follow - it’s not a “hire a new team and rewrite all your code” obstacle. It’s a click-a-button and recompile inconvenience for 99% of developers.
Marketshare is not a metric you use to decide if you’re going to take time and develop software for a particular platform - what’s more important is user base and which versions of the OS is being used the most.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it. And the user base is minuscule hence my comment:
I have to say that I don’t think that market share equates to hundreds of millions of Mac users. I’ve already read comments from music professional stating a lot of their old legacy plugins etc will no longer work. And the developers are either not in business anymore or too small to worry about Apple and spending money if an Apple silicone dev kit.
For most it is a click. And legacy plugins can run in Rosetta.
So you stating the Parallels team can convert X86 bases paralleled into ARM based Parallels with a single click.. really? And no if you read the article I linked to you will see Rosetta won’t support X86 based VM, that’s the point of the support being dropped:
“Rosetta can translate most Intel-based apps, including apps that contain just-in-time (JIT) compilers. However, Rosetta doesn't translate the following executables:
To me that doesn’t sound like something that can be fixed with ‘a single click’.
And reading the posts in the forums there, it would mean a VM machine will have to ‘emulate’ my Windows and it’s apps to work not Virtualise them, I don’t enough about it to know if that’s true but it makes sense, virtualising X86 programmes on X86 platforms. And emulation doesn’t tend to work as well or perform as well.
People are confusing emulation with virtualization. They are two different things.
I may be in the minority, but I was really hoping that Apple's pro line stayed intel, and the consumer line migrated to ARM processors.
Absent something really amazing happening, I will need to shift my small firm back to Lenovo laptops in a couple of years. We currently use MacBook Pros with parallels and windows to run legacy windows software, etc., where the developer has not yet made a MacOS version, and is certainly not going to make a MacOs version for ARM processors. So I (and my business) am one of the small percentage of Mac users who relied on the Intel processors and is going to get burned by this.
That said, I am warming to the idea of Apple Silicon for my personal laptop, etc. I will miss the option of using Bootcamp to game on my MacBook Pro with its discrete graphics card, but streamed gaming services like Nvidia Now are slowly obviating the need to game on your local machine at all.
Comments
With little exception (they may license some simple Peripheral subsystems from Arm), Apple’s Arm-based SoCs are 100% designed in-house from the ground-up. No one designs them but Apple.
I believe the first one or two Ax SoCs were designed in conjunction with Samsung (who also holds an Arm Architectural License); but that hasn’t been the case for over a decade, at least.
I knew you were going to say that. Regardless, branding is important whether they're telling it to millions of developers OR consumers. You want to read about architecture specifics, the rest of the week is for stuff like that.
I recall them have special status as an "Orginal Licensee" from way back in the last century.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10691/
...if they want more meat they can watch the state of the union and tech sessions.
And the animoji/skins/sugar water is only related to the Mac. Apple is doing amazing stuff with Watch - giving up on fashion and going for health is super smart. iOS is stronger than ever and the use of AI to organize stuff is great. The Home features are starting to make sense. All fine - for another thread.
Instead of pushing the Mac forward with tools that transform how we find, gather, structure, validate, and share knowledge, they will switch to new silicon - not that they even cared upgrading on the old one. That is simply not the answer to the question of the relevance of the Mac.
http://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/rosetta-wont-support-x86-virtualization-windows/
Maybe that team will rebuild it for a market share in single digits, but I know that Parallels is on Windows so guess it’s an X86 platform, and by the looks of it will need to be rewritten for Apples hardware right?
I do believe a lot of folks use virtualisation software to run Windows for work purposes on their Macs, and as stated above currently that support is no longer offered in Apples processor based machines.
“Rosetta can translate most Intel-based apps, including apps that contain just-in-time (JIT) compilers. However, Rosetta doesn't translate the following executables:
- Kernel extensions
- Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms”
To me that doesn’t sound like something that can be fixed with ‘a single click’.
And reading the posts in the forums there, it would mean a VM machine will have to ‘emulate’ my Windows and it’s apps to work not Virtualise them, I don’t enough about it to know if that’s true but it makes sense, virtualising X86 programmes on X86 platforms. And emulation doesn’t tend to work as well or perform as well.