<story><title>Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21295475/apple-mac-processors-arm-silicon-chips-wwdc-2020</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Teknoman117</author><text>I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.</text></item><item><author>ianhowson</author><text>&amp;gt; So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m predicting the opposite: you won&amp;#x27;t actually see any difference.&lt;p&gt;Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you&amp;#x27;ll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gains [1]. Not one thing that they demoed requires any meaningful CPU power.&lt;p&gt;Similarly, while ARM parts &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; more efficient than x86 per compute cycle, it&amp;#x27;s not a dramatic change.&lt;p&gt;The big changes, I think, are more mundane:&lt;p&gt;- Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped&lt;p&gt;- Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators. They will probably put that stuff in T2 for Intel Macs. If they&amp;#x27;re already shipping T2 on every machine, with a bunch of CPU cores, why not just make those CPU cores big enough for the main workload?&lt;p&gt;Doubling CPU perf is meaningless if you can ship the right accelerators that&amp;#x27;ll do 100x energy&amp;#x2F;perf for video compression, crypto and graphics.&lt;p&gt;[1] for a regular web browsing type user; obviously if you&amp;#x27;re compiling stuff this may not apply; if that is true you&amp;#x27;re almost certainly better off just getting a Linux desktop for the heavy lifting</text></item><item><author>vessenes</author><text>Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers.&lt;p&gt;Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance&amp;#x2F;watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip.&lt;p&gt;Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; Intel’s thrashing has cost them at least two significant update cycles on the macbook line in the last six years. Search this fine site for complaints about how new mac laptops don’t have real performance benefits over old ones —- those complaints are 100% down to being saddled with Intel.&lt;p&gt;Apple has a functional corporate culture that &lt;i&gt;ships&lt;/i&gt;; adding complete control of the hardware stack in is going to make for better products, full stop.&lt;p&gt;Apple has to pay Intel and AMD profit margins for their mac systems. They are going to be able to put this margin back into a combination of profit and tech budget as they choose. Early days they are likely to plow all this back into performance, a win for consumers.&lt;p&gt;So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. Alternately a Macbook Air type with 16 hours plus strong 4k performance. You’re not going to want an Intel mac even as of January of 2021, unless you have a very unusual set of requirements.&lt;p&gt;I think they may also start making a real push on the ML side in the next year, which will be &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; interesting; it’s exciting to imagine what Apple’s fully vertically integrated company could do controlling hardware, OS and ML stack.&lt;p&gt;One interesting question I think is outstanding - from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized, vs AMD64. I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen — I wonder if systems developers will get on board, deal with slower &amp;#x2F; higher battery draw intel virtualization, or move on from Apple.&lt;p&gt;Languages like Go with supremely simple cross architecture support might get a boost here. Rust seems behind on ARM, for instance; I bet that will change in the next year or two. I don’t imagine that developing Intel server binaries on an ARM laptop with Rust will be pleasant.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ogre_codes</author><text>&amp;gt; I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.&lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#x27;s margins are consistent, if their costs go down significantly, pricing comes down or features increase. The iPad is a perfect example, for years it was $500 and they just kept increasing the feature-set until eventually they could deliver the base product for significantly less.&lt;p&gt;Shareholders benefit from increased market share just as much as they do from increasing margins, arguably more. The base iPad and the iPhone SE both &amp;quot;cannibalize&amp;quot; their higher end products, but significantly expand their base. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised at all to see a $800 MacBook enter their lineup shipping with the same CPU as the iPad.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21295475/apple-mac-processors-arm-silicon-chips-wwdc-2020</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Teknoman117</author><text>I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.</text></item><item><author>ianhowson</author><text>&amp;gt; So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m predicting the opposite: you won&amp;#x27;t actually see any difference.&lt;p&gt;Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you&amp;#x27;ll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gains [1]. Not one thing that they demoed requires any meaningful CPU power.&lt;p&gt;Similarly, while ARM parts &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; more efficient than x86 per compute cycle, it&amp;#x27;s not a dramatic change.&lt;p&gt;The big changes, I think, are more mundane:&lt;p&gt;- Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped&lt;p&gt;- Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators. They will probably put that stuff in T2 for Intel Macs. If they&amp;#x27;re already shipping T2 on every machine, with a bunch of CPU cores, why not just make those CPU cores big enough for the main workload?&lt;p&gt;Doubling CPU perf is meaningless if you can ship the right accelerators that&amp;#x27;ll do 100x energy&amp;#x2F;perf for video compression, crypto and graphics.&lt;p&gt;[1] for a regular web browsing type user; obviously if you&amp;#x27;re compiling stuff this may not apply; if that is true you&amp;#x27;re almost certainly better off just getting a Linux desktop for the heavy lifting</text></item><item><author>vessenes</author><text>Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers.&lt;p&gt;Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance&amp;#x2F;watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip.&lt;p&gt;Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; Intel’s thrashing has cost them at least two significant update cycles on the macbook line in the last six years. Search this fine site for complaints about how new mac laptops don’t have real performance benefits over old ones —- those complaints are 100% down to being saddled with Intel.&lt;p&gt;Apple has a functional corporate culture that &lt;i&gt;ships&lt;/i&gt;; adding complete control of the hardware stack in is going to make for better products, full stop.&lt;p&gt;Apple has to pay Intel and AMD profit margins for their mac systems. They are going to be able to put this margin back into a combination of profit and tech budget as they choose. Early days they are likely to plow all this back into performance, a win for consumers.&lt;p&gt;So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. Alternately a Macbook Air type with 16 hours plus strong 4k performance. You’re not going to want an Intel mac even as of January of 2021, unless you have a very unusual set of requirements.&lt;p&gt;I think they may also start making a real push on the ML side in the next year, which will be &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; interesting; it’s exciting to imagine what Apple’s fully vertically integrated company could do controlling hardware, OS and ML stack.&lt;p&gt;One interesting question I think is outstanding - from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized, vs AMD64. I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen — I wonder if systems developers will get on board, deal with slower &amp;#x2F; higher battery draw intel virtualization, or move on from Apple.&lt;p&gt;Languages like Go with supremely simple cross architecture support might get a boost here. Rust seems behind on ARM, for instance; I bet that will change in the next year or two. I don’t imagine that developing Intel server binaries on an ARM laptop with Rust will be pleasant.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ianhowson</author><text>Bingo. Estimates vary wildly, but I&amp;#x27;ve seen figures saying that Axx CPUs cost Apple about $50 each. Even if it&amp;#x27;s more like $100, that&amp;#x27;s still an insane amount of additional profit per unit to be extracted. They don&amp;#x27;t need to deal with single-supplier hassles and they get much more control over what cores go into their SoC.&lt;p&gt;This is sort-of-OK for consumers but &lt;i&gt;amazing&lt;/i&gt; for Apple and its shareholers.</text></comment>