markus_ger
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Apple's A11 Bionic matches single-core 13" MacBook Pro performance in alleged benchmark
All Apple ARM devices since the first iPhone were always running MacOS X. The kernel is the same, although the OS has different modules, for different purposes e.g. 'Cocoa Touch' instead of 'Cocoa'. If they wanted to, they could bring a MacBook Air like device tomorrow. I am pretty sure they are already working on the big applications, since they are forced to make this step sometime in the future, when Intel CPUs do no longer make sense in terms of energy efficiency and speed. Just like they did with the PowerPC.melgross said:There’s a lot more to making an ARM Mac than just slipping a new SoC in. While some keep dismissing it, the fact is that ARM doesn’t run x86 software. Yes, Apple likely has macOS running on ARM. It makes sense for them to keep playing with it. And if they wanted to, they could bring their mainstream apps over. But big software packages are something else. FCP, Logic Pro and software from Adobe, Microsoft and others are a good 100 million lines of code. You really can’t fix this with a compile, which some people naively think.
Apple will make the switch, when they feel that the time has come, and whoever wants to stay relevant will have to do the same, or will lose out the most powerful PC platform. And this is not fanboy talk here: the ARM64 architecture has way more potential than Intel's x64 architecture. Intel would have to create a new, binary incompatible architecture, to catch up to Apple and lacks the software, the OS and the customers.so the question is what Apple would do here. Could they convince small developers to go with it? Probably. But large developers would really have to,have a very good reason to go through this again. And as it’s nkt likely that Apple could use this for anything other than a Macbook, AMD just maybe, but not likely, a Mini, there might not be enough a market for all of this software.
so we would have to go back to the premise I first brought up a few years ago. That is that experts have found that about 80% of the slowdown when running emulation is due to a small number of chip instructions, somewhere around a dozen, or a bit more, depending on which chip families are being emulated by which other families. As Intel doesn’t have patents on individual instructions, Apple could take those few and incorporate them into their ARM chip. When xu6 software requires them, the chip would switch over to them for these calculations.
if Apple could get an A12X perhaps 40% faster than this A11, then with those extra instructions, that could work out about as well as a mid range i5 low power mobile chip for much less money that Apple pays Intel.
i could see that working.
