What If Apple Made Processors For Its Computers?

[ZombieZakk]

Let me introduce you to a little company called Lenovo. See, they make this laptop called Thinkpad X220, that gets an estimated 8 hours with a 6-cell, 15 hours with a 9-cell, and 23 hours with a 6+Slice Battery Combination.

you do realize there is a hell of a size difference with the the lenovo+ a slice battery compared to an air.

 

[wordoflife]

Intel probably is best in class for what it does. Do not fix what is not broken.

 

[old-wiz]

To make it economical, you have to build the chips in very large quantities. Intel produces chips for many different computer mfgrs, so they make a huge quantity which lowers the cost per chip.

 

[testcss]

I hope I'm right about the A-whatever processors now that the new Macbook Air computers are coming out. By the way, A9 supports quad core processors with up to 2 Ghz. This chip only takes 1.9 Watts! Compared to the Sandy Bridge processors, it uses less power and is only marginally slower. You all have valid points about reworking the OS, Windows compatibility, speed, etc. but those problems are easily solved. Windows 8 is built for ARM processors, 64-bit designs are on the way, and ARM can only get faster at the low Ghz it is at now. The A15 Design coming in 2012 ,Link, has 16 cores at 2.5 Ghz. With Apple at the reigns we could see some of the best chip designs ever!

 

[KnightWRX]

Marginally slower ? Mhz myth much ? The Cortex A9 is much slower than the Sandy Bridge architecture. Don't be fooled because the "Mhz look the same!". Clock speed means nothing, it's all about instructions per clock.

Seriously, ARM anything right now is much slower than x86.

 

[MacHamster68]

why would bootcamp not be possible on a arm based Mac?

windows 8 will run on arm based computers
http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/05/microsoft-shows-cool-demos-of-arm-based-computers-running-windows/

and look at that little thingy its a arm based computer (prototype)
Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)
http://www.raspberrypi.org/pcb.jpg

and here the spec of that little bugger

700MHz ARM11
128MB of SDRAM
OpenGL ES 2.0
1080p3D H.264 high-profile decode
Composite and HDMI video output
USB 2.0
SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
General-purpose I/O
just plug in a leyboard and mouse and ethernet or wireless adapter to the usb port and a hdmi tv on the other end
price will be $25 or £15 when it hits the market running ubuntu

all you need for emailing, surfing and watching films

 

[Cheffy Dave]

It's not what if, but more like when

 

[KnightWRX]

windows 8 will run on arm based computers

With no Windows software compatibility to show for it. Windows 8 on ARM will be a tablet product, made to run tablet software. I doubt many vendors will bother to port from x86 Windows.

 

[AppleCat]

The whole software incompatibility thing is an issue diminishing by the day. It's not 1985 anymore where loads of code was written in assembly and was directly hardware dependant.

Porting software today is more and more turning into a matter of just selecting the other target and building from source. Apple will make sure it will be smooth, and developers will have their popular softwares running natively quickly. And in any case Apple did a great job with Rosetta last time, I'm sure there won't be much software that falls through the cracks.

They won't switch until they're getting adequate performance, and once they have that and throw out the damn DVD drive (because admit it, spinning plastic discs around at high speed and shooting laser beams is pretty arcane and wayback stuff that needs to go) and replace all that volume with battery, people will be in love again.

 

[Sjhonny]

Maybe we'll see an ARM based mac with the arrival of the A8 ... Right now only the quad core via (?) from nVidia (cortex-A15 based) has proven to out perform a certain atom cpu (not high end) in both raw processing power as power consumption, while running honeycomb on a tablet.

A cortex-A15 derivate is probably what we'll see in the A6. It comes, not even by a long shot close to the performance of the most basic Sandy Bridge model... (except maybe the mobile Celeron, but I haven't seen any benchmarks for those yet, nor do they even support turbo! (the whole point of sandy bridge in my opinion ...) ). The A15 products will arrive at around the same time as the ivy-bridge cpu's ... so make up your mind yourself ... There'll be no reason at all to put ARM in mac's the coming two to three years. The performance just isn't there, nor the hardware support (does ARM15 designs even support things like pci(-x)?). And now we're not even talking about the hassle of virtualization or recompiling of all existing intel/universal binaries (not only OS-wise) ...

 

[MacHamster68]

you all seem to forget that the big majority of Mac users have bought Mac's that are overkill for what they do on them for some who just look around their emails and surf in the interweb even a iphone would be overkill already in terms of processor performance

 

[KnightWRX]

you all seem to forget that the big majority of Mac users have bought Mac's that are overkill for what they do on them for some who just look around their emails and surf in the interweb even a iphone would be overkill already in terms of processor performance

Maybe, but there's a little matter of compatibility in switching to ARM.

It's not just a performance problem. x86 and x86_64 code would have to be run through a Rosetta like piece of emulation software and of course, emulation slows things down. So now you have a processor that is 4x less powerful than your Intel equivalent running code at half it's normal speed. You just took a 8x performance hit.

I hope you weren't planning on playing games on this thing.

 

[testcss]

Maybe, but there's a little matter of compatibility in switching to ARM.

It's not just a performance problem. x86 and x86_64 code would have to be run through a Rosetta like piece of emulation software and of course, emulation slows things down. So now you have a processor that is 4x less powerful than your Intel equivalent running code at half it's normal speed. You just took a 8x performance hit.

I hope you weren't planning on playing games on this thing.

Maybe the average consumer doesn't want to play high-powered games on their computer. The web browsing performance is more than adequate on these ARM chips and I'm comparing the MBA's processor to the ARM chips. A quad 2 Ghz ARM chip is probably about as powerful as the 1.4 Ghz dual core. If you rad the article on Apple Testing A-whatever chips in their MBA, you'd know they were impressed by the ARM chip's performance. Say you put an ARM-15 8 Core 2.5 Ghz chip in a MBA. That performance would be equivalent on your magical 8 times scale to about an 1.2 ghz i5 (4 Threads). The ARM chip would still use less energy and have a similar or cheaper price when it is released soon. You aren't seeing the ARM's ability to leverage processing across many small cores.

 

[KnightWRX]

A quad 2 Ghz ARM chip is probably about as powerful as the 1.4 Ghz dual core.

No, it's not. That's your mistake. Most software isn't coded in a way to take advantage of mass-parallelism the way synthetic benchmarks can. Unless you get your instruction-per-clock count up, your ARM processor just isn't up to par with an x86 chip.

And again, a x86 web browser, running emulated on a 4x slower ARM chip just isn't going to be able to push the HMTL5 Canvas stuff and the HTML5 video decoding required for a modern website, throwing us back to compatiblity. You'll have to wait for your browser vendor to port to ARM, if they ever decide to.

And since most of the browsers these days are a mish-mash of in-house code and outside libraries, the vendors will have to wait for those libraries to port to ARM too.. And those libraries might have dependencies they need to wait for too... and on. And on.

It gives us the whole PPC -> x86 thing, except now the new architecture is slower than the new one and can't run emulation well enough for the few years until the dust has settled.

If you want an ARM computer that badly, I suggest you look at open source software to run on it. Most of it is written so that it is at least source compatible with dozens of CPU architectures and will compile right up if no binaries are available. Linux can run on about anything under the sun and most of the major projects will build fine on most of those architectures.

 

[Primejimbo]

If they did, and they were comparable in power to Intel's CPUs, then I would like it because Macs could be cheaper then.

Yea, because it's Intel that makes Mac's so expensive....

Like others said, if it's not broken, don't fix it.

 

[pgiguere1]

Seriously, external RAM?