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Apple makes its move away from x86 official
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15875/apple-lays-out-plans-to-transition-macs-from-x86-to-apple-socs
https://techreport.com/featured/3471264/apple-arm-switch-official-2020/
It had been rumored for years that Apple was going to drop x86 and use ARM cores instead for Mac devices. Once Apple had some high-performance CPU cores for their iOS devices, why did they need to keep buying Intel CPUs for a Mac? Today, they made it official. Well, almost: Apple didn't say that they were going to use ARM, but it's hard to imagine that it could be anything else.
The transition won't be ideal, of course. Switching CPU architectures never is. But Apple is hoping for some longer term benefits, such as not having to pay whatever Intel decides to charge. This also gives them the ability to put whatever custom things into their silicon that they want and have full OS support. And, of course, it creates the possibility of greatly lessening the differences between iOS and Mac OS, making it easier to move back and forth between the two.
For consumers, this probably means the end of being able to buy a Mac and then dual boot Windows. If you're hoping to run arbitrary Windows software on a Mac, including but not limited to games, that's probably going not going to work anymore. Macs never were ideal for gaming, of course, but some people liked the option to dual boot so that anything that required Windows would at least run.
Apple says that the first consumer Mac devices to use Apple CPUs will be out later this year, but it will take two years for a full transition. Presumably, the Mac Pro will be the last thing. Apple's experience at CPU design for iPhones doesn't need to scale up very far to power a Mac Mini, but a Mac Pro with a huge CPU and a ton of GPU performance is a much larger leap.
https://techreport.com/featured/3471264/apple-arm-switch-official-2020/
It had been rumored for years that Apple was going to drop x86 and use ARM cores instead for Mac devices. Once Apple had some high-performance CPU cores for their iOS devices, why did they need to keep buying Intel CPUs for a Mac? Today, they made it official. Well, almost: Apple didn't say that they were going to use ARM, but it's hard to imagine that it could be anything else.
The transition won't be ideal, of course. Switching CPU architectures never is. But Apple is hoping for some longer term benefits, such as not having to pay whatever Intel decides to charge. This also gives them the ability to put whatever custom things into their silicon that they want and have full OS support. And, of course, it creates the possibility of greatly lessening the differences between iOS and Mac OS, making it easier to move back and forth between the two.
For consumers, this probably means the end of being able to buy a Mac and then dual boot Windows. If you're hoping to run arbitrary Windows software on a Mac, including but not limited to games, that's probably going not going to work anymore. Macs never were ideal for gaming, of course, but some people liked the option to dual boot so that anything that required Windows would at least run.
Apple says that the first consumer Mac devices to use Apple CPUs will be out later this year, but it will take two years for a full transition. Presumably, the Mac Pro will be the last thing. Apple's experience at CPU design for iPhones doesn't need to scale up very far to power a Mac Mini, but a Mac Pro with a huge CPU and a ton of GPU performance is a much larger leap.
Comments
This is all about control and maximum profit for Apple only.
The good old days
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
The OS itself (and by extension, the hardware it runs on) is becoming more and more irrelevant.
The only shocking part about this announcement is that it took this long to occur.
1) Apple has had a lot of success at building custom ARM cores,
2) Apple is literally the only vendor who wants to build a high-performance desktop on ARM cores,
3) Apple loves to customize things to make them incompatible with anything else, and
4) Apple loves to do weird things so that they'll have some sort of exclusive feature,
it would be shocking if they don't build their own custom CPU cores. Having their own custom SoC is a given, but it's possible to do that with off the shelf ARM cores--which is what most other vendors that use ARM cores will do. I don't think that even the Cortex X1 would be tempting for Apple to use.
All while running on an iPad Pro chip.
The reason that the development kits used a phone processor is that that is what was readily available. Apple will have higher performance CPUs available by the time the real consumer desktops launch.
I don't think Apple would make the switch if they weren't capable of matching intel, but I believe they'll do better.
In terms of games, we've hit the point where you don't have to have a PC to play games anymore, cloud gaming has kind of fixed that issue.
Aren't people complaining of latency and there's even a "locked at 30 frames per second" bit about Elder Scrolls Online.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I use cloud gaming almost exclusively these days, but I have a 1GBPS fiber connection and no data cap. Others may not be so lucky at the moment, but it's only a matter of time before data caps go away.
Not trying to derail. Just saying that, if you can't play something on a Mac you don't need to dual boot, you can use a cloud streaming service and in many cases get as good or better performance than one would expect.
I don't think that an ARM-based iMac will often match the top x86 CPUs with the same number of cores, but neither do I think that it needs to. If it offers 90% of the performance of a high end Windows desktop, that's good enough, in part because it's impractical to make a clean comparison. Something like 30% wouldn't be good enough, but the A12 is already far above that.