Apple will begin phasing out Intel in 2021 Mac

[Greenpaint]

Apple needs to take the software compatibility issue seriously if they want this move to succeed. Longer battery life and more durable parts are nice, but those benefits pale in comparison to the time and money companies are not willing to spend to make their software compatible with a new software architecture.

Transition between architectures needs to be as easy as possible, if companies need to dedicate a full team of software devs for several months to make things work it'll be a hard sell.

Luckily I work with software that is pretty platform agnostic so I'm not attached to any single platform at work.

 

[Freestyler]

Apple PC marketshare is still pretty small. Like 12%

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It's not necessarily about the percentage of marketshare, it's also about what that 12% represents. Are 60% of Adobe's CC subscribers on Mac? Does Microsoft make 30% of its Office 365 income from Mac users? Are Macs used more by businesses with higher revenues? These are all hypotheticals that I have no idea about, but it just goes to show you, the marketshare % isn't everything.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

You're talking about Apple right? The same apple that charges $1000 for casters with no locks?

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Also the same Apple that just released a $399 USD iPhone with a CPU that is more powerful than other devices priced at twice that. And this thread is about Apple bringing those same CPUs to the Mac lineup.

 

[Kittens McMittens]

People keep going off about "apple's chips" ITT, not realizing this is more about ditching x86_64 than intel specifically. This really sucks. Intel is not the only manufacturer of x86_64 processors. There is nothing stopping apple from actually making an x86_64 processor themselves. Switching to ARM is not a good thing. All that fragmentation shit apple fans like to hate on android for? This is that, to laptops and desktops.

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I'm pretty certain AMD and Intel have x86-64 tied up in a patent minefield which they cross-license. Back when Nvidia was talking about making a CPU (before Tegra) Intel went so far as to put out a statement that there would be no new entrants to the x86 market, and Nvidia confirmed they would not attempt to enter the x86 market.

 

[subrock]

Excited for the possibilities, but I'm definitely not going to be an early adopter unless they figured out some magic level emulation

 

[Vagabond]

Thank god I am in a position to make buying decisions for my organization. I can only imagine if the 12-15% of people who currently have Macs in my org were upgraded to these ARM models.

 

[SRG01]

I'm pretty certain AMD and Intel have x86-64 tied up in a patent minefield which they cross-license. Back when Nvidia was talking about making a CPU (before Tegra) Intel went so far as to put out a statement that there would be no new entrants to the x86 market, and Nvidia confirmed they would not attempt to enter the x86 market.

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The current x86 landscape is a bit different. There's a licensed Chinese x86 out there based off of Zen, as well as some counterfeit x86 chips floating around too.

 

[Kittens McMittens]

The current x86 landscape is a bit different. There's a licensed Chinese x86 out there based off of Zen, as well as some counterfeit x86 chips floating around too.

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The Chinese venture is China only. I doubt Intel or AMD would permit it outside of China. Counterfeit chips are another story, as they are unlawful. No way Apple would do that.

 

[MadraptorMan]

Why is the ARM architecture so much better/more efficient than Intel's? What is Apple doing that Intel can't?

 

[ShutterMunster]

I am so ready for this.

 

[Vestal]

Why is the ARM architecture so much better/more efficient than Intel's? What is Apple doing that Intel can't?

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Apple makes these chips.. Intel doesn't....Instead of paying intel for their chips and logic boards they will keep that $$$.

Like others have mentioned, compatibility and performance will determine how successful this is.

 

[CthulhuSars]

Guess this is the first time I drop MBP as a business device. I need the ability to dual boot into windows and loosing that I will just go with a laptop that supports X86 in the future.

Womp Womp it was a good run MBP.

 

[Veliladon]

Why is the ARM architecture so much better/more efficient than Intel's? What is Apple doing that Intel can't?

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The front end of the ARM64 pipeline is orders of magnitude more simpler than x86-64. The x86-64 decoder is a mess because it has to deal with forty years of shit being grafted onto x86 over the years. It has to cope with variable length instructions, instructions that can be spread across page boundaries (Jesus fuck the logic for that one), a ridiculous number of addressing modes, register aliasing tables, a micro-op decoder, a micro-op fuser, a macro-op fuser. It's all basically to turn x86-64 into a RISC machine but look CISC from the outside. It chews up a hell of a lot of a power budget when you're dealing with a TDP in single digit watts.

ARM64 on the other hand is all 32-bit long fixed length instructions, it's load store, and they all have to be inside a cache line boundary. It's all dead fucking simple. CPU reads program counter, CPU pulls in cache line from RAM if need be, CPU reads instruction, CPU decodes instruction, CPU sends to execution queue, execution units execute it. The pipelines are dead simple. They use way less power.

 

[MadraptorMan]

Apple makes these chips.. Intel doesn't....Instead of paying intel for their chips and logic boards they will keep that $$$.

Like others have mentioned, compatibility and performance will determine how successful this is.

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I understand why Apple wants to use their own chips, but I am asking why they are so much better. Or am I wrong in that assumption?

I was under the impression they out-performed Intel's stuff.

 

[MadraptorMan]

The front end of the ARM64 pipeline is orders of magnitude more simpler than x86-64. The x86-64 decoder is a mess because it has to deal with forty years of shit being grafted onto x86 over the years. It has to cope with variable length instructions, instructions that can be spread across page boundaries (Jesus fuck the logic for that one), a ridiculous number of addressing modes, a micro-op decoder, a micro-op fuser, a macro-op fuser. It's all basically to turn x86-64 into a RISC machine but look CISC from the outside. It chews up a hell of a lot of a power budget when you're dealing with a TDP in single digit watts.

ARM64 on the other hand is all 32-bit long fixed length instructions, it's load store, and they all have to be inside a cache line boundary. It's all dead fucking simple. CPU reads program counter, CPU pulls in cache line from RAM if need be, CPU reads instruction, CPU decodes instruction, CPU sends to execution queue, execution units execute it. The pipelines are dead simple. They use way less power.

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I see! Thanks for the explanation.

 

[MTR]

I'll probably get the last intel iMac model I can and wait and see over a few years. I usually get 5 years or more out of a mac.

 

[HommePomme]

The by far most used engines aka UE4 and Unity have supported Android since the dawn of time.

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Yeah but most companies weren't building their main console games for Android. Now that switch is actual target hardware you have current and last gen AAA games getting builds for ARM, just wonder what that means as some computers move that way

 

[Figments]

Apple needs to take the software compatibility issue seriously if they want this move to succeed. Longer battery life and more durable parts are nice, but those benefits pale in comparison to the time and money companies are not willing to spend to make their software compatible with a new software architecture.

Transition between architectures needs to be as easy as possible, if companies need to dedicate a full team of software devs for several months to make things work it'll be a hard sell.

Luckily I work with software that is pretty platform agnostic so I'm not attached to any single platform at work.

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They're trying to do that by courting the iPad developers with Project Catalyst, and I suspect they'll be ramping up advocacy in the coming months and years.

 

[OtterMatic]

I think the problem will be how long this transition is gonna take. The higher end is probably gonna be the last to move to ARM. Are they gonna release a new MacBook line again? I can't imagine they are going back to the MacBook and MacBook Air confusion again. I doubt they are going for something like a Surface Pro.

 

[bxsonic]

This is both exciting AND terrifying.

I hope this means that the 12" Macbook will make a return, albeit more powerful and with better keyboard and battery life. If they can sell that at $899 - $999, it will be the best Macbook for people like my wife.

 

[Nesotenso]

I see! Thanks for the explanation.

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makes x86 great for the data server market where power is not a concern, not too great for applications which require a Li ion battery. So that's why ARM dominates in cell phone, tablets etc. Now you have companies licensing the ARM ISA and building server chips.

 

[hateradio]

This is the third time Apple's done this:
68K -> PPC
PPC -> Intel
Intel -> ARM
Both previous times involved emulation and tools to help migration.

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RIP Intel?

People keep going off about "apple's chips" ITT, not realizing this is more about ditching x86_64 than intel specifically. This really sucks. Intel is not the only manufacturer of x86_64 processors. There is nothing stopping apple from actually making an x86_64 processor themselves. Switching to ARM is not a good thing. All that fragmentation shit apple fans like to hate on android for? This is that, to laptops and desktops.

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Intel for Android was never really a thing. The fragmentation is short-lived on Apple land. They switch, stop supporting the old stuff, and move on. Who here cares about PPC? (Besides the one person.) If you mean developers needing to have two code bases . . . well they already have to. They have ARM iOS, ARM Android, x86_64 Windows, and Mac, which may have some cross over, but it doesn't concern Apple. They'll provide Xcode and that's that.

Why would Apple invest in an x86_64 processor for a mobile device? Sure Mac Pro exists, but it's probably already been accounted for in terms of future sales.

ARM is Apple's main concern because of iOS/iPadOS/watchOS. They already develop the chip. Its their directive that macOS needs to join the herd, with all the little apps that are already out there.

Maybe a stupid question: can Nvidia/AMD GPUs currently used with MacOS/Windows be used with ARM? Or will these also be completely different?

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That's a good question. I assume that either of these companies will continue to supply the Pro machines with GPUs.

I assume they'll have ARM drivers on the way.

 

[Deleted member 2474]

see a lot of people making some wrong assumptions about how computers work in this thread, so just to be clear:

- for the vast majority of apps, recompiling for ARM won't require all that much work. most mac software is written in objective-c or swift, not x86-64 assembly. most things will amount to little more than ticking some boxes in xcode and recompiling. unless you're writing kernel extensions or something, modern programming languages abstract away most of the differences in CPU architecture enough that it won't change much on the programmer end.
- project catalyst is entirely irrelevant to the mac-on-arm project. as is self-evident, everything in the catalyst frameworks all works natively on intel too.
- "how are they going to port the ancient macOS codebase to arm?" folks, they already did it over a decade ago. that's basically what iOS is and always has been under the hood. porting appkit and whatnot will be (relatively) easy in comparison when the underlying kernel and whatnot already have more than a decade of ARM optimization work built-in.
- if rosetta's success in the powerpc -> intel transition is any indication, any software compatibility layer apple makes will probably be performant enough for most apps that aren't premiere pro or matlab or something. and apple will almost certainly be working on the business side of things to make sure the big devs get their apps running native on ARM asap.

 

[Stinkles]

They said they experimented with this, but it didn't work well.

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but everything they've been doing points to another stab at it. Maybe as a hybrid approach- switch mode and it goes fully from one form factor to the other. Alternatively just reshaping the OS so they have identical foundations and different user facing UI/devices.

 

[Last_colossi]

Should be interesting to see the performance differences, the way Intel's been going lately Apple & ARM may even be surpass them in performance.

 

[Deleted member 1476]

--- Outdated info ---

 

[enzo_gt]

Very interested to see how this goes and whether it coincides with a more major overhaul of MacOS. This is partially just to see if they'll completely break their last ties to skeumorphism and do something bold that will have ripple effects across the industry like metro/modern UI and material have since.

Seeing both Apple and Microsoft do this dance over unifying their operating systems and how Surface has shaken up Apple's approach to hardware has been really interesting over the past decade or so.

 

[Deleted member 2474]

Damn, I better get one of those Intel ones before they go extinct, I need my Linux distros to work and I don't think they run on ARM yet.

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what distros are you using? ubuntu, fedora, and debian all have supported ARM ports

 

[BlastProcessing]

Very interested to see how this goes and whether it coincides with a more major overhaul of MacOS. This is partially just to see if they'll completely break their last ties to skeumorphism and do something bold that will have ripple effects across the industry like metro/modern UI and material have since.

Seeing both Apple and Microsoft do this dance over unifying their operating systems and how Surface has shaken up Apple's approach to hardware has been really interesting over the past decade or so.

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Honestly, I am ready for a return to skeuomorphism. I think it's time for the pendulum to swing back that way for a bit.

 

[lorddarkflare]

Interested to see what they do with their Pro- Line.

I can see this ending the heavy Mac usage by many dev shops I know.

 

[GarthLordOfTheSith]

This is both exciting AND terrifying.

I hope this means that the 12" Macbook will make a return, albeit more powerful and with better keyboard and battery life. If they can sell that at $899 - $999, it will be the best Macbook for people like my wife.

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If they keep the entry level air at $999, I honestly believe there's no market for an $899-999 12" Macbook. That won't stop them from doing it though (lord knows it never did in the past considering the awful value of the launch 12" MacBook in 2015 compared to the almost identically priced Pro at the time)

 

[Deleted member 1476]

what distros are you using? ubuntu, fedora, and debian all have supported ARM ports

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Yeah I had a brain fart, went out to one of the sites to double check and they had a couple of ports. My bad.

 

[bxsonic]

If they keep the entry level air at $999, I honestly believe there's no market for an $899-999 12" Macbook. That won't stop them from doing it though (lord knows it never did in the past considering the awful value of the launch 12" MacBook in 2015 compared to the almost identically priced Pro at the time)

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Didn't they do this when they had the 11" & 13" MacBook Airs?

A smaller, lighter MacBook at 12" with an ARM processor at $899 seems like a pretty compelling device to me even with the current MacBook Air offering. Especially if performance and battery life is as good if not better than the current MacBook Air.

The MacBook 12" was an awful value at launch due to its insane price and awful specs, two things that Apple hopefully will avoid if they launch this new MacBook.

 

[Lafazar]

Has no one mentioned gaming yet? Because you can pretty much forget using Steam on ARM based Macs.

Pretty much all of the old games will not be recompiled to work on ARM (developers have moved on long ago) and I don't expect to see many new games being cross-developed if the architecture is so wildly different.

Using emulation if possible of course, but that will result in worse performance, less efficiency and more power draw even for simple games.

 

[345]

but everything they've been doing points to another stab at it. Maybe as a hybrid approach- switch mode and it goes fully from one form factor to the other. Alternatively just reshaping the OS so they have identical foundations and different user facing UI/devices.

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i think if they haven't done it by 2020 it's pretty clear they never will.

if you'd asked anyone 10 years ago whether it'd be easier to make a touchscreen mac or an ipad with a keyboard and trackpad, no-one would've said the ipad, but here we are. closest you're going to get is a clamshell ipadOS device i reckon.

Has no one mentioned gaming yet? Because you can pretty much forget using Steam on ARM based Macs.

Pretty much all of the old games will not be recompiled to work on ARM (developers have moved on long ago) and I don't expect to see many new games being cross-developed if the architecture is so wildly different.

Using emulation if possible of course, but that will result in worse performance, less efficiency and more power draw even for simple games.

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steam for mac was already pretty devastated by catalina and the shift away from 32-bit. i think apple sees mac gaming as arcade and the app store now really.

 

[Terrell]

Honestly, I am ready for a return to skeuomorphism. I think it's time for the pendulum to swing back that way for a bit.

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Skeuomorphism as a visual design aesthetic is needless right now. Its whole reason to exist is to bring familiar real-world behaviours to a software space, either to lessen a learning curve or to provide certain kinds of feedback to the user. When skeuomorphism gets in the way of functional design, however (as it almost always does eventually), you do away with it in favour of more functional options that you transition your users into and thus become the intuitive design language. At this point, no one needs visual design cues to know how to use their iPhone, so bringing back visual skeuomorphs would be a purely aesthetic choice with no utility.
Besides that, some skeuomorphic designs meant to resemble a real-world object would be mimicking objects that no longer exist or are highly irrelevant in popular culture, which is fine for legacy visualizations to a degree but useless when reverting back to skeuomorphic design from another design sensibility. This meme tells the story of why:

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Has no one mentioned gaming yet? Because you can pretty much forget using Steam on ARM based Macs.

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There's a reason no one has mentioned gaming. I don't think you have to guess why.

 

[Angelus Errare]

Also keep in mind that for now this will be applied to their Macbook, not the Macbook Pro, Mac Pro, iMac. Those will still be intel at least for 2021.

Honestly, I am ready for a return to skeuomorphism. I think it's time for the pendulum to swing back that way for a bit.

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Skeuomorphism will never come back, no need for it any longer. But you will see a rise in Neumorphism which has more design cohesion than skeumorphism ever did (Nothing more annoying than the notepad app looking completely different than the voice note app, that looked different than the writing app, etc). I've grown to like Neumorphism

Examples

 

[kami_sama]

One thing I thought about is the amount of macs used in academics, and while a lot are used for just writing, many are used for science and engineering for programming or computing (easy) things.
So what happens once Matlab, Mathematica and other academia software stop working?
I don't know if macs will reign in those places after the change.

 

[fontguy]

Has no one mentioned gaming yet? Because you can pretty much forget using Steam on ARM based Macs.

Pretty much all of the old games will not be recompiled to work on ARM (developers have moved on long ago) and I don't expect to see many new games being cross-developed if the architecture is so wildly different.

Using emulation if possible of course, but that will result in worse performance, less efficiency and more power draw even for simple games.

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It's been discussed. Apple has never been particularly concerned with gaming, and developers' Mac support is pretty thin as it is, so I doubt Apple sees it as much of a sacrifice.

This also might make creating games for Apple devices a little more attractive since you can now get your game on three platforms instead of two for roughly the same amount of work.

 

[timshundo]

I lived through the last cpu architecture transition AND was early adopter and I remember it being pretty painless. Universal apps were quickly available and rosetta ran apps as well as my previous PPC iMac could. I played so much halo CE online and even that got a universal binary upgrade!

Everyone was really excited that now that we were x86, we'd get all the games PCs were getting.... LOL. Shitty ports years after the original release; nothing changed. So with that hope dashed, bring on ARM. Gamers will never pick a Mac for games and that's OK. Apple gets to hone in on Apple Arcade indie developers and move on. Most Mac users get all their gaming through consoles anyway. Next gen consoles are basically small gaming rigs anyway so...

Agreed with everyone; this will only work if x86-64 emulation is AS GOOD as, let's say, a current gen MacBook Pro. I do need full performance on FCP X tho so if they've got an ARM version ready, I good to go. After that, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, After Effects, and illustrator is all I need. Figma runs in a browser so.... Yeah! Bring it! I'm excited.

I dont even dual boot to windows anymore. I just have a little Win 10 virtualization through Parallels that solves all my compatibility needs.

hyped!

 

[The_Inquisitor]

As a developer I run windows on my PC to test Edge and IE11. Unless I can run windows 7 on an ARM processor this is going to be a problem.

 

[Terrell]

One thing I thought about is the amount of macs used in academics, and while a lot are used for just writing, many are used for science and engineering for programming or computing (easy) things.
So what happens once Matlab, Mathematica and other academia software stop working?
I don't know if macs will reign in those places after the change.

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MathWorks apparently is ready to discuss their plans for supporting ARM64 architecture.... if you're willing to sign an NDA. https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcen...here-for-native-support-on-arm-v8-64-bit-cpus

As for Wolfram Mathematica, they apparently support a version for Raspberry Pi, which is ARM-based, so I don't think there's much to worry about there.

 

[hateradio]

As a developer I run windows on my PC to test Edge and IE11. Unless I can run windows 7 on an ARM processor this is going to be a problem.

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Hopefully, in two years you'll have a new job where you don't have to do that.

 

[The_Inquisitor]

Hopefully, in two years you'll have a new job where you don't have to do that.

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I won't be a front end developer? Sorry is this sarcasm?

 

[Deleted member 2474]

One thing I thought about is the amount of macs used in academics, and while a lot are used for just writing, many are used for science and engineering for programming or computing (easy) things.
So what happens once Matlab, Mathematica and other academia software stop working?
I don't know if macs will reign in those places after the change.

Click to shrink...

back in the powerpc -> intel switch mathematica was one of the apps they showed off at wwdc to demonstrate how easy it is to port between architectures. they had the mac version of mathematica up and running on intel in like a single day.

Apple WWDC 2005

youtu.be

people really overestimate how much most software development cares about the underlying cpu architecture.

 

[kami_sama]

MathWorks apparently is ready to discuss their plans for supporting ARM64 architecture.... if you're willing to sign an NDA. https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcen...here-for-native-support-on-arm-v8-64-bit-cpus

As for Wolfram Mathematica, they apparently support a version for Raspberry Pi, which is ARM-based, so I don't think there's much to worry about there.

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That's good to know.

back in the powerpc -> intel switch mathematica was one of the apps they showed off at wwdc to demonstrate how easy it is to port between architectures. they had the mac version of mathematica up and running on intel in like a single day.

Apple WWDC 2005

youtu.be

people really overestimate how much most software development cares about the underlying cpu architecture.

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Oh, so this has already been done before.

 

[ErrorJustin]

I understand and recognize that this is overall good news but I'm personally bummed about it. I've been bootcamping fairly high-end macbook pros into Windows for gaming for over a decade now. With a dedicated GPU they have always beasted through current-gen games believe it or not ("beasted" in the scale of hat a laptop can do, of course)

Any thought on how long it'd be until App support for Intel macs wound down? If the rollout doesn't start until 2021 and doesn't hit the whole line until 2022 or 2023 they'd probably support Intel machines until 2025 at least, right?

I just bought a very pricey Macbook Pro (16'' 2.3GHZ i9, w/ Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB) in January and I love it, but I'll be pretty upset if I don't get 5-6 years of use out of it at minimum. Ideally 7+ years like my last MBP.

 

[ClivePwned]

I got into Macs just at the tail end of the power PC era and had a G4 PowerBook and a last gen quadcore G5 powermac at work. They were great, but I also got myself the first gen intel iMac, which despite being down on power, ran a lot better than the powermac for general use. I was still able to use software the Power PC stuff for several years after the transition.

The first year of universal apps and the odd thing not working wasn't terrible. The only thing that was a pain was Adobe, surprise.
When I was able to combine Windows PC and Mac on one machine thanks to bootcamp, that was fucking amazing and that would be a loss. I picked up a specced up 8 core imac late last year and have barely touched the windows side in 4 months so, IDK, maybe I'll just get a separate Windows machine for that stuff after the arm transition. I am at least another 2 years of replacing my current MBA so with luck, i'll miss the worst of the chnageover (again, it wasn't so bad last time).

 

[Terrell]

Any thought on how long it'd be until App support for Intel macs wound down? If the rollout doesn't start until 2021 and doesn't hit the whole line until 2022 or 2023 they'd probably support Intel machines until 2025 at least, right?

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Well, the PowerPC-to-Intel jump was a LOT more complicated than Intel-to-ARM would be, just by virtue of how different the software development landscape is compared to 2006. And the PowerPC-Intel transition was fully completed in 3 years and 1 month when Snow Leopard killed Rosetta dead and rendered the PowerPC code in universal binaries useless bulk on a hard drive. Adobe made the Intel transition in 9 months, and that was when there was no indication that they were prepping for such a move, unlike now with iOS versions of their software effectively being ARM architecture betas with an initially limited feature set.
So chances are this transition will follow a very similar or shorter timeline, so if ARM Macs are introduced in 2021, I expect the hardware lineup fully switched over by 2022 like it was with the Intel transition and for the software side of it to be completely wrapped up by 2024 or earlier.

 

[kiguel182]

I totally agree with the issues related to cross-platform development and how Apple is making their OS less and less developer friendly and, therefore, consumer friendly.

Unfortunately they are doing this while still on Intel. ARM will at least have benefits to the consumer. Catalina is a terrible OS that made me start moving from Macs after like 10 years. Killing OpenGL and 32 bit apps sucked.

I think Intel is slowing down improvements to their laptops. But Apple and killing legacy software and not using cross-platform tools is another issue (and a big one).

 

[Waveset]

Been through this before with PPC > Intel, its a pain but the payoff should be worth it.