Caporegime
Because on the table is 12 core single threaded CPU with 8 cores at full speed and 4 "efficient" cores. With Thuderbolt 4 (open license) but apparently no USB 4 support.
We have zero info on how the desktop class CPUs.
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Because on the table is 12 core single threaded CPU with 8 cores at full speed and 4 "efficient" cores. With Thuderbolt 4 (open license) but apparently no USB 4 support.
If you're that dependent on Windows apps, surely you'd just buy a PC instead of constantly rebooting between the two?Hands up creative people, how many of you don't give monkeys about loosing bootcamp?
What is the ratio of Mac Pro to Macbook or Mac Mini sales? Whilst most Mac Pro users may upgrade their processors and the like - I imagine there are far more owners of other models that don't.I'd estimate 80% of Mac pro 4.1 and 5.1 owners, but then again I'm not reliable statistical resource, all the Mac pro forums and all the Mac pro users I know do that, but I do accept this is a bit of an echo chamber situation in my case.
It's not been announced what that was for, but the suggestion is that it is a laptop part, rather than for a new Mac pro.Because on the table is 12 core single threaded CPU with 8 cores at full speed and 4 "efficient" cores. With Thuderbolt 4 (open license) but apparently no USB 4 support.
Among its once core audience - music and video industry - Apple is surviving thanks to one thing and one thing only - the fact we can adapt, flash or hackintosh various PC devices to their boxes. x86 compatibility is the only thing that keeps this market alive. ARM means end of compatibility with PC stuff, end of driver support from third parties for existing cards, expansions and hardware, major overhaul of all the software suites again, end of VM, end of bootcamp where needed. And for what? A bizarre notion that Apple can win CPU race with Intel and AMD?
Phhuullleeeeeeze bro... no, they can't. Look, I love those Apple idiots. And for decades I pick them over Microsoft even though they rip me off and cause me massive grief all the time and to be honest - by now there is very little reason to stick with them. But you'd have to blindly fanboy to think they have any chance in a war with Intel and AMD. It's not going to happen. I'm not investing in another Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics or Apple PowerPC shlong waving festival with x86. Been there, done that, still have a shelf full of shrunk T-shirts and a bucket of SCSI drives that run out of viable OS for data shredding in the loft. Not a single company in history, and I mean absolute behemoths of the markets, managed to maintain upper hand with proprietary CPU over x86 architecture for more than a few years and every time Intel geared down in generation the race would end in a complete demise of yet another industry giant.
Among its once core audience - music and video industry - Apple is surviving thanks to one thing and one thing only - the fact we can adapt, flash or hackintosh various PC devices to their boxes. x86 compatibility is the only thing that keeps this market alive. ARM means end of compatibility with PC stuff, end of driver support from third parties for existing cards, expansions and hardware, major overhaul of all the software suites again, end of VM, end of bootcamp where needed. And for what? A bizarre notion that Apple can win CPU race with Intel and AMD?
Phhuullleeeeeeze bro... no, they can't. Look, I love those Apple idiots. And for decades I pick them over Microsoft even though they rip me off and cause me massive grief all the time and to be honest - by now there is very little reason to stick with them. But you'd have to blindly fanboy to think they have any chance in a war with Intel and AMD. It's not going to happen. I'm not investing in another Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics or Apple PowerPC shlong waving festival with x86. Been there, done that, still have a shelf full of shrunk T-shirts and a bucket of SCSI drives that run out of viable OS for data shredding in the loft. Not a single company in history, and I mean absolute behemoths of the markets, managed to maintain upper hand with proprietary CPU over x86 architecture for more than a few years and every time Intel geared down in generation the race would end in a complete demise of yet another industry giant.
Yes. That's what I keep repeating. We've been through this already as a market, as a consumer, we've already "voted". We've done all kinds of RISC, PowerPC alternatives before and it was painful and tedious and many, many companies collapsed in the process. And we emerged into 2010's in a better world, where everyone understood "proprietary" was not wanted. Where your Mac Pro was finally compatible with almost everything. It would accept off the shelf SATA HDDs and off the shelf SSDs. And it could double boot to Windows, natively. And it could run linuxes in VM. And you wouldn't have to pay thousands of pounds for some excrement poor graphics card, because ATI or nvidia you had from your gaming PC could run in macos and have cuda and opencl acceleration. And when your CPUs became slow, you could upgrade them beyond normal spec. And when your SATA 3 SSD became too slow, you could get a PCI-E card with M2 SSD and improve the speed further. And we would get ported games. And ported software. And even something like a free ffmpeg would encode Apple ProRes at ten times the speed of the flipping Compressor. And it was done. It was sorted. We've ticked that box. The run up that hill took many decades but we arrived - and it was worth it and the view was fantastic. And we *** NO *** loved it. And we bought more and more Apples.
And then Apple comes out and says "you know what we miss? some proprietary **** - those fond 5 years when you all had to suffer Rosetta emulations, universal binary tradeoffs, massive incompatibilities and buying all the software again. Yeah, we fancy some of that." Well - I don't. If at least they had something viable on the horizon - "a new Mac Pro with 10 physical CPUs 10 core each clocking at 5ghz, fully accelerated for h266, guys - it's going to be totally worth it ". But no. That's not what's on the table. Encoding on iPad chip is. *** NO *** that.
I bought my first Mac in 2008 which was at the end of the transition period from PowerPC to Intel and although I knew the change was happening, it didn't affect me in the slightest. All the software I wanted to use worked perfectly whether it was PowerPC or Intel coded due to Rosetta. It was perfectly smooth and I didn't have a single issue with it. Universal binaries were the norm and by the time support was dropped for PowerPC completely, everything was running natively on Intel.
It was handled perfectly then, I don't see any reason for it to be different this time. Apple aren't stupid, this has clearly been in the planning stages for a number of years and I'm sure they wouldn't make the change if they didn't think they can do a good job of it.
You’re angry (..) you’re fawning over the divinely inspired miracle that is x86 (...)it’s pretty clear you don’t even understand how modern CPUs work. Irony is dead.
Oh the good old “RISC is bad” argument, (..) ignoring the fact that every modern processor is internally a RISC processor (...) No matter how much you worship at the altar of the divine x86 (..) Deal with it.
Linux has been multi-architecture for years now, and almost every Linux software is available for both x86 and ARM. Compilers are now a lot better at handling multiple architectures and installation managers handle everything behind the scenes. There hasn't been a mass exodus of Linux users/developers because they now need to compile their software for two architectures. Almost every major Linux distro has an AArch64 version as well that works just as well as their x86 ones.
That was me. You used alternatives to the F word which is not allowed in any of our forums. Two instances is hardly ‘a lot’.I see you masked a lot of my text with *** NO *** - can you point me to the new forum guidelines of what I can and cannot say in this subsection, and please believe me - this is genuine request, I'm not being difficult, I just don't want my posts to look like I said something bad.
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regardless of wether the final destination is hegemony of speed or power - Intel is not a company Apple can compete with CPU development or manufacture . no one ever could. Corporations with much bigger resources than Apple perished in the process of trying to keep up. Corporations that at various points in time nearly purchased Apple, still perished in the process of trying to keep up. This type of marathon, is not something that Apple can maintain.
Hey, Castiel (hands up old forumites - iunderstoodthisreference.gif) I don't deal in absolutes and stop colorising my words with.. well.. whatever that set of overly dramatic vocatives above was supposed to achieve.
Steering discussion back on topic, here are a few very simple, in my opinion, facts and I welcome any eloquent critique of my thesis:
- x86 may be far from "divinely inspired miracle" as you put it and RISC was never "bad" - I've spent some of the best years of my twenties on RISC machines (and then some further best years on PowerPCs) and I loved every minute of my adventures with SGIs and SPARCs but look - the market have spoken - they're all dead now and we're still on x86 "PC". I know, I know, you still want to convolute it on technicality, claim that we are in fact on RISCs with x86 instruction sets - please don't - you know exactly what I mean. Intel has won the race for unified PC, workstation, server architecture with everyone. Some thought it was a matter of OS, it wasn't, it was a matter of speed and compatibility. DEC collapsed despite being able to run Windows NT, Apple saved their company and OSX because they adopted Intel's hardware.
And so the simple fact is - moving to a regular x86 PC architecture was the best thing that ever happened to Apple personal computer range. Full stop. No contest. And to us - users - too. None of us would be here discussing this madness if they didn't. Agree?
- Apple can not compete with Intel (and now temporarily AMD) in CPU R&D for personal computers (laptops all the way to servers). Yes, we are in a unique moment in time, when Intel screwed up and temporarily stalled, moved resources to other things and got hit hard by smaller players arguably jumping in some capacity ahead (including AMD) but the simple fact is - regardless of wether the final destination is hegemony of speed or power - Intel is not a company Apple can compete with CPU development or manufacture . no one ever could. Corporations with much bigger resources than Apple perished in the process of trying to keep up. Corporations that at various points in time nearly purchased Apple, still perished in the process of trying to keep up. This type of marathon, is not something that Apple can maintain. One could argue they can barely maintain Intel's tempo while using Intel chips and more often than not, we get old excrement in new wrappers as a make belief "fresh" and "latest" machines (new 2020 macbook pros with two Tb3 still using two generations old CPUs, but how about 2018 Mac Pro using 2013 Xeons, any takers?). Agree?
- Apple can not compete with AMD or Nvidia in graphics. (insert lots of words) but ultimately similar stuff to all the above. Agree?
You can't compare open source porting to commercial software development. Coding for ARM isn't just a case of recompiling stuff, it needs to be coded differently plus any video, photo, audio software for ARM will additionally need new accelerations for CPUs and GPUs. We can safely presume a lot companies won't double their costs and won't join this challenge - they won't recreate their interface drivers, software, plugins, suites etc for universal binary 2. Recompiling stuff specifically for Catalina was bad enough for many, let alone new architecture. And a lot of it won't work in Rosetta 2 or will be too slow to utilise property (it's not 90ies, you can't be really expect to do DAW work or video editing in emulator these days). The next few months will show how many roadmaps at Apple supporters will change but somehow I can't imagine even large partners - like Blackmagic - writing all of their device drivers and all of their software again and then continue to develop DaVinci Resolve in two separate forks for free etc.
To me it's quite clear Apple is not switching to ARM because they can make our machines faster or more powerful. They're switching to it because it will make your next £2500 laptop cheaper for them to manufacture. Not to you to buy. To them to make. And they hope the internet will stop comparing how much more and newer Intel gear you can get for that £2500 from Acer, Lenovo or MSI if your next MBP is an iPad Pro with keyboard. Agree?
Thunderbolt confirmed to work with ARM - https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/08/apple-arm-based-macs-thunderbolt-support/
To say they'll just get it for a year and then it's just security updates is pure conjecture.
It's because their chips are now competitive. That's the reason...
To me it's quite clear Apple is not switching to ARM because they can make our machines faster or more powerful. They're switching to it because it will make your next £2500 laptop cheaper for them to manufacture.
I'm sure there are a plethora of reasons why Apple are now fab'ing their own mobile/desktop silicon, with packaging, cost and (more) control being higher up that list than competitiveness - unless you have a source that states otherwise?
That was me. You used alternatives to the F word which is not allowed in any of our forums. Two instances is hardly ‘a lot’.
Apples 2 year old A12 processor is as fast as Intel in a consumer electronics application (e.g. a laptop) which is Apples target market.
HACO said:Apple is now more or less on par with Intel and AMD (ahead in terms of IPC, behind in terms of frequency).
While money doesn't solve every problem, by today's market cap, Apple is almost seven times larger than Intel..
Key word - "at the moment". Like Cyrix was once faster, PowerPC was once faster, UltraSparcs were once faster, MIPS R12k was faster etc, the silicon valley's hell over the last quarter of a century has been paved with carcasses of industry giants that based their entire market share on the fact that their proprietary chips were once faster than 386s, 486s, Pentiums, Itaniums or other Corewhathaveyous. For a moment. And then a moment later consumers, and by that I also mean us lot, on this very forum - reached out with wad full of cash to any brand that could bring them the latest fast x86 chip.And at the moment, they're doing a better job than Intel.
HACO said:No company has bigger resources than Apple, and no company has ever built such a hugely successful chip development team like Apple's in such a short time. Their R&D budget is astronomical, they have 10x more cash at their hands than Intel, and 4x their revenues. To say Apple doesn't have the resources to compete with Intel.
HACO said:It might not be Apple's plans right now, but there's nothing stopping Apple from using AMD/Nvidia GPUs with ARM processors. These GPUs are not x86 and are certainly not Intel. You can already use a 2080 Ti on ARM machines. No problem. It's not an architectural limitation. So not sure where you're going with this.
HACO said:You're making a lot of assumptions here.
HACO said:Have you stopped to think about why Apple is doing this right now? Why didn't they do it 5 years ago? Apple has been releasing products with their own chips for 10 years. Why not even 10 years ago?
HACO said:I'm entertaining this nonsense for longer than I should (..) Intel fanboyism at its most basic form. (..) pure childish, or again, fanboyism. (..)
Really? By what benchmark? Genuine non-gaslighting question.
It's a pretty well known fact... Apple even claimed the iPad pro is faster than most laptops sold back in 2018. Here's a link time Tom's Guide when it came out in 2018:
(snip).
Some very interesting stuff in this video. Apple has the potential to bring some serious power with their new chips.
This screenshot is telling. Obviously it’s based on previous performance and extrapolating a bit, but damn. The score at that TDP. This isn’t even the Mac chip but an iPad chip. Imagine with a higher TDP and active cooling.