ninaholic37
Golden Member
- Apr 13, 2012
- 1,883
- 31
- 91
Rakehellion
Lifer
- Jan 15, 2013
- 12,181
- 35
- 91
They already have development builds of OS X running on ARM. Problem is getting everyone else's software to run on it.
Rakehellion
Lifer
- Jan 15, 2013
- 12,181
- 35
- 91
I am not, the apple bussiness is not based on the best absolute performance, but in creating the need of differentiation in their user base. Absolute performance only matters to the dorky hardware enthusiast that lurks technical forums. I can assure our mindset cant be further away from the typical apple product consumer.
Absolute performance doesnt even matter to intel, who went the perf/watt route a while ago. So that argument doesnt even make sense coming from the intel cheerleader group.
Apple will be absolutely fine with their own socs, it was long overdue. From start they were a company that refused to settle with an processor and gpu provider, you cant be coasting thinking they will keep needing your products forever, this was proven so many times in their history that is pretty much a vox populi.
ADD MOAR (pun on more) CORES!!!:thumbsup:
Ideally ARM uses such low power, you could just add one more, and if that isnt enough, add another, and keep on adding while optimizing the code to handle the multiple arm cores.
And due to arm's low power again, putting 5 - 10 - 15 - 20 isnt something very difficult... its implementing the code and fetch/handle which would be the hard part.
But if ur apple and dumping that much money into unified code, who knows if it isnt possible.
Sure sure, put 20 poorly performing cores on a SoC and just watch that boat anchor sink...
There is a reason that Apple hasn't been trying to compete on core counts in mobile. And that reason applies to laptops and desktops as well. There is a reason that Intel still makes and sells lots of 2 core products and there is a reason that Intel has basically topped out its non-server products at 4 cores for almost a decade.
AKA adding cores does basically jack all if the software can't handle it, and outside of server workloads and a small subset of workstation workloads, the software currently can't and most likely will never handle it.
Tsavo
Platinum Member
- Sep 29, 2009
- 2,645
- 37
- 91
I would be shocked if there wasn't an R&D team at Apple that wasn't responsible for testing OSX on ARM. Heck, there might even be someone testing OSX on POWER just to be sure
I work for Apple. My team is porting OSX to IBM's new z13 Mainframe in order to make iTunes performant.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/45808.wss
is this still a thing? This rumor has been going on and on and onnnnnn literally for years now.
Eug
Lifer
- Mar 11, 2000
- 24,175
- 1,815
- 126
It isn't 2008 anymore.
Plus the interface stuff I'm talking about has nothing to do with performance. It's about not targeting such usage.
Let me give a completely unrelated example on Android just to illustrate a point. Did you know you can run your Android Nexus tablet off Ethernet? Yep, you can do this. Just plug in a USB to Ethernet dongle, an Apple one for example, and it is recognized and then you can surf the net without either WiFi or cell data service available. It works perfectly... Except it doesn't. It works fine for surfing but you can't actually do an initial configure of your device this way. It turns out the account setup method REQUIRES something other than Ethernet, or at least that was the case on Jelly Bean. Dunno about Lollipop. This has nothing to do with performance. It's just a bug, but one nobody cared about because it wasn't designed to be used this way in the first place.
Similarly, on iOS you can use a keyboard just fine, but you can't use it like a usual laptop keyboard since some keyboard commands don't do anything on iOS or else behave differently, because the OS wasn't really designed to be used in this manner. This would be easy to correct if Apple had a reason to do it, but up until now Apple had no reason to.
Arachnotronic
Lifer
- Mar 10, 2006
- 11,715
- 2,012
- 126
Apple doesn't care about performance so they spend $$$ hiring the world's best chip architects and circuit designers. Right.
p.s. In order to focus on "performance/watt" you need to deliver on the "performance" part, particularly as the power envelopes for various device classes are pretty set in stone at this point.
Sure you can, try one of'em Android-x86 builds (live bootable iso's) I've been doing this for nearly 2yrs now on my PC, just recently switched to a UEFI MB which gives me trouble booting with secure boot on.
Edit ~ Just wanna clarify that I was only talking the live iso (x86) builds & that you can skip network detection if you have a working ethernet connection, it'll then work off the ethernet & not require wifi, have't tried this on a tablet though so maybe right in that case.
Last edited:
We've had recycle bins for as long as I remember so I'm not sure what's so innovative about it. I also put computer hardware in them for as long as I can remember so where is the innovation?
crashtech
Lifer
- Jan 4, 2013
- 10,695
- 2,294
- 146
Is that all you have to pick on, my choice of adjective? Replace innovative for constrictive, then.
crashtech
Lifer
- Jan 4, 2013
- 10,695
- 2,294
- 146
Not offended. Afraid of being misunderstood, perhaps. Sorry for my poor sense of humor!
I hope they don't for the MBP 15 and 17. It might be fine for the MBA and MBP 13 but the i7 quads are beasts.
I think the market for Mac Pro is extremely small anyway. The people who shell out thousands of dollars on a high-performance desktop PC aren't going to go with Mac, let's just be honest.
If you're doing serious editing work or similar very CPU-intensive stuff, you need to be able to upgrade your PC all the time, which the Mac Pro is poor at. Finally, Haswell-E is a monster for productivity tasks, and again, you can't have that processor with a Mac Pro. So I don't think that Apple is going to replace Intel in their Mac Pro line but honestly I don't even know why they even bother with the current iteration of it as is, because it's mostly worthless at doing what it is doing.
As for the "Apple doesn't care about absolute performance", that's correct in a narrow sense. Apple does care about performance overall, but they, more than anyone else, always balance this against power constraints and design(slimness/weight) constraints.
However, in such environments, they are still always pushing for maximum performance possible. So they do care about performance, a lot, just in context. And the context here is that ditching Intel makes eminent sense for most of their PC hardware business. Would the 5K iMac do fine on a A9X? Probably not. But maybe on A10X. And even before it could get replaced, most of the high-volume stuff would be abe to be replaced before that.
Finally, a word about Microsoft. Since Nadella took over, the company has been consistently moving away from Ballmer's walled garden philosophy. Nadella is no genius, but he's at least open and smart enough to understand that people don't love office so much so that they're willing to lock themselves into their ecosystem. That's why he's now releasing their stuff on everything and usually with quite generous strings attached.
Would Microsoft port their stuff to ARM? Well, they already are. But with ARM on keyboard? Again, they already are. There might be some differences for Apple's ecosystem(I'm no app developer so other people can fill this one), but I doubt that a highly proficient company like them would face any serious trouble. And yes, Windows RT was a fiasco, but the ARM viability benchmark should and will be Android.
Apple hasn't done software inside their OS'es that well, aside from Safari, in a long time. Maybe because their hardware stuff is just that profitable, while software is typically isn't(it's even given away sometimes). But I don't think that they wouldn't handle the task of co-ordinating various stakeholders - as well as step their own game - if they wanted to switch.
If you're doing serious editing work or similar very CPU-intensive stuff, you need to be able to upgrade your PC all the time, which the Mac Pro is poor at. Finally, Haswell-E is a monster for productivity tasks, and again, you can't have that processor with a Mac Pro. So I don't think that Apple is going to replace Intel in their Mac Pro line but honestly I don't even know why they even bother with the current iteration of it as is, because it's mostly worthless at doing what it is doing.
As for the "Apple doesn't care about absolute performance", that's correct in a narrow sense. Apple does care about performance overall, but they, more than anyone else, always balance this against power constraints and design(slimness/weight) constraints.
However, in such environments, they are still always pushing for maximum performance possible. So they do care about performance, a lot, just in context. And the context here is that ditching Intel makes eminent sense for most of their PC hardware business. Would the 5K iMac do fine on a A9X? Probably not. But maybe on A10X. And even before it could get replaced, most of the high-volume stuff would be abe to be replaced before that.
Finally, a word about Microsoft. Since Nadella took over, the company has been consistently moving away from Ballmer's walled garden philosophy. Nadella is no genius, but he's at least open and smart enough to understand that people don't love office so much so that they're willing to lock themselves into their ecosystem. That's why he's now releasing their stuff on everything and usually with quite generous strings attached.
Would Microsoft port their stuff to ARM? Well, they already are. But with ARM on keyboard? Again, they already are. There might be some differences for Apple's ecosystem(I'm no app developer so other people can fill this one), but I doubt that a highly proficient company like them would face any serious trouble. And yes, Windows RT was a fiasco, but the ARM viability benchmark should and will be Android.
Apple hasn't done software inside their OS'es that well, aside from Safari, in a long time. Maybe because their hardware stuff is just that profitable, while software is typically isn't(it's even given away sometimes). But I don't think that they wouldn't handle the task of co-ordinating various stakeholders - as well as step their own game - if they wanted to switch.
Apple cannot move to ARM this easily, for a non-obvious reason.
There are tons of people running Windows and Linux VMs on Macs. You can't do that with ARM.
There are tons of people running Windows and Linux VMs on Macs. You can't do that with ARM.
Nobody wants to run an ARM-based linux distribution. For example, people might want to actually run the x86_64 Redhat 7 distro. It's a portability argument. We already know that there are special linux builds for ARM.
TRENDING THREADS
-
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)- Started by DisEnchantment
- Replies: 25K
-
Discussion Intel Meteor, Arrow, Lunar & Panther Lakes + WCL Discussion Threads
- Started by Tigerick
- Replies: 24K
-
Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread- Started by TheF34RChannel
- Replies: 23K
-
-
Facebook
Twitter