Apple to move away from Intel?

[Axtremus]

@Mik said in Apple to move away from Intel?:

I would make changes in toiletries and such to lose a couple ounces. It all adds up.

Yeap. There were times when I left the toiletries with the hotel or the remote office that I knew I would return to, which eliminated the need to haul toiletries. Same for chargers, charging cables, comfortable walk-around slippers, etc.

[mark]

@Mik said in Apple to move away from Intel?:

@Axtremus said in Apple to move away from Intel?:

@taiwan_girl said in Apple to move away from Intel?:

I don't know if it is only me, but I never really care about weight of laptop (within of course reason).

There was a time when I traveled very frequently with a laptop. At the time, a half pound reduction in weight, say, from a 3.5 lb laptop to a 3 lb laptop, was enough to get me to acquire that new laptop that's half a pound lighter.

It surely is if you are lugging it through an airport a lot. I would make changes in toiletries and such to lose a couple ounces. It all adds up.

And you guys laughed at me when I was building my bike when I would say things like, "My front derailleur is made from titanium and weighs 76 grams less than the one made from steel!"

[Mik]

Actually we still laugh at you for that.

[George K]

@Mik said in Apple to move away from Intel?:

Actually we still laugh at you for that.

[Klaus]

@George-K said in Apple to move away from Intel?:

Unlike PC vendors, who license Windows from Microsoft or ChromeOS from Google, Apple also controls the operating system. This gives Apple a huge advantage over its competitors. Apple’s latest iPhone SOCs include both fast and slow cores, which the company prefers to call “performance” and “efficiency” cores. The advertised speed for a computer, like “3 GHz processor,” is the speed of the fast cores. When you do something processor-intensive, like rendering video in Final Cut Pro X or compiling an iPhone app in Xcode, those tasks would spin up all the fast cores. When you’re writing an email message or reading a Web page, the Mac doesn’t need to do hardly anything. Right now, all macOS can do is run the main Intel processor at a slower speed. With a custom ARM-based SOC with fast and slow cores, macOS could switch to slower, more energy-efficient cores. Dynamically switching cores depending on the task is key to saving energy.
In its A series chips for iOS devices, Apple also has custom-designed media cores for tasks like decoding video for a movie, audio for a podcast, and encryption. While Intel chips have similar features, with a custom chip, Apple could optimize for the media formats and encryption algorithms most common on Macs. And since Apple also controls macOS, it can ensure that macOS algorithms and processor cores are perfectly matched, again ensuring that they consume less power for any given task. When Apple engineers improve their algorithms, they can update their next-generation media cores to perfectly support the improvements, without those improvements also becoming available to competitors.

If it were so easy, then Commodore would be the big computer maker today and not the descendants of the IBM PC.

Modularity - building things by composing independent parts - is a beautiful and powerful design idea.

It's interesting how things go back and forth between monolithic and modular in every technical space every few years. Microkernel operating system or monolithic OS? Modular database or monolithic database? P2P or Client/Server? And so forth. There's never a clear answer.