knowitall

mattinoz said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

mdriftmeyer said:

The ARM Mac will be a hybrid iPad Pro with a build-in keyboard.

There are zero rumors or suggestions that this is the avenue that will be taken.

I'm not opposed, but it's unlikely.

Hybrid is the only path that gives Apple any carrot to drive the transition.

Who needs rumours all the parts are hiding in plain sight.

Going ARM solo in a Mac is all pain no gain.

“Hybrid” meaning: “worst of both worlds”

Nice info, good summary.

My take on it is that the transition to 64bit is the most difficult one.
Now we are past that the hurdle to ARM (64bit) is relatively easy.
This is so because 64 bit driver software using 64 OS (library) hooks is already there and transferring this to ARM code is just a recompile. Remember that the (64bit) OS is the abstraction to the hardware and no one is poking directly on it (the hardware) anymore.
So its a recompile of existing 64bit code in a high level language (nobody is writing software in assembly anymore (and rightly so)) against existing 64bit OS libraries, and that is only a few seconds to minutes away.

Apple correctly transitioned to 64 bit first as a precursor to transition to ARM and shed tons of old and non maintained 32 bit code in the process.
Moving to ARM is just a breeze, losing Windows as a result is a godsend I think.

By the way, Windows via bootcamp is susceptible to specific hardware driver support, but that is not the case for Windows running on virtualizer software like Parallels, because that emulates standard hardware (of which it is know to be supported by Windows).

That is a very good actress. 

You forgot the most important one: iPhone has iOS.

loopless said:

Anyone who works in or develops HPC software cringes at this.  Sure it's likely you can make an ARM chip with the performance of high-end Xeons, but the world of HPC software is a million years away from XCode app development where you can flip a switch to build for a new architecture. There are so many bespoke libraries (e.g. Intel MKL) and years of optimization that have gone into getting HPC code to run fast on AVX Xeons.

Apple is a bit-player in HPC with the Mac Pro because of their 'war' with nVIDIA ( cutting off access to the compute power of their massively parallel GPUs)  - it would just sideline them even more if they went ARM.

I cringe at your comment.