By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
LurkerJ said:
Captain_Yuri said:

I hope the whole ARM situation won't be a case of replacing x86 but rather, providing a cheaper alternative. Like a Macbook or Surface for the people that can't afford to spend $1000.

If Apple actually does decide to replace their entire Macbook line with ARM, I think they are giving even more reason for people and companies to not consider Macbooks over windows laptops. The whole idea of Macbook Pro is you can have both Apple's OS for their software/app development and also boot to Windows if you need access to Windows Apps. If they go all out on ARM, I think a lot of companies will say nope.

Their decisions in the past like not supporting Vulkan and maybe this rumour as well already made Valve drop support for SteamVR on Apple devices, can't imagine what's gonna happen if they do something that drastic.

It's a bumpy road, but if anyone is going to make it work, it's Apple. Not because they're special or anything, it's just because they happen to have a comprehensive line of products that, at this moment in time, that generates excitement among consumers and developers (not gaming devs for sure), from tiny watches, small mobile phones, to tablets and laptops and large desktops . Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my iPad but I don't understand all the jizz that tech bloggers throw its way each time Apple releases a software update... but hey, it's working for them (and for me as a consumer), and developers are on board, let's see how that goes. 

Apple don't make CPUs anymore, they make APUs and soon enough they will have their own 5g modems. I am personally excited to see where they're going with all of that, even if it fails. Competition is good. 

I don't see Apple putting the ARM Chips into their Apple Mac Pro and iMac Pro lines of Workstations anytime soon unless they put a kiloton of those into one. As in, at least 64 CPUs (32 big, 32 LITTLE) to make up for the performance differences between Intel's X86 and ARM. And that's with continuing using AMD GPUs.

In other words, they woud get too big to be worth it for the big models right now. For reference, the A13 is about 98mm2 large with just 2 big and 4LITTLE CPUs; current Intel and AMD mobile chips are around 160mm2 in size, Intel's 8 core Coffee Lake is 176mm2, Comet Lake around 202mm2 and the HCC Cascade Lake in the Mac Pro around 485mm2. So even if we remove the GPU, an A13 blown up to 64 cores would probably result into a bigger chip than the HCC Cascade Lake despite the latter being produced in 14nm while the A13 is produced in 7nm.