Is OSX86 doomed?

[theconnactic]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSqfaDWvoVg

[Gen_]

In a word: No.

Apple will never move Pro range from x86. They may move MacBook one day but Adobe are not going to move Creative Suite to ARM and simply put it sells too many Macs.

Intel also have the capability to blow away ARM offerings should they need to. Apple moving to ARM would be too symbolic to the rest of the world of the end of desktop computing on x86.

Intel bringing AMD Vega iGPUs should show already how much Intel is willing to bend over backward to make sure that their main customer sticks with them, but Intel has stalled the PC industry with it's lack of performance gains since Sandy Bridge.

[Gen_]

Also, I might add this interesting facet.

If Apple did transition completely to ARM, that could likely be fantastic news. All the existing x86 code now has no value to them so likely won't be compiled for x86 at any point in their chain post EOL, updates clearly won't work for existing models and hacks without recompilation to x86, and recompiling software to another arch would be a great test case for the 'making parts for existing but out of production goods' protections in copyright law that China loves so much.

Essentially it would be like handing over the source of OS X to hackintosh devs, and the existing Macs would eventually rely on the community for updates. What's the best developed, community and OS centric dev space right now on Mac: Hackintoshers

 

We're the Apple equivalent of the Android OS dev forums.

 

[Eric LeClair]

Nah this is all just media hype. X86 is going nowhere. It might morph into something else but I highly doubt that either. If it it broke don't fix it kind of deal. 

[Gen_]

Depends on how you look at it. I was saying the same thing first then I realised something.

The last time this happened was PPC. This was because no matter how much (water) cooling and grunt they stuck in a Powermac it just couldn't keep up with new Intel chips. Jobs was as vocal about his dislike of PPCs progress as he was of Flash, but hopeful as the tech plateaued and they moved on.

Intel are going through the same thing. tl;dr they are being very reactionary and scared because x86 won't get much faster for a long time. Spectre/Meltdown hardware fixes still mean having to replace technology, initially with worse (much worse judging by how far back it reaches) tech. This is the last in a long line of publicly visible problems within their org, all alongside Apple doing their own ARM for a long time now. Plenty more things to point out if need be:
 

Spoiler

Intel blunders: Haswell was late, hot and underperforming compared to expected (esp on Mobile). Then Broadwell was supposed to be a desktop chip too and wasn't. Then tick tock stopped and Intel started flat out lying to suppliers about expected dates on new gen (according to Semiacc). IPC improvements went single digit for a while. Kaby lake, Coffee Lake and 14nm+ and ++ etc were invented along the way to cover the failure of Intel to get Cannon 10nm working. Every node before matured without being renamed, with the CPUs gaining from them getting a new stepping or refresh. The whole time since Core 2, Intel tried to strangle the industry on quad cores because of their fab process, arguing that power efficiency was the new 'Power'. Apple were happy to play ball having seen PPC do a Pentium 4 (and cook trying to catch up with an intrinsically simpler design). As Intel slowly got rid of the dual socket a year ago through pricing and socket types, Apple had already redesigned their new Mac Pro to be small, sleek, powerful and obviously gpGPU biased.

Then AMD comes with TR and suddenly; SkyX panic and 14 core Dell boxes without server prices incoming and we go from 1/4 size Mac Pro's to needing a 27" enclosure to fit the big cores in. It's not that 14 cores is new, it's that taking it out of Xeon range puts it in consumer's eyes and that makes Mac Pro and everyone else with a single Xeon look slow. It completely ruined everyone's trend models on computer power draw. It's also that Apple likely consulted with Intel on what TDP the Pro should be capable of as the last case design was a 20 year design. The advice they were given was bad enough that they can't make a new Mac Pro that's competitive, so they are forced to make the iMac Pro and expand their weakest market to two products.

Because the idea of 'Power' suddenly doubles in power requirements, everyone has to push the premium units down in the range to account for the new cores needing new bigger enclosures and cooling. 10nm is a train wreck... current releases point to it only being usable at very low watts, which makes sense because had AMD not just popped up, i7s would still be quad and your top end 65w desktop chip could end up as low as 30w. No 10nm, no impressive Mac Pro.

It's less about whether AMD won, and more about the fact it made Intel abandon their ethos of a market where power draw would keep reducing for the whole consumer processor range, not just mobile. Coffee Lake core count, the fact that X299 had 3 times the TDP of X99 at it's upper end and the fact that Server ARM will be able to match or beat Intel outside x86 emulation are all strong reasons why Apple could simply start putting Atom cores in every Mac for the x86 apps and move everything else to high TDP server ARM. This is especially true as Intel move to more cores, forcing parallelism in apps. ARM can already match x86 IPC in most things, if not AVX.

If Intel were serious about keeping both power users and low watt users it would have scaled up Atom quads long ago (to fight ARM) and eliminated Pentium/Celeron and all other low end big cores. Intel is too focused on single core output and ultimately x86 will hit a ceiling there that RISC (ARM and others) doesn't have.

tl;dr SkyX practically forced an entire product range out of Apple. Apple didn't like being forced to do anything. ARM will eat x86 alive on desktop because Apple can have them fabricated on desktop TDP processes, even if it takes them building fabrication themselves... they could also go to AMD for this as AMD has Opteron ARM A1100 server cores already. 

 

Edited May 30, 2019 by Gen_

[rpowell01]

Apple would lose MILLIONS because most hack users buy from the app store. We just like the freedom to use whatever OS with any hardware we build. I bought OSX and many apps from the store.

[Huckleberry Pie]

It would be one hell of a transition period for Apple, and would serve to further isolate them and disenfranchise developers. X86's advantage is that porting applications from Windows to Mac is trivial, and unless Apple does a VLIW translation engine of sorts Transmeta style, the idea of an ARM transition isn't going to sit well at least in my opinion.

[mhaeuser]

The underlying architecture does not play a role for code without compiler-depending bugs or intended architecture-specific behaviour, which I'd assume is rather rare for userland applications, Windows applications are not written in x86 ASM.

[ITzTravelInTime]

Because the software of mac os is not made to be architecture specific, apple can just port it, all the apple's oses are based on next step, which was an os with a great compatibility for multiple architectures, in fact there were versions of next step distribuited for 5 architactures at the same time, and apple did use this in the days of the transition from ppc to intel, and also now it's already maintaining the kernel for both intel and arm cpus, because of ios, so it's not unlikely that there will be a transition to arm if they need because they heve already prepared a huge chunk of the os for arm cpus, the deal braker is that a transition will brake binary compatibility unless apple provvieds a translation engine, like rosetta, this is already made by windows 10 for arm, and specking of that, there is also a growing market of arm windows and linux compatible machines, so i don't think that the hackintoish will die, but it will need to be reworked if we have to use just arm cpus, but i don't think that apple is going to say goodbye to the high end and so they will still use x86 in the high end and arm for cheaper portable devices, and most likely they will still couple the x86 machine with a custom chip (like the T1 and the T2 chips) and i think that those chips will be mandatory for mac of in future releases for x86 machines.

 

So my idea of the future of apple is that they will switch to an hibrid configuration for mac os, supportging multiple cpu architectures each release, with arm for the portable devices and x86 for the desktop machines and high end stuff, but with the apple's own T-serires (not the yt channel) silicon which will be mandaory to run mac os on x86 machines.

 

But for hackintoshing as long as we can emulate the firmware and having access to arm uefi machines we can still do it, but that will require a huge rework of the sw that we need, and also there will be some work required for drivers and such because apple will use custom hw, for controllers and gpus, so i don't expect it to run well, also because windows 10 for arm is already a thing, there are already arm windows 10 devices out there waiting for us to hackintosh them, if the future will require us to do that.

Edited February 19, 2019 by ITzTravelInTime

[mhaeuser]

Most ARM UEFI devices are entirely locked down, flash protection, enforced signature-verification against the MS CA and all

[Huckleberry Pie]

19 hours ago, Download-Fritz said:

Most ARM UEFI devices are entirely locked down, flash protection, enforced signature-verification against the MS CA and all

Not to mention that they'll most likely make a Fort Knox out of them Macs just as what they did with iOS. Forget about persistent jailbreaks and bootrom-level hacks or anything of that sort.

[CMMChris]

My guess (and hope) is they won't do a complete ARM transition except ARM becomes mainstream in the PC world at some point. Otherwise it wouldn't make much sense. We will likely see a healthy mix of ARM and x86 machines.

Edited February 24, 2019 by CMMChris

[Huckleberry Pie]

On 2/24/2019 at 6:07 PM, CMMChris said:

My guess (and hope) is they won't do a complete ARM transition except ARM becomes mainstream in the PC world at some point. Otherwise it wouldn't make much sense. We will likely see a healthy mix of ARM and x86 machines.

A more realistic scenario would be to implement ARM on the lower-end models e.g. Macbook Air and reserve x86 for those requiring more raw grunt.

[Gen_]

The idea that ARM is slower than x86 is dead. The phones they were saying were keeping up with Nehalems in 2017... they were doing with on a 5-10W budget wth passive cooling so in a desktop 50W implementation will do much more. The A12X in an iPad Pro is equivalent to a Xbox One S in raw crunching power. The latter draws 100W from the socket.

Also necroing to point out this is a fact now. Intel have announced they will cease taking new orders from Apple at the end of 2019. Idk if this means an AMD or ARM switch (considering the lack of a GPU in-house and the face that AMD already have ARM chips with iGPs) but it's probably the Bionic desktop debut.

Edited May 30, 2019 by Gen_

[mhaeuser]

On 5/30/2019 at 9:45 AM, Gen_ said:

Intel have announced they will cease taking new orders from Apple at the end of 2019.

Source?

[Guest]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/report-apple-will-begin-selling-macs-with-its-own-processors-in-2021/

Architecture unknown

[_Cute_Kitty_]

Yes, OSx86 is completely doomed. I would guess Apple has been trying to break away from Intel for a while now because of the money lost from hackinotshes. It doesn't make sense to keep Intel processors around from a business standpoint if Apple can make their own CPUs and guarantee no one else can implement them in PCs. We've seen preludes to this with the T2 chip stuff. The advancement of new technology is going to shoot the hackintosh community in it's own foot. We've been usng technology to our advantage, but it's grown too big for us to handle and now I believe Apple can completely lock down their OS to their own specific hardware. We'll see how this plays out but I don't expect it to be good. First Nvidia went, now Intel is going. You fill in the blanks.

Edited April 25, 2020 by _Cute_Kitty_

[ameris_cyning]

10 hours ago, _Cute_Kitty_ said:

Yes, OSx86 is completely doomed. I would guess Apple has been trying to break away from Intel for a while now because of the money lost from hackinotshes. It doesn't make sense to keep Intel processors around from a business standpoint if Apple can make their own CPUs and guarantee no one else can implement them in PCs. We've seen preludes to this with the T2 chip stuff. The advancement of new technology is going to shoot the hackintosh community in it's own foot. We've been usng technology to our advantage, but it's grown too big for us to handle and now I believe Apple can completely lock down their OS to their own specific hardware. We'll see how this plays out but I don't expect it to be good. First Nvidia went, now Intel is going. You fill in the blanks.

 

Hackintoshing is a niche. Those who do it are either a) not going to buy a Mac or b) already own one. The vast majority of us here are in column A. Mac hardware is simply not that good. Macs are expensive as {censored} and not worth the money.

[_Cute_Kitty_]

5 hours ago, ameris_cyning said:

 

Hackintoshing is a niche. Those who do it are either a) not going to buy a Mac or b) already own one. The vast majority of us here are in column A. Mac hardware is simply not that good. Macs are expensive as {censored} and not worth the money.

 

Sure most people fit that column but Apple isn't interested in motives for having a hackintosh. They are interested in ensuring that the only way you can get MacOS is by buying their expensive hardware, and they are doing just that. It's not motives, it's not logistics, it's business. You might say, "only a small portition of people are running hackintoshes," but that is not true. More and more people are running hackintoshes now, as a lot of the "mystery" and "difficulty," in intalling them has now been removed by plane jane guides like Opencore vanilla. It's easier than ever to install a hackintosh and there are a trillion guides and EFIs out there to follow regardless of sklil level. Any average joe with an interent connection can get a hack running, in fact, it's easier than ever to GET the install media for a USB with things like Gibmacos. Snazzy Lab's videos probably had tons of people buying hardware and installing MacOS on their machines. More people are running hacks than ever before, and it's time for Apple to pull the plug. They have the tech, the motivation, and the ability to do it and so they will. I hate them from a hackintosh perspective, but I love them from a business standpoint. Locking their operating system tight is the smartest thing for them to do, and it's what they're working on right now.

[Guest]

I think this is more about breaking away from intel than even acknowledging hackintoshes. Apple could have put a lot more effort into locking down their OS, but they didn't. However, they have the technology to make their own cpus, and are already using it for their mobile devices. Why not have more vertical integration, and just cut intel out of the stack?

[oliveryuan]

of course osx is not doomed

its been around for years, and has tons of apps

apple only sells macs with its OS, so as long as apple sells computers, there will be osx

you'd be retarded to put windows on a mac, its just not cost efficient

[Guest]

5 hours ago, oliveryuan said:

of course osx is not doomed

its been around for years, and has tons of apps

apple only sells macs with its OS, so as long as apple sells computers, there will be osx

you'd be retarded to put windows on a mac, its just not cost efficient

No one said macOS was doomed - we're talking about osx86, AKA hackintoshes.

[Hackintosh Tech]

Think we are safe for at least 5 years

[eSaF]

2 hours ago, melvyn2 said:

No one said macOS was doomed - we're talking about osx86, AKA hackintoshes.

 

I don't know but I will go by the thinking that anything Man Made is breakable, Apple's OS was emulated way back from Tiger if my memory serves me well so I don't think or would like to think that a change from using Intel chips to their own in an attempt to lock down their OS is going to stop some clever bugger from breaking it down just as before, so I am not worried on the premise that our Hacks are doomed. Don't forget, if they lock us out what about the millions of units they already sold containing Intel chips, Ok I dare say they can offer some kind of concession like a trade in but it won't be free that's for sure, either way it will cost the end user that went out and bought a Mac I for one would not be happy to shell out for an already over priced unit. Just my two cents that's all.

[sunnywilson09]

The idea that ARM is slower than x86 is dead. The phones they were saying were keeping up with Nehalems in 2017... they were doing with on a 5-10W budget wth passive cooling so in a desktop 50W implementation will do much more. The A12X in an iPad Pro is equivalent to a Xbox One S in raw crunching power. The latter draws 100W from the socket.