Apple will prove it has silicon legs beyond ARM at WWDC 2020

Posted:
in macOS edited June 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced Apple to shift its Worldwide Developer Conference into an online-only format, but that isn't stopping the event from being the most anticipated event Apple has ever put together.

WWDC20

ARM Mac geddon

One of the most tantalizing ideas expected from WWDC20 is additional insight into Apple's future plans for an ARM Mac. It's widely believed that Apple will be outlining a strategy to deliver future Mac hardware using its own custom silicon rather than Intel's x86 processors that have powered Macs since 2006.

Apple has been building out its own custom silicon empire over the past decade. The initial fruits of its labors were first seen with the development of A4, the System on a Chip developed under the leadership of Johny Srouji to power the first iPad, and iPhone 4. It also powered Apple's first product that shifted away from Intel to ARM, with the second generation Apple TV that also shipped in 2010.

Johny Srouji


In the years since, Apple has rapidly delivered multiple variants of new custom silicon developments each year, investing billions into work that would only be useful if it were able to continuously ship massive volumes of high-end new mobile hardware powered by its increasing fast and efficient A-series chips.

There have long been rumors that if Apple could develop its own chips for mobile devices -- and for new form factors such as wearables including the S1 powered Apple Watch in 2015--that perhaps Apple could similarly build its own chips for Macs as well.

The advantage of using its own custom silicon in Macs is often imagined to deliver reduced cost, longer battery life, and faster innovation on Apple's own schedule, rather than having to wait on Intel to deliver the features it needs.

In fact, Apple is already delivering a variety of new features to its recent Macs using its own custom silicon in the form of the T2 chip, which provides optimized media handling, encryption, security, and support for features from Touch ID and Touch Bar to SideCar and Hey Siri.

If Apple migrates its entire Mac processing architecture from Intel, the primary shift would apparently involve moving CPU code from Intel's x86 to the ARM architecture CPU cores it has been using across the last ten years of new A-series chips. For this reason, the shift to Apple's custom chips is often described as a move to ARM. It's bigger than that, however.

The highly efficient ARM

The ARM architecture has been evolving for several decades. ARM originated as a clean new RISC processor architecture at British PC maker Acorn in the late 1980s. At the start of the 1990s, Apple coordinated with Acorn to adapt its design to power its new battery-operated, handheld Newton MessagePad. That new mobile ARM Architecture really began to take off in popularity once Nokia and other phone makers began using it to deliver vast volumes of their low-power phone sets in the late 90s.

ARM chip
First generation ARM chip


By 2001, Apple had scuttled any future plans for Newton handhelds but had a new reason to use ARM chips in its new iPod. Across the next five years, Apple rapidly made use of incredible millions of ARM chips to power a wide range of its portable music players. It then used an ARM SoC paired with a powerful GPU to deliver iPhone, which packaged nearly a complete Mac environment into a mobile device capable of working as a phone, a media device, and an internet-connected app platform.

In 2010, Apple's A4-powered iPad upgraded the iPhone experience into a larger, full-page format that made streamlined, handheld computing accessible to new audiences ranging from education to sales teams to aircraft pilots and other specialized sectors of the mobile enterprise. For Apple, iPad sales grew as large as its conventional Mac sales in terms of revenue and much larger in terms of shipments.

Embracing and extending ARM

However, Apple's history of custom silicon using ARM CPU cores went beyond just the technology it had licensed from ARM, Ltd. Some of Apple's biggest jumps in technology, such as the 2012 A5X powering the new Retina Display iPad 3, were delivered primarily through massive enhancements to the GPU graphics architecture rather than just its general computation ARM CPU cores.

After quickly developing an entirely custom ARM core design with A6 that was tightly optimized for the specific needs of iOS, Apple muscled into mobile video gaming with A6X iPads.

Another notable example is 2013's A7, which introduced the first 64-bit ARM ISA used in a mobile device. Apple had jumped so far ahead of the rest of the industry using an extended implementation of ARM that some competitors failed to believe what they were seeing, while several bloggers simply insisted that Apple must have misrepresented its work to fool the public.

By 2014, Apple could shift production of its A8 to the world's most advanced chip fabrication plant at Taiwan's TSMC, achieving new leaps in performance and efficiency that weren't due to the design of the ARM architecture itself.

Across the last five years, Apple has introduced new custom silicon that also moves beyond ARM. This includes features such as Apple's custom storage controller and its image signal processor used to optimize camera features and leverage powerful computational photography techniques to differentiate its iPhone and iPad.

Unique features of Apple's iPhone X took advantage the company's custom A11 Bionic SoC, which introduced dedicated neural network logic cores branded as the "Neural Engine" to perform specialized machine learning calculations far faster and much more efficiently than simply running these on the CPU or on a GPU with specialized AI features. Like Apple's now custom GPU design, the Neural Engine is not "ARM Architecture."

Neural Engine
Apple has drawn attention to its "bionic" Neural Engine, which is not "ARM"


Apple has also apparently extended even its ARM ISA, with the A13 Bionic in the iPhone 11 family and iPhone SE not only sporting an advanced Neural Engine but also supplying new machine learning accelerators in the CPU cores, known as AMX blocks. Apple says its AMX blocks are six times faster at matrix math compared to its previous generation CPU cores.

The custom enhancements Apple is building onto its ARM core designs, combined with its non-ARM logic ranging from the Apple GPU to its Neural Engine and the other custom silicon packaged into its mobile SoCs, all results in an "ARM" chip that is increasing not really just an ARM chip.

Remaining compatible with an ISA such as ARM or Intel's x86 is only important if the code needs to work on future generations of that chip designer's products. That means that if Apple migrates its Macs away from Intel, it gains full control over where the Mac can go. It no longer needs to follow the future road map Intel lays out.

Apple can flexibly shift the work of the macOS user interface and the acceleration of the tasks of its apps to new types of processor engines, much the same way that it has increasingly shifted its user interface to the GPU starting in the early 2000s to deliver a buttery fast UI, first on the Mac and then on iPhone and iPads.

Over the next decade, we will see increasing use of new types of processing that rely on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and neural processing-- based on our own increased understanding of how the brain itself works. As we move beyond the traditional CPU that has calculated most of the standard computations in PCs since the 1980s, Apple's ability to build custom silicon SoCs and wearable System in Package processing components that optimize logic specifically for the tasks required will become increasingly important and necessary to stand out and leap ahead of commodity competitors who are mostly focused on delivering yesterday's smartphones at low prices.

The future of wearables, augmented reality, and even the more ordinary ability of Apple to offer powerful iPhones that are price competitive with cheap Androids while still being faster than than the fastest Androids are all contingent upon Apple developing its own future in custom silicon.

It should come as no surprise that Apple now wants to bring even more of the same flexibility and optimization to its conventional Mac computing platforms.
patchythepiratelolliverrundhvidwatto_cobra

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 18
    radarthekatradarthekat Posts: 3,842moderator
    It’ll be truly exciting to see Apple take the reigns on processor architecture for Macs and for their even bigger computing platform; an Apple-designed autonomous vehicle.  That will certainly be an all-Apple silicon architecture, and it doesn’t seem to me to make much sense having Intel sitting there as an outlier in the middle of Apple’s future product line.  
    JWSCjony0watto_cobra
  • Reply 2 of 18
    thttht Posts: 5,420member
    Will be interesting to see if the FPGA in the Afterburner card and the H.265 ASIC in the T2 make their way on to the SoC. And who knows, maybe they announce support for RED with the Afterburner card next week.

    At some point in time, I wonder if it is possible to make the branch predictor based on a neural engine block. Improvements in branch prediction could yield some more IPC gains at low power, and further their lead in single core perf/Watt. 

    Another big trend in the chip world is integrated systems packaging. There's a branding push with Foveros and chiplets, which will put I/O controllers into the chip packaging, but Apple can go another step further by putting the RAM in-package or on-package. They already do this for the iPhone and iPad SoCs, but it's not a big challenge with these machines having at most 6 GB RAM at present. A Macbook Pro with 32 to 64 GB of RAM on-package? Will be interesting to see.
    JWSCradarthekatrundhvidwatto_cobra
  • Reply 3 of 18
    For a change, a short and sweet DED article. Pleasure to read such editorials (rare) from DED. Long may it continue.
    h4y3sJapheyJWSCjony0radarthekat
  • Reply 4 of 18
    GG1GG1 Posts: 483member
    Did Apple design their own chips for for the iPod at the end of its run? I believe Apple used someone else's chips at the start of the iPod run, but I don't know if they replaced them later.

    edited June 2020 watto_cobra
  • Reply 5 of 18
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    An DED also ticks I can actually agree with and even support.  He hit upon the most important thing here, this move isn’t about ARM.    ARM just gives them complete access to the silicon, it is this silicon playground Apple is interested in.   

    Effectively silicon is like the printed circuit boards of the 1980’s and later where engineers stitched bits of logic together to implement their IP.   Apple needs access to that silicon to better implement things like Neural Engine and custom video processor on chip.  It will be most interesting to see how Apple markets these chips , I don’t see ARM being the focus.  
    patchythepiratejony0muthuk_vanalingamradarthekatwatto_cobra
  • Reply 6 of 18
    frantisekfrantisek Posts: 756member

    ARM Mac geddon


    I do not know how exactly was this meant but in my head resonate

    Armagedon = ARM Mac get done

    commentzillaradarthekatwatto_cobra
  • Reply 7 of 18
    tht said:
    Will be interesting to see if the FPGA in the Afterburner card and the H.265 ASIC in the T2 make their way on to the SoC. And who knows, maybe they announce support for RED with the Afterburner card next week.

    At some point in time, I wonder if it is possible to make the branch predictor based on a neural engine block. Improvements in branch prediction could yield some more IPC gains at low power, and further their lead in single core perf/Watt. 

    Another big trend in the chip world is integrated systems packaging. There's a branding push with Foveros and chiplets, which will put I/O controllers into the chip packaging, but Apple can go another step further by putting the RAM in-package or on-package. They already do this for the iPhone and iPad SoCs, but it's not a big challenge with these machines having at most 6 GB RAM at present. A Macbook Pro with 32 to 64 GB of RAM on-package? Will be interesting to see.
    This is spot on. Apple will have a serious advantage in performance per watt being able to move all of these components onto the SOC, something which is much more difficult to do on the PC side since the components are usually assembled. I suspect Apple will not only be ridding themselves of INTEL but also AMD for the GPUs as the systems advance. I can easily see ARM laptops like the 13" MBP being twice as powerful their INTEL counterparts within the same thermal envelope and price.
    jony0lolliverradarthekatwatto_cobra
  • Reply 8 of 18
    JWSCJWSC Posts: 1,203member
    Very pleased to see Apple’s laser focus on silicon hardware with ARM and other processing architectures.  Apple is playing to win here.

    Now, if only Apple could apply that same laser focus on their software offerings, which are mundane at best.
  • Reply 9 of 18
    mjtomlinmjtomlin Posts: 2,673member
    I think people are missing something... Apple designs at most 2 SoCs a year, Ax, and AxX. For Apple to move the Mac line away from Intel they would have to design many more in order to differentiate performance between models. That's the thing they have with Intel right now; flexibility and versatility - options.

    Is Apple simply going to put an A14 in all iMacs, Mac minis, and Mac Books? Where there is no performance options? Or will they be able to scale? A14I for mobile, A14IX for pro mobile, A14M for Mac, A14MX for pro Macs?

    They would still be able to design a single new CPU every year, but would have to differentiate each SoC by the number of CPU cores and the clock frequency.

    This is why I think they're designing their own ISA - something that can scale from efficient to performant and be highly optimized to run their code.
    edited June 2020 muthuk_vanalingamradarthekatGG1watto_cobra
  • Reply 10 of 18
    thttht Posts: 5,420member
    mjtomlin said:
    I think people are missing something... Apple designs at most 2 SoCs a year, Ax, and AxX. For Apple to move the Mac line away from Intel they would have to design many more in order to differentiate performance between models. That's the thing they have with Intel right now; flexibility and versatility - options.

    Is Apple simply going to put an A14 in all iMacs, Mac minis, and Mac Books? Where there is no performance options? Or will they be able to scale? A14i for mobile, A14ip for prop mobile, A14m for Mac, A14mp for pro Macs?
    Mark Gurman is rumormongering that Apple has 3 specific chips for Macs, all based on the A14 core. With binning, those 3 chips can go into 5, 7, ..., 20 products. Not only that, they are already working on the generation of Mac chips succeeding those. Apple designs phone chips, tablet chips, watch chips, headphone chips, so on and so forth, every year. Their chip design output is a lot more than you think, and designing a few more is definitely in their wheelhouse.

    At current, all of Intel's chip options suck, they have been bad for the past 3 years, and will be bad for the foreseeable future. If they weren't switching to ARM, they would be switching to AMD.
    commentzillalolliverRayz2016jdb8167cat52GG1JWSCwatto_cobra
  • Reply 11 of 18
    thttht Posts: 5,420member

    tht said:
    Will be interesting to see if the FPGA in the Afterburner card and the H.265 ASIC in the T2 make their way on to the SoC. And who knows, maybe they announce support for RED with the Afterburner card next week.

    At some point in time, I wonder if it is possible to make the branch predictor based on a neural engine block. Improvements in branch prediction could yield some more IPC gains at low power, and further their lead in single core perf/Watt. 

    Another big trend in the chip world is integrated systems packaging. There's a branding push with Foveros and chiplets, which will put I/O controllers into the chip packaging, but Apple can go another step further by putting the RAM in-package or on-package. They already do this for the iPhone and iPad SoCs, but it's not a big challenge with these machines having at most 6 GB RAM at present. A Macbook Pro with 32 to 64 GB of RAM on-package? Will be interesting to see.
    This is spot on. Apple will have a serious advantage in performance per watt being able to move all of these components onto the SOC, something which is much more difficult to do on the PC side since the components are usually assembled. I suspect Apple will not only be ridding themselves of INTEL but also AMD for the GPUs as the systems advance. I can easily see ARM laptops like the 13" MBP being twice as powerful their INTEL counterparts within the same thermal envelope and price.
    They will probably keep using AMD GPUs for awhile. It's basically gated by how much power the dGPU uses, while there isn't much to the design aspects, other than memory design.

    I do think the on-die GPUs they will have will be about 1.5x to 3x of Intel processor graphics. The 3x is basically because Intel's UHD processor graphics on Intel 14nm chips are not good, and it will be an easy bar to clear. Problem is Intel is still producing mostly 14nm chips across their desktop and 45W mobile chips, and they won't a decent performing on-chip GPU until 2021.
    commentzillatmayGG1watto_cobra
  • Reply 12 of 18
    mjtomlin said:
    I think people are missing something... Apple designs at most 2 SoCs a year, Ax, and AxX. For Apple to move the Mac line away from Intel they would have to design many more in order to differentiate performance between models. That's the thing they have with Intel right now; flexibility and versatility - options.

    Is Apple simply going to put an A14 in all iMacs, Mac minis, and Mac Books? Where there is no performance options? Or will they be able to scale? A14I for mobile, A14IX for pro mobile, A14M for Mac, A14MX for pro Macs?

    They would still be able to design a single new CPU every year, but would have to differentiate each SoC by the number of CPU cores and the clock frequency.

    This is why I think they're designing their own ISA - something that can scale from efficient to performant and be highly optimized to run their code.
    ARM is scalable and already highly optimized for iOS which is built on the same foundation as macOS. I think they'll need far fewer new chips than you think to get this off the ground. Based on the article below it looks like three total, which makes sense. One each for the laptops, desktops and the last for the MacPro. Clocking should provide enough scaling to differentiate performance between models. Then as the each new generation comes out they'll have the older CPUs to differentiate models further, just like they did this year with the 8th and 10th gen chips in the 13" MacBook Pros. They will also have the option to run CPUs in parallel in the MacPro just has they have in the past.

    Whatever they do they are going to keep it streamlined and they certainly are not going to abandon ARM for anything else.

    Apple will reportedly use 12-core 5nm ARM processor in a 2021 Mac

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/23/21232441/apple-arm-mac-2020-5nm-processor-12-cores
    lolliverwatto_cobra
  • Reply 13 of 18
    mattinozmattinoz Posts: 2,299member
    mjtomlin said:
    I think people are missing something... Apple designs at most 2 SoCs a year, Ax, and AxX. For Apple to move the Mac line away from Intel they would have to design many more in order to differentiate performance between models. That's the thing they have with Intel right now; flexibility and versatility - options.

    Is Apple simply going to put an A14 in all iMacs, Mac minis, and Mac Books? Where there is no performance options? Or will they be able to scale? A14I for mobile, A14IX for pro mobile, A14M for Mac, A14MX for pro Macs?

    They would still be able to design a single new CPU every year, but would have to differentiate each SoC by the number of CPU cores and the clock frequency.

    This is why I think they're designing their own ISA - something that can scale from efficient to performant and be highly optimized to run their code.
    Or it's the same A14 in all but the Mac's have a one or more Beast core co-processors of Apple custom design packaged on the same carrier with memory to suit the machine. 
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 14 of 18

    tht said:

    tht said:
    Will be interesting to see if the FPGA in the Afterburner card and the H.265 ASIC in the T2 make their way on to the SoC. And who knows, maybe they announce support for RED with the Afterburner card next week.

    At some point in time, I wonder if it is possible to make the branch predictor based on a neural engine block. Improvements in branch prediction could yield some more IPC gains at low power, and further their lead in single core perf/Watt. 

    Another big trend in the chip world is integrated systems packaging. There's a branding push with Foveros and chiplets, which will put I/O controllers into the chip packaging, but Apple can go another step further by putting the RAM in-package or on-package. They already do this for the iPhone and iPad SoCs, but it's not a big challenge with these machines having at most 6 GB RAM at present. A Macbook Pro with 32 to 64 GB of RAM on-package? Will be interesting to see.
    This is spot on. Apple will have a serious advantage in performance per watt being able to move all of these components onto the SOC, something which is much more difficult to do on the PC side since the components are usually assembled. I suspect Apple will not only be ridding themselves of INTEL but also AMD for the GPUs as the systems advance. I can easily see ARM laptops like the 13" MBP being twice as powerful their INTEL counterparts within the same thermal envelope and price.
    They will probably keep using AMD GPUs for awhile. It's basically gated by how much power the dGPU uses, while there isn't much to the design aspects, other than memory design.

    I do think the on-die GPUs they will have will be about 1.5x to 3x of Intel processor graphics. The 3x is basically because Intel's UHD processor graphics on Intel 14nm chips are not good, and it will be an easy bar to clear. Problem is Intel is still producing mostly 14nm chips across their desktop and 45W mobile chips, and they won't a decent performing on-chip GPU until 2021.
    Considering an iPad Pro can already beat a 16" MBP (5500M) running Fortnight on the same settings (90-100 fps high, 60 fps medium) at roughly the same screen resolution (built-in screen), it may not be a long wait. I suspect Apple is farther along than most expect.

    Like some others I think the new hardware will come out within a 12-18 month period within a 5-year transition away from INTEL, basically allowing the last of the INTEL Macs to receive concurrent macOS updates for 5-years until they are vintage, probably followed by an additional 2-years of security updates until they are considered obsolete at 7-years. It's hard to see them cutting support any sooner considering the size of the INTEL Mac user base, who like me expect to get their monies worth.
    lolliverwatto_cobra
  • Reply 15 of 18
    mcdavemcdave Posts: 1,927member
    Agree with DED.  Ax SoCs already have several ISAs and likely the GPU & Neural capture the majority of all executed instructions.  CPUs are supervisory in many applications these days and the exciting stuff is elsewhere.
    Despite taking an increasingly back seat, I’ll bet Intel advocates will still be throwing CPU-only or deprecated graphics tech benchmarks around.
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 16 of 18
    mjtomlin said:
    I think people are missing something... Apple designs at most 2 SoCs a year, Ax, and AxX. For Apple to move the Mac line away from Intel they would have to design many more in order to differentiate performance between models. That's the thing they have with Intel right now; flexibility and versatility - options.

    Is Apple simply going to put an A14 in all iMacs, Mac minis, and Mac Books? Where there is no performance options? Or will they be able to scale? A14I for mobile, A14IX for pro mobile, A14M for Mac, A14MX for pro Macs?

    They would still be able to design a single new CPU every year, but would have to differentiate each SoC by the number of CPU cores and the clock frequency.

    This is why I think they're designing their own ISA - something that can scale from efficient to performant and be highly optimized to run their code.
    ARM is scalable and already highly optimized for iOS which is built on the same foundation as macOS. I think they'll need far fewer new chips than you think to get this off the ground. Based on the article below it looks like three total, which makes sense. One each for the laptops, desktops and the last for the MacPro. Clocking should provide enough scaling to differentiate performance between models. Then as the each new generation comes out they'll have the older CPUs to differentiate models further, just like they did this year with the 8th and 10th gen chips in the 13" MacBook Pros. They will also have the option to run CPUs in parallel in the MacPro just has they have in the past.

    Whatever they do they are going to keep it streamlined and they certainly are not going to abandon ARM for anything else.

    Apple will reportedly use 12-core 5nm ARM processor in a 2021 Mac

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/23/21232441/apple-arm-mac-2020-5nm-processor-12-cores
    Using history as a guide, as much as it seems quite probable Apple will transition the Mac line to ARM-derived ISA CPUs because they appear to be making performance improvements in both power and clock efficiency faster than Intel has, ARM ISA is just the latest CPU ISA for them to use on the Mac line.

    There’s no guarantee Apple won’t ever discontinue the Mac line, as Apple has discontinued past computer lines before.  ARM-derived CPUs aren’t likely to be the last-and-greatest CPU ISA and most efficient ever designed: I’ve been following other CPU architectures, and there are some (At least one I know about) in development with promise of greatly exceeding power and instruction efficiency on the same process node (keep in mind Intel seems to be falling behind on process node, besides architectural efficiencies, compared to TSMC) compared to currently available CPU architectures.  That being said, until they’ve had a completed and tested-in-the-real-world chip made, they aren’t worth waiting for, something about counting your chickens before they hatch applies here ;)  But, if they live up to their projections, I see no reason Apple wouldn’t transition to a completely new architecture if it results in a higher value than the price of keeping with the older CPU architectures, just like Apple has done twice before with Macs.
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 17 of 18
    mjtomlin said:
    I think people are missing something... Apple designs at most 2 SoCs a year, Ax, and AxX. For Apple to move the Mac line away from Intel they would have to design many more in order to differentiate performance between models. That's the thing they have with Intel right now; flexibility and versatility - options.

    Is Apple simply going to put an A14 in all iMacs, Mac minis, and Mac Books? Where there is no performance options? Or will they be able to scale? A14I for mobile, A14IX for pro mobile, A14M for Mac, A14MX for pro Macs?

    They would still be able to design a single new CPU every year, but would have to differentiate each SoC by the number of CPU cores and the clock frequency.

    This is why I think they're designing their own ISA - something that can scale from efficient to performant and be highly optimized to run their code.
    ARM is scalable and already highly optimized for iOS which is built on the same foundation as macOS. I think they'll need far fewer new chips than you think to get this off the ground. Based on the article below it looks like three total, which makes sense. One each for the laptops, desktops and the last for the MacPro. Clocking should provide enough scaling to differentiate performance between models. Then as the each new generation comes out they'll have the older CPUs to differentiate models further, just like they did this year with the 8th and 10th gen chips in the 13" MacBook Pros. They will also have the option to run CPUs in parallel in the MacPro just has they have in the past.

    Whatever they do they are going to keep it streamlined and they certainly are not going to abandon ARM for anything else.

    Apple will reportedly use 12-core 5nm ARM processor in a 2021 Mac

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/23/21232441/apple-arm-mac-2020-5nm-processor-12-cores
    Using history as a guide, as much as it seems quite probable Apple will transition the Mac line to ARM-derived ISA CPUs because they appear to be making performance improvements in both power and clock efficiency faster than Intel has, ARM ISA is just the latest CPU ISA for them to use on the Mac line.

    There’s no guarantee Apple won’t ever discontinue the Mac line, as Apple has discontinued past computer lines before.  ARM-derived CPUs aren’t likely to be the last-and-greatest CPU ISA and most efficient ever designed: I’ve been following other CPU architectures, and there are some (At least one I know about) in development with promise of greatly exceeding power and instruction efficiency on the same process node (keep in mind Intel seems to be falling behind on process node, besides architectural efficiencies, compared to TSMC) compared to currently available CPU architectures.  That being said, until they’ve had a completed and tested-in-the-real-world chip made, they aren’t worth waiting for, something about counting your chickens before they hatch applies here ;)  But, if they live up to their projections, I see no reason Apple wouldn’t transition to a completely new architecture if it results in a higher value than the price of keeping with the older CPU architectures, just like Apple has done twice before with Macs.
    When I say they are not going to abandon ARM, I mean it's going to be the next CPU architecture in the new Macs. Sure a decade from now they may go in another direction but for now this is it. Apple has a hit with ARM and they're leading the pack when it comes to performance per watts, well past Android hardware because they can tailor it to their exact needs. In volume ARM chips ship in 10x the volume of x86. It's become the dominant CPU architecture an it's already been scaled up to super computing levels so scale is not an issue in the foreseeable future.


    watto_cobra
  • Reply 18 of 18

    mcdave said:
    Agree with DED.  Ax SoCs already have several ISAs and likely the GPU & Neural capture the majority of all executed instructions.  CPUs are supervisory in many applications these days and the exciting stuff is elsewhere.
    Despite taking an increasingly back seat, I’ll bet Intel advocates will still be throwing CPU-only or deprecated graphics tech benchmarks around.
    I've always believe that ever since Apple bought Semi-PA in 2008 their goal was to move away from x86. That was 12-years ago and they've been laying the groundwork for their own universal iOS/macOS CPU ever since. INTEL was a pitstop, a stop they would have never made if PPC could have keep up the pace.
    edited June 2020 cat52GG1watto_cobramcdave
Sign In or Register to comment.