Apple Mac computers will use own brand CPUs from 2020

[DanceswithUnix]

Considering they use arm cores as the base of their cpu's they were hit with meltdown and spectre on their 'own brand cpu's' too

ARM is just the ISA that Apple's home grown cores use, I haven't seen any mention of how susceptible their implementation is to Meltdown or Spectre. In the same way that AMD are not the same risk level as Intel chips, Apple's cores could be better or worse off than an off the shelf A73.

As for the performance bit, I didn't think Apple kit has any sort of performance reputation really? Maybe that's just me, but I hear people complain about gaming ability for example. If they are aiming for thin & light laptops, their ARM chips are probably about good enough already compared to the low wattage Intel parts.

[keithwalton]

They'll start with something like the macbook air, drop in their latest arm chip and brand the os ios pro, or something similar and brand it as the greatest/bravest thing to happen to the laptop ever. They will then slowly migrate the whole product line over.

After all ios has a far larger user base and software library than osX will ever have and a laptop thats marginally faster than a tablet will work for most modern apple buyers as long as it looked right

[spolsh]

It's Bionic - it'll be the 6 million dollar mac.

[LSG501]

Apple does not need to convince adobe to port their programs to ARM, because apple has already convinced them to do this for the ipad pro (and android mobile devices). All apple need to do now is a new API for keyboard support (leave in the touchscreen on the ipad-book, for easier compatibility) and to jenga the ARM hardware into a folding unibody chassis (a pretty easy task)

iOS apps are nowhere near what you get on the desktop... Producing a limited functionality app specifically for the iPad is not the same as porting the bloated mess of code that is adobe creative suite.

Not scalable? The ARM cores that are getting packed 48-to-a-chip?

They're specifically designed for server use, completely different type of workload to a desktop or workstation. Note also I said at present, I know they can be bolted together like the centriq.

ARM is just the ISA that Apple's home grown cores use, I haven't seen any mention of how susceptible their implementation is to Meltdown or Spectre. In the same way that AMD are not the same risk level as Intel chips, Apple's cores could be better or worse off than an off the shelf A73.

It's not like apple is going to come out and say exactly how badly they've been hit by it but they did say even iOS based devices are affected and they needed patching.

[3dcandy]

I can't see it. More like use a custom AMD design licensed from them (which has an x86 license) and go from there. AMD's great strength is in the modular approach - so great that even Intel have bowed
Use 4 x AMD cores and a Vega unit to produce something low power but good enough for a Macbook Air type device is what I'd expect with it being scaled to 8 cores and then 16 for a dustbin type device

[DanceswithUnix]

I can't see it. More like use a custom AMD design licensed from them (which has an x86 license) and go from there. AMD's great strength is in the modular approach - so great that even Intel have bowed
Use 4 x AMD cores and a Vega unit to produce something low power but good enough for a Macbook Air type device is what I'd expect with it being scaled to 8 cores and then 16 for a dustbin type device

I can't see that though

That wouldn't make use of Apple's CPU design expertise and investment.
The only thing going for using an AMD64 CPU is Intel's current performance in a mass market part, going AMD would lose that.
It would be awkward to integrate Apple's new GPU design with an AMD CPU core.

Parts like the A9X and A10X are pretty big lumps of silicon, it would need a deeper pipeline to get the boost clock speed up to make it really laptop capable.

[LSG501]

It would be awkward to integrate Apple's new GPU design with an AMD CPU core.

AMD are/were arm licensed to use arm architecture, not sure if it's the full license where they can do their own arm designs or just to reuse the arm designed cores, and they released an arm based server opteron. Now I'm not saying that AMD and Apple would work together but there's no reason that AMD couldn't design an interconnect between their gpu and apple's core, they've already done it with Intel, albeit a bit more easily due to being x86/x64.

Actually thinking about it, at a basic level they just need a 'pcie connection' to connect a gpu to any cpu that has driver support

[3dcandy]

I can't see that though

That wouldn't make use of Apple's CPU design expertise and investment.
The only thing going for using an AMD64 CPU is Intel's current performance in a mass market part, going AMD would lose that.
It would be awkward to integrate Apple's new GPU design with an AMD CPU core.

Parts like the A9X and A10X are pretty big lumps of silicon, it would need a deeper pipeline to get the boost clock speed up to make it really laptop capable.

Possibly - but then they will lose a rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishload of market share because it will be iOS on everything and I can't see many people using an iOS based laptop or pc. Unless they either run a translation level or get everyone to re-compile and rewrite the software which is also something I can't see happening. Perhaps they will just make an ARM version of osx. Whichever way it goes the current trajectory Apple are on of making life difficult for everybody will harm them

[scaryjim]

AMD are/were arm licensed to use arm architecture, not sure if it's the full license where they can do their own arm designs or just to reuse the arm designed cores, and they released an arm based server opteron. Now I'm not saying that AMD and Apple would work together but there's no reason that AMD couldn't design an interconnect between their gpu and apple's core, they've already done it with Intel, albeit a bit more easily due to being x86/x64.

Actually thinking about it, at a basic level they just need a 'pcie connection' to connect a gpu to any cpu that has driver support

Not sure whether you're suggesting an AMD Arm CPU + Apple GPU, or Apple CPU core + AMD GPU here. And neither make sense from Apple's PoV, as they have both CPU and GPU designed in-house already. All they need to do is find a way to bump their CPU core performance sufficiently to meet the needs of the majority of OSX users. There's absolutely no reason they can't use dGPUs with an Arm CPU if they decide they need more graphical oomph ... as you say, they just need a PCIe cluster on the SoC.

Possibly - but then they will lose a rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishload of market share because it will be iOS on everything and I can't see many people using an iOS based laptop or pc. Unless they either run a translation level or get everyone to re-compile and rewrite the software which is also something I can't see happening. Perhaps they will just make an ARM version of osx. Whichever way it goes the current trajectory Apple are on of making life difficult for everybody will harm them

People said pretty much exactly the same things when Apple moved from Power to x86 over a decade ago. They seemed to survive that transition somehow...

I suspect we'll initially see OSX compiled for Arm, with a virtualisation layer to run native x86 apps, followed by a streamlining of iOS and OSX into a combined product (much like MS are doing with the Windows 10 line), and eventually a high-level runtime to do away with most native applications. Perhaps it'll even persuade Adobe to clean up the codebases for their creative products...

[3dcandy]

All good points... but the world has changed. For example the removal of USB on many Macs has stopped my musician friends from updating because most music hardware is still in usb2 status (because it just works and no need for more/better). Plus they tend to use older software etc. A quick chat about 2-3 months back was an almost unanimous vote of no upgrades here/might move to Windows because of it
A move to change that would mean they would lose that market overnight unless they did something awesome to make older software run. I know Apple aren't worried about that - but they will be if that niche market dries up overnight

[3dcandy]

And re: Adobe - a graphic designer mate of mine is going to swap back from Mac to PC because for her spending a nominal amount results in better performance on CC these days

[Biscuit]

... CPU core performance sufficiently to meet the needs of the majority of OSX users.

This is the key element. Most people buy macOS because its shiny and (apparently) "just works". Hell, some of the newer models that dont have cooling fans will barely even turbo before they start thermal throttling but 9/10 people wont notice this, as the brief turbo clocks will be enough to get them through the workloads they're likely to be doing.
Apple doesn't, and hasn't cared about the power users for some time.

[DanceswithUnix]

Possibly - but then they will lose a rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishload of market share because it will be iOS on everything and I can't see many people using an iOS based laptop or pc. Unless they either run a translation level or get everyone to re-compile and rewrite the software which is also something I can't see happening. Perhaps they will just make an ARM version of osx. Whichever way it goes the current trajectory Apple are on of making life difficult for everybody will harm them

In the past they have convinced companies to ship "fat" binaries which contain compiled code for old and new architectures. So that is a technology that already exists and is tried and tested, but it would need a while to get companies to buy into the idea, compile up and start shipping software and upgrades in fat format. If they want to ship hardware in 2020 it would be best to give a couple of year's notice so telling people in early 2018 should do it

Then there are the people running cloud based MS Office or Google docs. They won't care or notice.

Edit: As well as the obvious transitions, Apple also went through the "32 bit clean" transition where dodgy 68000 code tricks no longer worked on 68020 and higher. That was a bit easier as code could be compiled that would run happily on both, but it was still an instruction set change and an upheaval where old code wouldn't just run on new hardware.

[TheAnimus]

Then there are the people running cloud based MS Office or Google docs. They won't care or notice.

God help them!

[shaithis]

I can see the end result of this being slower Macs and I bet the prices go up as well....