techconc

cloudguy said:

tmay said:

cloudguy said:

A14 is only hexacore. Strange. Was certain that it was going to be octa-core. Hexacore is good enough to replace the i3 and i5 in the Mac Mini and MacBook Air, but for MacBook Pro and iMac they are going to need an octacore design at minimum.

CloudDude, the A series SOC isn't going to be used in any production Mac, so you can stop clutching your pearls.

I have read in various places that it was. Some have said that it would not be, but more places have stated that it would be than would not. Do you have a link? Thanks.

BGnATC said:

Can anyone verify whether the CBS component is the commercial-free version or not?

Thanks!

elijahg said:

Another point no one seems to have factored is that Intel has tons of extensions to x86 which are essentially never compared in benchmarks against ARM. SSE1/2/3, AVX, MMX, Quicksync etc. Lots of cross-platform software uses these extensions to speed things up, and the code can be directly ported from the huge market that is Windows to the smaller Mac market. Software that makes use of those extensions is much much faster than that which uses general x86 instructions because they come with much less legacy cruft. If Apple switches, cross platform devs aren't going to waste time optimising their software to double the speed on the tiny Mac market, Mac users will just get an inferior experience, again.

Peza said:

To me this move just seems to be made to generate more profit. Arm has a place yes, but not in the Pro market. It makes sense in mobile devices but not a desktop.
It makes little sense and Apple should instead research AMD’s professors that are just seemingly getting better and better superseding Intels chips in performance.

If I owned a Mac desktop with an ARM processor I wouldn’t be able stop thinking to myself, it’s got the same processor as my phone has...

And then you have the persuasion of developers to make their X86 platform programmes work on ARM, and no running mobile apps doesn’t cut it on a desktop costing 2 grand or more.

I’m not a fan of this idea.

1. Yes, Apple will be able to produce more cost effective chips than they can buy from Intel.  This can manifest itself in several forms:   A) Same performance at a cheaper price and using less power.   More powerful chips for the same price and same power budget.  C) A combination of the A and B.
2. Increased performance per watt leads to better overall solutions.  Less thermal issues.  Better battery life.  Higher overall performance.
3. Less work in terms of supporting operating systems and libraries across multiple CPU architectures.  Optimize for ARM.  Simplify compiler tools, etc.
4. Instead of worrying about a phone class chip on your desktop, maybe you should think in terms of ... if they can make a desktop class chip for a mobile device, imagine what they could do for a desktop variant with no such thermal constraints!
5. In terms of developer support, etc.  This has all been done before.  Catalina is actually the first step in this migration by jettisoning 32 bit apps and libraries.  Apple has encouraged developers to use their accelerate framework so there shouldn't really be any code with hand optimized Intel assembly anymore.  For most developers, little more than a recompile would be required.  

1. No dual booting into Intel based Windows anymore.  Honestly, who cares?  I'm a dual platform user and I've never used my Macs for that.
2. Yes, there will be a transition.  It will take some time before all code is ARM native, etc.  However, transitions have been smooth in the past and are well positioned to be smooth now as well.

davgreg said:

Is it possible that Apple is going to in-house CPUs, just not made by Intel?

Apple has the resources and market scale to get custom x86 chips done.