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MisterAndrew

macrumors 68030
Sep 15, 2015
2,895
2,390
Portland, Ore.
people still purchase for the apps for hackintosh and that is where apple usually gets their money from. Seems more like you have issue of people figuring out a way to get the best of both worlds.

Nope. The license to use macOS is dependent of running it on Apple hardware. It's part of the purchase price of a Mac. Therefore a hack is running a pirated OS. No app can be legitimately run on that.
 

1193001

Cancelled
Sep 30, 2019
207
196

b0fh

macrumors regular
May 14, 2012
155
63
Not accurate. They moved the dev offshore. That article is four and half years old on top of that. FAKE NEWS. ;)

No. They killed the entire team and then brought in a new team offshore. The original team worked on Fusion from the beginning till when they were laid off. That VMware couldn't/wouldn't even pay for 15-20 US developers shows how little they think of it.
 

SocialKonstruct

macrumors regular
Apr 21, 2020
181
159
Midvale, UT
Already this ARM move is looking bad so far...

screen-shot-1-jpg.475268
 

OkiRun

macrumors 65816
Oct 25, 2019
1,005
585
Japan
Expect to see ARM PCIe coprocessor boards for the 7,1 (and you could stuff some serious hardware in an MPX module) if the transition isn’t rapid.
Thoughts about how an ARM based Mac Pro would affect the release of new types of MPX modules for the 2019 7,1...?
 

zephonic

macrumors 65816
Feb 7, 2011
1,314
709
greater L.A. area
Well even if the hack hardware costs more, Apple doesn't receive anything for the services they provide including the OS. So basically a hackintosh user expects Apple's engineers to work for free.

I don't know that I'd agree with that statement.

I have an iPhone (my third), an iPad (my second), a 13" MBP, a cMP, and a '07 iMac that is collecting dust because the only thing that runs on it is SnowLeopard and a super old Firefox. I pay for Apple Music and iCloud storage, and I have two Apple TV's.

Apple's desktop offerings are a joke. The MacMini has mobile components, and the iMac comes with a friggin' 5400rpm drive, FFS. The MacPro is not realistically priced. I'll wait to see what they announce at WWDC, but I'm pretty sure my next desktop is gonna be either a Hackintosh or just plain vanilla Windows.

We built a gaming PC for my son, AMD Ryzen 6-core with a 5500XT GPU; it smokes anything short of the iMacPro/MacPro, and it cost ~$1000.

If I could buy a similarly spec'd MacMini for $1500, I'd do it. But you can pay $2500 for a MM and still get inferior performance! At some point, it just doesn't make sense anymore.


I think what I'm trying to say is people who go hackintosh aren't just PC guys who want a Mac for less $$$. AFAIK, the majority are loyal Mac users for whom Apple no longer builds a viable machine.
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Already this ARM move is looking bad so far...

screen-shot-1-jpg.475268

Sigh. That's not how that works.

Quu's post on the first page of this thread explains it, I suggest you read that.
 
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goMac

macrumors 604
Apr 15, 2004
7,663
1,694
Already this ARM move is looking bad so far...

screen-shot-1-jpg.475268

That's a actively cooled desktop CPU against a passively cooled phone CPU.

So that's actually looking pretty darn good. Especially that the CPU with no fan on it is beating the CPU with active cooling in single core, which supposedly is ARM's weak point according to these forums.

The ARM CPUs that Apple is supposed to be using on Macs are massively upgraded over what they put in cell phones. That benchmark is the bottom tier performance, and it's a pretty darn impressive bottom tier.
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They will drop support for Apple - companies aren't going to support 3 code bases, especially when the 2 apple ones have so little marketshare.

ARMs not a third code base. Same code base as Intel. PowerPC and Intel weren't two separate code bases, I don't expect that to happen here.

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Expect to see ARM PCIe coprocessor boards for the 7,1 (and you could stuff some serious hardware in an MPX module) if the transition isn’t rapid. Once it’s complete, expect to see x64 coprocessor MPX modules for the ARM Mac Pro. Maybe they’ll also introduce a mythical xMac.

I would not expect to see this. PCIe isn't fast enough for this setup, and they'd have to have separate banks of RAM, which really doesn't make sense on a workstation.
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...which is almost exactly what MS did with Windows RT - the first stab at Windows-on-ARM that sunk without a trace. Windows RT wouldn't run Win32 apps (even with re-compilation) - it would only run "modern" Windows 8-style apps from the Microsoft Store which - in 2012 - looked something like the toilet rolls and pasta aisles of most supermarkets did a month or two back. "Some would say we made a huge mistake in disallowing Win32". Well, lets see, Windows RT bombed spectacularly (because iOS and Android had already won the mobile market and had huge app stores, iWork, Google Docs etc. had shown people that there was life after Office, so the only unique thing MS could have offered to claw back the mobile market was the ability to run regular Windows software and the familiar Windows UI). So, yeah, that probably counts as a "huge mistake", but this was when MS was also making a "huge mistake" with Windows 8 - which would have been the end of Windows if it hadn't been "too big to fail".

I think a lot of the hand wringing and drama in these parts about ARM is Microsoft's fault.

First you had Windows RT that couldn't run Win32 apps. Except it could, Microsoft just blocked it for third parties because they wanted to get rid of Win32. But then everyone thought that the real reason was because ARM couldn't handle real apps.

Then they did Windows 10 on ARM. And it's ok. But their message to developers is "well maybe support it please if it's not too much trouble I mean we don't want to bother you" so no one recompiles for it and it kind of wastes away. And everyone once again thinks ARM can't do real things.

Meantime, I have two Raspberry Pis that I'm doing development for. They both run real Linux. You wouldn't know they were ARM devices. And they run all the Linux stuff I work on, and pretty good for $30 devices. They're not Mac Pro levels of performance. But they're $30 and don't even have a heat sink, so I wasn't expecting to bench them against my Mac Pro.

I've got an iPad and an iPhone on my desk. Both run macOS derivatives, and both run great. I run plenty of "real" stuff on my iPad and it runs just fine, with multitasking and all the fixins. And the iPad Pro is a screamer in performance.

Microsoft is the only one having trouble with ARM, and it has nothing to do with ARM, just Microsoft being badly managed. It's not hard to recompile apps for ARM, unless Microsoft's bungling makes it hard. Literally for a lot of apps building for ARM will just be clicking the build button. Except Microsoft can't even manage that right on the Windows side.
 
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bluecoast

macrumors 68020
Nov 7, 2017
2,256
2,673
Focussing on what happens to the Mac Pro:

I think it’ll be the last machine that moves to ARM. Likely we are years out from this.

The main focus is going to be firstly, consumer notebook as that’s the least performance focussed Mac out there.

So the first ARM Mac will undoubtedly be the MacBook.

When people are pleasantly surprised about how fast the new MacBook is, there will be clamours for ARM on more lines.

We can expect the ‘iMac’ to swiftly follow - it may launch alongside the MacBook. And I am speculating that it may launch just as the ‘Mac’

Why am I not saying that the Air or iMac are going to be updated?

Obviously not all software is going to be ARM ready immediately. There will likely be Open-GL only apps etc that businesses rely on that which are produced by smaller companies, which will only slowly make the leap to being ARM ready.

So I expect that the MBA that’s just launched is going to be with is for a while (maybe into early 2022) for those that have to buy an Intel machine.

Ditto the iMac (that’s rumoured to be coming out soon) with the ‘Mac’ being the ARM version of this.

Although admittedly I could be very wrong here and we’ll just see a switch to the ARM iMac with a few intel models hanging around (hard to find in the stores and on Apple.com etc).

The Mac Mini will probably switch around this time too.

Then by WWDC 2021 (maybe sooner) we’ll see the ARM MBP redesigned 13-14 inch model. I think there’s a good reason why the just launched MBP wasn’t redesigned. One or two of the current Intel MBP’s will hang around for a while too.

When everyone is impressed by this, we can expect to see the 16 inch MBP in the fall of 2021/spring 2022.

I’m not sure if we’ll ever see an update to the iMac Pro. The new Intel iMac is likely going to cover that base.

And finally, when Apple has scaled all of its chip architecture up, when everyone is fully convinced that they can do it, when enough pro software has moved over, we’ll see the ARM MP. WWDC 2022? Fall 2022.

I’m not in the industry so at this point, the crystal ball gets hazy.
 
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goMac

macrumors 604
Apr 15, 2004
7,663
1,694
Rumor mill seems to be indicating 2021 may only get an ARM MacBook Air. I think Intel Macs will be around for a while. Probably not looking at an ARM MacBook Pro until 2022 and maybe an ARM Mac Pro in 2023.

There’s going to be a lot of time for things to be worked out. If you’re on a Mac Pro right now you can take a deep breath and relax. It’s going to be a while until this works it’s way to you.

I’m guessing we’ll see 1-2 more Intel Mac Pro upgrades before ARM Mac Pros even enter the picture.
 
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pasamio

macrumors 6502
Jan 22, 2020
356
297
Already this ARM move is looking bad so far...

screen-shot-1-jpg.475268

You're comparing the i9-9900K that has a TDP of 95W against the A13 Bionic which has a TDP of 7W. Now I don't expect an ARM chip to beat out top of the line Intel chips on single threaded performance any time soon and I'd expect Apple won't either. Even AMD can't beat them at it right now though they're coming close.

What is a much fairer comparison is those CPU SKU against a CPU you'd see in a low end laptop, and when that happens Apple's AX CPUs do reasonably well:
 

Phil Tschee

macrumors newbie
Jun 12, 2020
1
0
To give some historical context, the Mac Pro's predecessor was the Power Mac G5.

Apple first announced the Intel processor architecture transition on June 6, 2005.
The last Power Mac G5 A1117, PowerMac11,2, was released October 19, 2005.
It was discontinued after the release of the first Mac Pro in August 2006.
The last full OS release, 10.5 Leopard, to support the G5 was was released on October 26, 2007
The first full OS that did not support the G5, 10.6 Snow Leopard, was released June 8, 2009
The final security update for Leopard on PowerPC was Security Update 2011-004 released June 23, 2011.
The Power Mac G5 became "vintage" per Apple's rules five years after final sale -- August 2011

I would say that five years after last sale is about as long as you can expect any sort of support to persist. If you figure that Apple will take about a year or so to replace the Macintel Pro with an ARMed Mac Pro -- say, mid 2021 -- then you can expect Macintel products to be supported until about mid 2026.

The 5 year service and support does typically fall true with most models such as the MacBook Air, MacBook, Mini...5 years after last date of manufacture the machine will go vintage. There have been exceptions to this however. The last Mac Pro
To give some historical context, the Mac Pro's predecessor was the Power Mac G5.

Apple first announced the Intel processor architecture transition on June 6, 2005.
The last Power Mac G5 A1117, PowerMac11,2, was released October 19, 2005.
It was discontinued after the release of the first Mac Pro in August 2006.
The last full OS release, 10.5 Leopard, to support the G5 was was released on October 26, 2007
The first full OS that did not support the G5, 10.6 Snow Leopard, was released June 8, 2009
The final security update for Leopard on PowerPC was Security Update 2011-004 released June 23, 2011.
The Power Mac G5 became "vintage" per Apple's rules five years after final sale -- August 2011

I would say that five years after last sale is about as long as you can expect any sort of support to persist. If you figure that Apple will take about a year or so to replace the Macintel Pro with an ARMed Mac Pro -- say, mid 2021 -- then you can expect Macintel products to be supported until about mid 2026.
there have been exceptions to the 5 year rule. The 2010 imac was serviceable and supported by Apple until around 2018 due to a large quantity being used in education, as was the 2012 MacBook Pro which was serviceable until 2018 as well.
 

StuAff

macrumors 6502
Aug 6, 2007
391
261
Portsmouth, UK
>this thing< advertises up to 80 cores per 'processor'. What part of 'putting a lot of cores' did you miss? That's pretty complicated silicon work. I wonder what their manufacturing failure rate is, and how many bugs there are in something that complicated.

Maybe I over simplified the ARM in a toaster comment, but they aren't for heavy lifting, because when you get to that point, why not have a larger instruction set, and just design a better main sequence processor. *shrug*

80 cores per processor, 160 cores in a dual socket server? How big are the chips? There can't be much of a cache per core. Maybe it would work, but I don't see any big providers beating my door down to sell me something like that. That wounds like a neural network idea processor. Lots of little processors doing lots of little parts of a process, until they get it done. *shrug* And then it's all based on the software.
Again, you're missing the point. ARM's licencees, including Apple, design the chips for their specific needs. TSMC seem to know what they're doing making them. If you can stick 128 physical cores in an EPYC system, why not 160 in something like Altra (incidentally, that has a 'mere' 128KB L1 & 1MB L2 cache per core). Apple is unlikely to use that number even in a Pro, but… And RISC processors aren't for heavy lifting? Seriously? What on earth was Apple doing with the G5s then? How about POWER9, the latest successor to those G5s? The ARM and POWER9-based supercomputers? If Apple goes down this route, it will make it work.
 
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Quu

macrumors 68040
Apr 2, 2007
3,442
6,876
Already this ARM move is looking bad so far...

screen-shot-1-jpg.475268

9900K Specifications:
High Performance Core Count: 8
All-Core Base Clock: 3.6GHz
All-Core Turbo Clock: 4.7GHz
2-Core & Single-Core Turbo Clock: 5.0GHz
TDP: 95 Watts
Actual Power Consumption when at 4.7GHz under load: 130 Watts.

A13 Bionic Specifications:
High Performance Core Count: 2
Low Performance Core Count: 4
All-Core Base Clock on High Cores: 2.65 GHz
All-Core Turbo clock on High Cores: 2.7 GHz
All-Core Base Clock on Low Cores: 1.8GHz
All-Core Turbo Clock on Low Cores: 1.8GHz
TDP: 6 Watts
Actual Power Consumption when at 2.7GHz under load: 7 Watts

Do you see now how your interpretation of this comparison is flawed? The Apple chip has 1/4th the high performance cores. 1/2 the clockspeed, 1/18th the power consumption, 1/15th the thermal design power of the 9900K.

The fact the A13 loses by so little with a CPU that has such a large advantage is crazy and goes to illustrate the incredible potential Apple can unlock by moving their design out of the constraints of an iPhone chassis.

As I said on page one of this thread it's the IPC (Instructions Per Clock) that counts when evaluating designs across different architectures. Apple has I believe the most efficient processor design on the planet right now.
 

bluecoast

macrumors 68020
Nov 7, 2017
2,256
2,673
I don't know that I'd agree with that statement.

I have an iPhone (my third), an iPad (my second), a 13" MBP, a cMP, and a '07 iMac that is collecting dust because the only thing that runs on it is SnowLeopard and a super old Firefox. I pay for Apple Music and iCloud storage, and I have two Apple TV's.

Apple's desktop offerings are a joke. The MacMini has mobile components, and the iMac comes with a friggin' 5400rpm drive, FFS. The MacPro is not realistically priced. I'll wait to see what they announce at WWDC, but I'm pretty sure my next desktop is gonna be either a Hackintosh or just plain vanilla Windows.

We built a gaming PC for my son, AMD Ryzen 6-core with a 5500XT GPU; it smokes anything short of the iMacPro/MacPro, and it cost ~$1000.

If I could buy a similarly spec'd MacMini for $1500, I'd do it. But you can pay $2500 for a MM and still get inferior performance! At some point, it just doesn't make sense anymore.


I think what I'm trying to say is people who go hackintosh aren't just PC guys who want a Mac for less $$$. AFAIK, the majority are loyal Mac users for whom Apple no longer builds a viable machine.
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Sigh. That's not how that works.

Quu's post on the first page of this thread explains it, I suggest you read that.

You’d hope that with the economy more of scale that Apple will gain from using ARM on the Mac can be passed down to us (cheaper products) and much better specced entry level devices.

Agree, a premium consumer desktop computer should not be sold with a hard disk drive in 2020.

I’m hoping that we’ll see ARM ranges for the Malike the (rumoured 2020 lineup) for the iPhone where the only difference is (Apparently):

Size of screen and storage
And consumer or pro festures (and finishes).

Presumably though we’ll see different processors in the consumer and Pro ranges. Q: I wonder if we’ll start to see a difference there in the consumer and pro iPhone?
 
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theluggage

macrumors G3
Jul 29, 2011
8,015
8,452
But what is left in the OSX 3d space will go by the wayside. You won't see much effort because none of those 3d apps work worth a crap on low end hardware (which is why I have retired both of my 4,1 and moved to Windows).

...but that has very little to do with ARM and everything to do with the direction Apple has been moving in for the last 10 years or so. For most developers, the effort in supporting ARM should be no worse than dealing with whatever delights MacOS 10.16 throws their way (unless Apple does a half-baked job with MacOS for ARM).
 

theluggage

macrumors G3
Jul 29, 2011
8,015
8,452
I would not expect to see this. PCIe isn't fast enough for this setup, and they'd have to have separate banks of RAM, which really doesn't make sense on a workstation.

Interestingly one of the early commercial incarnations of ARM was an "accelerator" board for IBM PCs:


...and, of course, the early ARM development was done on a "coprocessor" box for the BBC Micro (although the BBC was designed from scratch to potentially act as a front-end to a "headless" co processor).

Not saying that's particularly relevant in 2020 - but it's always worth remembering that the original ARM wasn't designed as a low-power mobile thing - it was designed to kick sand in the face of the x86 and succeeded (against the 286) - but unfortunately, in the late 80s and early 90s, nothing that wasn't IBM/Intel compatible could get a look-in. What's changed now is that the computing industry has become far more open to alternatives.

Then they did Windows 10 on ARM. And it's ok. But their message to developers is "well maybe support it please if it's not too much trouble I mean we don't want to bother you" so no one recompiles for it and it kind of wastes away.

This is where Apple and Microsoft's situations differ. Microsoft controls PC software, but it doesn't control PC hardware. In terms of PCs Apple is one of the 5 largest personal computer makers - even if Dell/HP/Lenovo are considerably higher in terms of sales, Microsoft are way down on that list - meanwhile it's not hard to put Apple at the top once you expand "personal computers" to include mobile... Also, a large part of "Wintel"'s monopoly comes from the corporate sector who are totally allergic to anything that compromises backwards compatibility. So the CEO of Microsoft can't stand up one day and say "We're moving Windows to ARM and in 2-3 years time we'll be dropping Intel support" unless they have the support of Dell, HP, Lenovo and an army of corporate customers who won't risk having to coax the author of their 30-year-old stock control software out of retirement/the grave. The CEO of Apple controls hardware and software so if, in a couple of weeks, Tim Cook announces that all Macs will be ARM based within 3 years then - for better or worse - it's probably gonna happen and developers will need to shape up or ship out.

That's not to say that Apple can't/won't stuff it up by (e.g.) turning the ARM Mac into a glorified, locked-down, non-backwards-compatible iPad (or, to translate that into English, discontinuing the Mac in all but name), doubling the price, making it so thin that you need to keep it in a rigid box etc. but until we know let's credit them with an ounce of common sense. Turning the Mac into an iPad - competing with the iPad Pro - would be nonsensical.

(We do, however, have to live with the reality that Apple makes most of its money from the iPhone and sees "services" as the future - it wouldn't be too much effort to release XCode for Linux/iPad/cloud to take care of iOS development and just dump the Mac completely)
 

PinkyMacGodess

Suspended
Mar 7, 2007
10,271
6,228
Midwest America.
On the Ampere processor referenced upstream. Apparently only Lenovo released a server line based on that processor, and it was discontinued in what looks like a really quick timeline. The HR330A and HR350A were a one and two U server that only ran CentOS 7.5, Oracle Linux 7.5. Yeah, HUGE business OS's I'm sure. So what were those servers aimed at? What market? Education? Research? Those servers might have been available over a longer period of time, but they appear to have popped up, and disappeared quickly. Odd...

And the only source for propaganda on them is Ampere! Lenovo has scrubbed them from their site.

Lenovo HR330A Server

Lenovo HR350A Server
 

Quu

macrumors 68040
Apr 2, 2007
3,442
6,876
On the Ampere processor referenced upstream. Apparently only Lenovo released a server line based on that processor, and it was discontinued in what looks like a really quick timeline. The HR330A and HR350A were a one and two U server that only ran CentOS 7.5, Oracle Linux 7.5. Yeah, HUGE business OS's I'm sure. So what were those servers aimed at? What market? Education? Research? Those servers might have been available over a longer period of time, but they appear to have popped up, and disappeared quickly. Odd...

And the only source for propaganda on them is Ampere! Lenovo has scrubbed them from their site.

Lenovo HR330A Server

Lenovo HR350A Server

With regards to the first generation Ampere servers they were promising prior to retail availability due to them having high performance per watt compared to equivalent Broadwell-EP XEON's. But by the time Ampere actually launched Skylake was out which increased core counts, IPC and clock speeds. This basically wiped Ampere out.

Even CloudFlare who wrote a very encouraging blog post about how they were planning to deploy ARM servers and showed their testing setup and results (which were incredibly encouraging) backtracked as soon as Skylake became available because the performance advantage was undeniable.

For a new architecture of any kind to gain traction it can't be worse or equivalent to the market leading architecture. It has to be significantly better because the software engineering effort required in switching is substantial. Ampere being just as-good and then not-as-good is what made the OEM's who had initially offered it switch.

But as I say, doesn't mean ARM is dead in the server market. It just means more time is needed, more engineering, more money.
 
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PinkyMacGodess

Suspended
Mar 7, 2007
10,271
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Midwest America.
Again, you're missing the point. ARM's licencees, including Apple, design the chips for their specific needs. TSMC seem to know what they're doing making them. If you can stick 128 physical cores in an EPYC system, why not 160 in something like Altra (incidentally, that has a 'mere' 128KB L1 & 1MB L2 cache per core). Apple is unlikely to use that number even in a Pro, but… And RISC processors aren't for heavy lifting? Seriously? What on earth was Apple doing with the G5s then? How about POWER9, the latest successor to those G5s? The ARM and POWER9-based supercomputers? If Apple goes down this route, it will make it work.

But supporting that number of processors is not going to be easy for a standard OS. The only, apparently, servers based on the Ampere processors were made released by Lenovo, and there is no information except for Lenovo propaganda available on the Ampere website. Either they are pre-release, or they are 'post-release' and Lenovo has dropped them cold, and hard. And running only two rather obscure OS's, leads me to believe that king of parallel computing is going to be a heavy lift for a consumer OS. (Oh, from the Lenovo propaganda, it shows a few more OSes supported: CentOS 7.5 and 7.6, RHEL 7.6, Oracle Linux 7.5 and 7.6, and Ubuntu 18.04. But they are still not widely used OSes in business. They are niche and getting business to adopt them for more than limited specialized purposes is going to be a hard sell, which is probably why Lenovo appears to have dropped them)
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But as I say, doesn't mean ARM is dead in the server market. It just means more time is needed, more engineering, more money.

But with two choices already, does the market actually need a third choice? The market appears to say no. But SPARC ran for years in the educational space. (The university I attended had Sun machines everywhere) If Ampere can find a niche, and exploit it, they might stay alive for a while. I think Sun died due to crappy management. SPARC could have stayed relevant for longer, and so it goes...

Intel stole their cheese? It happens. Intel got fat and lazy for far too long. They finally have to work for market relevance. AMD stole their cheese...
 
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StuAff

macrumors 6502
Aug 6, 2007
391
261
Portsmouth, UK
But supporting that number of processors is not going to be easy for a standard OS. The only, apparently, servers based on the Ampere processors were made released by Lenovo, and there is no information except for Lenovo propaganda available on the Ampere website. Either they are pre-release, or they are 'post-release' and Lenovo has dropped them cold, and hard. And running only two rather obscure OS's, leads me to believe that king of parallel computing is going to be a heavy lift for a consumer OS. (Oh, from the Lenovo propaganda, it shows a few more OSes supported: CentOS 7.5 and 7.6, RHEL 7.6, Oracle Linux 7.5 and 7.6, and Ubuntu 18.04. But they are still not widely used OSes in business. They are niche and getting business to adopt them for more than limited specialized purposes is going to be a hard sell, which is probably why Lenovo appears to have dropped them)
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Point missed, yet again. If Apple is going down this route, it won't be using Ampere, it'll be designing its own CPUs for its own objectives. As it happens, as yet, Mac OS supports 'only' 64 threads. That will increase over time as Apple sees fit. Windows 10 Pro: 128. Win 10 Workstation and Enterprise: 256. Linux is hardly obscure, either, even in the home user space, let alone business.
 

djjeff

macrumors 6502
Jun 10, 2020
318
162
So the only question is when will Intel be able to do it? It's looking like 10nm won't be a 4 year delay but may be a 5 year delay and they may even skip it and set a loftier goal of 8nm because the more they wait to bring 10nm to market the less relevant it becomes.
Which means the current issues they are encountering are only temporary.
 

Pressure

macrumors 603
May 30, 2006
5,182
1,546
Denmark
The dark grey is the A13 running in the current iPhones. The blue at the bottom is the Core 9900K (Skylake) and the orange is the Ryzen 3900X (Zen2). There is plenty of headroom to tweak things if Apple isn't constrained by the phone size (thermals and power) and small chip size (98mm2 A13 versus 180mm2 for 9900K and 80mm2 per CCX plus uncore stuff in the 3900X).

spec2006-a13_575px.png
 

Quu

macrumors 68040
Apr 2, 2007
3,442
6,876
But with two choices already, does the market actually need a third choice? The market appears to say no. But SPARC ran for years in the educational space. (The university I attended had Sun machines everywhere) If Ampere can find a niche, and exploit it, they might stay alive for a while. I think Sun died due to crappy management. SPARC could have stayed relevant for longer, and so it goes...

Intel stole their cheese? It happens. Intel got fat and lazy for far too long. They finally have to work for market relevance. AMD stole their cheese...

More competition is always good. Personally I'm quite happy with the AMD EPYC series of processors for my servers. The market rarely cries out for anything but once it arrives they jump on what can provide them a competitive advantage.
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Which means the current issues they are encountering are only temporary.

To me 4 years going into 5 years is a longer delay than temporary. If they were building something for the government that cost upwards of 10 billion a year and it ran over by 4 years there would be congressional hearings to determine why.

And it's possible they will abandon 10nm entirely, move to TSMC or Samsung's 7nm nodes etc
 
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