Apple has been screwed by CPU manufacturers 3 times already, or do you think they changed architectures because they were having great fun doing that?
In the past 3 years I've seen more and more people asking not for an Arm Mac, but for an AMD Mac. Because AMD is again cheaper and faster than Intel.
But it appears Apple can now afford to build their own CPUs that are better and lower power than either AMD or Intel. Not to mention PowerPC, which is still around in some form at IBM :)
It's a no brainer for them. No one can screw them over now except themselves.
Well Apple is certainly an interesting choice, and maybe if this happened like 2 years ago, they might've done it, too. However, I think they are too far along building their ARM SoC for Macs right now, and it would take them more than 2 years to put AMD's chips on the right track. Plus, if Apple bought them, would they even be allowed to keep them for themselves? Wouldn't that mean Intel would remain the only competitor in x86 for Windows devices?
Because this type of things are a +10 year commitment and Apple wants stability, they can't risk their whole Mac product line if AMD makes another Bulldozer dud.
AMD is clearly better now, but Apple just needs the CPUs not to suck, so Intel it is.
Maybe this is 2005 Me talking, but I simply don't trust AMD to do anything well. To be fair, both Intel and them have had high profile failures where the product either didn't work at all or didn't perform adequately (Itanium and Bulldozer).
The AMD I remember also had a tendency to over estimate performance and underclock parts, (1800+, anyone?) even if they could sell them for less.
It's this part that makes me think Apple wouldn't want to deal with them. For all of Intel's missteps, Apple choosing AMD because they are the cheaper alternative smells weird to me.
I would guess that Apple always had plans to switch to their own arm cpus. Perhaps what happened is that their experience with Intel was so bad that they chose to accelerate those plans, rather than have to deal with AMD.
Most likely Apple has a contract with Intel for some kind of deal on the price, so switching to AMD would incur a round of lawyers and negotiations to get a similar price. That doesn't come for free, so if they had other plans in the works, it would make sense to move faster rather than try and do something for a short period of time.
Apple should have switched to AMD instead. They would have almost perfect compatibility with Intel hardware and they would not need investing lots of money to develop chips.
Now they either need to halt some Mac lines or develop all kinds of CPUs, from mobile (which they probably can do, because they should be similar enough to iPhones) to server-grade (which they have no experience at all). And there's no way Mac Pros would sell enough to offset development costs. I just don't understand how they are going to manage that situation.
AMD is beating intel on price and performance and they have a fraction of the resources of Apple.
Intel is behind on process and has been for a couple of generations right as everyone hits a process wall.
For the first time since I got into computers in the late 80s Intel looks vulnerable.
As to whether Apple would go ARM on a MacBook who knows, I’d guess they wouldn’t but they could straight buy AMD in cash so it’s not beyond the realm they could tool up for desktop class ARM.
It boggles my mind that Apple hasn't switched to AMD Ryzen yet. Lower cost for them, more cores/higher overall performance for their customers. What's not to like?
But no, they'd rather try and sell people $20,000 Xeon Mac Pros with half the cores of an AMD Threadripper and like 4x the price.
I don't see how Motorola/Freescale and IBM having shifted focus from competitive consumer PowerPC chips to embedded applications reflects so badly on Apple. That platform remained competitive with Intel until the G5, which never hit its stride.
Apple learned from their mistake. They made a dramatic transition to Intel inside of a single year. The impact to consumers was nearly zero.
Compare this with Microsoft's recent efforts to switch to ARM.
I am secretly hoping that at least for Desktop Mac, Apple could switch to AMD. They could leave the Mac Pro and iMac Pro for Xeon ( Or they could choose AMD and that will be EPYC ) But right now it is very hard to argue for purchasing Intel when AMD offer many more cores for lower price at the expense of ~20% peak single threaded performance.
Unless Intel offer Apple very good deal but I thought part of the Intel / AMD agreement was Intel can not use any tactics to undercut AMD with incentives or rebate or something similar.
At the same time Intel is like assembling old Apple alumni from CPU to GPU.
Apple should be able to design better CPUs than Intel. They've poached their chip designers for over a decade, and have been the world's largest company for years. Beating Intel's single-core IPC is so easy that AMD did it with Ryzen for a laugh - if Apple couldn't do it on RISC, they may as well have given up making chips entirely.
I own no stock in Intel or Apple. It's worth discussing to me because it exposes how insecure people are about relying on "lifestyle" companies. Even Intel is a lifestyle company for some people, and those users are equally as pathetic as the people who let Apple, AMD or Nvidia define who they are. If Apple didn't go to such extreme lengths to appear different and look accountable, their staunchest defenders wouldn't have so far to fall.
Funny... A move to AMD would be less disruptive to the macOS ecosystem and would solve the roadmap issues. It seems AMD will have the lead for a good couple years right now.
Intel must be creating a lot of problems for Apple to warrant this move. Or maybe AMD is not willing to give Apple the same sweet deal Intel gave Apple to get the transition.
Apple always want to keep all options open – unlike in the past – but that doesn’t necessarily mean Apple will move away from Intel. They probably have plans to do it and teams working on it, but as long as Intel can deliver what they need they won’t.
I think they are well prepared for every eventuality, but currently Intel’s and Apple’s interests are pretty well aligned.
Basically we are seeing a race towards a common goal from two directions here, though: Can Intel hit the low power goals (with sufficient performance) before Apple hits their performance goals (at low power) through some alternate route? Honestly, I don’t see Apple being able to touch Intel’s performance and with regards to power use Intel is getting better all the time. The space for ARM-like laptop chips is getting smaller by the day.
And Intel actually wants to hit that low power! It’s not like they are disinterested in that (like IBM being disinterested in making the CPUs Apple needs back in the day because they were making their money elsewhere and Apple was just a small, unimportant customer of them, not worth all the effort), they are working on that all the time.
That’s what I mean when I say their interests are aligned. I mean, I obviously think that Apple is always on the lookout for alternatives (and they have been through many such transitions by now, so I’m very confident that they would be able to pull it off), but I honestly think they would prefer their and Intel’s interests to remain aligned and Intel just making some kick-ass low-power CPUs, exactly what they need for their future retina resolution, light-weight, super-thin, all-day battery life, fanless MacBooks.
AMD is making a bigger dent in Intel than Apple ever will. Apple doesn't even have 10% of laptop marketshare whereas AMD are currently at 20% for laptops and on a steady climb. Not to mention both the desktop and server markets where AMD is doing even better. So unless you think the whole PC world is going to switch to macOS or there exists another company capable of competing with AMD using ARM, we're not going to see a whole lot of change.
I think amd may be on the verge of fixing a lot of the problems that intel has run into in their inability to move forward quickly - the 10nm switch is potentially devestating intel (intel's slow pace of advancement is kind of what the article eventually gets to). If apple said they were going to focus on amd chips at this point, the market would be excited. Are those apple arms going to be able to really handle the cpu load and scale over time like large market intel and amd design teams are scaling investments over billions of devices? I'd just be afraid apple isn't quite big enough. It's very exciting when a change like this comes along in any case. Will they run x86 'legacy' mac programs at a reasonable speed?
I haven't really followed the news. This is a surprising claim, but I admit I haven't checked up on it. Are their chips actually that competitive with a maxed out Intel quad core macbooks? It took a long time to get fully swapped from x86 to ARM. In the scheme of things Intel chips seem like such a marginal cost to Apple, why bother changing?
There's some parallels with IBM dropping the ball on PowerPC, driving Apple to jump to Intel. The situation hasn't gotten quite as bad as it was with PowerPC, but Apple has seen this all before and wants to make the leap before it gets that bad, or at the very least open up an escape hatch or two (given Apple's relationship with AMD for graphics, I would be shocked if they haven't also talked about Ryzen in high end Macs).
I'd be surprised if Apple hasn't been investigating alternatives to Intel chips since the day they switched. Not necessarily out of any dislike for Intel, (I think the switch has worked out quite well for Apple), but rather to remain nimble and be able to jump ships if Intel ever ran aground like the PowerPC consortium did.
I think Apple would have been perfectly happy buying CPUs from Intel as long as Intel kept their end of the bargain up.
After the PowerPC fiasco and IBM leaving Apple high and dry, I have zero doubt that there was a contingency plan always under way before the ink even dried on the PA Semi acquisition, but it wasn't probably a concrete strategy until about the third time in a row Intel left Apple high and dry on a bed of empty promises.
Apple has so much experience with processor transitions they don't have to stay on ARM either. And they have the capital to move somewhere else if it makes enough sense to them. I find it highly unlikely - but if it made sense it would be highly probable :)
In the past 3 years I've seen more and more people asking not for an Arm Mac, but for an AMD Mac. Because AMD is again cheaper and faster than Intel.
But it appears Apple can now afford to build their own CPUs that are better and lower power than either AMD or Intel. Not to mention PowerPC, which is still around in some form at IBM :)
It's a no brainer for them. No one can screw them over now except themselves.
reply