https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-intel-arm-cpu-2020/
Apple is betting on itself (and ARM) as it begins a two-year plan to dump Intel

 

Intel tends to optimize for the Windows computer that comprise more than 80% (90%?) of the overall market. Apple is aiming for longer battery life and higher performance in graphics.

Nothing mysterious about that.

 

I used Apple's as a kid at school, and then used DOS/windows machines until now. And I watch a lot of tech videos and built gaming PCs but I can't remember what a MAC or Apple really is anymore, and I'm now a Linux i5-9600k rig.

 

Now that It has been 5 years since I worked at Intel, maybe I can talk.

The “intel Architecture” (IA) is a nightmare. It is as if you built the engine for a 2020 car by keeping all the parts in the 1920 model, and each successive year, and then added more parts to get more performance.

Unfortunately, multiple attempts to replace it, eg. 4/32 and Itanium, were disasters driven by researchers, as opposed to engineers.

I was excited about the claims made for Itaniium that it could achieve ILP (instruction level parallelism) of 4, compared to about 1.5 for IA. They had all kinds of “proof” that they could do this. The end result: about 1.6.

Intel could buid an ARM like chip that would blow away everything else that is out there in power and performance but, alas, they never will because they can’t let go of IA.

Bob

 

I don't know whether intel's marketing gurus would agree, but I suspect the company has enough horsepower to take on a new product line and both could take advantage of their process prowess. Wherever intel is going, unfortunately Apple will not be going there.

Apple will have its own chip in its desktops and will start to merge the desktop environment with its iPhone and iPat (IOS) operating system. At that point, as far as I am concerned, Apple will be making information appliances instead of computers and those of us who need more than an information appliance will move on to perhaps an intel hardware base hosting both Windows (which seems to be headed the way of IOS but more slowly) and Linux.

And to think how happy I was when Apple switched from Power PC to intel so I could finally stop using the slow simulator run Windows on a Mac.

 

I don't know whether intel's marketing gurus would agree, but I suspect the company has enough horsepower to take on a new product line and both could take advantage of their process prowess.

Agree, that is exactly what I am saying. Intel has gone to heroic efforts to jeep their half century old processor design competitive. With the same effort on a chip designed frim scratch with what we know today, with their process and expertise, they should be able to outperform everything else.

They also have a C/C++ compiler that is fully compatible with either gcc or Microsoft, that could be leveraged to jump start software conversion. That is what I was working on.

Instead, when they started a new design, they went to blue sky ideas from academia that never panned out.

You probably don’t know that just before Y2K, they acquired a proprietary ARM architecture design that could reach 1GHz long before ARMs own designs did. And, of course it went nowhere.

Bob

 

Now that It has been 5 years since I worked at Intel, maybe I can talk.

The “intel Architecture” (IA) is a nightmare. It is as if you built the engine for a 2020 car by keeping all the parts in the 1920 model, and each successive year, and then added more parts to get more performance.

Unfortunately, multiple attempts to replace it, eg. 4/32 and Itanium, were disasters driven by researchers, as opposed to engineers.

I was excited about the claims made for Itaniium that it could achieve ILP (instruction level parallelism) of 4, compared to about 1.5 for IA. They had all kinds of “proof” that they could do this. The end result: about 1.6.

Intel could buid an ARM like chip that would blow away everything else that is out there in power and performance but, alas, they never will because they can’t let go of IA.

Bob

Agree, that is exactly what I am saying. Intel has gone to heroic efforts to jeep their half century old processor design competitive. With the same effort on a chip designed frim scratch with what we know today, with their process and expertise, they should be able to outperform everything else.

They also have a C/C++ compiler that is fully compatible with either gcc or Microsoft, that could be leveraged to jump start software conversion. That is what I was working on.

Instead, when they started a new design, they went to blue sky ideas from academia that never panned out.

You probably don’t know that just before Y2K, they acquired a proprietary ARM architecture design that could reach 1GHz long before ARMs own designs did. And, of course it went nowhere.

Bob

I think Intel does have an ARM processor in their x86-64 processors and it is used for Management Engine and inaccessible to normal users.

 

I think Intel does have an ARM processor in their x86-64 processors and it is used for Management Engine and inaccessible to normal users.

Intel and just about every modern CISC architectural vendor uses RISC processor( optimized for x86 eccentricities) technology as the core processing engine with a heavy duty front-end decoder (microcode) for the needed x86 instruction set.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Microcode