Apple Abandons Intel and Maybe AMD Radeon as well

Apple has announced its long-rumored move to its own silicon (using the Arm Instruction Set) and has abandoned Intel and x86. Since its processors have built-in GPUs, this could also mean the end of its relationship with AMD.




#garyexplains

[Ratteler]

Everyone get ready for a Raspberry Pintosh. :-D

[ashishpatel]

Intel is getting rekted on all fronts.

First with qcom.
Then with Amd.
Now with Apple.

[selentatsukienjoyer]

What I love from this is, Intel, AMD, and Quallcomm will also innovate to optimizing each of their own product

[_IronLion_]

Regarding the GPU, there are leaks that AMD is making custom RDNA2 GPU's specifically for Apple, so they'll probably stick with AMD for that.

[wacesferpit]

I don't mind ARM getting more popular, but my paranoia is for manufacturers to try to use the SoC deal to make their hardware even more like black boxes with highly integrated firmware that are almost impossible to repair and really difficult to develop to without the OEM's tools.

[CommodoreFan]

I guess all the Hackintosh crowd will either have to pony up for Apple silicon, or come join us penguins on Linux. All are welcome. 😀🐧

[mvj]

And this will propagate arm optimised programs on windows too!!!

[odw]

The largest question is indeed not just app compatibility, but also app performance. Day-to-day users (like students for example) using first-party Apple applications will probably be better off. ARM is quite amazing for battery life. But I wonder whether the transition will be as smooth for other key audiences like creatives and coders. It's nice to have a compatibility/emulation layer, but for third-party DAWs/video editing and coding IDEs, performance matters a lot. So I'm curious whether they will succeed in not alienating those consumers. x86/x64 is a really ugly inefficient instruction set though, so if the transition works out, the competition and innovation could be very good for the overall hardware market.

[ChrisBa]

Imagine an macbook with an arm soc and an 100w batterie. 3 days of battery life

[mas]

2005 Apple moves from PowerPC to Intel
2020 Apple moves from Intel to fricken ARM.
Now, where are the intel leadership that chopped of the XScale program now? 🤣

[nrg]

Looks to me like Apple eventually wants to lock down macOS like iOS. They're slowly building up the walls of the macOS garden! Are we going to be able to run non-store apps in the future? Can we run something on the machine that's not macOS? It's these practices that make me dislike Apple products of late. If I purchase something I want to be able to use it how I want to use it! For example if they drop support for the product when it gets old, I want to be able to install a custom OS or something to keep it going!

[DesignTechie]

T series processers are already in Mac’s as the co processer to keep with the naming hierarchy it would be nice if it’s dubbed T3 QC which now that I say is kind of ominous because of terminator

[nrg]

6502 to 68k, 68k to PPC, PPC to Intel, Intel to ARM. That's 4 arch transitions. And every time they've offered short term transition products then not long after drop support. My PC can still technically run 8086 software!

[nmadfernan]

the industry moves to low energy, high efficient processors. im thinking how the data centers will transition.

[jlu]

What's interesting is that iOS was once based off of macOS, now it seems they are leveraging the matured iOS to form the base for macOS of the future. I wonder if the Mac App Store will be amalgamated into the App Store?

[chrisdistant]

I believe they say “in a matter of days” you get your apps ported, because some performance critical parts of code might have to be rewritten to better suit the ARM instruction set, even if that may actually not make a big difference most of the time.

[yanksmc]

The first thing I thought of when Apple announced the move was “I can’t wait for Gary’s content” lol

[perfectionbox]

Hopefully they develop a local cloud where all my data/apps seamlessly is shared between tablet, phone, laptop and desktop w/o a global cloud

[legolas]

In a coupe days because the Xcode 12 version for Arm is not ready on intel machine yet. Apple says will be available soon to build universal 2 package when they combine Xcode 12 for arm and intel.

[pweddy]

The A12z is basically the same as the a12x, so everything that ran in the presentation was running on a 2 year old SOC. The cores got a 20% bump going to a13 some rumors suggest a 30% uplift for the a14. Since it’s going to be 5nm I suspect the rumors are probably close to the mark. An a14 based cpu withe the rumored 8big/4small would be a beast between 2 and 2.6 times as fast as an a12z.