Eventually I guess we'll get a name for the series of chips, so we can begin calling them the Q-Macs or whatever the Mac equivalent of the A-series chips will be.
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It's not ARM chips, it's Apple Chips using ARM instruction set
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Eventually I guess we'll get a name for the series of chips, so we can begin calling them the Q-Macs or whatever the Mac equivalent of the A-series chips will be.
It isn’t a silly point at all. There are very few companies working with an ARM architecture license. Qualcomm is one but they are now just going with ARM designs instead of designing their own. Samsung Exynos uses ARM cores. Their latest chips use Cortex A77s and A55s or Cortex A76s and A55s. They do have an architecture license and design their own custom CPUs as well. The Graviton is an ARM Neoverse N1 design.
What Apple is doing with Apple Silicon is pretty unique in the industry. Trying to paint it as just like everyone else is just factually incorrect.
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ASi seems appropriate and short. Or Si maybe.
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Nah. ARM Macs is what it is.
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This will definitely happen when there are multiple generations of ARM Macs and the Intel Macs are obsolete.
Exactly. Thanks for putting more detail behind the one of the main points.
The other one is that with the tightly integrated, and fully controllable SOC components, the future of the Mac is looking pretty amazing.
Just one example of several we already know of. Those examples are with mobile chips. I suspect Apple has plans for their Mac chips where these extra specialist modules will play a bigger part. Possibly not right away but down the line Apple will be free to design all new Macs for all new purposes by customising these extra modules on their SoCs. Intel and AMD mac their CPUs as generic as possible, so this is another way in which Apple will be able to outmanoeuvre them.
It's shorthand, and its also the CPU architecture/instruction set, which is the thing that actually matters - whatever Apple call it.
Apple are calling it Apple Silicon because it's more than the CPU - they're including the GPU, motion coprocessor and who knows what else. But the easiest way to discriminate between old and new is the CPU platform, no need to worry about the rest of the SOC, as that comes along with the CPU.
They deliberated called it Apple Silicon during their WWDC keynote presentation and made pretty obvious efforts to avoid referring to Arm architecture throughout the presentation.
While they mentioned Arm during some of their followup WWDC sessions, it is pretty clear from Apple's official documentation that they are downplaying the Arm architecture.
Above all, Sroudji was very, Very, VERY deliberate in not highlighting Arm. Arm is an instruction set. Apple has done nice things with silicon using this instruction set. They have arguably done FAR MORE with silicon that has less to do with Arm.
While they mentioned Arm during some of their followup WWDC sessions, it is pretty clear from Apple's official documentation that they are downplaying the Arm architecture.
Above all, Sroudji was very, Very, VERY deliberate in not highlighting Arm. Arm is an instruction set. Apple has done nice things with silicon using this instruction set. They have arguably done FAR MORE with silicon that has less to do with Arm.
Or maybe:
ASS (Apple Silicon Systems)
Or:
FAT ASS (Futuristic Advanced Technology Apple Silicon Systems)
Which is why discussing it becomes problematic when most people dont know the difference. When it should have been considered as baseline level knowledge.
But thanks to YouTube now more people know ( For some strange reason there are more people enjoying technical information in video format than written )
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've done digging, and I haven't heard anything specific to there being hardware accelerated virtualization. I'm happy to be wrong. I do know that Apple leverages Intel VT-D as part of the boot chain to help secure everything at startup. I'll do some digging.
It's my understanding that they are telling people to use Hypervisor.framework to use the native hypervisor.
I've dug through the documentation for the framework, and I'm not seeing anything that leads me to believe that they are using hardware features on Apple Silicon.
It's not just semantics, and the problem with using it as shorthand is that many people out there will think it's literal ARM chips (eg. Cortex). If that's the 'knowledge' they're running with, they'll start to look at the capabilities of a Cortex CPU (for example) vs an i7 or i9 thinking they're going to come away with a reasonable comparison of capabilities.
But they won't, not even close. Not only is Apple's silicon a completely custom designed piece of hardware, it's an entire SOC, not just a CPU, which means it replaces a whole collection of what would normally be disparate chips/controllers spread across a motherboard.
The differences are profound and people that run under the assumption that this is simply a move from i5/i7/i9 chips to some form of Cortex are missing almost everything that's actually important about this transition.
Apple dumped Cortex back starting with A6. Their cores are unique to them and the only thing the resemble somewhat is the Core 2 microarchitecture. Given that they very aggressively poached design talent off of Intel (particularly the team that created the Core microarchitecture) this is not exactly shocking.
Don't be silly. Whoever knows what a Cortex is will know better than that.
The point is that they won’t know what “Cortex” is, but they will know it is “ARM”. And since ARM = ARM they’ll being looking at the capabilities of ARM(Cortex) and assuming ARM(ASi) are equivalent.
Exactly. I've already see people (layman) using benchmarks from other ARM hardware, comparing it to Intel, and trying extrapolate from that what the ASi (Apple Silicon) performance is going to be. They're looking at a completely unrelated, isolated hardware component rather than a custom SOC that incorporates so much more built from a custom, proprietary design. And as long as people keep calling Apple's upcoming SOC an 'ARM chip', that's going to be a risk.
The Apple Silicon chips have one feature that is ARM-like, and it isn’t even the largest part of the chip. Calling it an ARM chip is like saying you have a SONY car, because it has a SONY radio.
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It's poor analogy because ARM instruction set is an essential technology, to allow the applications to run on the chip. It's the ARM instructions that also allow for non-trivial iOS app compatibility. A better analogy is perhaps saying you have a gasoline powered car as opposed to a diesel powered car.
It's poor analogy because ARM instruction set is an essential technology, to allow the applications to run on the chip. It's the ARM instructions that also allow for non-trivial iOS app compatibility. A better analogy is perhaps saying you have a gasoline powered car as opposed to a diesel powered car.
ARM is being used to denote compatibility of software and distinguish it from x86. Its not a descriptor of the detailed CPU specs.
You only have to look at this section of the forum
Apple Silicon (ARM) Macs.
people will look at and think ARM.
very few people will distinguish between an instruction set and the processor.
we call them intel or amd Cpu, we don’t refer to them as x86/x86-64 instruction set chips from intel or amd.
these will get known commonly as Arm Macs, wether apple like it or not.
Apple Silicon (ARM) Macs.
people will look at and think ARM.
very few people will distinguish between an instruction set and the processor.
we call them intel or amd Cpu, we don’t refer to them as x86/x86-64 instruction set chips from intel or amd.
these will get known commonly as Arm Macs, wether apple like it or not.
We call them Intel Macs and so does Apple. They never made any with AMD so who knows how that would have panned out.
In both cases above, it's because they're actual Intel chips. However, ASi (Apple Silicon) are not ARM chips. Not even close.