NEWS FLASH: Apple switching away from Intel

[ameris_cyning]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-plans-to-move-from-intel-to-own-mac-chips-from-2020

 

Quote

Apple is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel, according to people familiar with the plans, Bloomberg News’ Ian King and Mark Gurman report. 

 

 

[IUTniun]

end of hackintoshes

[Cyberdevs]

Not necessarily?! What will happen to all the Macs with the Intel CPU? Is Apple going to drop the support for all those Macs as well? Although Apple has done this before when they switched to Intel from their PPC architecture but who knows?

I guess if that's going to happen we all have to stick to macOS Very High Sierra (10.14 ) and macOS Ultimately Sierra (10.15 :D) or macOS Last Sierra 

[Awesome Donkey]

This has been rumored for years now. My guess is they'll start with lower end Macs, as their in-house chips probably won't be able to come close to the performance of higher end Intel chips like in the Mac Pro, for example.

[fantomas]

I guess it is planned on April 1, 2020??? Right??

[joe75]

2 years to figure out how to build an arm powered mini or air.. It will flop.

Any iMac or MacPro will still need Intel or *AMD* in two years time. 

[apianti]

Yeah, this is not feasible, and Apple would have to announce it now in order to have a timeline to have it released within two years (or less because it says by 2020). Not to forget they already had the developer machines built when they made the announcement for Intel.... Then it took like six months after the announcement of switching from PPC to Intel just to get out the first two terrible Intel iMac and MacBook Pro, and another six months to replace actual products. Intel increased their own schedule to help out Apple to get core microarchitecture ahead of schedule. It was another eight years after, before PPC macs were declared obsolete and removed from support. And they want to make all apps work across all devices, ask Microsoft how that works out? Windows 8 is well known for being a disaster because they tried to force this upon their customers, and no one wants a glorified cell phone as their desktop. No high end (or maybe even low end) Intel could be replaced with any ARM chip that is available, they just aren't designed to perform heavy tasks. There is a reason that there are not a lot of ARM desktops but there's a lot of ARM mobile/tablet devices. Also, what manufacturer could possibly create enough chips to meet the demands of the desktop market? There's a really only Qualcomm or Samsung, and I very much doubt either have the ability to create that many chips and innovate them quick enough to keep up with Intel and AMD innovations. Not to mention why would Samsung want to create ARM chips for Apple after their recent relationship troubles and direct competition in many areas. It's only beneficial to Samsung if they can also use the technology as well, which we have already found out Apple won't let them do. Which is why Samsung no longer makes their chips. So that leaves Qualcomm, with who they are also currently in legal battles, doubt there won't be bad blood in that relationship too. So they going to expect that the foundries that make their current iPhone chips are going to suddenly be able to completely change their foundries for producing desktop quality chips, maintain their mobile chips, and still have employees left after they don't all jump from the buildings? Or is Apple going to create their own foundry to directly compete? Because that would be much further than two years away... One last note, why would this be leaked? This would 100% be covered by an NDA and very few people would actually know about it inside the company. When has Apple ever let something out before an official announcement? "The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition." What does that even mean? I think this is some one random person wrote something stupid and a bunch of other news organizations just copy-pasta'd, I just went through google on like the first fifty articles talking about this are almost direct copies, lol. The only realistic thing I actually see is that they are creating software to make apps across all devices more feasible, which sounds more like they may approach an interpreted kind of binary format like microsoft did. I'll believe this when Apple says this is what they are doing.

Edited April 3, 2018 by apianti

[MaLd0n]

iMacPro2,1 for play Pac Man 

[Lucy183]

Hope the future macOS releases will be intel and arm(or whatever they'll call them) supported, like they did with 10.4 and 10.5, but for a long time

Edited April 3, 2018 by LuCyr04

[XLR]

Is it going to happen on April 1st 2020 by any chance?

[chris1111]

Future Hackintosh   ➥ ➥ ARM motherboard  

    New Hackintoh macOS ARM Project   

Edited April 3, 2018 by chris1111

[Rocky12]

 

ARM Hackintoh

Gigabyte MP30-AR0 is an ARM Server Motherboard Powered by Applied Micro X-Gene 1 SoC

 

MP30-AR0 specifications:

• Processor – AppliedMicro X-Gene 1 processor with 8 ARMv8 cores up to 2.4GHz (TDP 45W)
• System Memory – 8 x DIMM slots, Single, dual rank UDIMM modules @ 1333/1600 NHz supported (up to 16GB)
• Storage – 4x SATA III 6Gb/s ports + 1x SD card slot
• Connectivity – 2x 10GbE SFP+ LAN ports (integrated), 2x GbE LAN ports (Marvell 88E1512), 1x 10/100/1000 management LAN
• Graphics – Video Integrated in Aspeed AST2400. 2D Video Graphic Adapter with PCIe bus interface up to 1920×1200@60Hz 32bpp.
• Expansion Slots – 2x PCIe x16 (Gen3 x8 bus) slots
• Other Internal I/O
  • 1 x CPU fan header
  • 4x system fan headers
  • 1x USB 2.0 header
  • 2x Front panel headers
  • 1x APM strap header
  • 1x HDD back plane board header
  • 1x PMBUS header
  • 1x BMC JTAG header, 1x JTAG PLD header
  • 1x BIOS_H header
  • 1x Chassis intrusion header
  • 1x SATA DOM jumper, 1x BIOS recovery jumper, 1x ACK selection jumper
  • 1x IPMB connector
• Rear I/Os
  • 2x USB 2.0, 1x Mini USB
  • 1x VGA
  • 1x Serial
  • 2x SFP+, 3x RJ45
  • 1x ID button with LED, 1x Power button with LED, 1x Status LED
• Power – 1x 24-pin ATX main power connector; 2x 4-pin ATX 12V power connectors
• Dimensions –  244 × 244 mm (microATX form factor)

[xpamamadeus]

Can this run ozmosis or Clover?

Looks as this mbo bios uses uboot..

 

[Rocky12]

this is a developer question may be they can put some light on it

nothing is impossible  Intel

Cavium ThunderX =ThunderX2

Edited April 3, 2018 by Rockey12

[Allan]

1 hour ago, Rockey12 said:

 

• 1x USB 2.0 header
  • 1x VGA
  • 2x USB 2.0, 1x Mini USB

Still VGA and no USB 3?? 

[Cyberdevs]

Isn't apple suppose to develop their own version of the ARM processors? or these mainboards just use the same processors that apple will use in the future Macs?

[Rocky12]

thanks buddy 

[Balamut]

Compare that to the Intels 2020 CPUs or heck even AMD's, I think even Apple decides to go on the suicide mission with ARM to control everything it won't be another decade and extreme revolution in ARM chip architecture.

Don't forget by that time Intel will be on the Gen10.

[ameris_cyning]

9 hours ago, Cyberdevs said:

Isn't apple suppose to develop their own version of the ARM processors? or these mainboards just use the same processors that apple will use in the future Macs?

The A-series are based upon the ARM architecture. Apple has used them in the iPhone and iPad for several years now.

AMD and Intel release x86 chips. They have their differences, but they are incredibly similar. However MacOS cannot boot off of an AMD processor OOB. One needs a modified kernel to get it to work. I assume that any probs associated with the A Series chips could be overcome by our talented developers.

[apianti]

On 4/4/2018 at 2:03 AM, ameris cyning said:

The A-series are based upon the ARM architecture. Apple has used them in the iPhone and iPad for several years now.

AMD and Intel release x86 chips. They have their differences, but they are incredibly similar. However MacOS cannot boot off of an AMD processor OOB. One needs a modified kernel to get it to work. I assume that any probs associated with the A Series chips could be overcome by our talented developers.

If Apple did switch to ARM and completely dropped support for x86 chips then you would only be able to run in an ARM emulator as the two architectures are not interchangeable. They have entirely different instruction sets and implementation.

On 4/3/2018 at 5:05 PM, Rockey12 said:

thanks buddy 

Too bad that this CPU is very expensive, meant for servers, and can't even compete with previous generations of xeons, let alone new. That is the major failure of ARM, it can't compete with a comparably or lower priced x86. Then there's the manufacturer's release that contains:

Quote

By doing so, says Cavium, it will be able to keep the performance of its ARM server chips on par with the low-end of the Skylake Xeon product line, including single-socket Xeon D and Xeon E3 chips as well as two-socket Xeon E5 variants with a modest number of cores.

Seeing how current ARM chips cost approximately the same as desktop chips but perform no where near, the cost to performance ratio of trying to make them into desktops just does not make sense. Most phones now have either quad- or octa-core snapdragons. But it takes approximately 4 (extremely optimized) ARM cores to match one haswell core and that gap has only widened with each new generation, as the 48 core ThunderX competed with a lower end 12 core xeon, the 54 core ThunderX2 is competing with an even lower end 14 core xeon...

[Cyberdevs]

@apianti

So that means if Apple is going to switch to their version of the ARM processors it'll be the end of OSX86 as we know it?

[apianti]

31 minutes ago, Cyberdevs said:

@apianti

So that means if Apple is going to switch to their version of the ARM processors it'll be the end of OSX86 as we know it?

Yes, would become ARMmacOS, lol

[corbiz]

On 05/04/2018 at 6:48 PM, apianti said:

Yes, would become ARMmacOS, lol

[Cyberdevs]

On 4/5/2018 at 6:09 PM, Hervé said:

Yeah! Let's all buy a Pi... again!

Oh wait! Hasn't this been heard before? https://alvinalexander.com/photos/arm-vs-intel-performance-comparison

Let's hope that when Apple does the switch, it won't cost us an ARM and a leg... Meantime, I'm going to sit in my ARM chair and play Pac-Mania on my old Archimedes A310.

Best regards,

Loof Lipra

There are rumors of Apple releasing a new version of MacPro in 2019 and I guess they will call it MacPi Pro if they are going to use ARM processors in that machine as well

"Play the Pac-Man Like a Pro - MacPi Pro"

But no worries it's going to be modular, so we can add as much as ARM processors as we like, they sky is the limit

Edited April 8, 2018 by Cyberdevs

[Huckleberry Pie]

Unless they have managed to secure a licence for x86 and add some VLIW support (think Project Denver or Transmeta) to reassure customers, this is bound to be a failure IMHO given how prevalent x86 is for the past 30 years. Apple has been the odd man out when they were still the only guys having a different architecture on their home computer systems in the 90s and 2000s.