Apple reportedly plans ARM shift for laptops Apple may - and we emphasis that last word - have decided to transition its laptops from Intel processors to ARM-based CPUs Intel certainly has a fight on its hands in the media tablet market, currently dominated by ARM chippery, but does it need to worry about the laptop space too? It will if the allegation about Apple, made …
I think Apple will come up with more and different devices running iOS and iOS apps instead of coming with a laptop running OS X on ARM. There's the Apple TV and I wouldn't be surprised if the next thing would be a 30" all-in-one Apple TV, also running iOS. And then a desktop tablet with 15" or so you prop up on your desk and use with a BT keyboard and trackpad. Running iOS, of course. Or an 11" MBA running iOS instead of OS X, which would be very much like an iPad with a keyboard.
"I did a quick survey of the make of machines in use in the cafe. Two out of the three times Apple MacBooks came out at over 50% share, the other time at 40% share. Total sample size is now probably about 50 machines, so statistically significant.
What does this say?"
Absolutely nothing. If I go to a redneck beer-drinking-and-fishing hangout, I can "prove" that 90% of the population drives Ford pickup trucks.
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That said, moving to an ARM would be a smart move. They have superior power use (something like 1 watt at 1.2ghz), the modern designs do have a pretty strong FPU, they have "Neon" instruction set and a DSP which do virtually all video decoding work (it can decode videos using about 30mhz of processing power, and that is without using any video decoding support of the video chip.) A lot of OSX is heavily multithreaded, it'd be real easy to stick 8 or more dual-core ARM CPUs into a notebook, and still use less than the power budget of the existing Intel processor.
"If you recompile OSX for ARM64 and you keep the APIs identical, why would you need to emulate anything for additional software?"
The CPU must be emulated, a program is not just a string of API calls. CPU emulation technology is good but this can still be a significant slowdown. Of course, you are right though, none of the other hardware has to be emulated a bit. (Although I haven't tried it...) qemu for Linux can do exactly this -- for instance, put some Linux for Intel libraries and binaries on an ARM, and run them on the ARM... most system calls are the same, and qemu can "convert" a few platform-specific ones (usually different for historical reasons).
OSX supports "FAT" binaries (inherited from NextStep) -- these are binaries that contain, potentially, SPARC, Motorola 68K, PA-RISC, Motorola 68K, PowerPC, Intel, and (probably already) ARM code in a single binary (probably the Mach-O file format already has ARM support, since iOS is a mutant OSX).
So, if Apple flubs it you'll end up with these Macs that "can" support native code, but actually are constantly running everything under emulation, not getting the performance it should. If they do moderately well, by the time the ARM machiunes ship they can at least make sure video playback support and Apple's own apps use NEON and any available DSP (ARM video acceleration for instance, very effective)) *and* supports whatever video acceleration the video chip supports. If they get it right, they will release ASAP XCode, gcc, etc. that support Intel + ARM "FAT" binaries, as app makers rebuild the apps they naturally gain ARM support*, so by the time the ARM machines ship a fair amount of software can be ARM native.
*I've run Linux distros on PA-RISC, PowerPC (Mac) *and* an IBM POWER system, DEC Alpha, as well as Intel, I have a command-line only Debian install on my (ARM) phone too. None of these feel like a stripped down port, portable code is portable. I think most apps will be similar going from Intel OSX to ARM OSX, it'll just be a matter of hitting "build project" or whatever, not some troublesome porting process.
It's win win for Apple.
First off, the SOC will cost $10 instead of $200.
Secondly it certainly becomes a games type machine where the user has to buy everything from the APP store.
That 30% is worth billions and your average user is not bothered that they are barred from writing or even choosing where to buy software
Huh? Apple laptops are workstations and ARM 64-bit are still years away, maybe around 2014-15. Are you serious? Would people really run FCP, Avid etc on a ARM laptop in just years? Why would Apple benefit from another split of architectures? Would make no sense in keeping desktops and workstations on x86 if that happened, you could simply build bigger ARM-chips with more I/O, cache and memory bandwidth and more cores. But that would simply return them to the PowerPC-days of getting the tech developed and on par with Intel.
I can't help but think this strategy has 2 strands, one, lower cost processors for Apple, but keeping the premium pricing. Two, and maybe more importantly, a revitalisation of Apple's close tie-in between processor and hardware and death to the Intel hackintosh. Of course, the Hackintosh could be re-invented on ARM laptops, but this feels like a shift to iOS style laptops to me
Surely it's possible that both chips may coexist within the same laptop. Imagine being able to hot swap into iOS to significantly extend battery life. If say for example you were currently editing a doc located in the 'Cloud' and you had 10% battery left.... you could switch over to iOS and continue editing using significantly less battery power.
Why waste your time releasing an updated hardware to take advantage of Intel's new connection technology (Thunderbolt) to drop it in favour of a (yet another) CPU manufacturer.
Not withstanding the fact noted by others that the OS will need recompiling, and will lead to versioning compatabilities between the desktop and laptop and iOS versions of applications, why waste money tooling up for thunderbolt for a 4 (ish) week run of new hardware.
this surely, is a sham. As much I now questionApple for their recent (last 4 years) decisions in how to conduct business, I don't believe this is a serious story.
For a sort of iPad with built in keyboard device, somewhere between an existing Macbook Air and an iPad there's possibly a market for this but the idea that all their laptops would follow suit is daft. I have a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro, being able to work on both and swap software between them is essential (I use Logic mostly). Having different architectures just wouldn't be practical (a lot of music plugins allow you to install on multiple machines, you just swap the USB dongle to the one you're actually using at the time) so they'd have to shift the whole lot to one, where you'd suffer with the loss in processor performance and the return of Universal binaries, sure you could have a bagillion cores but OSX and Mac's have always been terrible at utilising multi-core environments efficiently (I think the only program I have that does it well is Handbrake). There's a lot of software that became available for OSX when Mac's adopted Intel thus making them more popular, Apple will know this.
> 7th May 2011 07:59 GMT
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> The ARM core, even today, is still about 32,000 transistors
Do you have a referencer for that?
(Not trying to snark. I was seriously trying to look up transistor counts and similar stats for modern ARM processors and drawing a blank. Google searches are overwhelmed with references to "Tri-Gate Transistors" and/or "2D" in contrast to that; failed to find on arm.com or wikipedia; etc.)
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