apple just announced what many of us have been anticipating for years now
with equal measures dread and excitement they're ditching Intel yup the longest
lived CPU partnership in mac history is
done and apple has confirmed not only the development of their own ARM-based
chips in-house but also their intention to complete this migration away from
Intel systems over the next two years
max and potentially even pcs may never be
the same but me you can always count on me and my
segways to sponsors like elgato elgato's
new wave 1 and wave 3 usb broadcast microphones are here use their wave link
app to control your wave mic up to seven other audio sources and create
independent mixes check them out at the link below
since the development of the a4 soc began in 2008 apple has been
consistently designing their own silicon in-house thanks to ARM's generous
licensing model that allows third parties to implement their instruction
set in standard ways but without limitation in terms of core layouts
this flexibility gave apple the ability to control the entire design of the
iphone and since the iphone 4s they've
consistently defended their fastest smartphone crown
apple's chip design prowess has brought them to the point now where the current
iphone 11 pro a phone can offer up
single core performance that's competitive with their current macbooks
in synthetic benchmarks and that's to say nothing of their other in-house
silicon meanwhile it's no secret that Intel hasn't been performing up to
expectations for years apple's efforts to build
slimmer and lighter macs with longer battery life have been frustrated by the
enormous heat that they've had to deal with
or have outright refused to deal with now Intel's upcoming 10 nanometer tiger
lake micro architecture with z graphics has been making headlines for its
promising performance improvements but here's the thing if apple's promising to
launch a laptop with their own silicon this calendar year they clearly got sick
of waiting anywhere from 12 to 36 months ago and have been well past the point of
no return for quite some time furthermore tiger lake's thermal
performance is yet to be seen so
with 12 years of experience designing cpus and having achieved a claimed 100x
performance improvement since they started why buy cpus that might turn out
to be flops from Intel or from AMD for that matter
if you want it done right do it yourself and i don't even blame apple for seeing
it that way i mean i love Android as much as anyone but look at how much
runtime apple squeezes out of a comparatively small battery next to
their Android competitors and this is all while offering a snappy user
experience within many cases half the system memory it's this control and
consistent execution that makes apple so
darn profitable here's the thing there's
always a trade-off between your upfront r d costs versus your ongoing costs
you can allow someone else like google or qualcomm to handle your operating
system and your CPU design that keeps your engineering staff requirements
lower but you might need to make up for some sloppiness with a big fat battery and
some extra RAM or if you're apple you
spend up front optimizing that hardware
perfectly so that every unit you ship is as inexpensive as possible
this model works out great as long as you can sell enough that your units
times cost savings is greater than that upfront r d investment
we see the same thing in game consoles sony for example built a custom rad
tools crack and hardware decompression chip for the ps5 that was a complicated
undertaking but without it sony would need a bigger faster SSD or a much
beefier CPU in every console unit they
ship so that initial investment could turn out to be absolutely game-changing
pardon the pun but while using apple silicon in a laptop
might not be painful the transition could be
going from power pc to Intel was a lot smoother than from motorola to powerpc
but it was still fraught with compatibility and performance
implications early on while universal binary eventually became standard until
powerpc died out the rosetta translation layer's first incarnation didn't run
especially well and apple prevented their pro suites like final cut and
logic from running under it as a result this time around apple says rosetta can
translate an application at install time
rather than at run time potentially making things much faster overall only
time can tell how that works out though as with the transition to Intel
eventually all applications will be ARM only and that has some both frightening
and exciting implications for consumers
first ipad os apps can basically
just work on a mac apple arcade and the
new maps and messages apps are working examples but the possibilities go much
much deeper because iOS and ipad os are
based on macOS it's relatively easy for
apple to unify the entire ecosystem now around their custom ARM
architecture effectively erasing the distinction between what's a mac and
what's an idevice for developers the
ipad is even getting relative mouse input for gaming and desktop grade
spotlight search now however this convergence isn't without danger
there's nothing official but it seems that the app store is being emphasized
far more right now than alternative ways of installing applications and that's a
big problem for services with external monetization schemes now to be clear the
app store offers a valuable service and apple should make money from it but the
thing is if i already have something in place why should i as a developer be
forced to use it least of all on a desktop operating
system where there isn't really much precedent for this that's where things
get frightening because it's not clear who apple is putting first right now i
mean promising custom hardware solutions
tailor-made to what their customers need might actually be worth some
monopolistic behavior to some people but there's one small problem does apple
even know what their customers want to do with their computers the last few
years have been spotty at best when it comes to listening to both customer and
developer feedback i mean who asked for the touch bar and then how did it take
an unacceptable three years for the company with the world's eighth highest
r d spending to get rid of a fundamentally broken keyboard design to
be fair apple has demonstrated a willingness to change lately user
upgradable storage on the mac pro for example that's a great step forward
there's just a lot of questions still to be answered in how this whole thing is
gonna play out like how did the ipad pro with magic keyboard and macbook differ
now what if Intel gets their [ __ ] together will pcs completely overtake
them like what happened during late game power pc or what if the opposite happens
the computer industry has a long and proud tradition of doing something kind
of half ass at first waiting for apple to do it properly and then finding a
hundred slightly worse ways to copy that will Windows for ARM become more widely
available what's going to happen to boot camp only time can answer these
questions but in the meantime i do have some predictions for how things are
going to play out one Intel has tried to
make low idle power consumption and always on computing a thing for years
with initiatives like smart connect but it's never actually worked very well
meanwhile apple has this absolutely on
lockdown with iOS you can leave your ipad untouched for literally weeks at a
time pick it up and all your files notifications and settings are right
there waiting for you and you probably still have 20 battery to boot this along
with the instant on experience that we take for granted on phones is coming to
mac which means that apple has a major selling point on their hands even for
people like me who do basically everything in a browser anyway
next this is going to completely fix the thermal throttling that we have
criticized apple for mercilessly over the last few years now putting a TDP
rating on apple's soc is a little bit
challenging but a non-text performance data indicates that the a12z's vortex
cores in the ipad pro can draw about
four watts in a single threaded workload if we were to extrapolate that out to
all four vortex cores which is unlikely
to be possible on a tablet but very possible on a laptop with better cooling
and power delivery that's about 16 watts
fully unchained which curiously happens
to be almost exactly the cooling capacity of the 2020 macbook air with
its weird fanless heatsink which is why my conspiracy theory might actually not
be that far off they could stick an ARM processor into that same cooling and
chassis design and it'll run faster cooler and probably with better battery
life thanks to its ability to use low power cores to handle background tasks
now i actually doubt that they will change much else on the first go because
the marketing practically writes itself you know same mac as before
more apple than ever magic
probably a little catchier than that but i think you guys catch my drift
prediction number three if they want this to be a success on the desktop
either apple's ARM cores need to get competitive with x86 cores in single
threaded tasks and i mean heavy desktop ones or they need to augment them now
desktops are definitely coming and based on these performance claims i think
apple is taking the latter path here giving themselves two years to finally
push developers to both properly take advantage of many core CPU designs
and to properly take advantage of heterogeneous compute which is using a
combination of CPU and GPU or neural
processor for that matter to do conventional CPU work
faster when it comes to performance though there's more to consider
ARM given that it's a risk architecture is able to do more work in fewer clock
cycles and with less power than a sisk architecture like x86 can that's an
advantage that apple used to enjoy with early power pc macs outperforming their
Intel counterparts at much lower clock speeds but there are some drawbacks to
this approach while risk is more streamlined with no
microcode for example it also lacks flexibility meaning that if your
application uses an x86 instruction for
which there is no ARM equivalent you as
a developer are looking at either having to work around it manually or simulate
it with many more cycles than you would otherwise need that's part of why
microsoft's Windows rt didn't support x86 emulation when it launched what
makes this different is that compared to powerpc or even Windows rt
many developers are by now well accustomed to working with ARM thanks to
mobile devices although there are still unknowns
will adobe for example be able to quickly implement every feature in the
ARM version of creative cloud i mean
given they can't even get every feature working in the regular anyway will apple
try to force them into the app
i mean i can't imagine adobe giving up 30 of their subscription fees come on
the bottom line anyway is that nothing quite like this has happened before
we're watching history being made today and whether apple succeeds or fails one
thing is clear and that's that the computer industry will never be quite
the same unlike my segway to our sponsor
which is the same as it was in the beginning of this video even drop.com is
bringing you the mass drop and sennheiser pc 37x gaming headset it's
angled drivers and open back design results in very natural sound they're
super comfy the drivers come from the same family as their hd 598 and hd 600
series headphones meaning you got great stereo imaging and locational accuracy
and they come with a noise canceling microphone they've sold over 40 000 of
these things so if there was a problem with them you'd know about it because people be talking about it everywhere
they include a 2-year manufacturer warranty so go check them out at the
link in the video description if you guys enjoyed this video actually
sorry Anthony i'm going to hijack this i'm going to send them over to the
subzero water cooling on the 2020 macbook air video because that's where
we found out that that laptop is designed around seemingly an a12z
processor