That would be funny if they went back to PowerPC, but I’m 99% sure it will be ARM, but I hope it will have it’s own DMA Bus and knowing Apple, it will be proprietary as hell, not repairable and they’ll not only not allow you to boot Linux, they will make you not able to turn off Gatekeeper.
So, you won’t be the Keymaster anymore.
honest;y, with how powerful their current A11 chip is, and the fact that for once apple is actually ahead of its competitors in the mobile CPU space, i’m not surprised. They’ve been waiting for this moment for almost a decade.
While yes, it will lost likely be locked down, once you install homebrew onto OSX it essentially turns it into a fairly polished linux-like OS.
Also, because a large portion of their userbase use bootcamp, they will most likely retain some leniency in that department, potentially allowing a “jailbreak” of sorts for installing Linux and other OS’s
ARM is mostly good at performance per watt in that watt class and it doesn’t scale well to a 75W CPU. RISC is very good for doing simple things fast. Not so much complicated things fast.
Edit: Wow, I knew this conversation sounded familiar…
Honestly, this news has a lot of ups and downs, though IMO the ups outweigh the downs.
Given the sort of optimizations they can do with their phones, it wouldn’t be outlandish to see 2-4 days of batteries on those machines. ARM + the massive laptop batteries will be a huge revolution for laptop tech. Also, ARM chips have a very sm all footprint, allowing for smaller board designs and more room for other things
On top of that, it light finally push people doing actual work on these machines to the imacs, which have always been superior to the macbooks in every way except for portability. In the apple retail sales department, way too many folks overestimate the power of the laptops, even the 15inch models and end up spending 3 grand on a machine that will be stomped all over by a base model imac (which is 2/3 the price). This is also ignoring some upgradability features.
This should probably also give intel the much needed kick in the plums. They haven’t really had competition in the mobile space since basically forever. More competition is always good, maybe intel will finally be arsed to create a mobile chip worth a damn instead of just throttling anemic versions of their desktop i3 chips and calling them i5/i7 U series.
In terms of mobile ARM chips, Apple genuinely is the current performance leader overall, so i expect some pretty good performance to come out of those machines, at least for the more basic tasks. It’ll be interesting how the GPU compute part of the chip will hold up to adobe and other companies that dont optimize for anything. Maybe itll be ARM + Radeon?
from a FOSS standpoint, this isnt great. Even though the A series chips have been out forever now, many of them are still uncharted territory, and considering how fast their development cycle is, im not surprised that no one bothers trying to port any OS to the iphones. Since Windows does have a version that can run on ARM with no problem, i suspect they’ll either keep bootcamp and allow you to install that, or MS may potentially release a bootcamp edition of windows that lives up to the apple restrictions. Either way, i suspect there will be a way to install linux distros onto there. There might be a bootloader jailbreak, who knows.
And again, OSX + Homebrew is actually a very good combination. homebrew just adds a linux style package manager to OSX, allowing you to install all of your favorite linux tools while maintaining the core functionality of the OS. IMO not enough people try the homebrew method on their machines and end up installing a distro which is more privacy friendly but sacrifices optimizations and thus battery life (generally), or end up returning the machine because OSX was just slightly too locked down by default.
Apple has been doing lots in the privacy field, so their hardware will probably incorporate the secure enclave into the rest of the macbook lineup, though its impossible to tell how much of those privacy promises actually hold true.
I dont see this as an entirely bad thing. While i dont trust Apple as a company, i must give them credit on pushing their own CPU over the years and developing it into something thats actually worth using. considering theyre pretty new to the whole CPU degisn world, theyve done really well over the years. I will eagerly await an ARM replacement for the 12" macbook, and hgopefully with thunderbolt integration
Intel is in really bad situation then…
AMD is getting better, not just in desktop but in the server space, competition, now Apple is abandoning them…
I know, the airplane moved from 10 000 feet to 9500 feet, it’s a bit early to evacuate the houses on the ground, but still…
Why do I feel that Apple desktops and laptops will end up more like Chromebooks with this change…
Yeah, Intel are still the 800 pound gorilla in the room but it is nice to see some competition and things happening that will hopefully make them up their game.
They will do the same bollox as they did with the powerpc-----
This will be great until they will of course have to delay products by a year when the chips cant deliver on the adverts created before the first piece of silicon rolled off the belt. They will back themselves further and further into a corner for about 3 years until even the ghost of Steve Jobs can’t save them and they return to x86 intel/amd with their tails between their legs but claim “THIS IS WHAT WE WHERE PLANNING TO DO ALL ALONG!!!”
and apple people…
I am sure it will be great right up until the time they deliberatly slow down the computers , like they did with iPhones…to force a new purchase.
Actually they have been hiring linux kernel developers and driver stack developers left and right as fast as possible in Texas and California. They aren’t going to lock out linux users on their chips because the millions of devs that use OSX need linux and they sure as hell are not running VM’s for that shit, nor should they.
Eh. I’ll buy one. Need my risc.
When does the i686 patent expire? They could license AMD64 from AMD at that point and mix it with their ARM tech and have backwards compatibility with the old stuff while making it impossible to run the new stuff on non Apple devices.
looks like Apple is going for even more potato hardware than now. for only $4999.99… 
‘Apple chip’ is basically just a custom Qualcomm mobile CPU with private branding and NDA up the butt. absolutely nothing special about it. Sure it’ll handle facebook like a champ. 
I’m curious if they are engineering their own from scratch or if they will be using something like OpenPOWER.
Source?
Apple are in the position technically and financially to make their own laptop CPU. As stated above by @RotaryWombat their making some great performing A11 chips.
Apple are a hardware company so making the CPU, possibly the GPU as well would just be more money and more lock in for Apple.
Virtualizing X86 is easy. If Apple’s bare metal can shed all the x86 legacy and be engineered and built from the ground up with 21st century planning, IO etc all patented by Apple and the competition would have to catch up. It could be very compelling laptop / imac. And this
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-Hiring-For-Linux-Kernel
So a Silicon Validation Engineer - Linux Driver and Kernel Developer. Someone with 5+ years of embedded Linux kernel development experience, understanding of Linux kernel internals, familiarity with ARM, and device driver development.
If they do it will be good for Intel and AMD to have more fire under them.
i686 has already expired. The problem is the Pentium IV patents aren’t expired yet.
Also x86 and especially AMD64 is Voodoo Magic. CISC is well, complicated. It’s really hard to figure out how to make an efficient chip that supports all x86 Opcodes and extensions even if patents were no object.
How much of P4 would you need to make something capable of running standard A64 based software? Using nothing newer than that as cores on an ARM SoC?
I didn’t realize how true this was until watching this talk from last year’s BlackHat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrksBdWcZgQ
It will most definitely be ARM based. I can totally see Apple consolidating their home PC’s with their iOS line of products. Given that the iOS has much more software support for it than OSx, it seems like could just make an iOS desktop variant. It seems weird to me that Apple would develop a whole new architecture just for them.
Though, I could even see a weird x86 / ARM hybrid of somekind.
Killing off x86 will REALLY PISS OFF professional content creators if they’re not ready. If Adobe decides to not support Premiere on Apple ARM, most studios still using Macs being forced to upgrade will have to use FCPX (Bleh)
This is why Davinci Resolve is making a huge Linux push right now.
