Apple to ditch Intel?

[egbert]

Just on the Apple/AMD thing - if AMD could sign Apple you would have to bet they would give them very generous terms. Retail and wholesale pricing numbers would be irrelevant - stealing that market from Intel would be such a prize in terms of enhancing the brand's prestige and expanding their market into new territory. Even Intel, when they signed Apple back in 2005, gave them very generous deals and they actually allowed them to be first out the door with each new generation of hardware - ahead of the whole PC industry who had been supporting them since the 8086!

[pekbro]

If they choose AMD people are going to expect macs to become cheaper... I doubt Apple is much
interested in that.

[egbert]

If they choose AMD people are going to expect macs to become cheaper... I doubt Apple is much
interested in that.

I think Apple would be thinking about the long term performance of their CPU/chipset vendor. AMD were in front with the Athlon, and now they may have their nose in front again. In the lengthy interim period, Intel pulled out all the stops on their own kit development (their early Core series CPUs had all the advances they had been developing shovelled in at a much faster rate than was planned) and also on bribing and strong-arming the industry not to use AMD. Both of these strategies appear to have worked and AMD lost market-share and was starved of funds to keep up with Intel. AMD now do not build their CPUs in-house - they sold off their foundries.

[Forgotten]

How did this thread get to 6 pages? The thread started about 7 years go, the rumors probably 10 years ago now...

Don't you think it would have progressed somewhat if this is really going to happen anytime soon?

[egbert]

There is a saying in journalism that all stories eventually come true. UltraJV just got in on the ground floor with this one.

[Forgotten]

There is a saying in journalism that all stories eventually come true.

Probably because journalists want us to forget how many times they were wrong...

[BertKoor]

How did this thread get to 6 pages? The thread started about 7 years go, the rumors probably 10 years ago now...

Egbert revived it for good reasons (see halfway page 2)

[Forgotten]

Egbert revived it for good reasons (see halfway page 2)

It seems similar to most of the reports over the past decade though, so I'm inclined to take it with a grain of salt until Apple or Intel comment officially.

"Intel officials and developers have REPORTEDLY told Axios"

"This week's report from Bloomberg reiterated Macs running on Arm MAY arrive in 2020"

The rest of the article and the Bloomberg article are about Apple making it easier for iOS developers to port their apps to MacOS.

[fmr]

Egbert revived it for good reasons (see halfway page 2)

It seems similar to most of the reports over the past decade though, so I'm inclined to take it with a grain of salt until Apple or Intel comment officially.

"Intel officials and developers have REPORTEDLY told Axios"

"This week's report from Bloomberg reiterated Macs running on Arm MAY arrive in 2020"

The rest of the article and the Bloomberg article are about Apple making it easier for iOS developers to port their apps to MacOS.

This is Apple marketing machine working at full steam. They are desperate, so anything goes for having their name in the press.

They should look at their product line and their prices, instead.

[egbert]

Bloomberg's still going strong on this story:
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/ne ... ke-filippo

APPLE HAS SNAPPED UP a top engineer from chip designer ARM, further pushing the idea that Cupertino might want to move away from Intel chips.

Bloomberg reports that Mike Filippo, a lead CPU and system architect on a suite of ARM processor designs, has been hired by Apple, and could fill the shoes of Gerard Williams III, who served as Apple's head architect for its processors but left earlier in the year.

Filippo's LinkedIn has him down as working for Apple as an "architect" since May. And his previous jobs as a chief CPU/system architect at Intel, a CPU designer at AMD, as well as his role at ARM suggests he's doing similar work at Apple.

Apple has, of course, remained silent on the situation, because it just does that; perhaps an air of mystery helps tickle Apple fans into a frenzy every time a new iPhone arrives despite them being mostly highly iterative devices.

Having Filippo on board would mean Apple could tap into the CPU specialists wealth of experience from being involved in the largest names in the chip in the world. Filippo worked on the Cortex-A76, which is the ARM CPU Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 is built around and can be found in most of the top Android flagships.

If Apple can harness that knowledge, it could boost the way it makes use of ARM designs and instruction sets; not that it needs to as the ARM-based A12X Bionic is one seriously powerful and capable mobile chip.

Hiring Filippo could also be indicative of Apple looking to bring in more ARM expertise as it tries to find alternative chips to stuff inside its Mac machines, rather than relying on silicon from Intel. That may take some time to do, but Apple has plenty of that and a pile of money to throw around.

And Cupertino isn't alone in such machinations, as Microsoft also look like it trying to cut reliance on Intel by supposedly working to create a next-gen Surface Pro with an ARM-based SoC. µ

[Jolaff]

If they choose AMD people are going to expect macs to become cheaper... I doubt Apple is much
interested in that.

I doubt Apple really care about what people expect

[discoDSP]

If they choose AMD people are going to expect macs to become cheaper... I doubt Apple is much
interested in that.

I doubt Apple really care about what people expect

[BertKoor]

If they choose AMD people are going to expect macs to become cheaper... I doubt Apple is much
interested in that.

I doubt Apple really care about what people expect

I doubt that for a customer shipping volumes like Apple does, there is much price difference in simular specced Intel or AMD CPU chips. Let alone you as a customer get to see that $10 difference in the price tag of the final built $5000 machine.

[JerGoertz]

[Bjørn Felle]

Switching CPU isn't a big deal any more. Most software isn't written in a way which directly addresses the hardware. It's mostly API calls, which are the responsibility of the Operating System. So it will just be a case of software developers opening up their source project and recompiling. It's really not that big a deal as long as the OS exposes all the same APIs to the developer. If the transition from PPC to Intel is anything to go by, a transition from Intel to ARM would be pretty smooth.