Apple Mac in 2020?

lukedlb

I read that Apple Macs will no longer use pentium processors in line with the rest of their hardware. Does this mean we should expect another revolution in their operating system akin to the one at the beginning of the century?
There may be more than a few mistakes/misunderstandings in this post. 

thermionic

I doubt it. Their mobile devices have been running on Apple processors (based on ARM designs) for years, and the operating systems have also been converging.

JezWynd

I sincerely hope not. The move to Intel from Power PC was traumatic (and costly) enough.

What it will do for development of apps and pricing is anyone's guess; though Apple seem to have a bigger slice of the laptop  market than they've ever had before (this purely based on the number of laptops I see in coffee shops, so it's perhaps not the most accurate guage!).

thermionic

Incidentally, my copy of Logic 9 stopped working (it won't even start) since I upgraded to High Sierra - not a major OS change, just a small incremental update the type of which I've done many times before with no problems. I was planning to get Logic X anyway at some point, but I'd very annoyed of course if a £200 package stopped working.

monquixote

It's all highly speculative at the moment.

They are already starting to use their own chips in Macs as the recent Macbook Pro and iMac Pro have the T1 and T2 chips which are system management chips.

The next version of iOS and MacOS will introduce universal apps so I don't think it would be too much of a jump if you started to see some ARM based Macbooks in 2-3 years, but they will probably be a replacement for the Air with the pro stuff staying Intel for quite a while.

Rara

Be interesting to see if the pricing changes. It's leaped a few hundred quid for Mac's in the last 2 years

Axe_meister

Personally I think it will be a mistake on their side. The Move to ARM is to make things thinner and lighter and be even more "lifestyle" BUT that will come at expense of performance.
Apple are already looking credibility in the profession workspace (Mac Pro? new MacBook pro) so a reduction in performance for more shiny features is a step backwards

Stuckfast

It could be a very shrewd move. Moore's Law has run out of steam and there is not much scope left for improving the power of an individual CPU, so it's quite likely that the future lies in parallel architectures. In that situation the ARM / Apple processors have a big advantage thanks to their lower power consumption and heat generation. So although each individual CPU is not as powerful as an Intel one, you can put a ton of them together in a way that is not really possible with Intel chips.

Danny1969

I think the plan is to use ARM coprocessors - validating security and handling some input functions . The main processor will be Intel I would have thought but could be wrong

monquixote

Danny1969 said:

I think the plan is to use ARM coprocessors - validating security and handling some input functions . The main processor will be Intel I would have thought but could be wrong

I think that's what they are doing already with the T1 and T2, but the rumour is they will eventually use them as main processors.

digitalscream

Stuckfast said:

It could be a very shrewd move. Moore's Law has run out of steam and there is not much scope left for improving the power of an individual CPU, so it's quite likely that the future lies in parallel architectures. In that situation the ARM / Apple processors have a big advantage thanks to their lower power consumption and heat generation. So although each individual CPU is not as powerful as an Intel one, you can put a ton of them together in a way that is not really possible with Intel chips.

Moore's Law is running out of steam, yes, but that only applies to the CPUs at the top end of the performance charts. Under synthetic pure-CPU benchmarks, a recent quad-core i7 has about 5-6 times the processing capacity of the top-end consumer-grade ARM CPUs.

The reason the A11 Bionic chips look so good in single-threaded performance is that the controller lets all the cores (which aren't equal, by the way - they only have two performance cores) work on the same thread. That's why the multi-threaded performance is much closer to the single-threaded performance than you'd expect for a 6-core CPU. They can do brilliantly with a single task, but get them to do other menial stuff while performing that single task and the performance starts to drop significantly. Hence them being great CPUs for phones and tablets, but not necessarily good for desktop use.

The irony is that if you give the A10 or A11 CPUs a proper multithreaded load - which is supposed to be ARM's strength - like video encoding, or a DAW, it'll wet the bed in comparison with their single-threaded scores.

Of course, with that tech developed further, it's possible that things could begin to approach parity. However, the performance/watt and heat efficiency will drop dramatically; there's a very good reason that the A10 and A11 have only two performance cores out of six. We're a long way from that.