Apple getting ready to ditch the Mac?
Could this be true ?
Forum Discussion
I am more "tech savvy" than most people, but I admit, I don't know a lot about Macs. (Switching to PowerPC shocked me; less so with the switch to Intel).
What I do know is that being "hitched" to Intel means that Apple will always have to pay extra for good graphics. This is probably really hitting home now that Apple has been able to continue to improve the graphics on the A-series of chips used in phones and tablets for "only" the cost of the employees. (Not that this cost is insignificant, it is just a "one time cost" as opposed to money going out the door for every unit sold.)
Are there any ARM cores out there today (or maybe unannounced) that have similar performance to a single i7 core ? I don't know. But, adding Apple designed graphics to a quad/octal core high performance ARM could greatly reduce the price of their notebooks.
Apple has a large and very enthusiastic customer base. It is pretty much the "go to" hardware for video and photo editing. But that has been slowly changing.
I do know this after 30+ years "in the business", it is getting more and more difficult to improve the performance of the existing chips. Performance improvements has always been based on finding a bottle neck and making it less of a bottle neck. Main memory access is today's biggest bottle neck (even with DDR4). Server chips are going to 4 way interleaving ($$$$) but that is not practical for most system. The quickest solution is adding more cache, preferable level 1 cache.
What I do know is that being "hitched" to Intel means that Apple will always have to pay extra for good graphics. This is probably really hitting home now that Apple has been able to continue to improve the graphics on the A-series of chips used in phones and tablets for "only" the cost of the employees. (Not that this cost is insignificant, it is just a "one time cost" as opposed to money going out the door for every unit sold.)
Are there any ARM cores out there today (or maybe unannounced) that have similar performance to a single i7 core ? I don't know. But, adding Apple designed graphics to a quad/octal core high performance ARM could greatly reduce the price of their notebooks.
Apple has a large and very enthusiastic customer base. It is pretty much the "go to" hardware for video and photo editing. But that has been slowly changing.
I do know this after 30+ years "in the business", it is getting more and more difficult to improve the performance of the existing chips. Performance improvements has always been based on finding a bottle neck and making it less of a bottle neck. Main memory access is today's biggest bottle neck (even with DDR4). Server chips are going to 4 way interleaving ($$$$) but that is not practical for most system. The quickest solution is adding more cache, preferable level 1 cache.
