wizard69
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Regulatory filing points to new MacBook Pro launch in coming months
Most likely a 13/14” model for the very reason you suggest, that is to replace the poorly engineered keyboard. Hopefully they address all the other short comings with an eye on customer needs.seanismorris said:If it’s MacBook updates, it’s to replace the butterfly mechanism with scissors on the keyboards.
I wonder if Apple is kicking around the idea of using AMD? That’s probably to much to hope for....As for AMD, as 13/14” MBP with six or eight cores would be most welcomed. Unfortunately Apple has a tendency to under power the smaller MBP which likely will mean four cores if they did go AMD. If Apple doesn’t go AMD they run the risk of high quality notebooks and very low cost, from the PC world out performing the Macs by a large margin.One of the take always from CES is the stress AMD put on the idea that they are customer driven and that their new APU’s are designed to meet customer demands /needs. This is something Apple could learn a lot from. Keyboards that work, SD card readers and similar technologies are all things that customers need.
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Intel aims beyond 5Ghz for future MacBook Pro H-series processors
This post is wrong in so many ways as to be a joke.linuxplatform said:
They will come out before Apple comes out with their own chips which will be ... never. Seriously, I wish people will give this up. It isn't their area of expertise. CPU and SOC design isn't easy. If it was, everyone would do it. Instead there are only two CPU companies on the planet and have been for decades - Intel and AMD both of whom use the same base x86 design - and the number of SOC companies isn't that much bigger (and again they all start from the same base ARM Holdings design). Sun Microsystems, Motorola and IBM, who were all making CPUs or SOCs as recently as the 1990s? RIP. Also there is this whole "application compatibility" thing. Macs run on x86 just like Windows and Linux computers. Result: while you have to tweak for the different OSes and such, all "PC" applications are developed for the x86 instruction set. If Apple wants to use their ARM SOCs for MacBooks or develop a wholly new SOC/CPU, all those developers would have to port, rewrite or create from scratch their x86 applications or Apple would have to emulate x86 (more on this later).rob53 said:FUD from Intel to try and slow down Apple's migration to i's own chips. Intel won't come out with these any time soon.
Consider what Google does with Chromebooks. Nearly all Chromebooks run on x86, nearly all Android apps are ARM. So Chromebooks run the Android apps on am ARM emulator. Were Apple to switch to either their own Ax chips or design completely new ones, they would likely have to offer x86 emulation too. Except this causes a performance hit. Not a big deal for Android apps on Chromebooks as most Android apps are designed to be able to run on dual core CPUs with 512 MB of RAM anyway. But for the desktop and productivity applications that people use on MacBook Pros? Yeah, that's a problem.
And x86 is copyrighted. Where Google can emulate ARM on ChromeOS because they picked up ARM patents when they bought Motorola (plus some ARM stuff is open source anyway) Apple cannot emulate x86 on anything without paying either Intel or AMD a ton of cash. Microsoft is dealing with this right now ... they need to emulate x86 on Qualcomm's chips to get back into the mobile space ... and Intel has responded "fine ... write us a check for every device you sell." They would give Cupertino the same terms that they give Redmond.
So while an A12 can certainly match the performance of the Intel CPUs in most MacBooks in theory - iMacs and Mac Pros not so much! - the x86 emulation would take a decent bite out of that performance. Add to that Apple needing to pay significant licensing fees to Intel - let's see you call THEM a patent troll! - PLUS the little issue that Apple would need to ensure their x86 on ARM emulation isn't too similar to Microsoft's - Redmond will sue too if it does - and it doesn't make sense from a technology or business sense.
Which is why Apple is never going to do it. And is why the people who keep claiming that they will have never taken so much as a high school computer architecture class.Apps these days are not developed for x86. They are developed for operating systems and the APIs they support. The development process tries to separate the programmer from the hardware as much as possible via high level languages and abstractions. Very few wise developers these days target the processor directly.If you want to see how operating systems can operate on different hardware without a major strain just look at Linux. Many distros run on ARM, x86 andPower without any drama. This is due to the item above, that is the use of high level languages and a focus on APIs.As far as the development of ARM based hardware for Macs by Apple it is actually a real good idea. Why? Simple it spreads the cost of chip development across multiple products. Today’s A series is already good enough to run Mac Book like devices. Given a little more I/O, cache and thermal budget and you cover even more hardware. The design of the A series is already a good base for building higher performance Mac oriented processors.As for Sparc and the many other dying processor offerings, they died along with the companies offering them. The reasons are complex but the big factor was the advent of the buy Intel mentality. Frankly the last half decade was a wake up call for people ascribing to that mentality. Buy Intel literally crushed innovation. This is perhaps the biggest advantage for Apple, their own hardware allows for innovation. Again the A series is a very public demonstration of this advantage.
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Intel aims beyond 5Ghz for future MacBook Pro H-series processors
Intel seems to be looking to the past by focusing on high click rates. That means long execution units for a given process which didn’t do them any favors back then and won’t in the future.mdriftmeyer said:
Apple is out of excuses not to switch to AMD now. And no Apple isn't switching to ARM and yes they have been testing Zen in-house for over a year.As for AMD I’m not sure what Apples problem is with adopting their hardware. Ryzen is excellent even in older forms before today’s releases. Excellent in a way that Apple should love which is very good GPUs in their APU chips. That was with the initial Ryzens, now AMD leads I all fronts.Honestly Apples behavior with high prices and crappy performance has me really negative with respect to the Mac lineup. Things like M.2 SSD’s are old hat these days in far cheaper machine. I’m not an All inOne fan but even if I was the iMacs are truly pathetic for the price. In some cases you are buying 5 year old tech at new hardware prices. Macs, the iMac especially, have become huge rip offs. -
Apple chip partner TSMC to start 5nm 'A14' production in mid-2020
Well several things will likely happen.sergioz said:I am more concerned about 5nm A14 from TSMC. What will happen next? Or we'll keep pushing nanotechnology 4nm, 3nm, 2nm, 1nm, there is not going to be 0nm there has to be completely new approach! Any one has a clue in what is that new technology?First multi chip modules will likely be more common. The A series already does this in some cases and AMD has had fantastic success with Chiplets. Note in one case stuff gets stacked in another stuff gets spread across a carrier.Second 3D design will likely be implemented. This is where far more layers are used on a chip to effectively Build logic in 3D.Third far faster replacements for silicon will likely happen. Lots of research going on in this area right now. In any event imagine a 10 or even a 100 GHz processor core running at room temperature.There is a lot of research into optics and quantum tech that might actually happen some day. This goes off the deep end but we have about a decade of shrinks left so there is time.The only real negative is that some of this tech ups costs significantly. Still I don’t see anything to be concerned about this decade and maybe even the next.
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Apple escalates legal fight with iOS virtualization tool provider Corellium
There probably is a long game here. I can’t see anything that this company is doing that is illegal if they own a copy of iOS. I suspect that Apple wants to go after people running MacOS in VM’s but want to build up the legal ground work.MacPro said:I suspect Apple may also have some thoughts on Hackintoshes in the near future.Frankly modern hardware and virtual machines are technologies made in heaven for a developer and even advanced users. We are at the tipping point where it is almost foolish not to have this capability especially when 24 thread hardware, 16+GB of RAM and other advancements mean there is few negatives to consider. That is this year; by 2021 the average desktop could easily support 32 to 64 threads and 512 GB of RAM. At that point a developer could run VM’s for Android, MacOS, Linux, Windows, BSD and more all at once.AMD expects to debut its AM5 socket this year which I would expect would offer the step increase in performance to deliver such hardware to the desktop at reasonable prices. All they need is a successful transition to 5nm to offer cost effective machines like this on the desktop. The thread ripper series is just a way to see the future of desktop machines.So yeah I suspect that Apple is being truly dark and evil here. They appear to want to stifle (some might say control) the evolution of computing technology. The rather pathetic Mac Pro is something that they will try to protect when competing tech can offer twice the performance at 1/4 the price.
