from Hacker News

Apple Plans to Announce Move to Its Own Mac Chips at WWDC

by sleepyshift on 6/9/20, 10:33 AM with 456 comments

• by Shank on 6/9/20, 5:00 PM

  Don't get me wrong. I love the potential native performance gains from this transition, but I can't help but just be a tiny bit scared for the future of my day to day work.

  For better or for worse, my company uses Docker for Mac for the vast majority of the stack that I don't work on but need to actively develop. I'm already paying a huge VM cost and it's pretty terrible. I don't see Apple working on any kind of native containerization solution. Does that mean that I'm going to be eating the current VM cost + x86_64 virtualization cost in the future?

  I really want to keep using macOS as a platform. I know I can just stay on the hardware I have, but it's not really practical to be on an end of life architecture. It seems just a tad shortsighted to ditch x86_64 when a lot of people depend on it specifically because it's a shared architecture with other platforms.

• by hylaride on 6/9/20, 11:24 AM

  Moving to it’s own chips may be fine and all, but I’d much prefer Apple to deal with the rotting quality of its OSes first.

• by neximo64 on 6/9/20, 11:14 AM

  Hopefully the new macs are faster. Here's something you can try yourself:

  My 10 year old Macbook pro running lion, if I go to the Safari menu in the corner click it and move the mouse up and down really quickly over the menu items, the responsiveness is instant & there is no flickering.

  Doing the same with the * * max spec * * 16" Macbook Pro has flickering. Easily reproducible in this very Safari window if you're reading this on a Mac.

  Everything has been downhill this decade with the quality. If the focus was on ARM then hopefully if it was a resource diversion the quality is good after.

  Well i hope at least..

• by rado on 6/9/20, 12:22 PM

  My 3yo iPad Pro is ridiculously faster than my 3yo iMac at some tasks like photo editing. It's night and day. Also quiet, cool and thin. Very excited about the Arm transition, warts and all.

• by bgorman on 6/9/20, 4:52 PM

  If Apple doesn't provide some form of acceleration or support for x86 hypervisors I can see this leading to mass exodus of the Mac platform for web developers. It will be interesting to see what Apple does.

  Given the technological steps Apple has made, it seems like it is only a matter of if, not when Apple will switch over some computers.

  I personally would predict the Macbook Air (potentially a new Macbook), Mac Mini, iMac and potentially the iMac Pro will switch over to Arm first. It seems like a poor risk/return ratio to switch the Macbook Pro and Mac Pro lines to Arm at this point in time. Who knows what the manufacturing yield will be on the initial 5nm chips.

• by chrisseaton on 6/9/20, 11:50 AM

  I'm really worried - there's software that I rely on such as parts of the JVM ecosystem that haven't had as much much work put into them for ARM as they have for Intel. How long do we have to bring things up to speed? Just a year? Obviously everyone has known this is coming but I haven't seen much action yet.

  If we get the worst case scenario and Apple ships only ARM hardware from January 2021, then I feel like there's going to be some serious problems.

• by theblackcat1002 on 6/9/20, 12:36 PM

  On the other side, AMD APU code name was found in latest macOS release which should hint the other side of the story.

  https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-may-start-selling-ma...

• by rbanffy on 6/9/20, 1:10 PM

  Funny... A move to AMD would be less disruptive to the macOS ecosystem and would solve the roadmap issues. It seems AMD will have the lead for a good couple years right now.

  Intel must be creating a lot of problems for Apple to warrant this move. Or maybe AMD is not willing to give Apple the same sweet deal Intel gave Apple to get the transition.

• by Nursie on 6/9/20, 12:26 PM

  Well, there goes the Hackintosh!

  Well, eventually, I imagine that Apple will continue to support their x86 Macs for some time, especially as we've recently had the launch of the revamped Mac Pro which is not a cheap machine. But maybe ten years down the line they'll stop updating it and that will be that.

• by api on 6/9/20, 4:45 PM

  This recent event has converted me to a full blown supporter:

  https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310

  I lost days of time to what very much appears to be yet another hardware bug in Intel's latest core. If you don't believe me that it's a hardware bug, read the whole thing. It's probably a zero day security vulnerability too.

  The only catch is: if Apple also takes the opportunity to iOS-ify Mac and lock it down to the point that it is no longer useful for professional work, I will have to drop the platform entirely. I've seen some decent AMD Ryzen laptops showing up on the market and I could use Linux with a Windows VM for the occasional Zoom call or similar thing.

  Honestly though... I think if Apple pulls this off well without alienating their user base, it probably spells the end of the X64 architecture outside cloud and servers. Given that people prefer to deploy to the same architecture they develop on, it probably means X64 will eventually die in those areas too. AArch64 could end up being the core architecture of almost everything by the 2030s.

• by meesterdude on 6/9/20, 11:40 AM

  Apple ditching intel could lead to some great improvements in hardware, but I would be much happier if they made no changes to the hardware and actually started investing in OSX again. Catalina is a disaster. I've been using macs since OS 7 and I cannot believe how bad Catalina is.

• by mromanuk on 6/9/20, 6:38 PM

  My wild prediction: Apple will remain using x86, but based on AMD chips and integrating stuff like ML, security, etc. Both of them use TSMC as foundry.

• by jurmous on 6/9/20, 11:38 AM

  Could it be that Apple brings an X86 emulator on the machine like they did with Rosetta in the PowerPC to Intel transition? Most calls to native libraries like Metal and UI would be handled natively so we probably don't notice slowness in most apps. Even Chrome and nowadays Adobe Photoshop are compiled to ARM versions. If so this will be a smooth transition.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_%28software%29

• by seanalltogether on 6/9/20, 5:19 PM

  My only concern here is that the Mac line still only represents 10% of Apples revenue, and they might not give these desktop processors the attention that a supplier like intel or amd would to their own processors. I hope I'm wrong but I feel like Apple has been making serious missteps in the mac line for the past 10 years because its no longer their core product.

• by dblooman on 6/9/20, 11:32 AM

  Having tried Windows on ARM with the surface, I was surprised that many apps I use every day were not available. Perhaps Apple will be better at onboarding developers to the transition, but will also be interesting to see how long developers continue to support Intel. Can anyone speak as to the difficulty of working with ARM and Windows?

• by whywhywhywhy on 6/9/20, 1:51 PM

  >Apple’s chip-development group, led by Johny Srouji, decided to make the switch after Intel’s annual chip performance gains slowed

  I'm just not really buying this as the justification, Mac has almost never been about competing on raw performance and moving to ARM could even mean a large performance hit for most software where performance counts for years to come.

  Although I guess we also keep getting lectured on how amazingly powerful iPad Pros are yet we never really see them do anything beyond a paint program, GarageBand level music production, basic video editing and keynote.

• by pickle-wizard on 6/9/20, 4:57 PM

  I think this would work well for me. Most of my day is spent with SSH or RDP sessions to systems that do the heavy lifting. So I'll welcome the power and heat savings.

  Though I don't think I'll be buying one soon. When I travel I have a 2018 MacBook Air and when I'm at home I have a 2013 Mac Pro. Both machines still work great for my needs, and I plan to keep the Mac Pro until Apple stops OS updates for it. When it comes time to replace it, I'll replace it with a Mac Mini, and I don't need a machine that powerful anymore.

• by _ph_ on 6/9/20, 1:47 PM

  I am quite excited about this rumor. If only to finally find out what Apples plans with respect to ARM based Macs are :). Also, just in general it would be exciting to have a real contender for intel-compatible chips on the deskop. I still can remember the times when there were several competing architectures. And obviously, Apple has the potential to create really game-changing chips, considering what they are doing with the iPhone hardware.

  One thing I still find peculiar is, Apple could have had nice ARM-based computers for quite a while. They are actually selling them in the form of the iPad, especially the Pro. But what keeps people to the Mac vs. the iPad is less the hardware, but mostly the software. The decisive difference in practical terms between macOS and iPadOS are the mostly artificial software limitations of iPadOS. While Apple loudly advertices the ability to copy files from an USB stick to "Files", the fun usually stops there. App support for file exchange is still very limited, you cannot even copy music to Files or your iCloud drive and add this to Apple Music or the TV app. So I find it a bit odd that they have to create ARM based MacBooks just as a solution to a basic problem of their software.

• by bob1029 on 6/9/20, 1:28 PM

  I read this article very carefully, and I still have not yet seen any confirmation here or prior that rules out a semi-custom solution involving the other x86 vendor.

  Perhaps this is just a game of semantics?

  "Its own mac chips" vs "x86+ARM chips co-designed by AMD & Apple, fabricated by TSMC, and slapped with an Apple logo".

  From AMD's semi-custom page:

  "We are not bound by convention and don’t subscribe to “one-size-fits-all” thinking. We develop customized SOCs leveraging AMD technology including industry-leading x86 and ARM® multi-core CPUs, world-class AMD Radeon® graphics, and multimedia accelerators. We offer the option to further customize each solution to include third-party and/or open market IP or customer designed IP. Discover how you can differentiate with AMD Semi-Custom solutions."

  https://www.amd.com/en/products/semi-custom-solutions

  I still cannot see a hard switch to ARM without any HW x86 capability in the mix. The impact to user experience would be very dramatic and the PR would be a nightmare to deal with. The way I see this playing out is that the next gen of Apple hardware provides both an x86 and an ARM stack, with subsequent generations potentially being ARM only (i.e. w/ x86 emulation). There is just too much software investment in the x86 ecosystem at this point. You have to give people a path to migrate peacefully or they will never return. This isn't like prior architecture switches. The impact with PPC->x86 was not even 1/100th what the impact would be today if Apple forced a hard x86->ARM switch.

  All of that said, I can understand why they would want to keep something like this under wraps until T-minus 0.

• by ksec on 6/9/20, 11:44 AM

  It is easy to reason for switching to their own CPU on MacBooks or MacBook Pros, roughly at 16M Unit per year. But what about Mac and Mac Pro? Combined to less than 2M Unit.

  Are we going to have Split in platform where developers is expected to debug on both Arch? This isn't the same as moving from PowerPC to x86, where majority of Pro Apps are already on WinTel. ARM is still relatively new on many Pro Apps. Adobe may be slightly better equipped, but not AutoDesk.

  If not, would Apple spend additional hundreds of millions on 100W+ CPU design that are sold in tiny quantities?

  It is also worth pointing out Mark Gurman has been saying this since before he joined Bloomberg when he was at 9to5Mac. And since 2016 when he joined Bloomberg the rumours were taken more seriously.

  And the first rumours to suggest Apple is working on ARM Mac goes back as far as 2010.

• by drcongo on 6/9/20, 11:53 AM

  Given who wrote this, and for which publication, this article definitely needs the Daring Fireball disclaimer.

• by dehrmann on 6/9/20, 4:40 PM

  It's interesting how Apple takes the opposite approach of PCs. PCs have been on x86 variants forever, to the point that MS-DOS will run on a new PC without much fuss.

  For Apple, this makes, what, the fourth architecture for Macs?

• by derefr on 6/9/20, 5:04 PM

  By including even the Mac Pro in the eventual transition, Apple seems to be expecting to have their own chips beating out Intel/AMD compute performance for workstation-class tasks within the next 5-10 years. You'd assume they'd keep the "halo products" running whatever chips are best-of-class, rather than whichever are most cost-effective to put in; so if they're switching for even those product lines, they're seemingly expecting their own chips to become best-of-class.

  That's an interesting bet, given how long the two giants have been at this.

• by skellington on 6/9/20, 5:08 PM

  Whelp....that's the end of Apple for most/many professional developers. Apple is working really hard to give up their PC market share again like in the PowerPC days.

  Great OS (although worse than usual recently), doesn't run any (hyperbole but rooted in truth) software.

  If they would just focus on running MORE software, especially games, they could probably grab so much more market share, but they are happy at 10% it seems.

• by jagger27 on 6/9/20, 5:10 PM

  I'm curious to see if they'll open up access to the T-series chips in our existing Macs to at least experiment with or use as a co-processor. The T2 is no slouch—it's based on the A10.

  It also makes me wonder if they'll ship a lower wattage Intel part alongside their Arm chips in a transition period. I think that would be kinda cool, and would ease a lot of backwards compatibility woes. Or they could keep things more or less the same and just beef up the T2 with more cores and interconnect bandwidth.

  It might not make much sense to ship a dual CPU Macbook Air, but it would certainly be cool to see Arm PCIe addon cards for the Mac Pro, where power and heat concerns are not as significant.

• by ziml77 on 6/9/20, 1:54 PM

  I've seen this headline for a decade. Is there anything that makes it more believable now?

• by mberning on 6/9/20, 12:15 PM

  I would like to see a return of the Macbook. I loved the form factor on mine, but after a couple OS updates the anemic processor became a painful bottleneck. On the flipside my several years old iPad pro still feels blazingly fast.

• by amanzi on 6/9/20, 7:16 PM

  I don't use a Mac any more but from what I see and hear, most Mac users aren't clamouring for more speed or for even thinner laptops, but for a more stable, less annoying operating system.

• by ilikehurdles on 6/9/20, 5:15 PM

  Truthfully, and to go against the grain a bit, whatever makes the platform faster sounds good to me. If my IDE, browser, and terminal tools continue to run just fine I'm not going to be up in arms about this change. We've been married to x86 derivates for too long, even more so to Intel's critically broken implementations of them.

  Shitty keyboards and useless touch bar aside, Apple has had a long history of pushing the envelope in radical and beneficial ways.

• by PedroBatista on 6/9/20, 11:57 AM

  That means they have to keep up with CPU performance for the next decades. It might be easy now but let’s see if they don’t hit a pothole and have to go back..

• by rukittenme on 6/9/20, 5:13 PM

  This is great news for software engineers, IMO. More battery life (hopefully), comparable performance (hopefully), and lower cost (hopefully). Contrary to popular belief, I think Apple has embraced those three principles in recent releases more so than they were 5 years ago.

  Everyone who writes software on macOS is probably virtualized already. Really shouldn't be any downside to this for the vast majority of programmers.

• by twoodfin on 6/9/20, 11:05 AM

  Notably missing: Any hints about hardware for developers.

  My conspiracy theory is that the sketchily rumored “gaming laptop”[1] is actually a hot rod ARM MacBook focused on developers to get the transition off with a bang.

  [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/12/30/sketchy-rumor-gaming-ma...

• by robert_foss on 6/9/20, 4:56 PM

  The article mentions higher GPU, NPU performance and higher efficiency. All of this I would expect since the SOC is likely incorporating much of their mobile experience/IP.

  However, it doesn't mention CPU performance or IPC, both of which will be extra important due to the binary level compatibility for x86 I would expect them to ship.

• by wyldfire on 6/9/20, 1:59 PM

  There have been a few models of Windows-ARM snapdragon-based computers for a little while now. Somehow, mindblowingly, they didn't bother to ship the first ones with a native Chrome port (only Edge). Now that they have native Chrome, and Apple is moving macbooks, I wonder if the tide will shift towards ARM for all laptops?

• by wil421 on 6/9/20, 12:19 PM

  How many times have I heard about an ARM MBP, an Apple TV (a real TV with screen), an Apple Electric car, or Apple Glasses?

• by toron123 on 6/9/20, 11:57 AM

  I read somewhere that emulation of x86 on arm is much wrose compared to emulation of arm on x86. Can someone confirm this?

• by miguelmota on 6/9/20, 9:28 PM

  I see in the comments that a lot of web developers are frustrated.. what programs do web developers use that only work on macOS? or is it also because of the retina screen? I've been developing on Linux for years without issues so trying to understand why devs choose macOS.

• by atlgator on 6/9/20, 4:52 PM

  Haven't we been here before?

• by hs86 on 6/9/20, 11:48 AM

  iOS apps on the desktop and the switch from x86 to ARM have uncomfortable many parallels with Windows 8 / RT.

  How is Apple's approach going to be different from Microsoft's? Will they keep backward compatibility? Will the CPU architecture really be a day and night difference or are our expectations too high due to the ubiquity of inflated Geekbench numbers?

  This will either make or break the Mac as a platform and I feel like currently, any further investment would be a gamble.

• by nsajko on 6/9/20, 10:10 PM

  I wonder if there was consideration within Apple of switching back to PowerPC (power9/power10) now that it is open (for whatever that means, I am not sure)? They would appreciate the control that would give them.

  Does somebody have an idea how much approximately would it cost Apple to switch the Apple A14 from ARM to POWER? Usually it is said that the instruction decoder is a small part of a CPU core, and the ISAs are not hugely different (compared to AMD64/Intel, at least).

• by neonate on 6/9/20, 6:12 PM

  https://archive.vn/ogP3y

• by NoPicklez on 6/9/20, 12:13 PM

  I wonder why they're deciding to go back, after all they used to develop their own chips back in the day.

• by Koshkin on 6/9/20, 8:51 PM

  "Project Kalamata"

• by velebak on 6/9/20, 6:30 PM

  The great unification continues between iOS and Mac!

• by watersb on 6/10/20, 1:30 AM

  A lot of discussion here about Windows/WSL2 or Linux on laptops, how it's gotten good enough for the HN crowd.

  The overloading of the Control key as the system menu shortcut ("accelerator"?) key when it's also the default Emacs bindngs for readline in Bash -- drives me utterly insane.

  If it were consistent, great, but on Windows there are many different text widgets, from PC console, Win32, and other layers. I simply can't develop the muscle memory.

  I have a very cheap HP laptop, the trackpad driver is nearly unusable. I installed the Synaptics Control Panel, and use it to "reset" the trackpad each time it wakes from sleep so that I have a chance at scrolling without randomly selecting the entire document's text and deleting it or dragging it to random places. It's horrible.

  On the Lenovo x230, the tiny trackpad is a bit better, but tiny, and the physical trackpad buttons give me the chance at dragging etc in the face of such madness. It's all very nerve-wracking.

  The trackpad on the MacBooks have never been a problem for me.

  Then there's text encoding. The Win-1252 Code Page. Turning UTF-8 into unreadable line noise in unpredictable situations. The CRLF madness that grows back no matter what.

  I use WSL2, Terminal, and VS Code, but it's unbelievably exhausting. Digging out of config issues with Code Signing certificate policy required a re-pave and 12 hours of re-installing etc to get back to sanity. Something needed an old VC Runtime DLL, which installed fine, but also seemed to overwrite a Microsoft root CA cert. Differential analysis with a working Windows we couldn't find the broken cert. Various msc tools and System Policy analysis and Troubleshooters and so on couldn't find it. The CERT: filesystem "provider" stopped working. It was a dead machine.

  Linux and macOS configs, I generally know where config files are, and can restore from backup.

  Want to restore from a Windows Image Backup? Or a copy of the file system from another Windows installation? Go ahead. Try it.

  I got heavy into PowerShell, there are some nice bits there, but it still has to fall back to text processing in pipes if some other tool doesn't output the correct data. Usually JSON, but is that schema documented? Certainly have yet to invest the time in Bash tools that might interact with PowerShell.

  It just doesn't stop. It just doesn't. I must accept that people are actually getting work done by adding WSL to the mix, but I guess I just break things.

  I don't seem to break things as badly on Solaris or Arch or even Gentoo or any of the BSDs.

  I have not given up on macOS. On the contrary, I will get another Mac laptop.

  It's a lot of work.

• by danaris on 6/9/20, 5:37 PM

  Thus far, the only source for this is Bloomberg, which published the story "The Big Hack", which was shown to be complete bullshit. They have still not issued a retraction, an apology, or any kind of acknowledgement that their reporting was so completely wrong.

  Their credibility on issues of tech—particularly Apple—is very suspect. (See also: Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect)

• by toyg on 6/9/20, 11:50 AM

  That’s me going bye bye then. It was fun while it lasted. After the keyboard fiasco and “Vistalina”, this would be the last straw.

• by Fiahil on 6/9/20, 4:58 PM

  Next in line: macos on ipad.

• by inapis on 6/9/20, 11:21 AM

  This transition would be fun to watch. Mac has a huge legacy, enormous amounts of apps and sometimes it is embedded deeply in a lot of workflows that it would be very challenging to displace. Unlike the PowerPC -> Intel transition, this time round, Apple has the iOS ecosystem to tap into.

  We'll probably still have 4-5 years before the Intel Macs are completely abandoned but then this is Apple we are talking about. For all intents and purposes, they might cut the umbilical cord in 6 months.

  Adobe is probably the only company which can delay the complete transition for some time.

  Edit - removed the line about electron. As others have pointed out, electron already runs on ARM.