Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML
cores and accelerators
Thank you for mentioning this. I feel like many have missed it.
I think Apple sees this sort of thing as the future, and their true competitive advantage.
Most are focusing on Apple's potential edge over Intel when it comes to general compute performance/watt. Eventually Apple's likely to hit a wall there too though, like Intel.
Where Apple can really pull away is by leaning into custom compute units for specialized tasks. Apple and their full vertical integration will stand alone in the world here. Rather than hoping Intel's chips are good at the things it wants to do, it can specialize the silicone hardcore for the tasks it wants MacOS to do in the future. It will potentially be a throwback to the Amiga days: a system with performance years ahead of competitors because of tight integration with custom hardware.
The questions are:
1. Will anybody notice? The initial ARM Macs may be underwhelming. I'm not sure the initial Mac ARM silicon will necessarily have a lot of special custom Mac-oriented compute goodies. And even if it does, I don't know Mac software will be taking full advantage of it from Day 1. It will take a few product cycles (i.e., years) for this to really bear fruit.
2. Will developers bother to exploit these capabilities as Apple surfaces them? Aside from some flagship content-creation apps, native Mac apps are not exactly flourishing.
1. If done correctly, non-Apple laptops may become significantly less attractive. Just like Android phones.
2. Intel may be in for a tough time, especially with AMD winning big on the console and laptop fronts recently.
3. AMD and Intel may have to compete for survival and to save the non-Apple ecosystem in general. If AMD/Intel can consistently and significantly beat Apple here, it may mean that the non-Apple ecosystem survives and even thrives. It may even mean that Apple looks at Intel/AMD as an option for Pro MacBooks in the future. However, this does seem a little less likely.
4. This could also herald the entry of Qualcomm and the likes into laptop territory.
Looks like a very interesting and possibly industry changing move. This could potentially severely affect Intel/AMD and Microsoft. And all these players will have to play this new scenario very carefully.
But isn't it just a matter of time til the novelty of smart phones wear of, they stop being tres chic and the cheap ones becoming 'good enough'? It might have taken decades, but eventually Ford bought Cadillac, Fiat bought Ferrari, VW bought Porsche (and Bugatti and a few more).
Big difference is Ford, VW, et al had local dealer networks that not only fixed the cars, but turned the lessons and data learned in the fixing back into engineering improvements upstream. The net result of this is over a span of years Ford and VW buyers would see the product get better each time they bought a new one.
Android will always be a low budget product as a market, because it's run by Google. Google doesn't care about its customers at all, but for the data they generate and its impact on ad sales.
Every time a user opens the Google app store, they can expect it to be worse than the time they opened it previously. Every time an Android user buys a new device, it's a crap shoot what sort of hardware issues it will have, even if it's Google or Samsung branded.
Market share and attractiveness aren’t necessarily related. A Kia isn’t as attractive to its target customer as a Mercedes but outsells it because of price.
Much more interesting would be the CVS gearbox which is THE Mercedes advantage, the TCU, the shifter or the ECU.
100x better but also 100x more expensive. Will not happen. Worked in F1.
I do hope AMD does well here as Apple's chips with all their custom silicon, T3 etc, mean the death of booting anything but apple signed OS images on that, forget Linux.
And that's not the future I am willing to buy into.
Thank you for expressing this. As much as I like Apple and the wonderful approach they have to design, something felt amiss. This is what I wanted to express.
I'm somewhat confused by this rhetorical question since the microcode of processor is vastly different than the userspace & kernel of Mac OS. Running an OS bare metal versus in a VM on top of Mac OS are different across a wide array of things. At a minimum performance is lower and less predictable on the VM; you now have two different OS's updates to worry about breakage with on top of their mutual interface (ask anyone who's done serious Linux dev work on a Mac); you have two different sets of security policies to worry about; the low level tools to debug performance in a VM don't have the level of access they do on bare metal; and if you're working with hardware for linux servers & devices in a VM you are going to have to go bare metall sooner or later.
The abstractions are leaky, the VM is not a pristine environment floating on top of some vaguely well-defined architecture. The software in one has two extra layers (VM software & OS) between it and the actual platform and all this is before you start hitting weird corner cases with cpu architecture differences in the layers.
Hmm, really? Since Windows 10 your desktop runs in a guest domain, while the kernel running the drivers is isolated.
Since about 5 years Apple provides this kit: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor Yeah, you got to use the hardware drivers from Apple unless it also supports PCI pass through, not sure but with the current user base I guess nobody would do that anyway.
I expect Apple to eventually run their ring-1 off the T chip, with everything else from a VM abstraction. It’s just the natural evolution of the UEFI approach, and Apple being themselves they’re doing it “their way” without waiting for the crossfire infested industry committees to play along.
Nope there was no mention of booting another OS. Craig talked about native virtualization that can be used to run Docker containers and other OS runtimes.
Do many people care about phone CPU performance? Sure, it needs to be good enough, but after that it's really far down on the list of things that matter.
What matters to everyone I know is screen size, camera quality and that a really small selection of apps (messaging, maps, email, browser, bank app) work well. Raw CPU performance is only a very abstract concept.
Raw CPU performance, perhaps not. But people definitely do care about a specific set of user-facing, ML-driven functionality - think speech recognition, speech synthesis, realtime video filtering, and so on.
Many of these are only barely possible on "pre-neural" mobile ARM CPUs, and at a significant cost to power consumption. Developing for newer devices is like night and day.
Google's speech recognition is damn impressive, but I'm talking performance/power consumption, not "quality". Sticking a 2080 into an iPhone won't give you better speech recognition results, but it will give you bad results faster.
> > Many of these are only barely possible on "pre-neural" mobile ARM CPUs
> Speech recognition on my old Pixel 2
I don't think the Pixel 2 can be called "pre-neural". "[...] The PVC is a fully programmable image, vision and AI multi-core domain-specific architecture (DSA) for mobile devices and in future for IoT.[2] It first appeared in the Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Visual_Core
When speech recognition starts understanding European Portuguese without me playing stupid accent exercises, and mixed language sentences as well, then I will care about it.
> only one camera, just a 4.7-inch display, and less than Full HD screen resolution
cpu selection is likely coming from industrialization concerns, less production line to maintain, less price per unit at volume etc, but they're going to beat that drum loud and proud for all it's worth, meanwhile the phone is cheap in area that in 2020 _do_ matter.
I know a couple people trying to port an ML app to iOS. It sounds like the interfaces are a bit of a nightmare, and the support for realllly basic stuff in the audio domain is lacking.
I don't know the dev ecosystem for apple broadly, but this doesn't bode well for people "bothering to exploit" the hardware.
#1, who can say. #2 might be side stepped by the compatibility they with iOS apps they will gain? (making it so all those iphone/ipad developers can ship their apps to macs, too.)
I think Apple sees this sort of thing as the future, and their true competitive advantage.
Most are focusing on Apple's potential edge over Intel when it comes to general compute performance/watt. Eventually Apple's likely to hit a wall there too though, like Intel.
Where Apple can really pull away is by leaning into custom compute units for specialized tasks. Apple and their full vertical integration will stand alone in the world here. Rather than hoping Intel's chips are good at the things it wants to do, it can specialize the silicone hardcore for the tasks it wants MacOS to do in the future. It will potentially be a throwback to the Amiga days: a system with performance years ahead of competitors because of tight integration with custom hardware.
The questions are:
1. Will anybody notice? The initial ARM Macs may be underwhelming. I'm not sure the initial Mac ARM silicon will necessarily have a lot of special custom Mac-oriented compute goodies. And even if it does, I don't know Mac software will be taking full advantage of it from Day 1. It will take a few product cycles (i.e., years) for this to really bear fruit.
2. Will developers bother to exploit these capabilities as Apple surfaces them? Aside from some flagship content-creation apps, native Mac apps are not exactly flourishing.