[Wolves] Ditching X86, Apple Starts An ARM Race

[Adam Sweet]

I saw an article about this about 2 weeks ago speculating that this was
coming this month and it wasn't positive about the prospect:

https://www.osnews.com/story/131888/apple-will-announce-move-to-arm-based-macs-later-this-month-says-report/

I've seen articles about Amazon's ARM CPUs having better performance per
dollar than Intel x86 in AWS, but they still have a lower performance
ceiling than Intel or AMD x86.

Apple make a lot more money by using their own ARM CPUs in their phones
and tablets and they obviously have a lot of expertise in the ARM field
for having done so. Doing that on the desktop makes sense in terms of
making them more money and consolidating on a single CPU architecture,
but it does mean Apple ARM laptops will have lower performance than
their own x86 machines and other x86 manufacturers unless they know
something we don't and that doesn't make sense for Apple's largely high
end performance niches like graphic design, music and video production.

The other thing here is migration path. Apple has moved from 68k to PPC
and then to Intel and largely done it well each time before shedding its
compatibility baggage after a couple of years. I understand the Mac
product line will move to ARM over 2 years but there are still Intel
Macs yet to be released. Not so great for end users that just bought an
x86 Mac.

Also, as my article above noted "No more Steam. No more Bootcamp. No
more Linux", nor presumably Windows.

Probably, Apple will do a good job of it, but it certainly looks sketchy
from here.

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On 25/06/2020 23:56, John Alexander via Wolves wrote:
> Ditching X86, Apple Starts An ARM Race
> <https://hackaday.com/2020/06/25/ditching-x86-apple-starts-an-arm-race/>
> 
> 	
> 
> 	
> 
> 
>     Ditching X86, Apple Starts An ARM Race
> 
> At its annual World Wide Developer Conference, Apple dropped many jaws
> when announcing that their Mac line will ...
> 
> <https://hackaday.com/2020/06/25/ditching-x86-apple-starts-an-arm-race/>
> 
> So after many years another change in the offing . It will be
> interesting to see how  they'll maintain compatibility with past Macs as
> they move forward
> 
>