Apple insiders say firm is testing CPUs with 32+ cores

[kompukare]

They need to be fined for all this nonsense. All you end up with is poorer countries being lumbered with tons of electronic waste.

Would be nice to see!
Thing is, Apple already think that the agreement with the EC about about phone chargers doesn't apply to them.
Aggreements with Apple don't seem to worth much, so the next time the EC has to put the weight of an actual directive behind any 'agreements' .

[Kato-2]

When do you think we’ll see x86 become dead to the end user? (Either to ARM or RISCV) And what was the last similarly huge shift in personal computing?

About 10-20 years.

1 - Arm designs have to get good enough for PC's.

2 - emulation were the performance is equal to or better than x86 to preserve the decades of software.

3 - porting as much new/current software as possible to native Arm.

Windows Arm PC's are nowhere anywhere near the above 3.

Apple on other other hand has had a massive Arm based user base on its iPhone it can leverage and because Apple keep its developer base in lockstep with the company it can pull off this kind of change.

Windows and Linux cannot, everything moves at different speeds.

This aint new back in the 90's PowerPC RISC designs were all the rage, Windows NT ran on them with x86 emulation, it did not prevail.

[3dcandy]

About 10-20 years.

1 - Arm designs have to get good enough for PC's.

2 - emulation were the performance is equal to or better than x86 to preserve the decades of software.

3 - porting as much new/current software as possible to native Arm.

Windows Arm PC's are nowhere anywhere near the above 3.

Apple on other other hand has had a massive Arm based user base on its iPhone it can leverage and because Apple keep its developer base in lockstep with the company it can pull off this kind of change.

Windows and Linux cannot, everything moves at different speeds.

This aint new back in the 90's PowerPC RISC designs were all the rage, Windows NT ran on them with x86 emulation, it did not prevail.

Broadly agreeing except Linux on ARM is gaining rapidly and closing the gap quickly. Many builds now quicker to come out on ARM than X86

[3dcandy]

About 10-20 years.

1 - Arm designs have to get good enough for PC's.

2 - emulation were the performance is equal to or better than x86 to preserve the decades of software.

3 - porting as much new/current software as possible to native Arm.

Windows Arm PC's are nowhere anywhere near the above 3.

Apple on other other hand has had a massive Arm based user base on its iPhone it can leverage and because Apple keep its developer base in lockstep with the company it can pull off this kind of change.

Windows and Linux cannot, everything moves at different speeds.

This aint new back in the 90's PowerPC RISC designs were all the rage, Windows NT ran on them with x86 emulation, it did not prevail.

Oh and ARM is good enough for PC's. Just not mainstream yet and as this site is broadly for enthusiasts that skew it a lot. Some great SBC's coming out and look at the Pi 400. Flash an sd card and have a great Amiga emulator for retro games. Can run a desktop too if you want. And the Pi 4 is slow, quad core only. Many SBC's have hex core cpu's with much faster gfx - just many people haven't even heard of them. Qualcomm have got a few 8 core SoC's that run Linux great, just you never see them in the flesh

[Tabbykatze]

Would be nice to see!
Thing is, Apple already think that the agreement with the EC about about phone chargers doesn't apply to them.
Aggreements with Apple don't seem to worth much, so the next time the EC has to put the weight of an actual directive behind any 'agreements' .

The other issue is that Apple is such a behemoth, putting a restriction on the sale of Apple products would probably harm the economy in the EU.

I wish governments would take Apple to task, and lay a slap down in both repairability and e-waste but it would have to be a combined motion between both the EU and the US else Apple won't care.

[MrJim]

More Apple disposable stuff,so expect even more soldiered parts,and little end user upgradeability or repairability. Apple boasts about how much recycled aluminium they used but made their latest iProducts even less easier to repair.

They and other companies are hypocritical when they go on about the environment. Yet,they continue to make products which are harder and harder to repair,with more and more soldiered and glued parts. I really hope the right to repair movements get more traction,and these companies get massively fined for computers which are on purpose made not to be repaired. Most of the broken electronics is shipped to poorer countries which end up paying the costs of all of this.

The European Union are planning to introduce regulations regarding 'right to repair'. Although with our imminent leaving of the EU, whether the UK will follow suit is another matter...

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/...ight-to-repair

[Xlucine]

Broadly agreeing except Linux on ARM is gaining rapidly and closing the gap quickly. Many builds now quicker to come out on ARM than X86

Is anyone actually using that as their desktop though? Your only option is SBCs, and even the powerful ones are far less responsive when web browsing than x86 machines (with an order of magnitude more power draw)

Oh and ARM is good enough for PC's. Just not mainstream yet and as this site is broadly for enthusiasts that skew it a lot. Some great SBC's coming out and look at the Pi 400. Flash an sd card and have a great Amiga emulator for retro games. Can run a desktop too if you want. And the Pi 4 is slow, quad core only. Many SBC's have hex core cpu's with much faster gfx - just many people haven't even heard of them. Qualcomm have got a few 8 core SoC's that run Linux great, just you never see them in the flesh

Pi4 is respectable by SBC standards - terrible by smartphone standards, but those always take a while to filter down to SBCs*. The 6 core ones aren't much better, you're just trading A72s for A52s

* Given you can get smartphones with pretty powerful chips, and lots of built in storage, and oodles of RAM, and a battery, and some cameras, and a touchscreen for not much more than quite naff SBCs, I'm not sure why we don't see more "premium" SBCs with modern SoCs. You can get a phone with a snapdragon 730 that would cream any SBC on the market (A76 cores! Beefy modern GPU! 6 A55 cores - the lower power part is 1.5 odroid C4s!) for a bit over £200 from a name brand like motorola, so you ought to be able to put out an SBC with one for a bit more than pi4 8GB money

[3dcandy]

Is anyone actually using that as their desktop though? Your only option is SBCs, and even the powerful ones are far less responsive when web browsing than x86 machines (with an order of magnitude more power draw)



Pi4 is respectable by SBC standards - terrible by smartphone standards, but those always take a while to filter down to SBCs*. The 6 core ones aren't much better, you're just trading A72s for A52s

* Given you can get smartphones with pretty powerful chips, and lots of built in storage, and oodles of RAM, and a battery, and some cameras, and a touchscreen for not much more than quite naff SBCs, I'm not sure why we don't see more "premium" SBCs with modern SoCs. You can get a phone with a snapdragon 730 that would cream any SBC on the market (A76 cores! Beefy modern GPU! 6 A55 cores - the lower power part is 1.5 odroid C4s!) for a bit over £200 from a name brand like motorola, so you ought to be able to put out an SBC with one for a bit more than pi4 8GB money

Again - here in the UK we don't see as many nice SBC's being readily available. Pi 4 with 8gb is what everybody thinks about. Nvidia Jetsons and similar just never seem to be available. I agree there are some lovely SoC's available, mobile ones for example and there are SBC's available in China for example with some Exynos 8-core SoC's that are pretty decent. But here in the UK there is no standardised OS choices, people look at Android and think it's a mobile OS. People don't want to compile source or have workarounds to get things working any more - apart from the Pi and that really simple BBC thing we have moved away from that. People losing their minds over Apples M1 chip and how good it is - it should be they spent millions getting to that point and are the main TSMC 5nm customer right now. And they threw transistors at making it emulate X86 and doing some things they wanted! Problem is, the market for an ARM based desktop in the UK is tiny. Probably less than 10k sales in total. Throw in that anybody would look at the Pi 400 and not any further and there is the issue. To beat the Pi 400 is quite easy in power and performance but price is keen. Less than £100 shipped with a 4gb old style keyboard pc and mouse with os already on an sd card - I stopped looking at second hand Amigas for some retro gaming as soon as it was announced. We have a Pi 3+ in a Sega case for our retro gaming needs - tempted to go Pi 4 in the nice SNES case that is available with a SATA port and an enclosure that looks like a cartridge and takes a 2.5" HD or SSD but again you're up to around £100 without the ease of a Pi 400

Easier in the UK to get hold of an Android TV box, flash a different OS or use as Android. Cheap wireless mouse and keyboard set and large SD card and off you go. Android has better support for gpu acceleration you can connect it to your tv easily enough and boom...
But do people want it - they certainly don't need it. If a big supplier (like Apple have) comes along and makes a decent bit of hardware, that just works with a decent ARM based SoC and gets a decent version of say Debian or Android included in the box and installed they *may* have a fighting chance - but it says it all when Apple release something and everybody suddenly goes wild when in reality it is pretty limited, basic io and locked down completely

[DanceswithUnix]

When do you think we’ll see x86 become dead to the end user? (Either to ARM or RISCV) And what was the last similarly huge shift in personal computing?

I would say x86 will be dead to the end user roughly never, sad to say since it is Not My Favourite Architecture.

Last similarly huge shift in personal computing? There are only two. The latest was the shift to AMD64 as a 64 bit architecture, at least cutting off Intel's attempt to push us into them as a single source of Itanium parts. The first one was when the PC came out. At the time any interesting computer was based on the 68000 CPU, but then thanks to being blessed by IBM in their PC which, because it was IBM, businesses bought by the skip load; the laughably poor 8086 with its architectural limit of 1MB, stupid segmented addressing and utter lack of CPU registers started to become the dominant architecture in computing, putting the whole industry back by probably a decade with all the himem, lowmem, lim ems extensions etc and the performance hit of incrementing a huge pointer taking several instructions.

So an architecture that started off crippled won the race to supremacy. In the 90's the fastest thing out there was the DEC Alpha which could emulate much 386 code something like 3 times faster than a genuine Intel Pentium CPU whilst running the same Windows NT natively, but no-one bought it. RISC PC attempts based on MIPS and later PowerPC architectures never got off the ground (I never even saw one of the MIPS ones except in pictures).

Eventually I expect RISC-V will eat into server space as well as the low end embedded and IOT markets, but the PC is an Intel stronghold. You would think that everyone carrying a rather capable ARM based machine in their pocket would change how people act, but it doesn't seem to.