ARM-ing The Macs
Few days ago at the offline Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference 2020, Apple announced some amazing and revolutionary change while refreshing and updating their old line ups.
One of the biggest announcements by Apple is that they are planning to transition Macs to ARM architecture based in-house made and developed Apple Silicon. This transition will allow the whole Apple ecosystem to run on the same processor thus allow easier integration between products.
The transition into ARM based Macs will take 2 years and the first release of a Mac with an ARM processor will either be late 2020 or early 2021. So far we do not know the specs or benchmark of the ARM based Apple Silicon CPU to be used.
Why is Apple making the switch to ARM?
Apple claims that it makes their Macs more power efficient and also achieve new levels of performance.
This will be true since Apple has been producing in-house ARM based chips for its iPad, iPhone line-ups. Rumors are there that Apple is planning to use the A-12Z Apple chip to power the first line-up of Macs since they would be able to pump for more power into it than an iPhone thus increasing the power CPU and the chip is also highly efficient too. So far A-12Z bionic chips are shown to be close to the speeds of the Apple Macbook 15 inch 2018 model.
One of the main reasons why Apple was because of Intel. As Intel released their processors on their on timetable which was frayed with months of delays to release the product such as CPUs thus affected Apple’s timetable for their products and also their plans. One of the biggest issues was with Intel’s Skylake CPUs in 2014. This gave Apple the push to start with in-house development of their own SoCs.
On a quite sadder note the ARM based Macs will not allow Boot Camp Mode and will not allow any Operating System to run on the computer on the ARM based Mac. Only pure virtualization is allowed.
So why is ARM a more efficient and possibly a better CPU than Intel?
ARM uses RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) instruction set while Intel uses CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) instruction set.
You have one simple instruction called HIT (I literally mean hit, not a computer jargon) and on a ARM computer you call HIT multiple times, thus the CPU will run each simple HIT instruction for each single compute cycle. While on an Intel computer the multiple HIT instructions will be converted to PUMMEL and the CPU will run the complex instruction PUMMEL.
RISC processor — ARM — will consume less power due to simple instruction set, while CISC processors — Intel — consume more power due to complex one line instructions.
ARM processors are designed to take maximum power of a CPU due to their simpler and highly efficient RISC instruction set. Intel processors have a more bloated instruction set — CISC — thus it does not utilize much of the CPU processing power for completing single line tasks efficiently because most of its power is taken by the complex single line tasks in its instruction set.
If we take a more in-depth look at the A12Z bionic chip made by Apple. It is a 64-bit processor with 10 billion transistors and 8 cores and a Neural engine. This is equivalent to the Xbox One S, a gaming console powered by a power cord. While its GPU power is equivalent to a desktop level 750Ti graphics card.
Intel has reached stagnancy in innovation and product line-ups. Intel is having issues of shrinking their CPUs to 10nm while AMD has already shrunk it to 7nm. Intel is still using the same strategy of trying to cram in cores and increase the processor frequency. They never look at power consumption, thermal issues of the processor, efficiency and also over price their products and have strict terms in licensing their products.
ARM on the other hand has branched out and touched nearly every sector. They also allow customization by other companies since it is open source. ARM processor are highly efficient and are used by many supercomputers. They are also at a very well priced range.
The only issue with ARM is that there is not many ARM based apps and it has not been used widely in the laptop and PC market. But Apple, as we all know, breaks boundaries. They have always been thinking ahead and looking at how the market would evolve. Many of us know that ARM processors are the future but it would take many years of development to get there. But Apple has given the market the push it needs to start developing, and rapidly at that.
We know the many products which Apple introduced to the market and nearly gave all the companies a heart attack and a run for there money. The iPhone line-up was revolutionary in aesthetic and feel and all of us at the time thought that it would only happen after a decade. Another one was Apple introducing only thunderbolt ports in their laptops and phones, this pushed all other companies in the market to start using thunderbolt ports on their phones. These are some of the examples where Apple broke the stagnancy of the market and introduced something new and revolutionary such that is sparks of rapid and amazing development of newer and innovative products.
We can expect in the next five to ten years more ARM based processors in laptops. But also an increase in innovation and development of ARM processors such that they are faster, better, more efficient and powerful because more people and companies will be investing in them.
The Death of Mac OSX…
The biggest release ever in the Mac OS lineup is coming. Mac OS Big Sur.
Big Sur is not 10.16, if you look at System Prefrences it shows 11.0. OSX is officially dead.
Ave and Farewell my old friend!!!
Big Sur has been redesigned and Safari has one of the biggest updates of all. Safari is now more private oriented and sleeker in design.
Big Sur includes technologies that will ensure a smooth and seamless transition to Apple silicon. Developers can easily convert their existing apps to run on Apple silicon, taking advantage of its powerful technologies and performance. And for the first time, developers can make their iOS and iPadOS apps available on the Mac without any modifications.
The Apple ecosystem has changed and it is bringing something new and amazing to the market and to the people.
This is a step in a new direction for some amazing creativity and innovation at last in this stagnating industry.
