Predictably Apple is planning to move Mac computers from Intel CPUs to their own ARM based CPUs manufactured by TSMC.
Their CPUs are good enough in terms of performance and would enable Apple to more tightly integrate hardware and software, have better battery life and significantly lower cost.
Apple has changed CPUs on Macs a number of times:
Such a change can be painful as applications will need to be rewritten to use the new instruction set and perform well. In the past they have used dynamic translation which converts from one instruction set to another, yet this has significant performance implications.
Lets compare performance of Apple's ARM CPUs and Intel CPUs:
iPhone X with A11 CPU performance:
Macbook Pro 15" with Intel i7-7920HQ CPU performance:
For typical end users performance with Apple ARM based CPUs will be perfectly fine, the single core performance is already on par with Intel CPUs and in most cases the multi-core performance is good enough for 95% of users. Yet performance will not be competitive for high end Pro users such as developers running multiple VMs, 4K video editors, AI processing and other processing tasks that demand high end multi-processor performance. Apple have a trend where they are no longer serious about Pro Mac users.
Yet I believe this change is generally good move for Apple as it will have a unified architecture. This will have the potential to use an iPhone as your real computer:
See more details below:
http://blog.zorangagic.com/2017/11/docking-gadgets-to-turn-smartphone-into.html
It is interesting as Microsoft are also toying with the idea of using ARM based CPUs for WIndows:
http://blog.zorangagic.com/2017/12/microsoft-and-qualcomm-unveil-arm.html
It is interesting as Microsoft are also toying with the idea of using ARM based CPUs for WIndows:
http://blog.zorangagic.com/2017/12/microsoft-and-qualcomm-unveil-arm.html
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