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

iPads and iPhone 12 will be first to have A14 since both will be using a proven iOS as in the past. Things get murkier with the laptops and the desktops, where an ARM based OS will have to be finished. (it'll also have to work with the X86 Intel systems but there some lagging is expected). Microsoft is likewise working on their Windows 10 upgrade for RISC/ARM, while getting ready for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 875 release sometime late 2020/early 2021. It's already in production. Supposedly.

Obviously, Google is also working on an updated Chrome OS and Samsung is trying to get in on the market riches, likely with Windows 10 X. At the moment, there is a lot of rumors, most unsubstantiated. Which is very popular these days.
 
I just bought a threadripper workstation and now AMD is starting to talk about Zen 3. This market moves too fast, if you need something now, buy it, if you don't need it yet, then wait!
(I needed my workstation now so it's all good on my side)
 
Samuel H said:
I just bought a threadripper workstation and now AMD is starting to talk about Zen 3. This market moves too fast, if you need something now, buy it, if you don't need it yet, then wait!
(I needed my workstation now so it's all good on my side)
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It looks like there are several battlefields being developed at the same time. The mobile phone/pads/laptops is one and the server/infrastructure is the other. ARM dominates in the "price/performance/area" sector and Intel/AMD owns the "top performance". On the lower/portable tier, Google, Microsoft and Apple are competing on the operating systems - with Microsoft almost out of the smartphone biz - and that's where the OS giants will have to fit the ARM CPU's across all platforms.

On the higher end, ARM is beginning to make significant inroads as well with AWS Graviton2, Ampere and Marvell designs.

And now there's more. There's an ARM CPU for the infrastructure/cloud computing.

If we take the conservatively clocked Graviton2 with its 2.5GHz N1 cores as a baseline, a theoretical 3GHz V1 chip would represent an 80% uplift in per-core single-threaded performance. Not only would such a performance uptick vastly exceed any current x86 competition in the server space in terms of per-core performance, it would be enough to match the current best high-performance desktop chips from AMD and Intel today (Though we have to remember it’ll compete against next-gen Zen3 Milan and Sapphire Rapids products).
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https://www.anandtech.com/show/16073/arm-announces-neoverse-v1-n2

So, where do the workstations come in? Well, for some uses beside e-mail and Facebook Messenger, a cloud server can offer a significant on-demand performance superiority. Any laptop can be turned into a supercomputer with a reasonable monthly fee. I surmise that uploading huge video files can take an eternity ... but with 5G around the corner, that might no longer be a problem either.
 
JAMedia said:
two new ARM macs but the 16 inch will be intel with a better graphics gpu
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You know for sure? Other tech sources saying all will be silicon.

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Badly want a 16" ARM, and after delaying upgrading for 3 years (for no good reason at all) this would be the ultimate reward of patience.
 
The key, as mentioned before, will be the software optimization for the ARM instruction set over and beyond the OS. And that may take a while.
 
Is this the thing that will kill third party editing software on Mac, or will it all switch code base one more time? For a short while, Avid no longer made Media Composer for Mac, they would only sell you PC machines. I'm wondering if this will happen again.

Windows on ARM is coming along better than ever, so we could see a big switch over to RISC codebase coming. Rumors are circulating that Microsoft will make an x86 emulation layer to fix legacy issues.
 
I cut my teeth on Avid 25 years ago, but you almost never hear them mentioned today. I don’t know if theses numbers that I stumbled across are accurate, but if true, Avid has less than 3.5% of the market(mostly feature/narrative/high-end). FCPX is #1 with ~18.5% and PP is #2 with almost 17.7%. But then another article states PP, FCPX, Resolve at 1, 2 & 3.
 
Greg_E said:
Is this the thing that will kill third party editing software on Mac, or will it all switch code base one more time?...
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Any 3rd-party app developer can create a Mac universal binary from a single code base. Although the term "port" is used, it's not like traditional app porting, say between Windows and MacOS. They don't need large sections of source code flagged with "conditional compilation" directives, e.g, IF ARM64 compile this section, ELSE IF x86 compile that section. They simply fix the (hopefully few) items in their current code base -- (many of which are bugs anyway and should have already been fixed), then compile and link the universal binary, and sell to both old x86 Mac user base and new ARM64 Mac user base.

The process was shown in the WWDC20 talk "Port your Mac app to Apple Silicon": https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10214/

The development team for DaVinci Resolve has had no problem optimizing their code for x86 MacOS, in fact Resolve is now faster than FCPX at certain tasks. I expect they will likewise have no problem getting their code base in shape to produce a universal binary that runs on both x86 and ARM64 Macs. They will likely quickly leverage any new Apple Silicon video accelerators. Whether Adobe's or Avid's development teams can be that agile, I don't know.
 
scorsesefan said:
Not good. My friend bought a PowerPC G5/DAW for several thousand dollars jsut before Apple went to Intel processors. Obsolete within months...
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Apple had no control over PowerPC chip development. That was Motorola and IBM, who fumbled it badly. These new chips, Apple has complete control over design and manufacturing. There's no parallel to their history with PowerPC here.
 
Rdouthit said:
Apple had no control over PowerPC chip development. That was Motorola and IBM, who fumbled it badly. These new chips, Apple has complete control over design and manufacturing. There's no parallel to their history with PowerPC here.
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That is quite true. And Apple wasn't a big seller volume wise back then, so Motorola really didn't care about Apple. Its design focus was on its big customers, who bought thousands of times as many processors as Apple did... for network routers. So in other words, Apple was basically selling overpriced routers. It's no surprise that it gave up and moved to Intel, since AMD had awoken the sleeping giant and then gotten its booty whomped.

Both Apple and AMD are selling larger volumes now than they were when Apple ditched the PowerPC lineup, but fewer computers and a LOT more iDevices.

There is one parallel though: AMD and Intel are in a processor war. Plus AMD, Intel, and nVidia are also in a GPU war. So times are more interesting now, when Apple is getting ready to jump in with its dark horse.

And we have two other major contenders jumping into the fray, since Microsoft and Sony decided to target serious gamers rather than budget gamers with the new consoles...
 
I recently was revisiting building a hackintosh and the thermal of intel/amd are bit crazy. They generate so much heat its like a car engine with all the fans and water radiator. I’m over generalizing but on the pc (enthusiasts) side has been focused on more cores, threads, clock speed, instead of smarter more efficient design.

On the pc side there has always been this problem where hardware companies build components and software companies write code to take advantage of it. Apple iphone is an example of the benefits of building hardware and software together to achieve a specific goal. Even when android phones have had higher specs they don’t perform as well as the iphone because they’re deigned the same way as PCs, using more cpu cycles to overcome inefficient design. Viewed from that vantage point it makes sense for Apple to apply that approach to their desktops/laptops.

We might look back on this 5yrs from now and realize what turning point this was. Although despite that there will always be room for intel/amd pcs because of the price difference. Because consumers have shifted there money away from desktops and cameras in favor of the smart phones, desktops have become less important and I don’t see that changing.

The only trend that might help us is that things have become more video centric and as a result computers are being better designed to serve that purpose.
 
So in other words, Apple was basically selling overpriced routers.
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LOL. No. That's a comically inaccurate take. I've never seen a router run on a PowerPC chip. Just because Motorola made routers and the PowerPC chip doesn't mean they're the same thing. A company can have wildly-varying product lines.

PowerPC was a joint effort between Apple, IBM, and Motorola... the "AIM Alliance." Initially it went pretty well. Eventually, things went sour when no one really could create a unified desktop/server operating system that was compelling. Since no one was buying PReP machines, Apple was really the only desktop/server customer for those chips. They were also used in a LOT of game consoles... PS3, Xbox 360, GameCube, Wii...

Things really took a turn when Jobs came back to Apple and killed the clones (of which Motorola was a manufacturer). This culminated in a tense phone call that got Apple demoted to just another customer of Motorola's chip fab. The G5 was pretty disappointing compared to Intel.... especially in the newly-hot laptop market where power use was a thing. So Apple moved to Intel which effectively killed PowerPC on the desktop.

That G5 was also not "obsolete within months"... those machines were supported with OS updates and software for years after the transition.

The Apple Silicon transition is a completely different ball of wax. Apple's in control of the design of the chips (and has that ability now, they didn't back in the PowerPC days) and is just outsourcing the manufacturing. While I'm a little skeptical they can scale the A-series chips to compete with the big iron in top-end iMacs, iMac Pros, and Mac Pros in a short timeframe I wouldn't take any insight on this transition from the AIM/PowerPC world. Entirely different.
 
There is one parallel. In his keynote, the main reason that Steve Jobs gave for moving from PowerPC to Intel was performance per watt.
 
jbregar said:
... The Apple Silicon transition is a completely different ball of wax. Apple's in control of the design of the chips (and has that ability now, they didn't back in the PowerPC days) and is just outsourcing the manufacturing. While I'm a little skeptical they can scale the A-series chips to compete with the big iron in top-end iMacs, iMac Pros, and Mac Pros in a short timeframe I wouldn't take any insight on this transition from the AIM/PowerPC world. Entirely different.
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There's no reason Apple can't do that. They have the money to hire top chip designers and the software developers. On top of that, a great portion of the design is already there from ARM. Coordinating the OS, the third party software and the chips themselves is what might take time. Cook said it might take a couple of years to switch everything. The key for the market victory is to get the most popular programs to align with the hardware ASAP because now they will have competition not only from the other ARM manufacturers like Qualcomm and Samsumg but from the OS players in Android/Google and Microsoft, with Intel and AMD also working on competitive consumer and pro/server products.

And the winner in this race will be announced at ... sorry, was thinking of the election.
 
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