anonconformist

Fatman said:

The current Mac App Store is limping along - this change will breathe new life to Mac apps, the lifeblood of any OS. If MS Office (needed for legitimacy), and ‘big screen’ oriented Pro Creative Design, Audio and Video apps smoothly make the transition, then the platform will continue to live on and even grow beyond its stagnant 10% market share. It is critical for Apple to support developers in porting to ARM, and it appears they have a solid plan that is already quite far ahead. Developers targeting iOS can now leverage their work for the Mac and expand their audience (and revenue) for a limited amount of effort. What will really be attractive - when Intel chips are shed - is a desktop/laptop platform that is more cost effective (think more $999 Macs - not $3000 Macs) and that is incredibly fast (potentially 2 or 3 times faster than Wintel Systems). Two advantages Mac needs.

I’d be curious what brings you to the conclusions of 2-3 times faster and $999 Macs with going to Apple Silicon: while Apple can almost certainly save quite a bit of money per chip (especially via making it SoC except for RAM, SSD and often discrete GPU, perhaps a few other things) just throwing in a fast  CPU alone does not guarantee a fast system: you still need high-speed SSD and RAM subsystems to keep the hungry beast fed.  Those things cost money, and a CPU 2-3 times faster needs notably faster and more expensive memory to achieve that.  The price of memory that fast aren’t likely to only be that much more expensive, but nonlinearly more expensive.

I’ve watched the CPU benchmarks of the A series CPUs over the past few years getting into Intel x64 levels of performance, in battery-powered passively-cooled systems, and wondering what they could do with more capacity to dissipate waste heat and not stuck on tiny batteries, but also keeping in mind Apple has tightly designed their systems for maximum bang for the buck with balanced systems.  Compared to desktop/laptop machines, Apple’s iPhones and iPads have always (until most recent iPad Pro with 6 GB RAM) had notably less RAM than their Macs: the more RAM you have, the more quickly the battery is drained even in standby, let alone in active use.  This RAM is not going to be the cheapest RAM because of the trade for fast-but-energy-cheap performance tradeoffs.  Put enough (16 GB these days should be the base level for a Mac) and the expense grows quickly.

the majority of the time a CPU is executing code, 30-40% of the time every CPU core is idle, waiting for data to be retrieved from main memory.  Throwing more cores on a chip to a point ensures there are always CPU computations going on in at least one core more often than not, but not even that is guaranteed.  Adding more cores beyond a certain point absolutely guarantees the main memory bandwidth will be incapable of keeping any of them truly busy doing computations: wasted silicon, you might as well not have added those cores, because beyond a certain point, cache coherency and other factors guarantees more power wasted with lower total throughout per core and for the whole system.

any system 2-3 times faster than Intel’s for throughout will cost a lot more than the system you compare it to in this situation.  You can’t make it all that much faster while making it cheaper, because the CPU monster Must Be Fed, and it is expensive.

commentzilla said:

anonconformist said:

rmusikantow said:

darthw said:

Will it be possible, eventually, for Apple to make faster SoCs than the fastest most powerful intel Xenon chips?

Yes. I just read that the new Japanese super computer, that is the fastest in the world is built using Arm chips.

can Apple eventually make their own SoCS to beat Intel Xeons? There are reasons that it could go either way:

ARM ISA is easier to decode is in its favor.
intel z86-64 ISA is more compact due to variable length instructions that reduce memory bandwidth required for a given number of of instructions that achieve the same thing.

I think there is zero chance Apple will stay with INTEL anything and they will have no issue out performing INTEL Xeons within the same power and thermal constraints.

INTEL chips bring a lot of baggage to include more complex instructions so I doubt they're more compact and while fixed length instructions may require more bandwidth.... 

"Fixed-length instructions are less complicated to handle than variable-length instructions for several reasons (not having to check whether an instruction straddles a cache line or virtual memory page boundary, for instance), and are therefore somewhat easier to optimize for speed."

Fast cache is heavier for power usage as well as space, and taking more space requires more time for the whole system to some degree, not to mention the more space a chip takes, the more expensive it is to make, as the higher number of defective chips you’ll have on any given die.

Space matters, and if they can deal with the variable length instructions in less decoding logic space/power than the caches required, it’s a win.  It’s not just about bandwidth to/from main memory, also internally, and size matters.  Resistance and capacitance increase with the size, and that increases power while decreasing speed as well: it makes the most sense to use the least total hardware regardless of the complexity of decoding basic instructions into the micro-ops, of which there are far fewer micro-ops ever in-flight at any given time than CPU caches storing ISA machine code and its data.

mcdave said:

darthw said:

Will it be possible, eventually, for Apple to make faster SoCs than the fastest most powerful intel Xenon chips?

The A12Z is just a developer chip for Macs. In terms of overall performance (which won’t be CPU-bound), the first A-Silicon SoCs for production Macs should beat most Xeons.

This is pure conjecture until further notice, unless you’ve got evidence otherwise.

Hopefully Apple will have their chips that competitive, but that’s TBD.

commentzilla said:

rain22 said:

commentzilla said:

rain22 said:

“ but it suggests that new Apple Silicon Macs will not be struggling to keep up with the graphics on Intel Macs.”

That would be nice - but seems extremely dependent on programs being optimized. The anemic library of titles will probably shrink even further - at least until there is market saturation. 

Mac users will be stuck using dumbed down iOS software for a long time I feel. 

After all - This is the motivation isn’t it? Eventually have just 1 OS that can be modded to facilitate the device. 

iOS and macOS share the same core and were designed to be processor independent. This is why existing apps can be modified and recompiled for ARM in days. I suspect the performance will be far better than you think. That Tome Raider demo spoke volumes. A brand new 2020 13" 10th Gen i7 Quad-Core can't even do that with native code.

I hope you are right. We got burned on a bunch of G5’s during the last switch. Rosetta didn’t work half the time, crashes, software wasn’t supported, and Apple dropped support on its own suit almost overnight. Peripherals became junk as no drivers were updated and Apple put the whole onus on developers and manufacturers. We ended up tossing the G5’s for a big loss and getting the new Mac Pro’s. At least then we could upgrade our own video cards.

A lot of difference between then and now. Apple has been running iOS (macOS) on ARM for a decade now and operating has been designed to create a layer of abstraction from the hardware. This is why many apps will only need to be recompiled or can run in translation. That Tome Raider demo was a x86 mac app running without modification in translation via Rosetta 2. The old Rosetta couldn't do anything like that since apps were much closer to the hardware in those days and Metal didn't exist yet.

As for INTEL updates, I assume any app written natively for ARM can be recompiled for INTEL which means developers will easily be able to support both platforms. That's the beauty of the abstraction layer. The only question then becomes how long will Apple support new versions of macOS on INTEL since that occurs at the hardware level. I suspect it depends on the install base and their traditional obsolete/vintage status for hardware; 5 years of full support and 2 additional years minimum for security updates.

5-7 years is just about what I expect to get out of a device. Come this Fall my 7+ year old 2013 15" MBP will no longer be supported by the current operating system, which means it's down to security update status. I got my money's worth and the resale value of these machines is likely to remain high since Bootcamp is gone forever.

Any OS ever meant for mainstream use over more than the last 20 years has had sufficient hardware/software abstractions built-in that it’s trivial to move the OS over to a new CPU and hardware configuration: anything else is a hobby or specialized embedded system.

MacOS from before it was going to be used for the basis of MacOS from 2000 on, in all its variations, has been abstracted from hardware dependencies: it’s a variation of Unix, which has a history of that from early on.

Windows NT and later (first released 1993, the core of Windows 10 today with evolution as any OS has over time) was also hardware-abstracted by design from the start, with Windows 95, Windows 98 and 98se and Windows ME being short-term backwards-compatible OSes that were very much x86-dependent by design: lots of assembly language in them to make them fit in hardware constraints, and also old compatibility from Win16. These OSes were an intentional stopgap for most home users to be able to transition without losing too much backwards compatibility as a main focus (also applied in business as well).

rmusikantow said:

darthw said:

Will it be possible, eventually, for Apple to make faster SoCs than the fastest most powerful intel Xenon chips?

Yes. I just read that the new Japanese super computer, that is the fastest in the world is built using Arm chips.

You can put enough of any CPU cores on a chip and have something with more computing power than a Xeon, but there are details required to work out there.  You can also have enough chips wired up to be more powerful overall.

your answer didn’t answer anything in enough detail to be more than an apples to orangutan comparison and doesn’t answer the original question.

can Apple eventually make their own SoCS to beat Intel Xeons? There are reasons that it could go either way:

ARM ISA is easier to decode is in its favor.
intel z86-64 ISA is more compact due to variable length instructions that reduce memory bandwidth required for a given number of of instructions that achieve the same thing.

we shall see, but for the same process node, it could go either way.