Apple dumps Intel and shows Final Cut Pro on new Mac with Apple CPU !

On the Arm front.

Bamboo Systems has launched a new server featuring its own architecture and NXP Arm chips.

The company, previously known as Kaleao, announced the general availability of the B1000N Series of servers, based on its Parallel Arm Node Designed Architecture. PANDA is designed to be used in parallel, with each 1U chassis fitting up to two blades, each with four servers.

The servers include an NXP Layerscape LX2160A with 16 Cortex-A72 CPU cores running at up to 2.2GHz. A fully-specced B1008N chassis features 128 cores, 16 DDR4 memory channels to 512GB DRAM, and 64TB of NVMe storage.

Focused on microservices workloads, the company claims the servers use up to 75 percent less power than comparable Intel systems, at half the cost of an equivalent Dell server....

And given the fact that there is far more software available now to run [on Arm], we're starting to see the excitement around it," (CEO) Craythorne said. "Do I think it is gonna overtake Intel overnight? Absolutely not. This is gonna be a long hard slog to to to even take a few percentage points out of Intel, but it's such a huge market."
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https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/bamboo-systems-launches-arm-b1000n-server/

Huawei’s ARM-based desktop PC could leave you scratching your head
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https://www.slashgear.com/huaweis-a...ould-leave-you-scratching-your-head-06627865/

Apple’s move to ARM could affect the development of products by other manufacturers, since Apple is a leader in the industry. What Apple does, others tend to follow. In this case computer industry giants like Dell, Lenovo and HP are keeping an eye on what is happening. If they also shift toward an ARM architecture for their future product line, it is another paradigm shift in computing. That is likely not to happen immediately though.
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https://medium.com/0xmachina/apple-silicon-the-move-away-from-intel-to-arm-645d7ec2fa98

Apple Silicon may have killed the PC as we know it ....

Before WWDC 2020, I was skeptical that Apple could easily replace the Xeon, but after seeing the fruits of what's been going on behind the scenes for the past few years, it's very clear this is something Apple has put a lot of R&D into, and it is much further along than anyone imagined.

So, Tim Cook said the timeline for the transition to Apple Silicon is two years, and I think he meant it.

By the end of 2022, I'm now certain that Apple will have chips that outperform the Xeon and will part ways with Intel completely.

Now, the Mac Pro and iMac Pro are very niche markets for Apple, so the commitment to designing an Apple Silicon platform to replace the Intel Xeon platform is not an insignificant one.

Could this lead to an interesting "one more thing…" moment?
Could Apple make a bigger -- possibly cheaper -- push into the workstation market?
Or what about a new push into the server market?
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https://www.zdnet.com/article/apples-may-have-killed-the-pc-as-we-know-it/
 
Will be curious how this looks long term. Apple has a much larger market share than when they were last out of x86. I could see a good % of software developers writing for the ARM Apple platform natively so long term, this may not be so bad on any front (even gaming). Let's also keep in mind there's no reason why Windows couldn't end up supporting both x86 and ARM, right? MS is already writing a native office for OS X ARM, so in a few years time we may even seem ARM Windows PCs as well.

I think this is cool. Good on them for making it a 2 year transition. I'll probably pickup a 16" Intel MBP in the next year, and then jump on the ARM wagon in 5-6 years once it's due for an upgrade after things mature a bit. Given how much the market has changed, I think this differentiation is a smart move for them and will likely help spur things forward in a number of ways.
 
filmguy123 said:
Will be curious how this looks long term. Apple has a much larger market share than when they were last out of x86. I could see a good % of software developers writing for the ARM Apple platform natively so long term, this may not be so bad on any front (even gaming). Let's also keep in mind there's no reason why Windows couldn't end up supporting both x86 and ARM, right? MS is already writing a native office for OS X ARM, so in a few years time we may even seem ARM Windows PCs as well.

I think this is cool. Good on them for making it a 2 year transition. I'll probably pickup a 16" Intel MBP in the next year, and then jump on the ARM wagon in 5-6 years once it's due for an upgrade after things mature a bit. Given how much the market has changed, I think this differentiation is a smart move for them and will likely help spur things forward in a number of ways.
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There is already an Arm version of Windows. A tad limited but no reason that couldn't be expanded now that the hardware is going to compete directly with other laptop/desktop hardware.
 
filmguy123 said:
Will be curious how this looks long term. Apple has a much larger market share than when they were last out of x86. I could see a good % of software developers writing for the ARM Apple platform natively so long term, this may not be so bad on any front (even gaming). Let's also keep in mind there's no reason why Windows couldn't end up supporting both x86 and ARM, right? MS is already writing a native office for OS X ARM, so in a few years time we may even seem ARM Windows PCs as well.

I think this is cool. Good on them for making it a 2 year transition. I'll probably pickup a 16" Intel MBP in the next year, and then jump on the ARM wagon in 5-6 years once it's due for an upgrade after things mature a bit. Given how much the market has changed, I think this differentiation is a smart move for them and will likely help spur things forward in a number of ways.
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In fact its kind of interesting that people are making such a big deal of this move when Microsoft has had an Arm based laptop for years now with the Surface. The latest Surface runs Windows 10 and even emulates x86 apps (Rosetta) but limited to 32bits. The surface never took off as well as Microsoft hoped but Apple is no pioneer here at all. Only thing Microsoft needs to "borrow" from Apple now is the universal app concept so we no longer need emulating.

I would be shocked if Microsoft doesn't now continue to expand on its Arm support and make that happen now that the industry will be taking Arm hardware more seriously.

The Surface is actually a very good device and the people that I know that have one absolutely love it.
 
This is long but fairly well thought out.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/hello...ofts-windows-future-is-intel-free-and-cloudy/

Still, I mostly disagree. Microsoft (Windows) and Google (Android) are very, very likely to emulate Apple by either developing own Arm chips or partnering up with a foundry a la AMD to manufacture a line designed specifically for the laptop/desktop/server market rather than transferred from the smartphone industry. To refrain from doing so would mean abandoning everything to Apple. Yes, cloud clusters would work too but it's about competing with Apple now or forfeiting everything at once.

The one that's being left out in the cold is Intel.

PS. And Apple wasn't the first one to make the big move anyway.

With the AWS Graviton2, the company is targeting not just the lower-end of the stack, but instead the heart of Intel Xeon CPUs. In the 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable series, 12-20 Xeon cores are considered mainstream and Graviton has more Arm cores with greatly increased IPC. By selling its own CPUs, AWS is able to also define a vCPU to equal or better Intel performance. That is the big deal that AWS saw early in its existence....

... the Arm-based Graviton2 is the worst-case scenario. (for Intel - DLD) Steep discounts in the hyper-scale market when there was little competition fueled AWS growth. In contrast, those buying enterprise servers tend to be higher-margin customers. With Graviton2, AWS is signaling that it is going to make Arm a first-class competitor to Intel in its infrastructure. In 2016 we said that the Cavium ThunderX was important for Arm developers to kickstart a lagging ecosystem. With the Cavium/ Marvell ThunderX2 review, we showed how the Arm ecosystem was greatly changed by 2018. As Graviton2 comes out, more developers will port to Arm and/ or program architecturally agnostically since the platform is going to be more of a Xeon competitor than a Xeon D competitor providing higher scaling.
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https://www.servethehome.com/aws-graviton2-64-core-arm-cpu-heightens-war-of-intel-betrayal/
 
DLD said:
Still, I mostly disagree. Microsoft (Windows) and Google (Android) are very, very likely to emulate Apple by either developing own Arm chips or partnering up with a foundry a la AMD to manufacture a line designed specifically for the laptop/desktop/server market rather than transferred from the smartphone industry. To refrain from doing so would mean abandoning everything to Apple. Yes, cloud clusters would work too but it's about competing with Apple now or forfeiting everything at once.
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I think it's more likely that x86 and ARM will become competitors. The biggest down side in all of this is IMO is the high likelihood of the gaming industry shifting to the next generation consoles might lead to a drop in the mid range market, leading those of us in content being stuck with higher cost computing hardware.

The one that's being left out in the cold is Intel.
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Sort of. Intel's being bumped down to the 2nd tier processor vendor, but it's also accepting that and moving on with a new strategy of diversification. So it's building its GPU, memory, modem, and even foundry businesses... Intel isn't in any real danger financially, but it's certainly not likely to be on top of the CPU game again anytime soon.
 
Other than marketing, Apple strategy and business moves, what do we who use Macs with FCP X and Resolve stand to gain with the move to ARM processors?
What do you think the tangible benefits will be in performance? Will this allow Apple to re-write the underlying base code to optimize with these processors, making
significant performance gains or is this just more a strategic business decision that won't really matter to users?

Please help enlighten us who are not 100% computer geeks!
 
A fully competitive market - i.e., without the Wintel domination - will lower prices across the board (per level of performance), thereby making it difficult to Apple, Wintel, Google to charge premium prices for its product. With Apple and Amazon switching to Arm, there's going to be a corresponding move from/by the developers. Apple will, obviously, not switch from its own OS but will invite the third parties to create for it. That will also lower prices for the related software.

Tim Cook expects this conversion to take a couple of years.

But there are already disruptive forces ahead.

https://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-arm-softbank-major-acquisition-news

And here's some more fairly informative reading. Almost on the topic at hand too.

https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac/apple-silicon-vs-intel-3793039/
 
puredrifting said:
Other than marketing, Apple strategy and business moves, what do we who use Macs with FCP X and Resolve stand to gain with the move to ARM processors?
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Resolve? Odds are nothing. Keeping in mind Apple's long history of using the walled garden approach business combined with now being run by a supply chain expert, I think the more likely strategy is to capitalize on the potato trend. The pandemic has lead to the youtuber trend gaining an enormous boost. A lot of those youtubers will keep producing content after the world opens up, because once they've built an audience, re-opening is no reason to abandon that revenue stream... if anything, they'll grow more then because re-opening will also lead to people regaining their disposable incomes.

And that is a PERFECT market for FCPX on an iPad.

What do you think the tangible benefits will be in performance?
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In the near term, nil. In the long term it's going to be more interesting, but I suspect that mainly the benefit will be that iPads will dominate Apple's sales and its laptop sales will tail off.

Will this allow Apple to re-write the underlying base code to optimize with these processors, making
significant performance gains or is this just more a strategic business decision that won't really matter to users?
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I think it's going to be more of the latter, but given where the majority of Apple's business lies, it seems more likely that it will be a wash. Whether Apple can compete with AMD is a big question, and that answer is going to depend mostly on whether or not Apple is willing into invest the required R&D required to compete for a slice of a relatively small market. There's a misconception that scaling up to the level of an Epyc is just a matter of stuffing more cores onto a chip, but there's a LOT more R&D involved in that. Without all of the infrastructure that AMD crams under the "Infinity Fabric" monicker plus a sophisticated cache and I/O subsystem, adding cores doesn't help performance.

There's a five-way war brewing in the computing world, and going all in house puts Apple in a spectator role in that. The plan to leave that race is probably why Apple's been dragging its feet on updates to the mac pro and to its high end laptops... they are a pretty small slice of Apple's market anyway, and shrinking. I've been seeing more and more macs in software development shops... definitely not using them for creative work, and certainly not needing massive GPUs or even current or high end processors, but a much bigger market than film industry...

At the same time, Apple is investing heavily in content, and I expect a bigger push in the entertainment hub side of things. FCPX on an iPadPro is enough for 95% of the world's digipotatoes and wedding videographers, and that's probably orders of magnitude larger than the film and gaming industries, and Apple's already losing market in the film industry while having pretty much no presence whatsoever in gaming.

IMO the biggest shakedown will come when the gaming consoles launch, alongside the gaming laptops using Ryzen Mobility. Right now Intel's riding on momentum due to some absent protocol support in AMD's mobile processors that prevent compatibility with nVidia mobile GPUs, but that's because we haven't seen the results of the CES design cycles yet. The AMD + nVidia mobile gaming rigs are probably going to start landing around the same time that the two upcoming monster gaming consoles hit the market, and if you've seen any of the previews of Unreal Engine 5 on those, you know what's coming, and for the PC industry it's not pretty.

For the end users, it's gorgeous... the sheer power of those consoles would have been unimaginable just two years ago, and guess who owns the CPU + GPU contracts for both of them... those will as usual outsell computers hand over fist, but these ones aren't pansy little cut down toy CPUs with a cheap Imgination Technologies GPU variant, they're a preview of Zen3 + RDNA2.

THAT is the future that the Apple silicon faces. I don't think that Apple is going to try to compete with the shrinking high end because it's shrinking; I think it's going to try to dominate the huge and currently captive living room market.
 
DLD said:
Intel announced yesterday that it's delaying the introduction of its 7 nM chips due to production difficulties. Its stock shed 10% in after hours trading. AMD's went up by 7%.

In the linked article, Arm based chips are ignored in their entirety.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/i...manufacturing-issues-2020-07-23?siteid=yhoof2
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"Calling into question its industry leading manufacturing prowess..."

Erm... that's a bit late. I think the rest of the world realized that Intel was behind in manufacturing right around the same time that AMD announced 7nm volume production shipping for revenue with TSMC as the foundry...
 
puredrifting said:
...what do we who use Macs with FCP X and Resolve stand to gain with the move to ARM processors? What do you think the tangible benefits will be in performance?...
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A current problem (hence potential Apple Silicon benefit) is the lack of standardized encode/decode acceleration, combined with newer 4k compressed codecs. There are currently four separate acceleration systems: Intel's Quick Sync, nVidia's NVDEC/NVENC, AMD's UVD/VCE and Apple's T2 which is essentially a band-aid. For *each* of those there are multiple versions and separate development frameworks, each with bugs and limitations. Xeon doesn't even have Quick Sync. To video editors it can be bewildering. Seemingly similar codecs behave very differently, probably due to slight encoding differences which conflict with the acceleration hardware. E.g, 4k 10-bit 4:2:2 All-intra from Canon is smooth to edit but the similar codec from Panasonic is sluggish. Thus we end up transcoding everything to a mezzanine codec or proxies. Currently no Mac platform has functioning hardware acceleration for encoding 10-bit HEVC, at least which FCPX or Resolve can use. It would be nice to shoot 10-bit material and preserve that bit depth in an export file 1/2 the size of H264 for web upload, and do the export in minutes not hours.

It's possible once Apple fully controls their own CPUs they can put whatever acceleration logic they want on it, which could enable more widespread editing of 4k and above compressed codecs without transcoding. It would be nice to take big 4k 10-bit HEVC files from an EVA-1, drop them on a timeline and edit without transcoding.

Some effects such as Neat Video are inherently compute-intensive, even on high-end CPUs and GPUs. In theory a future Apple Silicon CPU would blend both CPU and GPU functions in a high-core-count package which might enable better hardware acceleration of compute-intensive effects.

Intel dragged their feet on higher-core-count CPUs until AMD finally forced them to change. By contrast the current rumor is the first Apple Silicon machine will be a 13" MacBook with 12 cores. In general we can probably expect much higher core count machines while at lower power consumption.

Another possibility: a MacBook the size and weight of an iPad Pro plus Magic Keyboard, yet having more horsepower and all-day battery life. An iPad-size MacBook you could run *real* FCPX and Resolve on, not some watered-down tablet version. That MacBook will also run all current iOS apps natively. You might not want to run some junky iPhone app but there are some nice iPad apps. Going foward, there's much more software development focused on iOS devices than MacOS. On iPad those apps are rapidly getting more sophisticated. While an iPad app will run natively on an Apple Silicon Mac, Apple's new porting tools enables rapidly tailoring that app to the MacOS environment for a more traditional windowed/menu interface. Over time that could help solve the MacOS "niche app development" issue. Just get iPad OS developers to write the app then port it to MacOS or just run it natively. It's not a perfect solution but it has potential to quickly expand the Mac application portfolio.
 
puredrifting said:
what do we who use Macs with FCP X and Resolve stand to gain with the move to ARM processors?
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Little. The new computers might cost a little less, run a little faster, last a little longer ("with Big Red!").

It sounds like Intel might be slowly crumbling. So I think it was wise for Apple to cut ties.

I think that ARM in general, and Apple chips in particular, are better than x86. But when it all bubbles up to the user, through layers of complexity in all the different parts that form a computer, I doubt you will notice a big difference.

This is a good article that DLD shared, though, if you want technical details in plain English:

DLD said:
https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac/apple-silicon-vs-intel-3793039/
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To piggyback on what some of you explained (and thank you for the insights as I am not into understanding all of the finer points of the processor wars), as an editor, why would I want or care about editing video on an iPad, unless I travel a lot?
I get sitting on planes or being on the road, smaller, capable, lighter, etc.

But for those who edit in an office or home office, I see little to no advantage of editing on a tablet. Limited mouse options, external or tapping glass keyboard
tiny screen with not enough real estate or screen size to see finer details? I don't get the mania I seem to see out there for editing on iPad Pros and a tablet optimized version
of FCP X? How many pros want to work this way? I have a 27" iMac 5K screen and am wishing I had two or three more screens so I could better multi task during
renders without hiding the FCP X screen and for hooking up an output monitor.

I've edited on 13" MBPs and it's a claustrophobic nightmare, I hated the experience. It seems like trying to do real editing on an 11" iPad Pro would be even worse?
And about the same, other than a bit faster on the 12.9"? What am I missing about this phenomena?
 
combatentropy said:
This is a good article that DLD shared, though, if you want technical details in plain English:
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Thanks to both of you, that was a well written article that made the whole thing pretty understandable to me, a non-uber computer geek.
There are a lot of unknowns, some definite pluses but it seems overall that it's more of a strategic marketing move for Apple than a big
benefit for the end user, other than we won't be beholden to Intel delivering the latest and greatest to Apple as we have been for quite a while.
 
Totally in agreement with you on this. My 15" 2015 Macbook Pro serves both as my desktop and portable workstation. I love love love editing on it with FCPX and DaVinci Resolve. Tried Lumafusion on a 12.9" iPad Pro and while nice and portable, it's not a replacement for a MBP. Only way I'll use an iPad is through the sidecar feature allowing me to easily/precisely draw masks with the Apple Pencil...btw based on an educational guess, FCPX 10.5 or FCPXI(whichever they call it) will be coming out in Sept.

puredrifting said:
To piggyback on what some of you explained (and thank you for the insights as I am not into understanding all of the finer points of the processor wars), as an editor, why would I want or care about editing video on an iPad, unless I travel a lot?
I get sitting on planes or being on the road, smaller, capable, lighter, etc.

But for those who edit in an office or home office, I see little to no advantage of editing on a tablet. Limited mouse options, external or tapping glass keyboard
tiny screen with not enough real estate or screen size to see finer details? I don't get the mania I seem to see out there for editing on iPad Pros and a tablet optimized version
of FCP X? How many pros want to work this way? I have a 27" iMac 5K screen and am wishing I had two or three more screens so I could better multi task during
renders without hiding the FCP X screen and for hooking up an output monitor.

I've edited on 13" MBPs and it's a claustrophobic nightmare, I hated the experience. It seems like trying to do real editing on an 11" iPad Pro would be even worse?
And about the same, other than a bit faster on the 12.9"? What am I missing about this phenomena?
Click to expand...
 
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