It's not ARM chips, it's Apple Chips using ARM instruction set

[eoblaed]

An important distinction and why people are probably wrong when comparing actual ARM chips to Intel.

Rene covers this quite adeptly and shows why Apple Silicon SOCs using the ARM instruction set has the potential to be hugely disruptive.

 

[casperes1996]

Whilst I usually love Rene Ritchie's work; I actually thought this was a rather silly point to be stressing. ARM has long just been referring to the instruction set. While you can also license core designs that are "ARM", I think when people just say "ARM" they almost always just refer to the instruction set. It is no different for Samsung's Exynox or whatever they call it either. To my knowledge that's also a custom core licensed to the ARM ISA. And many others for that matter, like Graviton. Frankly "Apple Silicon" is just a lot to write and say every time. And it's the fact that it is a new instruction set that makes it a transition at all. If Apple instead had had a chance to license x86_64 from AMD and Intel and used that instead, it wouldn't really have been a difference at all software wise. A lot of what we talk about during this is because it's a new instruction set. Of course an Apple chip isn't the same as a Snapdragon. A Threadripper's also not the same as a Core i7. But when we're talking system architecture it's the ISA and ICX that matters for making anything at all to run on the system

 

[throAU]

I'll bet people who make this a talking point are the same ones who get pedantic about GNU/Linux as well.

 

[MevetS]

I think Rene pretty much nailed it. Apple Silicon is more than just ARM. And that is the point many people, including many on these very forums, are missing.

Boo hoo that one needs to write and say "Apple Silicon". Really, "it is a lot to write and say"? (perhaps get Text Expander?) And soon you'll be able to say A14 or A15 or such. Problem solved.

When people say "ARM" they mean different things and most people don't even know what an instruction set is (just go read most of the silliness in this forum). And most people think all ARM chips are equivalent (most people don't study Computer Science or post on computer focused forums). They've been conditioned by "Intel Inside" to think all chips are the same, after all, al PCs are the same right? Yes the chips are different, but to a consumer those differences are largely irrelevant, as long as their software runs,. But the ARM chips Qualcomm ships for anyone to use are very different from what Apple is developing for themselves. Off the self versus custom. Again, that was Rene's point. And missed by most everyone who think all 'ARM' chips are the same.

Rather than the "GNU/Linux" comparison try car or Rolls Royce. Yes, Apple Silicon is an ARM based system (and thus it correct to say that the transition is the result of the instruction set change). But no one would confuse a Rolls with a KIA (well, maybe people who think cheap PCs are actually worth buying).

Yet too many are confusing Apple Silicon with ARM.

 

[AustinIllini]

Mostly semantics. We say ARM Macs because

1. We called them ARM Macs when they were just rumored
2. They are based on the ARM architecture
3. It's easier to say that "Apple Silicon Macs"
4. It is the most obvious differentiator from Intel Macs.

 

[iDron]

Could introduce a new abbreviation like ASC (Apple Silicon Chips) or ASM (Apple Silicon Mac)

 

[casperes1996]

Could introduce a new abbreviation like ASC (Apple Silicon Chips) or ASM (Apple Silicon Mac)

I would probably go with AS Mac if I was referring to the whole CPU. But most the time I've talked about it, I have specifically talked about things that relate to instruction set changes, so I'm happy continuing with ARM as the term for that. It is accurate still. However, if we for example talk about the GPU portion it's incorrect referring to it as having anything to do with ARM, so yeah.

 

[burgerrecords]

An important distinction and why people are probably wrong when comparing actual ARM chips to Intel.

Rene covers this quite adeptly and shows why Apple Silicon SOCs using the ARM instruction set has the potential to be hugely disruptive.

who is comparing arm chips to intel? All the relevant articles i've seen at the typical tech sites for a while now are in reference to benchmarking the a13 and a12z and we know those chips are great.

And i'm not going to swallow that apple invents something once they come with their brand name for a technology that already exists. Apple has plenty of strengths and innovates plenty too but they don't just dream things up and then have the hardware engineers make that thing from scratch. They have a vision to implement technologies based in reality.

 

[Pressure]

The CPU complex (CPU+L2) of the A13 only takes up 13.7% of the total die size just to give some perspective.

 

[iDron]

Very interedting thoughts! So it's actually not Apple moving to ARM, but Apple moving to a system with a lot of dedicated processing units.
The video actually mentions that there are talks about Apple Silicon having a dedicated virtualization processing unit. Makes you wonder if they could build x86 virtualization in there.

 

[leman]

Whilst I usually love Rene Ritchie's work; I actually thought this was a rather silly point to be stressing. ARM has long just been referring to the instruction set.

I don’t think it’s silly. By primarily using the ARM moniker, one creates associations, which establish expectations. A computing professional might be able to compartmentlize these things properly (but even they have difficulties), but an average user? That’s why you have the “common knowledge“ that ”ARM is slow”, “ARM is for low power”, “ARM is not for pro applications” etc.

The point about Apple Silicon is its internals, it the ISA it implements. Apple CPUs are fast and efficient because of how they are designed and implemented. They would be fast no matter whether they implemented ARM, RISC-V or any other sufficiently modern instruction set.

And since ARM is just a user-facing spec, we should stop talking about ARM CPUs. We should talk about CPUs implementing ARM ISA. We don’t say that Intel makes AMD CPUs, do we (even though their CPUs implement ISA developed by AMD)

 

[Boil]

Motorola = 68k Mac

PowerPC = PPC Mac

Intel = x86 Mac

Apple Silicon = Apple Mac

???

 

[theluggage]

Motorola 68k = 68k Mac

PowerPC = PPC Mac

Intel = x86 Mac

Apple Silicon = Apple Mac

(...and if they switched to AMD processors we'd still have x86 Macs... or if you really wanted to stretch a point, the alternative name for the x86-64 architecture currently being used by Intel is "amd64"...)

As is quite common, the pedants are "not even wrong" and are just from Humpty Dumpty syndrome ("words mean precisely what I intend them to mean..."). The English language is defined by usage - get over it (or learn French). There's no historical consistency over whether Macs are named for the processor ISA or the processor maker. Use whichever you like.

However, the fact that the new Macs will be switching from x86 to ARM is significant. For one thing, ARM is very well established, is a known quantity for any developers also working on mobile, many Linux applications - including ones critical to web development - already 'patched' for ARM64 - and ARM compiler backends already tried and tested.

AFAIK there haven't actually been ARM-branded processors since the days when the "A" stood for "Acorn". There are Samsung Exynos chips, Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, Ampere Altra chips, Amazon Graviton chips, Marvell Thunder chips, Fujitsu A64FX chips, Broadcom chios and so on... and Apple Silicon/A-series. They use various permutations of ARM-designed and custom building blocks - but the one thing they all have in common is that they use one of the ARM instruction sets.

The point that the "ARM will never out-perform Intel" crowd don't get (well, apart from the inconvenient truth of all of those benchmarks showing that they already do) isn't that Apple are going to sprinkle magic pixie dust on it to make "Apple silicon" - but that every ARM-instruction-set chip in existence has been tailored for a particular application and varies enormously in power. Those chips have been predominantly low-power mobile or embedded system chips - but those Amazon chips were designed to stick it to Xeon and AMD Epyc, while the Fujitsu chips are for supercomputing applications (...and chips like the original ARM 2/3 did thrash their Intel contemporaries - the ISA was never developed 'just for mobile').

 

[MyopicPaideia]

I think the point trying to be made here is that we are not talking about a standard Cortex ARM core CPU, or even a super awesome Apple custom designed CPU core using ARM ISA. What the real point is that we are talking about a complete System On a Chip using Apple custom designed CPU’s, GPU’s, and - actually the real key to the whole thing - custom coprocessor accelerators, etc - all on the same die press. Apple Silicon SoC goes way beyond whether it is ARM or not, that’s the point. We haven’t seen this tight an integration of silicon in desktop computing before, only mobile / tablet form factors from Apple themselves in the iPhone and iPad, and Apple Watch/TV/Homepod.

This is what the big deal is. This is why expectations are so high virtually across the board, from clueless fanboys to professional pundits to industry insiders. Fully optimized silicon design specifically to run macOS and macOS optimized software as fast and smooth as physically possible, and seamlessly integrate with the entire Apple ecosystem.

There is and can be nothing that can compete with that user experience elsewhere, simply because the vertical integration doesn’t exist on any Windows or Linux platform.

I am willing to bet that on raw compute performance, the Apple Silicon will be on par or only slightly better than what Intel/AMD etc. are going to have on the market. However in real world performance on native software, I am willing to bet it will blow anything else out of the water. FPS, RAW import/export, etc.

I mean to be really honest - as I use an iPad Pro as my sole portable machine with a 2012 mac mini for the kids and and an 2017 iMac that serves as pretty much a media server for the last 2 years - just using Apple Watch to iPhone to iPad to Mac is just going to be an unbeatable experience. 6 months ago I was seriously looking to extract myself from the Apple ecosystem, looking at alternatives to macOS, iCloud, Apple Music, iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc.

But even now, building up your own sort of seamless mobile to desktop workflow across devices has irritating workarounds, dealing with multiple suppliers and reading reports of frustrations with services not working/syncing properly, migrations not working as expected, etc... it all seemed like a lot of effort to get out just for a worse experience on the other side, Android + Linux/Windows, with inferior hardware to boot!

This announcement has brought me back and I am excited for the Apple experience to be even better and more enjoyable and fun than ever. I am going to sell the mac mini and iMac and get an Apple Silicon iMac, and then wait and see whether I stick with iPad Pro or go back to the Mac in 2021, depending on what is released.

 

[Boil]

This announcement has brought me back and I am excited for the Apple experience to be even better and more enjoyable and fun than ever. I am going to sell the mac mini and iMac and get an Apple Silicon iMac, and then wait and see whether I stick with iPad Pro or go back to the Mac in 2021, depending on what is released.

iPad Pro can always fill a role in Sidekick mode!

 

[casperes1996]

The video actually mentions that there are talks about Apple Silicon having a dedicated virtualization processing unit. Makes you wonder if they could build x86 virtualization in there.

Hypervisor hardware; This exists in all big-name CPUs already. It's just similar to Intel's VT. It's just things like allowing guest operating systems to have faster memory mapping without needing to go through the host system first. They can get in-hardware access to memory mapping units and things like that. - In a way that is still separated from the main system memory maps - Those virtualisation technologies are not about instruction sets

I don’t think it’s silly. By primarily using the ARM moniker, one creates associations, which establish expectations. A computing professional might be able to compartmentlize these things properly (but even they have difficulties), but an average user? That’s why you have the “common knowledge“ that ”ARM is slow”, “ARM is for low power”, “ARM is not for pro applications” etc.

The point about Apple Silicon is its internals, it the ISA it implements. Apple CPUs are fast and efficient because of how they are designed and implemented. They would be fast no matter whether they implemented ARM, RISC-V or any other sufficiently modern instruction set.

And since ARM is just a user-facing spec, we should stop talking about ARM CPUs. We should talk about CPUs implementing ARM ISA. We don’t say that Intel makes AMD CPUs, do we (even though their CPUs implement ISA developed by AMD)

I would argue that to the average user it's irrelevant whether we say ARM or Apple Silicon. They'll give us blank stares regardless.
At this point, I refer to post 13 by the luggage. ARM has a great history in a wide variety of specialised areas and is not just in smartphones. There are a wide variety of custom ARM designs by a wide variety of manufacturers and it makes sense to name them all "ARM" even if they have entirely different performance/power characteristics and are completely different designs. They understand the same code.

Again, a Threadripper and a Core are two very different products as well, but if you go to a website to download software and it has several different downloads it will still say "x86, x86_64/amd64, ARM" as the download options for architectures, so frankly the average user is better served by us calling it ARM than if they were looking at that website saying "no Apple Silicon option".

In any case I'm not saying it's wrong to call it Apple Silicon anyway. I'm just saying it's not worth throwing a fuzz about whether we call it one thing or the other. Both terminologies have merit when communicating different aspects; Apple called it Apple Silicon at the main keynote, but in some of the tech talks afterwards they also called them "our ARM chips". I.e. in contexts like "The software you have running on our ARM chips will work without modification on ARM Macs". Because in that context it really is the ISA we're talking about, and if Apple were to go out and use a Snapdragon (not gonna happen but you know) it would still be a valid sentence. However if we're talking about the amount of L3 or specific perf/power characteristics or using things like the NPU or whatever, sure, ARM is not a fully encompassing term for it.
I've also pedantically corrected people on here before referring to it as ARM GPUs. But honestly it's just not worth being fuzzy about. I say after having written this whole thing

 

[Boil]

Apple APUs...
[automerge]1594994437[/automerge]
APUzilla...!

 

[Waragainstsleep]

I think the point isn't about the accuracy of the semantics, its that Apple's CPUs are doing more than just a CPU + GPU. Some of their existing Neural Engine modules have 8 cores of their own to do Machine Learning. Raw CPU core speeds therefore do not tell the whole performance story with these new Macs as with properly written software they can do all sorts of things in parallel to the main CPU.
Another great example being the A12Z which can handle 3 streams of 4K video at once. Many bigger Intel CPUs would struggle with this.

 

[MevetS]

Could introduce a new abbreviation like ASC (Apple Silicon Chips) or ASM (Apple Silicon Mac)

Or Apple Silicon SOC ...

 

[2Stepfan]

I think the point trying to be made here is that we are not talking about a standard Cortex ARM core CPU, or even a super awesome Apple custom designed CPU core using ARM ISA. What the real point is that we are talking about a complete System On a Chip using Apple custom designed CPU’s, GPU’s, and - actually the real key to the whole thing - custom coprocessor accelerators, etc - all on the same die press. Apple Silicon SoC goes way beyond whether it is ARM or not, that’s the point. We haven’t seen this tight an integration of silicon in desktop computing before, only mobile / tablet form factors from Apple themselves in the iPhone and iPad, and Apple Watch/TV/Homepod.

This is what the big deal is.

100%. Rene’s video brought this home to me in a way other commentary has not. ASi is a very different proposition to other processors or SOCs, because it has far greater integration. Very interesting.

 

[leman]

I think the point isn't about the accuracy of the semantics, its that Apple's CPUs are doing more than just a CPU + GPU. Some of their existing Neural Engine modules have 8 cores of their own to do Machine Learning.

That is not anything special these day however. Some of Intel's latest CPUs example also include ML acceleration hardware.

 

[Falhófnir]

As others have said, it's just shorthand, it's quicker to type 'Arm Mac' than 'Apple Silicon Mac' and can be understood without context, unlike 'AS Mac'.

 

[thisismyusername]

Does anybody who cares about what kind of chips are in Macs really not understand this? Everyone following this transition understands that Apple's chips are more than just an ARM instruction set. It's just easier to say "ARM". To say "it's not ARM, it's Apple Silicon" is basically arguing semantics. It's the same as saying "Linux is a kernel, not an operating system"; yeah, we all know... we're still going to just call it Linux.

 

[dugbug]

Does anybody who cares about what kind of chips are in Macs really not understand this? Everyone following this transition understands that Apple's chips are more than just an ARM instruction set. It's just easier to say "ARM". To say "it's not ARM, it's Apple Silicon" is basically arguing semantics. It's the same as saying "Linux is a kernel, not an operating system"; yeah, we all know... we're still going to just call it Linux.

well yes and no. ARM does not imply the GPU for example, but AS would apparently do that and GPUs are a reasonably mass-market discussed component like the CPU.

I wish apple had something better to call it, and I get it they want credit for being one of the worlds best SOC designers, but its a little goofy

 

[AustinIllini]

It's ARM Mac - Deal with it, lol