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Apple dropping Intel in favor of their own CPU. Very interesting!

Must be ARM based, since that's where Apple has been working the last couple of years.

This is what I predicted a long time ago. It makes sense, they will be in full control their entire eco-system.

It was years ago that Apple showed their first in-house design that surpassed Core i7 in many ways, design wise, and not many generations later they were able to deliver real Core i5 (laptop) performance. And this with a battery powered, passively cooled CPU running in the ~1GHz range. They weren't lying when they claimed "desktop class CPU" in their marketing materials.

Imagine if they would add a few more cores and construct the chip for optimal heat dissipation using powerful heatsinks with fans, and clock it in the range of 3-4GHz? I have no doubt that they will be able to create a powerful desktop/workstation class CPU able to compete with Intel. Their designs has for years been "over the top" for just phones and ipads, it has shown desktop ambitions all along...

As posted in that other thread, this is just an unsustained rumor.

Same one was floating around 2-3 years ago and it turned out that "Apple will use ARM in Macs" was just a controller chip for the touchbar and some security features.

Possible outcome:

Apple will continue on the effort on making IOS a full blown OS right to the point where the girl in the iPad-add asking "what is a computer" becomes reality.

At that point an iPadPro and beefed up AppleTV6 might compete with the MacBook and MacMini and if the big OSX-apps get a full version for iOS we might see the Mac fade away.

But not in in 2020.

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Do they have the factories to produce those chips?

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No, this is a different rumour, it names a specific project and says the executives have given the go-ahead.

Last time they switched there was a rumour in the Wall Street journal. It turned out Steve Jobs had a friend there...



Apple have already shown they can produce fast chips, they're not as fast as i7s but that's because you can't produce an i7 in 5 Watts. Going into a laptop or a desktop gives them the higher power they need to build an i7 class chip.

Beating Intel is not impossible, Qualcomm are already beating the Xeon E5s with lower power and lower price.

I hope not.
I remember the time when Apple switched over to x86.
Every developer (including me) had to do extra stuff to support both architectures (PPC, x86) resulting in extra large binaries.
Now Apple has managed so that there is only one architecture left to support on the desktop, which is x86_64.
Switching over to ARM returns all the shit.
Yes, Xcode helps a lot in building multi-arch binaries. But there are a large number of ports which are makefile based that need to be tweaked to support more architectures.

Manfred

And there's more...

Cortex-A76-high-laptop-performance

This is Arm's highest end part yet. It'll live happily in a laptop, and I don't mean a low end one!

I was reading Samsung's latest custom Arm is quite potent, Microporcessor Report said it "nearly doubles performance using a massive microarchitecture that challenges Intel’s Skylake in complexity and throughput".

Then this appeared, it ain't no phone chip!
Heads up: Fujitsu tips its hand to reveal exascale Arm supercomputer processor – the A64FX

Well, my place in the que for purchasing a 64bit Pinebook has come up and they've sent me an invoice.

The $99 price serves as a great reminder of what value can be had with low end ARM systems.

The processor used in this system clocks at the same speed as Tabor, but it's A53 core is a full 64 bit design.
Equipped with 2GBs of ddr3, an LCD screen and a full sized keyboard, it's priced at a fraction of what a entry level PPC will go for.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A11
> A11 is hexa-core (2 "big" cores, 4 "small" cores) at 2.39 GHz. The new "big" core
> is named Monsoon, while the new "small" core is named Mistral.

New:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12

A12 is hexa-core (2 "big" cores, 4 "small" cores) at 2.49 GHz. The new "big" core is named Vortex, while the new "small" core is named Tempest.

Update:

> X-Gene 3 renamed to eMAG.

X-Gene 3 released as the eMAG 8180:

https://amperecomputing.com/ampere-announces-availability-of-emag-for-hyperscale-cloud-computing-and-unveils-aggressive-multi-generation-roadmap/

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I just got one of the new iPhones, I don't buy phones very often so I treated myself
I looked up some benchmarks and it's as fast as my frikkin laptop! I'm using a 2 year old top end i7 MacBook Pro.

I knew they were getting close, but I had no idea they were that powerful.

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And like your mobile i7, not designed to keep up peak processing for long periods of time. Think of it mainly as a "boost" mode, like one of these flashlights that give you 2000 lumens of light... for around 2 minutes before thermal cutoff kicks in - and are otherwise just like ordinary flashlights in every other respect.

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Suremaybewhatever......

The things are mindboggling fast even if throttled down (got one myself).

It also suggest that either the A12 or the old i7 would make a fully capable desktop if mounted against a sufficient cooler.

Update:

> The PPC-based SoCs remain at Macom, apparently: [...]

They have since found their new home on the Macom website:

https://www.macom.com/products/networking/processors/embedded-processors
http://web.archive.org/web/20210118064512/https://www.macom.com/files/live/sites/ma/files/contributed/support/Connectivity%20and%20Embedded%20EOL%20products3.pdf


Edit:
01/2019 notice on discontinuation of PPC405EX(r), PPC460EX(r) and PPC460GT
Edit2: replaced dead links by working ones

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 15.05.2024 - 17:43 ]

Elite Dangerous announcement this week that it can no longer support Macs (two years after announcing that updates would be badly delayed for it) is just one in a long list of recent examples where software developers who have grown impatient with MacOS and its apparently abandoned API infrastructure. Apparently its OpenGL is now too old. Apple have been planning the switch for a long time it seems, and no longer put much effort into x64 MacOS.

The future of MacOS itself may be at stake - there's all sorts of rumours flying around that the overheads of porting MacOS to ARM are not realistic and that Apple want to fold everything into iOS and make their iPads and laptops the same thing.

That would be where people find out the hard way that, contrary to Apple advertising, a tablet is a smoke-and-mirrors imitation of a real computer. I'm glad I don't own any shares in Apple...

Raspberry Pi 4 is released:

- A 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU (~3× performance)
- 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM
- Full-throughput Gigabit Ethernet
- Dual-band 802.11ac wireless networking
- Bluetooth 5.0
- Two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports
- Dual monitor support, at resolutions up to 4K
- VideoCore VI graphics, supporting OpenGL ES 3.x
- 4Kp60 hardware decode of HEVC video
- Complete compatibility with earlier Raspberry Pi products

1GB RAM = $35 retail price
2GB RAM = $45 retail price
4GB RAM = $55 retail price

Prices excluding taxes.9

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-from-35/

No M.2 slot = useless imho.

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I think "useless" may be a bit strong here. Sure, in a desktop context it would surely have been preferable, as well as a PCI-e slot or two. But with desktop-alike performance (kind of), USB3, Gigabit Ethernet, Dual-band 802.11ac wireless, 4k, etc, I think $35-$55 makes it *very* useful for quite a lot of people!

[ Edited by takemehomegrandma 25.06.2019 - 00:43 ]

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Do they need foundaries? IBM sold theirs. As did AMD.
Chip design and production are not intimately linked.
Many companies do not produce their own chips.
Oddly enough, NXP still retains Motorola's foundaries.
Using TSMC (or even Samsung) makes more sense than using AMD offshoot Global Foundries.
Its allowed AMD to produce products at a finer pitch than its competitor Intel (which is still relying on it's own foundaries).

So again, does this matter?


[ Edited by Jim 26.06.2019 - 15:39 ]

> NXP still retains Motorola's foundaries. Using TSMC (or even Samsung)
> makes more sense than using AMD offshoot Global Foundries.

With their step from 45 nm to 28 nm, Freescale outsourced manufacturing to TSMC.
NXP have their 90 nm and 45 nm parts (including those taken over from Freescale) manufactured by GlobalFoundries.

I haven't seen this mentioned, but I haven't read all 39 pages of this thread!

balenaFin

It has an mPCIe slot, and I'm sure a compute Pi 4 will be along soon (I hope).

Just got a Pi 4, does feel quicker than a Pi 3...

OK guys, launch is happening. Just how powerful do you think the the new A13 chip will be?

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Very.



At sucking your wallet dry (*doh*)


Otherwise, usual yearly upgrade in performance, with 0 impact on anything that doesn't run iOS (or a variant of it).

>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12
>> A12 is hexa-core (2 "big" cores, 4 "small" cores) at 2.49 GHz. The new "big" core
>> is named Vortex, while the new "small" core is named Tempest.

> Just how powerful do you think the the new A13 chip will be?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A13

A13 is hexa-core (2 "big" cores, 4 "small" cores) at 2.65 GHz. The new "big" core is named Lightning, while the new "small" core is named Thunder.