I keep searching for "Graviton" in these thinkpieces. I keep getting "no results found."

Mac ARM laptops mean cloud ARM VMs.

And Amazon's Graviton2 VMs are best in class for price-performance. As Anandtech said:

If you’re an EC2 customer today, and unless you’re tied to x86 for whatever reason, you’d be stupid not to switch over to Graviton2 instances once they become available, as the cost savings will be significant.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

1. Back in the 1990s, the big UNIX workstation vendors were sitting where Intel is now at the high end, being eaten from the bottom by derivatives of what was essentially a little embedded processor for dumb terminals and scientific calculators. Taken in isolation, Apple's chips aren't an example of low-margin high-volume product eating its way up the food chain, but the whole ARM ecosystem is.

2. For a lot of the datacenter roles being played by Intel Xeons, flops/Watt or iops/watt isn't the important metric. For many important workloads, the processor is mostly there to orchestrate DMA from the SSD/HDD controller to main memory and DMA from main memory to the network controller. The purchaser of the systems is looking to maximize the number of bytes per second divided by the amortized cost of the system plus the cost of the electricity. My understanding is that even now, some of the ARM designs are better than the Atoms in term of TDP, even forgetting the cost advantages.

Elixir, my main programming language, will use all the cores in the machine, e.g. parallel compilation. Even if an ARM-based mac has worse per-core performance than Intel, I am ahead.

Apple can easily give me more cores to smooth the transition. Whatever the profit margin was for Intel on the CPU, they can give it to me instead. And they can optimize the total system for better performance, battery life and security.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/21/21298607/first-arm-mac-ma...

The App Store requirements make it easier to control this transition on iOS than macOS. I wonder how many Brew apps will make the transition seamlessly?

It misses, developers use Macs to build stuff => It's easy to make arm compatible applications => The server (most profitable) domino falls.

I can imagine moving straight to ARM processors if its easy enough to work on and AWS/Google has a deployment option.

The dominos can cascade really fast, particularly in where the new demand for chips comes in, vs the existing one that will just run as it is now.

I expect good compute performance, good graphics performance, better battery life, and (hopefully) better price range. We'll see what's in store for us tomorrow.

Does the same logic then hold in the datacentre? With the ability to add their own IP mean that AWS, Google etc can start to add new features (e.g. specialised accelerators) that would not be possible with Intel CPUs?

Will the Pro line of laptops continue on Intel or is it the whole line?

If it's the whole line, it's either going to be very good for developer tooling on ARM or it's going to be a nightmare.

I've been developing on Windows 10 ARM with WSL and it's pretty great, but it's not 100% there. I've had to switch back to x64 due to some tools not having ARM builds.

I use a Surface Pro X with LTE, having an always-connected, always-on machine is really nice.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)

Further, would the AppleArm run BootCamp? What happen to thunderbolt, given it is ok now from Intel to use it (but in ARM)? Is Office compatibility still important to Apple and if so have Microsoft Apple product teams are already testing ARM version of Office on both WinArm and AppleArm? (Given that some small subset did run on iPad Pro, or even iPhone).

But unlike Windows, Apple has successful twice and given it can ignore our call for CUDA compatibility and worry about future Premiere/Adobe ... They would move. And we will move as well. Just not sure where we move to.

Sorry lots of questions. And the impact to Intel ... it is a side show and side issue. Games on.

What's so hard about it ? Your code is supposed to use something like a C stdlib, which has been ported to ARM obviously. So what makes it so much harder than to recompile everything?

Once the OS is ported, the system libraries are available, and the programming language has a compiler for the target architecture, i don't understand what's blocking.

As far as I understand it, the OS is the main selling point of Macs and a substantial change in the user experience will probably alienate their core user base.

They shouldn’t have left this topic alone!

In the US 1/4 of developers surveyed on StackOverflow use macOS.

If they all switch to ARM and AWS will sell them Gravitron instances for a 40% discount, in what world are Intel data centers going to be necessary in the long term future?

Intel should be absolutely terrified.

If, like rumored, they are switching their pro line to ARM that will impact two groups of big spending customers (i.e. people actually spending many thousands of $ on hardware regularly):

1) Developers buying maxed out pro laptops for running IDEs, Docker, etc. I'm one of those.

2) Creatives using Adobe and other third party tool providers for 3D graphics, movies, photography, etc. This stuff is critical to their workflow and any hint of compatibility or performance issues will cause people in this segment to start considering other platforms or delaying purchasing decisions. I know people that bought the Mac Pro just before it was renewed because they needed it and there wasn't really anything else to buy for them that met their requirements even though it was 3 years out of date by then.

These segments are the ones where switching CPU architecture will hurt the most until such time that the tool ecosystem catches up. E.g. Adobe would have a lot of tools that probably will need quite a bit of work to run smoothly on ARM. It will be interesting to see how long that takes. The last few times Apple switched CPU architecture, it took Adobe a bit of time to switch and it provided an opportunity to MS, which was able to run Adobe's latest and greatest throughout the transition. And emulation is probably not going to be good enough here.

I'm a backend developer and the sole reason I'm still on a Mac is convenience. At this point it's neither the fastest nor the cheapest option. And, I can trivially get everything I use running on Linux or Windows (with the linux subsystem). Most of the stuff I use is OSS, cross platform (IDEs, command line tooling) & dockerized (databases, web servers, search engines, middleware, etc.).

All of that is x86 currently. Theoretically, ARM variants of the stuff I use could be created but in practice, this stuff does not yet exist or is kind of poorly supported/an afterthought at best.

Maybe, emulation of this stuff will be good enough. But still, I'm deploying on x86 and will be likely to want to test on that for the foreseeable future and not run different containers locally than in production. So, my workflow slowing down because of emulation is kind of a big deal for me.

So, (not so) hypothetically if I were to buy a new laptop right now, I'd be looking for something that supports my workflow going forward and that increasingly looks like either using Windows with the Linux subsystem or Linux (Ubuntu is pretty nice these days). Intel macs are still fine of course but not if there's this Apple will drop support in a hurry thing looming over it. I buy laptops with a 4-5 year useful life and Apple losing interest in anything Intel worries me when I'm going to be spending 3-4K on hardware.

The opportunities are also obvious: gaming & VR have so far not happened in the Apple ecosystem and I suspect a big part of the reason is Apple wanting to have their own hardware when they launch this stuff without dependencies on the likes of Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc.

Also data centers eventually switching to ARM is something that is technically already a bit overdue. At this point most linux software should just compile and run on ARM. Mostly it's just market inertia. Data center supply lines just tend to be dominated by AMD & Intel and developers just happen to run x86 hardware.

So, long term this is definitely a smart move for Apple and I suspect they want to get this over with sooner rather than later. However, they do have their highend users to protect. A mac pro without Intel architecture would be a hard sell in the current market.

Unless of course they really nail high performance X86 emulation. I could see them dedicating a few extra cores to that.

Otherwise I can't see the benefit in lower power CPUs for macs. If they really cared so much about reducing power usage and heat, then they wouldn't have shoehorned an i9 into their laptops

AMD chips are better than ever, throw a curve-ball and adopt them, please don't pick the weird mutant-mobile processor to seriously put in desktops Apple

AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, NXP...etc. all use TSMC.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

In the comments I read some really big numbers regarding the Mac dominance, can this be caused by a bias (country + income)? In this data OSx seems to be under 9%.

Please don't downvote me for questioning Mac dominance.

While ARM is not perfect, it does allow companies like Apple more control over the secretive firmware that boots these chips.

1. https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intelme

If you look at smartphones, you always notice how much memory apps require. It's not a secret. It's odd that nobody seems to mention this.

Anyways, Wirth's law is relevant again. Nobody wants to hear it, but I really believe a new era of lightweight software will soon begin. I put a lot of hope in WASM, and I hope it will work well on smartphones.

I'm using tinder on a 3 year old android, and everyday it's slower and slower.

It's almost like software companies and hardware vendors have the opposite interests. Software wants to be faster, but hardware vendors wants to increase their margin, so they want software to be slower or be more feature-rich.

There's already have a fairly powerful ARM chip in all Apple computers - the T2 chip. Assuming it's a similar spec to the iPad Pro's A12 then Apple could start by moving the OS to the T2 chip, which should improve the battery life of all recent macs.

They'll come up with a fancy marketing term for apps that have been compiled for ARM and advertise them as having improved performance and battery life, thereby putting pressure on developers to update. The X86's will initially be removed from all non-pro devices and replaced with more powerful ARM chips, and once there's enough momentum and support they'll also be removed from the pro devices in a year or two.