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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2019-08-22, 16:14

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
I'm very much a believer. I know Ax isn't as capable at the top end, but we all know that's not where it's going to start. The top end will be dominated by Intel (or AMD) for at least the next five years, but they seem to be running into one wall after another. Once Apple gets the basic design sorted out and gets a computer into the market (at the low end where the students and easy-users don't care so much what's under the hood as long as it gets the job done) then the cycle will build and the tech will roll uphill. At some point, Ax and OS X are going to merge and the results are going to be game changing, I think.
I’m a believer too in future Macs using custom Apple silicon too – Apple wants to control all its core technologies, and also their A-series SoCs are really damn good and Intel no longer really has a process advantage over TSMC, so it’s like, why stick with Intel? Legacy/compatibility? Apple never really lets that limit them for long.

If Apple were designing their first laptops today, would they go with Intel? Not a chance. That sort of says it all, I think, because Apple is all about not letting the past encumber them.

I agree they’ll start at the low end, but that has its own messaging challenges. Particularly what it would be like if the low-end MacBook that was powered by an ARM chip was faster in some ways than the pricier Intel MacBook Pro.

We already have custom Apple ARM chips in Macs, of course. I think the way forward might be this: Apple might just make that T-series chip more and more capable. In some ways T2 is already the “central” processing unit of the system – it’s what controls the boot process, it’s what controls access to the SSD. Maybe T3 will have a Neural Engine that developers can access with their own apps for tasks where it makes sense to, just like the system already uses the T2 as an ISP and codec processor. Maybe with the T3, macOS itself will run entirely on it, with the Intel chip just being an “application processor.” And then Apple can encourage developers to write their code to use the T-series chip more and more, and eventually the Intel chip is dropped, like training wheels.

That way, when the “transition” happens, the low-end Mac never has something the high-end Mac doesn’t. They’d both have the same T-series chip; the Pro models would just also have Intel chips for a little while longer, for workloads that still required them.

I don’t think Apple is going to take any A-series chip or A-X chip and just plop it into a Mac. I think they’d have a special, larger chip that was essentially an “A-XX” when the time came, and they’d give this chip its own branding, whether that’s T4 or G1 or whatever. MacBooks are larger, pricier objects than iPhones or iPads, so they should have larger, pricier CPUs. I think they’ll want to avoid the “it just uses a mobile part” stigma.

There is still opportunity to share that chip with other products, though – just like how the Apple TV and HomePod use A-series chips. The chip I think Apple would make for a Mac is basically the same as the chip I think they would want for a game console, for example…

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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