Tuesday, November 6th 2012
Apple May Ditch Intel for CPUs in Macs, But It's Not Over to AMD
In the coming years, Apple could end its partnership with Intel for supply of CPUs, according to a Bloomberg report, citing Gartner research. The company plans to make a transition from x86 to ARM for its Mac product line, which includes MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, and Mac Mini. Such a transition would be similar to the one Apple took from PowerPC to x86 machine architecture, across 2005-06. According to the report, Apple's engineers are confident of designing an ARM-based chip of their own that's powerful enough for mainstream personal computing on Mac products. Apple's engineers foresee a convergence of technologies between mobile devices (such as the iPhone and iPad), and Macs. Currently, Apple designs its own processors for iOS devices, which are ARM-based.
Source:
Bloomberg
74 Comments on Apple May Ditch Intel for CPUs in Macs, But It's Not Over to AMD
x86 isn't the only way to get things done, fortunately, and really, I think tech companies becoming more focused on customer experience, rather than trying to be the fastest option possible, is a really good thing.
Hardware today is barely used to it's fullest extent by anyone, except big business and engineering sort of things. The desktop, at this point, really doesn't have much place in people's homes any more, so it only makes sense for things to take a drastic change...the companies that don't, probably won't be here 10 years from now. I think opinions like this fail the market is a huge way. Without innovation...
There's really no reason that x86 can't be competitive in the mobile market, and there's no reason ARM can't be competitive in the desktop market. At a given level of computing performance, all architectures tend to have roughly the same power draw and heat generation, assuming there's no blatant design problems. The reason ARM hasn't attempted to compete in the desktop space isn't because it's not capable of the same level of performance, but because it would be stupid to try to challenge Intel in a market where they're firmly entrenched, where Intel has massive market presence and backwards compatibility with most systems back to the early 90's, and ARM offers neither. The other problem with expanding to desktops is that it would disprove this mythos and ARM is infinitely more efficient than x86, when it's actually just lower-power.
Apple is the only company that can make this transition from x86 to ARM happen in the desktop space. They've already proven that the majority of their users have no issues following them through architecture changes, and they have a reason to actually do it. Intel makes nearly 40% profit on the CPUs they sell to Apple, but profits from Apple's in-house CPU design department go straight back to Apple. This allows Apple to price their computers more competitively while maintaining their profits, or (more likely) increase their profit margins substantially. The transition may not happen this generation, but it certainly isn't far off.
That's all most people do, as in the vast majority of people, most of the time, as in the vast majority of the time, outside of work related computing tasks.
So, given that a 2-4 core Cortex A9 is roughly equivalent to a 1-2 core Pentium III of relatively high clocks, and this is what most people are happy with for personal use devices...
Let's extrapolate and speculate, without any data of course, and say that a 2-4 core ARMv8 cpu is somewhere in the performance envelope of a 1-2 core Pentium IV (maybe slightly more than that?)... hey, more processing power for a mobile device at the same power requirements... great for normal 'personal' use, more so than an ARMv7 cpu.
Putting ARM aside, it doesn't matter whether it is ARM or Intel Atom, small personal computing devices are more and more becoming the norm rather than the exception or the add-on purchase. And it will only continue as mobile cpu performance and mobile computing devices increase their product specs over time.
It's not that much of a risk for Apple to introduce an ARM based system as a bridge between their tablet/phone ARM devices and their x86 systems. Something like a dock to plug into one of their large displays that allows the docking of a future iPad or iPhone, plug in a keyboard, go to desktop mode... no brainer to think that one out... they're already implementing some convergence between iOS and the current version of OS/X.
A 2014+ era tablet/phone, quad core ARMv8 (or Atom for a Windows version), 4GB RAM, gpu cores capable of pushing enough pixels to handle a 4K display resolution --- all that is a reasonable expectation. The question is whether it is profitable, and that all depends on how a company like Apple structures its hardware offerings to its customers.
I just hope this means they'll get innovative with case design again. Bring us back to pre 05 Apple, I'll be interested in getting a Mac again.
There is no reason to put more money into expensive designs if only very few computer enthusiasts that are going to buy your products.
This is probably much further into the future, but I do fear the removal of the computer enthusiast market to a large degree.
In the grand scheme of things, Intel 'K' chips are a miniscule product volume within their entire processor lineup... it's the other models, the non-K i3s, i5s, Celerons, Pentiums, and i7s that make their way into the hundreds of millions of corporate desktop client systems, 'standard' consumer systems from the big OEMs, etc ... that is the market.
With gaming being increasingly dominated by consoles, especially with the new consoles being released within the next year or so, and the millions of people buying and playing games coded for their ARM devices, it's entirely possible that any 'enthusiast' system of the future (if you want it to be the best of the best and fastest possible) will be, essentially, a low end workstation.
That being said, I think that for gamers, building a custom PC with over-the-top everything, the embodiment of gratuitous conspicuous consumption, will slowly decline.
If there is less of a desktop market, in the future, there will be less custom and gratuitous 'crap' for 'enthusiasts' to ooh and ahhh about and use. If that occurs, the 'enthusiast' market will be small, niche, and utilize 1P and 2P workstation components, and be a much more expensive choice than today.
General, everyday computing will move to ARM or mobile Atom based systems.
I don't see them switching from x86 on their main product lines though.
Has 2 sata ports and expendable ram.
Ive played with a few ACORN risc machines they where pretty snappy.From what I can gather they cane out around the same time as the 486.
Fast forward from 1995 to know.
I know for a fact 80% of users don't use there pc to the full potential or need as much processing power as they currently have.
ARM do make a nice CPU / SOC.
And apple would be able to make exactly what they want.
I wonder if Amiga would ever go arm :P
ARM, on the other hand, is undeniably cheaper. Moreover, they can design the processor to their specific needs and, like Windows 8, migrate all their software to iOS instead of Mac.
I don't think Mac Pro brings in enough money for Apple to care. They'll make up the loses there, and then some, in the reduced cost of ARM compared to x86. Most Apple users don't care about performance so they're not going to care as long as it works.