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PosterThread
BigD 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 28-Jun-2020 22:48:23
#61 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7307
From: UK

@evilFrog

Ahhh, the Bandai (Apple) Pippin; designed by Apple by stealth without the confidence to put it up against the Mac directly with their own branding a bit like the CDTV! That didn't work out so well for either machine; complicating the porting of Mac / Amiga titles respectively. The Mac was still going down the pan until Jobs and Ive birthed the Bondi Blue iMac which I hated due to the 'puck' mouse!

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TRIPOS 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 29-Jun-2020 13:03:53
#62 ]
Super Member
Joined: 4-Apr-2014
Posts: 1204
From: Unknown

@LarsB

Quote:
And the ARM stuff? No dedicated GPU. Low clockrate. Extensive use of the powersaving makes it less rersponsive. Thats my psersonal opinion.


You are of course entitled to your opinion. But did you even look at the keynote and the “state of the union” presentations where they actually showed it running?

The new CPU’s aren’t here yet, so the demos were conducted using a A12Z CPU (that can be found in iPad Pro). Microsoft Office was extremely snappy, Photoshop was very fast. Final Cut playing three concurrent 4k streams in parallel, applying filters in real time while playing, without a glitch. Heck, even using Maya x86 through the JIT, maneuvering in that scene with 6 million polygons with textures and shaders on top, was extremely snappy. Photorealism in Cinema 4D, etc. I’d say that it was in fact impressive, and lack of responsiveness is nowhere to be seen, rather the opposite!

And again, this is not the CPU that will be used! That one isn’t ready yet.

Rumours have it that Apple are developing at least three different CPU’s based on their micro architecture coming in the A14 family, of which at least one will be a desktop class CPU. It will be a 12-core CPU made in 5nm fab, with 8 high performance cores (fire storm) and 4 low energy cores (ice storm). Given the performance already demoed using the much weaker A12Z, I feel kind of puzzled how you can actually be of the opinion that it will be “less responsive”.

And that CPU will still only constitute the beginning, the A15 family is already being developed, with more to follow of course. And remember that the transition to their own silicone is planned to take two years. The technology will be developed in the mean time, it’s not here yet, so there is no way to say at this point what it will be like. But a logical first step would be to release a laptop and a Mac Mini (developer systems in the shape of Mac Mini’s are being shipped right now, as we speak, probably with A12Z CPU’s), perhaps also a lower end iMac. That will probably be what we’ll see late 2020/early 2021. More computer options to follow after that, they will not all be here all at once, new products will emerge over time with new CPU’s that will fit the scope of the respective product. Apple will be in full control and they for sure has every kind of resources needed to accomplish this. And I’d say that it is a given that the desktop CPU’s will have plenty of options for peripheral equipments, both in terms of USB4 and PCIe 5 (probably, PCIe 5 is also where Intel is also putting most of its weight instead of PCIe 4).

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DiscreetFX 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 30-Jun-2020 0:09:15
#63 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 12-Feb-2003
Posts: 2480
From: Chicago, IL

@Thread

Franko loves Apple’s new transition to ARM Silicon. It will be his new Amiga of choice and the first thing he will install is AMOS AGA.

Last edited by DiscreetFX on 30-Jun-2020 at 01:36 PM.

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bison 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 30-Jun-2020 1:50:14
#64 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 18-Dec-2007
Posts: 2112
From: N-Space

@DiscreetFX

You're on that Franko lark again. You really need to make a poll out of it.

Last edited by bison on 30-Jun-2020 at 01:26 PM.

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LarsB 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 30-Jun-2020 12:50:01
#65 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 29-Jul-2019
Posts: 104
From: Unknown

@TRIPOS

thank you for the productive answer. Sounds good. And your are right Apple has any kind of resources. Still I think Apple will make the OS more restrictive. But thats another story. We can only can wait and see what happens there.

Cinema 4D remembers me to the good old times ;) But it was also the last nail to the coffin why I left Amiga.

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BigD 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 30-Jun-2020 13:02:21
#66 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7307
From: UK

@LarsB

Quote:
But it was also the last nail to the coffin why I left Amiga.


Come on! None of us really left the Amiga, we just don't use it as our primary machine anymore unless you're a AmigaOS 4.x fanatic!

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Raffaele 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 30-Jun-2020 20:02:28
#67 ]
Super Member
Joined: 7-Dec-2005
Posts: 1906
From: Naples, Italy

@amigang

I think it is just Apple move to have their own produced CPU with controlled manufacturing of their own.

Just more or less what Commodore did when they bought MOS Tech Inc. in order not to suffer of semiconductors market shortages.

Difference between Apple and Commodore is that migrating on their own controlled ARM CPU will stop Apple worrying of the sneaking phenomenon of Hackintosh clones that affect the platform adopting Intel Architecture.

With an ARM CPU of their own, Apple can produce non standard ARM processors impossible to be cloned neither leaving possible any hack implemented on other manufacturers ARM CPUs.

Last edited by Raffaele on 30-Jun-2020 at 08:04 PM.

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"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

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evilFrog 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 30-Jun-2020 21:04:57
#68 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 20-Jan-2004
Posts: 397
From: UK

@bison

Quote:
You really need to make a poll out of it.


Don’t forget the pancakes, @DiscreetFX!

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matthey 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 30-Jun-2020 23:15:24
#69 ]
Super Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2007
Posts: 1968
From: Kansas

Quote:

Raffaele wrote:
I think it is just Apple move to have their own produced CPU with controlled manufacturing of their own.

Just more or less what Commodore did when they bought MOS Tech Inc. in order not to suffer of semiconductors market shortages.


Apple has chips fabricated by TSMC so C= was more vertically integrated than Apple is today. C= squandered the MOS acquisition by not spending the money to upgrade the fab. Jay Miner could see the need.

Quote:

We originally did the chips using the NMOS process which has much higher current consumption than the state of the art CMOS. I'm surprised that Commodore haven't re-designed the chips in CMOS which is the big stumbling block to bringing out a portable. We did that because at the time, CMOS was much slower than NMOS and not as reliable. It's now much faster, so why are Commodore still using NMOS for some of their chips?


C= could have had a low cost low power one chip Amiga in the 90s. Instead, MOS turned into a liability as a hazardous waste site and HP started making the most advanced Amiga chips (Lisa). That was at a time when the memory miser Amiga (68k and AmigaOS) was more of an advantage. Today, even the memory could be included on an SoC (an Amiga can operate from what most other computers use as an L2 cache) and an Amiga could run off battery all day without the sluggishness of most low power devices. Failing in the shrinking desktop market with fat PPC seems to be the only idea instead of shrinking code by half and going smaller and cheaper as devices do.

Apple is not the only vertically integrated company designing state of the art mobile SoC chips. Samsung is more vertically integrated by fabbing its own chips. Qualcomm has been designing chips longer than Apple and entered the server market. Apple already has a small foothold with good name recognition in the shrinking desktop market and has a niche in the high quality higher margin segment or it likely would have stayed away. Sharing development costs with mobile helps reduce costs too.

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BigD 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 30-Jun-2020 23:36:24
#70 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7307
From: UK

@matthey

Quote:
Apple already has a small foothold with good name recognition in the shrinking desktop market and has a niche in the high quality higher margin segment or it likely would have stayed away. Sharing development costs with mobile helps reduce costs too.


It likely would have "stayed away" from it's heritage in the desktop space?! macOS birthed iOS and is a great environment in itself with less of a walled garden feel! Now they want to destroy it and roll it all up into iOS as far as I can see.

I couldn't care less about iOS apps nor Apple's already horrendously bloated profit margins! What are the odds that none of the cost savings will be passed onto us and high prices will continue to be justified by the in-house ARM development costs and marketing as always

Last edited by BigD on 30-Jun-2020 at 11:37 PM.

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matthey 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 30-Jun-2020 23:54:55
#71 ]
Super Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2007
Posts: 1968
From: Kansas

Quote:

BigD wrote:
It likely would have "stayed away" from it's heritage in the desktop space?! macOS birthed iOS and is a great environment in itself with less of a walled garden feel! Now they want to destroy it and roll it all up into iOS as far as I can see.


If Apple wasn't already in the desktop market then they likely would not have entered it. Good businesses migrate to higher margin markets. How many new companies have entered the desktop market lately? How many have disappeared because of consolidation or bankruptcy?

Quote:

I couldn't care less about iOS apps nor Apple's already horrendously bloated profit margins! What are the odds that none of the cost savings will be passed onto us and high prices will continue to be justified by the in-house ARM development costs and marketing as always


Apple cares about their profit margins and I expect they want to retain them. ARM chips will likely give you a smaller die size to make up for some of the performance loss and a small savings on your electric bill to help offset the Apple tax.

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LarsB 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 1-Jul-2020 9:52:55
#72 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 29-Jul-2019
Posts: 104
From: Unknown

@BigD There you are right. I watch look at Amigaworld dn Amiga-News multiple times a day. Also the NG stuff is very interesting. It casts shadow and light.

But I am all thankful that I dont need it as a base of daily work. Two more weeks :)

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agami 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 9-Jul-2020 11:51:11
#73 ]
Super Member
Joined: 30-Jun-2008
Posts: 1637
From: Melbourne, Australia

@thread

Apple isn't moving from one architecture (x86-64) to another (ARM), as much as it is moving from one philosophy (monolithic) to another (distributed).

I'm willing to bet that Apple's new Mac laptops and desktops will actually have an array of Apple custom silicon. What Amiga did in the late '80s and early '90s is coming back. The way I see it, we'll see an Apple custom silicon set, without the creative names, that will offload common tasks from the CPU.

They're already doing this to some degree with their Tn chips, and the way I would architect a lower power consuming arm-based laptop that can still work on multiple simultaneous 4k video streams without dropping frames and sounding like a Harrier Jump Jet is taking off, is through offloading.

The interconnect is the new "CPU".



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tlosm 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 9-Jul-2020 12:50:28
#74 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 28-Jul-2012
Posts: 2746
From: Amiga land

... from when i buy a Rasperry 3 now i have the 4 ...
i was say "is the time for AmigaOs to go on Arm and left ppc".
where now my pi 4 have performances better than my Quad G5 in computing and it have a psu 2500ma compared the 1000w psu of my g5 quad.

Last edited by tlosm on 09-Jul-2020 at 12:50 PM.

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Hypex 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 9-Jul-2020 16:44:52
#75 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@agami

Quote:
What Amiga did in the late '80s and early '90s is coming back.


Coming back in general? Or just to Apple?

It's been said Amiga was offered to apple, or Steve Jobs in fact, and he rejected it. Making it look funny that they were said to be scared of it later on. What happens five years after the Mac release? It gets colour and finally catches up the Lisa!

Anyway, what the Amiga had, with the custom chips is what the PC world embraced. Even VGA was a custom chipset on a card, that supported planar like the Amiga, with parallel plane write tricks unlike the Amiga. And had hardware scrolling support. Sound cards used custom chipsets. The idea just existed on modular cards rather than as a complete unit.

In the 90's the PC really took the chipset idea on. With hardware 3d cards and hardware blitters. Soundcards migrated from analogue synths to reproducing digital audio with midi hardware players. Unfortunately, all these combined to leave the Amiga behind, but the custom hardware acceleration lives on today.

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matthey 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 9-Jul-2020 20:52:45
#76 ]
Super Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2007
Posts: 1968
From: Kansas

Quote:

agami wrote:
Apple isn't moving from one architecture (x86-64) to another (ARM), as much as it is moving from one philosophy (monolithic) to another (distributed).


Custom hardware acceleration can be done with x86_64 too. Look no further than the PS4. It would be easier for Apple to develop for a single architecture and x86_64 has not been low enough power for smart phones. The Pentium used 73% more power than the 68060 with similar performance which didn't matter with Moore's Law in full swing but die shrinks are much more expensive now.

Pentium@75MHz 80502, 3.3V, 0.6um, 3.2 million transistors, 9.5W max
68060@75MHz 3.3V, 0.6um, 2.5 million transistors, ~5.5W max

Intel Atom cores tried to make x86/x86_64 low power but they couldn't go low enough. It looks like the 68k could go lower power while providing better performance than RISC necessary to get work done quickly for energy efficiency. Instead, we have ARM robbing performance enhancing ideas from the 68k like powerful addressing modes. I found the following in some ARM literature.

Quote:

These register index addressing modes provide a useful performance gain if they can be performed within a single cycle, and it is believed that at least some implementations will be able to do this. However, based on implementation experience with AArch32, it is expected that other implementations will need an additional cycle to execute such addressing modes.

Rationale: The architects intend that implementations should be free to fine-tune the performance trade-offs within each implementation, and note that providing an instruction which in some implementations takes two cycles, is preferable to requiring the dynamic grouping of two independent instructions in an implementation that can perform this address arithmetic in a single cycle.


So much for the RISC philosophy of simple instructions. Performance is more important and, indeed, ARM has progressed in performance past most "pure" RISC architectures.

Quote:

I'm willing to bet that Apple's new Mac laptops and desktops will actually have an array of Apple custom silicon. What Amiga did in the late '80s and early '90s is coming back. The way I see it, we'll see an Apple custom silicon set, without the creative names, that will offload common tasks from the CPU.

They're already doing this to some degree with their Tn chips, and the way I would architect a lower power consuming arm-based laptop that can still work on multiple simultaneous 4k video streams without dropping frames and sounding like a Harrier Jump Jet is taking off, is through offloading.


CPU core designs have long past exceeded the limits of what is practical and performance enhancements from die shrinks have become too expensive to be practical in many cases. SMP was the next logical step which is limited in how parallel tasks can be. Now we are moving to specialized hardware in and out of the cores. Hardware in the cores need to be general purpose enough to justify the use of encoding space which is already questionable with SIMD units. External custom hardware is becoming more popular as it can offer close to the performance for specialized tasks. This hardware often starts in an FPGA and may become part of the SoC when the logic is mature or may be left as an FPGA for flexibility in the case of servers.

Quote:

The interconnect is the new "CPU".


It is important to keep external hardware close and efficient whether an Apple SoC for smart phones, PS4 console or POWER server. Sharing hardware efficiently while maintaining cache coherency is important again today. The Amiga wasn't the best or worst in this regard not that it mattered with Moore's Law die shrinks outdating efficient hardware designs in one to two die shrinks. Mass production was essential then and is still important today.

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ppcamiga1 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 10-Jul-2020 6:45:02
#77 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 23-Aug-2015
Posts: 762
From: Unknown

@tlosm

We Amiga users use ppc for more than twenty years and will be still using it.
ARM may be used but next to ppc no instead of ppc.
Of course when on ARM will be something amiga connected and worth of use.
Instead of wasting time on attacks on ppc you should spend it on for example improving aros.
zune is still shit even compared to last classic mui 3.8 from 1997.

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Fl@sh 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 10-Jul-2020 10:30:46
#78 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 6-Oct-2004
Posts: 253
From: Napoli - Italy

@all

we can continue writing how nice was 68k or consider the fact it does not exists any 68k faster than any low end ppc, even ppc603 is faster.
I too love 68k but it'is retrocomputing and its arch is obsolete.
Maybe some current cpus like arm has been influenced from 68k, I raise the bet and I'm sure every current cpu arch was more or less influenced by mc68k..

If we want discuss about amigaos future development maybe is better to exclude any 68k reminescence and concentrate on arm, x86 or ppc.
my2cents

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Rose 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 10-Jul-2020 10:57:08
#79 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 5-Nov-2009
Posts: 982
From: Unknown

@Fl@sh

Quote:
I too love 68k but it'is retrocomputing and its arch is obsolete.


So is PPC. Tabor's CPU is ALMOST as fast as one on Raspberry Pi 3+. And that's when it's running native code.

Quote:
If we want discuss about amigaos future development maybe is better to exclude any 68k reminescence and concentrate on arm, x86 or ppc.


I know reality isn't a thing on NG forums but there is several times more users on 68k than NG.

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ppcamiga1 
Re: Apple moving to arm, the end of x86
Posted on 10-Jul-2020 11:24:10
#80 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 23-Aug-2015
Posts: 762
From: Unknown

@Rose

Quote:
So is PPC.


Of course not.

There is big difference between something as fast and as comfortable as cheap pc from Windows 95 era like ppc and something that is not like 68k.
The first is still nice retro while other should be in museum.

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