Apple replacing Intel in 2020

[ThijsX]

Some news;

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

[Nix4Life]

yep that's why we have the T2 chip

[gachowski]

A few things...

1. Bloomberg isn't the reliable source as it used to be and with Apple it's even worse.
2. Everyone is always looking for better chip suppliers.
3. I would guess that Apple keep a RISC version updated and around since they moved to Intel, just like what they did with the intel version of Rhapsody/NeXTSTEP.

Apple is massive chip machine and if they keep up their chip improvements even at 1/4 it's current pace they will catch intel with their version of RISC/ARM and pass it. There will be a point and we are almost there were CPU performance is like car horsepower.. my 203HP camry is more than enough for what I do every day no need for 600HP mclaren, just wasting resources.

The real story would be if Apple was going to make a hybrid chips both x86 and RISC/ARM. I would guess that it's a possibility too, as I am not that smart and I just thought of that and google just said that AMD did that in 2014.

: )

C

[gabester]

It's 2020 and there's no ARM-based Mac... yet. However what's revealed at WWDC remains to be seen streamed and it seems like it's only a matter of time with the breakout of iPadOS last year and recent rumors of Xcode for iPad Pro and ARM-based MacBooks coming...

My question is whether this impacts the value proposition for macOS in your organization. We have a heterogenous environment but Wintel dominates; Macs are perceived as beneficial in part because they can virtualize x86-64 and for the unix, they can be the universal software development platform (Windows, java, iOS, macOS, Android, linux). If a Mac doesn't have the ability to run x86 code, will your organizations be interested in it? I'm pretty convinced that ARM-based Macs will lose out to Windows 10 with Subsystem for Linux; no one is asking for Windows for ARM devices at present.

[gabester]

6 months pass and the world changes. Apple announced its own Silicon at WWDC, and is introduced the M1 chip and MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro and Mac mini hardware using it. The architecture as it currently stands has some limits, such as 16GB RAM and limited to 2 x USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports (although the M1 Mac mini has 2x USB-A ports as well.) Initial performance metrics seem astonishingly good. I still want to know how the M1 will impact Apple hardware in the enterprise esp. developers and those who do virtualization. Also - Apple's significantly changed how to reimage Macs for the second time in 2 years (T2 restrictions on USB booting and required internet connection during OS install... now Apple's killed internet recovery for the M1 but added an iDevice-like way to use Configurator to reload the OS in the worst-case scenario.)