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Apple to ditch Intel?
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[Tim Wilson] “Apple has the best-growing computer business in the industry, but it creates the optical illusion of shrinking, only because the rest of Apple is growing so much faster.”
Correct — while Mac revenue is small relative to iPhone revenue, it is very large in absolute terms. If Apple’s Mac division was a separate company it would be bigger in terms of annual revenue than Time Warner, Facebook, or McDonald’s. Apple’s Mac revenue is not that much smaller than Oracle’s total revenue.
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[Craig Seeman] “Wouldn’t it be more useful to keep the iOS interface, making it a real artist’s tool (again I’m thinking of a Wacom tablet type computer) rather then the same “old” Macbook computer interaction with just an Apple designed chip?
“Apple is probably tired of the limitations on Mac development imposed by Intel. E.g, Xeon still doesn’t have Quick Sync, laptop CPUs burn a lot of power per unit of performance, aren’t always available to meet Apple’s schedule, etc.
However — there is a lot more involved here than potentially switching Macs to an Apple-designed CPU.
The iOS and Mac UIs PLUS the development framework PLUS the app hosting must all be considered in a plan to move forward.
The Mac CPU change (if it happens) is just one element of this. In theory it could lay the groundwork for running iOS apps on Mac, or a future common development framework for both iOS and Mac apps.
Previous attempts to scale a single UI from phones to desktops didn’t work well, e.g, Microsoft’s Metro. In theory a more complex “Universal App” approach might work better, but that’s yet to be demonstrated in a complex app.
In unified UIs, desktops tend to lose function. Google has tried multiple times to force fit their “Material Design” standards (optimized for mobile) on the Chrome browser for desktop users. It results in things like the Bookmark Manager being dumbed down, large fonts, large line spacing, loss of resize ability in certain dialogs, etc.
Going the other direction, nobody has yet demonstrated how a touch-oriented tablet UI could host a complex professional app like Photoshop, FCPX, etc. The current desktop menu/windowed design paradigm contains hundreds/thousands of UI elements which have no corresponding mobile UI equivalent. E.g, when Adobe ports Premiere to macOS, those are both based on a menu/windows paradigm. It’s unclear if that kind of app could ever be ported with full functionality to a current mobile OS.
So several things are needed: a future evolved version of iOS which can host more complex apps (inc’l new UI paradigms), macOS which can support iOS apps, and development frameworks which allow a convergence of mobile and desktop software development. Whether this will be the rumored “Marzipan” or something beyond this, I don’t know: https://www.moveoapps.com/blog/apples-marzipan-decoding-effects-on-app-developers/
From the standpoint of code generation, we tend to view the upcoming CPU change (if it happens) like past ones, e.g, the 68k-to-PowerPC or PowerPC-to-x86 transitions. In those cases the software development and deployment framework was based on a statically compiled and linked binary executable which was specific to a processor instruction architecture.
If the Mac ARM transition happens, it’s unclear it will happen the same way. If Apple moves toward a managed code model using Just-In-Time or install-time code generation (similar to Microsoft’s .NET common language runtime), it would somewhat decouple them from binary dependence on a processor instruction set. OTOH if those methods eat the performance gains offered by profiler-guided static compilation, going to ARM may not help so much.
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[Tim Wilson] “No matter how big music, computers, and devices seems to you for Apple’s chip story, I’m tellin’ ya, this AI/AR automobile stuff is much, much bigger.”
Thanks for putting all of that on the table Tim. All fascinating and quite logical as an untapped area for major technological disruption.
The point of posting that first graph was simply to show that Apple is defined today in completely different ways from what it once was
And if those automobile patents are any indication, Apple may simply be looking at entirely new areas for expansion. And that’s desperately needed since on any given day in the Bay Area about 1 out of 3 people driving on the freeways is holding their iphone or Android in one hand and using it while their other hand is on the steering wheel and driving 80 mph towards that promised land of silicon valley.
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[Tim Wilson] “I’m tellin’ ya, this AI/AR automobile stuff is much, much bigger. “
Couldn’t agree with you more!
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“The most Apple can hope for is that Home Pod serves as a compelling-enough front end for Spotify and Prime to capture the hardware money from those folks, at which point Apple can try converting them back to Apple software.”
The problem is Apple isn’t pricing the HomePod for that strategy. Compared to Google and Amazon, Apple’s device is grossly overpriced. It would have to be superior by leaps and bounds. And all indications are that it isn’t. They are trying their iPhone pricing strategy where they were market leaders. In the home device they are far behind and need more aggressive pricing to catch up.
I own Mac computers and iPhones, but I much prefer the Amazon ecosystem. I don’t know what Apple can do to get me back in the camp. It won’t be easy and they will have to start delivering better value for the money. I’m already thinking of ditching iCloud because it’s going to start costing me $10 a month in a pricing schedule that is outdated.
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[Brett Sherman] “I own Mac computers and iPhones, but I much prefer the Amazon ecosystem.”
I’ve mentioned my father’s heritage at Apple before — starting there in 1979 as Apple’s first Director of Operations, where he set up large-scale manufacturing, the first sales channels, created the Apple Store, and much more, including being the one on stage to introduce Steve at the internal Mac rollout in 1984, and sitting next to Steve in the executive session in 1985 where John Sculley unveiled the new org chart that had Steve nowhere on it. You’re not going to find many people on earth who bleed more Apple red than him…
He first dove into Google Home because of the integration with search, YouTube, and home control, but has since gone all-in on Amazon. Refilling the larder with voice commands to Amazon Fresh, streaming music, home control, general search queries, much improved sound quality, apps integration, etc etc.
I think he’d buy an Apple offering at least as an experiment if there was any thought that it would actually be vaguely compelling. After you’ve played around even a little with Google and Amazon’s AI, though, it’s clear how very, very short of the mark Siri falls….which is why Apple just hired away Google’s former head of AI. He did a lot with AI behind voice-driven search, and if you’ve ever done head-to-head searches even with an iPhone and an Android phone side by side, it’s astonishing (and for Apple, embarrassing) how much better Google’s works.
And of course, with AI at the heart of what Apple wants to do with the car-driver-world interfaces and interactions, this might be Apple’s most important hire since Tim Cook, if not Sir Jony. (I think we can safely call Apple’s hiring of Steve in 1997 their single best hire. That has my father coming in at #5. Sounds reasonable. ????)
What I was kind of getting at, though, is that Amazon has done a good job of using voice to drive not just their own stuff, but apps like Spotify, and even connects to local libraries of downloaded media that might include iTunes purchases. Why, it’s almost like they understand that, as compelling as their own ecosystem is, it becomes still more compelling when people can add to it almost anything they want. ????
So, as much as competitive-ish pricing, and voice-driven AI that works roughly as well as Google and Amazon’s, I’d want to see some notion that Apple understands ecosystem extensibility here as well as they do in the App Store (where Netflix and Spotify happily suck the life out of the dessicating husk of the iTMS)….but I don’t know how realistic that is to expect.
Apple’s gonna be fine without any of this of course. They don’t need to win in any of these races as long as they keep sticking the landing with devices and computers. And I really am excited to see what they might do as the UI for driving. Cars are the most expensive device that most of use, and as much as I like my car (and I like it a lot), I’ve never seen any car that’s especially impressed me with its understanding of how I want to operate it. Apple DOES get this for devices, even moreso than for computers imo, so I’m ready to see what they’ve got.
And once Apple cracks this nut, I’m excited to see what their competitors do to kick it up another couple of notches. ????
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I’d argue that Apple’s phone business and mac business are almost the same, with the difference being one computer you can carry in your pocket and the other computer you can’t. Oh and the computer you can put in your pocket also incidentally, can make and receive phone calls.
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[Michael Gissing] “There might be one more MacPro but I would never base a business decision that needed powerful desktops on expecting Apple to provide for my needs.”
The thing is, today’s laptops are every bit as “powerful” as yesterdays primary desktops.
Out of curiosity, I looked at the “business machines” I’ve primarily depended on over the past 30 plus years.
Note the similarity between the processing grunt when I moved from my MacPro to my MacBook pro.
And the “experiential” difference was smaller (IMO) than the technical one. Maybe it’s the FCP X integration, maybe it was my ability to specify a “bespoke” GPU for my laptop in an era where much of the processes of modern video editing have been re-coded to run on GPUs over CPUs – but for whatever reason, I didn’t lose a single step in dumping my desktop orientation.
This is, put simply, the fastest, most fluid editing system I’ve ever sat behind.
That’s a HUGE change – particularly when you look at those price points.
Chasing desktop grunt might be over for me, unless there are compelling reasons a new modular MacPro really kicks tail for ProRes RAW or the ever increasing camera raster sizes we are facing.
It just feels like a much different ballgame now.
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[Bill Davis] “Note the similarity between the processing grunt when I moved from my MacPro to my MacBook pro.”
In that time frame I’ve moved from SD to 4k and have real time playback whilst grading. Standing still in terms of processor and going backwards in terms of GPU is unacceptable to me over the past ten years. If it works for you then fine. But your needs are not mine and so I stand by my remarks.
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[Michael Gissing] “In that time frame I’ve moved from SD to 4k and have real time playback whilst grading. Standing still in terms of processor and going backwards in terms of GPU is unacceptable to me over the past ten years.”
My experience is even the highest end desktops don’t always have adequate performance — because of the now-ubiquitous use of 4k acquisition, the higher shooting ratios now common, and incredible computational demands entailed by 4k H264.
When I used Premiere CS5 in 2010 on standard-def DV, it was fast on a desktop or a top Windows laptop of that era. It was great to just drop in camera files without transcoding and edit with high performance. Shooting ratios were lower then, so that helped.
Today both Premiere CC and FCPX can struggle on 4k H264 — on any platform. Adobe’s “Mercury” playback engine is no longer like quicksilver when editing that format, esp. for multicam.
The worst combination is 4k H264 on Premiere on a Mac because Adobe doesn’t even use Quick Sync on Mac. But with *either* FCPX or Premiere CC on the latest hardware, we are often knocked back a generation to the previous workflow of “transcode before edit” — not to a mezzanine codec but to proxy.
Traditional GPUs cannot help this because the core algorithm of long GOP formats is inherently sequential. GPUs can muster thousands of lightweight threads which can attack certain parallelizable tasks, but many tasks cannot be (or have not been) parallelized. Highly compute-intensive plugins such as Neat Video, Digital Anarchy Flicker Free, and Imagenomic Portraiture only partially leverage the GPU or not at all. E.g, Neat Video is slower if configured to use the iMac Pro Vega 64 GPU than if using all CPU cores and no GPU. The problem isn’t the Vega GPU and it can’t be fixed by a faster GPU or an eGPU.
My documentary team can produce 1 terabyte of 4k H264 per day. I’d like to screen dailies without building proxies, but it’s just too slow, especially on a laptop. I’ve only tested one machine that can scrub though single-cam 4k H264 with moderate smoothness using FCPX, and that’s the top-spec 2017 iMac. It is way faster than the 12-core D700 Mac Pro and faster decoding 4k H264 than the 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro. So we’d have to take a 2017 iMac 27 on site to get adequate editing performance to screen dailies without proxies.
For those doing scripted narratives or other productions with lower shooting ratios which can use ProRes or similar acquisition, even a laptop is pretty fast — at least with FCPX. Lower-compression intra-frame codecs are more an I/O problem than CPU. A top-spec MacBook Pro using SSD or Thunderbolt RAID storage can handle those codecs pretty well.
What I’d like is a desktop machine that regains the same timeline performance on today’s 4k H264 that we had in 2010 on Premiere using standard def DV. That machine does not yet exist, at least from Apple — even using FCPX.
So far Intel has remained absolutely intransigent on adding Quick Sync to any Xeon except the 4-core version. On the iMac Pro this forced Apple to write to AMD’s UVD/VCE transcoding hardware, which is better than nothing but thus far slower than Quick Sync on handling 4k H264. There are lots of factors at play here, but if Apple controlled their own CPU design for desktops they wouldn’t restricted by Intel’s decisions.
CPU design has now reached a point where major performance gains are difficult — as measured by traditional metrics such as clock speed and Instructions Per Clock. It’s unclear whether an A-series architecture would greatly improve this, as the problems seem fundamental. However — there are still major gains possible using “heterogeneous” processing — IOW specialized subsystems like Quick Sync. There are probably other software functions amenable to silicon-based acceleration — provided the chip vendor was cooperative and software harnessed this. Using an A-series CPU in a Mac would allow Apple to control both hardware and software.
The initial rumors of A-series CPUs on Macs focus on lower-end laptops, and those are a natural fit for some future iOS/macOS integration which a common instruction set might facilitate. The improved power consumption would help battery life. However this might be a testing ground to evaluate future use of higher-end A-series CPUs in higher-end desktop machines.
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