[HN Gopher] Apple's Mac Chip Switch Is Double Trouble for Intel
___________________________________________________________________
Apple's Mac Chip Switch Is Double Trouble for Intel
Author : ksec
Score : 32 points
Date : 2020-06-12 21:40 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| MintelIE wrote:
| Apple is "preparing to announce" the switch, but haven't we heard
| these rumors for, well, years now? How much more reliable are
| these rumors now compared to a couple years ago?
|
| I'm a little surprised to see Bloomberg basically cribbing
| MacRumors.
|
| EDIT: Instantly downvoted? LOL
| neximo64 wrote:
| 'Rumors' like this don't have exact dates like June 22nd.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I always take these rumours with a pinch of salt. But I don't
| think that there having been rumours for years discredits them.
| There were apple tablet rumours for years too, which turned out
| to be because they _were_ working on a tablet for about 10
| years before they released it (they ended up releasing the
| iPhone first as part of the same project, and I believe that
| was 7 years in).
| bsorbo wrote:
| Some analysts (including Gurman) have pretty consistently
| called out 2020 as "the" year for a couple years now:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-is-...
| Bud wrote:
| The rumors were valid a couple years ago, too; any change like
| this would definitely take years of planning.
| evv wrote:
| You don't need to rely on the rumors. Anybody who has seen the
| trend of Apple's hardware can see that they are moving in this
| direction. The iPads have touted "desktop class" CPUs for
| years.. Macs already have in-house supervisor chips, (the T2 in
| the MacBook). Apple is a smart behemoth, an expert at vertical
| integration, who has a lot to benefit by cutting out Intel.
| They will certainly attempt it. It's only a question of how and
| when.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| (both of these are genuine questions, not rhetorical ones)
|
| 1. If x64 wasn't already dominant and had the same market share
| as ARM, would you choose x64? Why?
|
| 2. With x64's current dominance, would you buy a ARM system as
| your primary one, knowing that you'll have significant
| difficulties developing for the majority of current market share?
| hidiegomariani wrote:
| noob here my thought is 1. arm is more power efficient than
| x64? 2. emulation + shift to remote development environments?
| cglong wrote:
| Someone described ARM Macs as targeting the modern developer,
| i.e. one targeting mobile first. I wouldn't want a Mac
| incapable of running Windows, but I don't think I fit this
| demographic.
| smabie wrote:
| How is the developer ecosystem going to fair? I would imagine a
| lot of tools don't work on ARM (or aren't regular tested on ARM).
| Moreover, I feel like it's going to be a big problem that the
| architecture you're deploying your code to is different than the
| one you are developing on. Who knows what kind of crazy
| performance differences/bugs there are between ARM and x86_64.
| Also, what about the audio/video/modeling software? I can't
| imagine that there's any support for ARM at the moment in that
| space.
|
| Also, is the Mac Pro going to switch to ARM? I'm not aware of an
| ARM chip that can compete with the super highend Xeons in the
| Pro. Having laptops run ARM and Pros run x86_64 doesn't seem like
| the best idea (also sounds like a lot of work on Apple's part).
|
| Of course, maybe this switch is going to create a high-end ARM
| space, allowing ARM to make inroads into HEDT and the server
| market.
|
| A lot seems unclear at the moment, but one thing is clear (to me
| atleast): there's going to be a huge fight over the next 10
| years, x86_64 vs ARM. No one can possibly know who will win, but
| it's exciting to the say the least. I think we've all been a
| little tired of the x86_64 monoculture since the end of PPC.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > I would imagine a lot of tools don't work on ARM
|
| A lot of open source code works well on ARM. But will we start
| to see some newly-discovered-but-latent arch-specific bugs,
| compiler bugs, undefined-behavior bugs-but-worked-on-x86_64
| bugs? Yes, sure.
|
| The cool thing is that Win/ARM and Linux on arm are still very
| much the same OS as their x86_64 ports. Presumably macOS
| is/will be the same way.
|
| ARM gets less love precisely because they're not as popular for
| developer native workstations. But I wouldn't be surprised if
| that changes over the next decade.
| dewey wrote:
| Wouldn't it be similar to the PowerPC -> Intel transition or is
| there something that makes this more complicated? That one
| worked pretty well with the Rosetta emulation layer.
| SahAssar wrote:
| I think you are overestimating the change. IMO the OS changes
| things a lot more than the processor architecture.
|
| Almost nobody (except imgix and a few others) run macos on a
| prod server, yet many devs run macos. For example: when they
| run stuff via docker they run it via a VM (whether they know it
| or not).
|
| Any dev (again, except imgix and a few others) that actually
| cares about server performance is already not running their
| benchmarks/perftests/tests on a mac, so that should not make a
| difference.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-06-12 23:00 UTC)