Apple Silicon

We’ve been wondering for years when we might see the first ARM-powered Mac, and a Bloomberg report today suggests that it will be next year.

Apple is set to release its first Mac based on a custom ARM chip next year, according to Bloomberg. This lines up with previous timeline reported from Bloomberg, which cited late 2020/2021 timeframe, and other reports from publications like analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

The different architectures make it difficult to predict the relative power of an ARM-based Mac against an Intel one, but there’s no reason in principle why an ARM-powered Mac couldn’t be more powerful than some of today’s machines …

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Apple is set to release its first Mac based on a custom ARM chip next year, according to Bloomberg. This lines up with the previous timeline reported from Bloomberg, which cited late 2020/2021 timeframe, and other reports from publications like analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Bloomberg says that Apple is working on a range of chips aimed for future Macs. The first Apple-designed chip will apparently be based on a 5-nanometer fabrication process, and feature 12 CPU cores: 8 high-performance cores and 4-efficiency cores.

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Former senior Apple exec Jean-Louis Gassée, who once held the role of head of Macintosh development, says that it would be perfectly viable for the entire Mac range to be powered by ARM chips – even the Mac Pro. This reverses a view he held last year when he called the idea a ‘fantasy.’

He said that while one of the two problems he discussed last year remains a huge challenge for Apple, power is no longer an issue …

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Ming-Chi Kuo is out with a new analyst note today and the most interesting part of his forecast is that Apple will release its first Mac with an ARM processor in the first half of 2021.

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Jason Snell has raised an interesting possibility over at Macworld: that future ARM-powered Macs might mean an end to the level of custom-build options we get at present.

It’s long been thought that it’s only a matter of time before Apple ditches Intel in favor of ARM-powered Macs using Apple-designed silicon. One report suggested that might happen as early as 2020. We’ve pointed to multiple reasons to believe that it will happen sooner or later. But Snell suggests that may come with a downside we haven’t yet discussed.

He opens by noting that, while Apple normally offers a choice of at least two processors (true even for the 12-inch MacBook), that isn’t an option with the 2018 MacBook Air …

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It’s long been rumored that Apple is working on Macs powered by custom-designed ARM CPUs, moving away from Intel ones. Here at 9to5Mac we’ve long argued that it’s a question of when and not if, with one report even suggesting that Apple could make the switch as early as 2020.

That idea gets a big boost today as ARM claims that its upcoming CPUs will out-perform Intel ones …

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Apple has reportedly poached multiple engineers and research staff from Intel for a new facility in Washington County, close to the chipmaker’s home base.

The hiring appears to have begun back in November, and is likely to further fuel speculation about Apple replacing Intel chips with its own ARM-based Mac CPUs within the next few years …

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It’s almost exactly a year since I last discussed the possibility of Apple ditching Intel in favor of Macs powered by Apple-designed CPUs. I argued then that it was a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if,’ echoing a view earlier expressed by my colleague Chance.

Bloomberg yesterday suggested that the ‘when’ might be 2020. That might seem like an ambitious timescale, but I do firmly believe two things. One, Apple is already running ARM-based Mac prototypes internally. Two, if it doesn’t happen in 2020, it won’t be too long afterwards …

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Apple’s announcement earlier this week that it plans to design its own GPUs for future iPhones and iPads did more than signal bad news for Imagination Technologies. It also added weight to the idea that Apple will at some point want to ditch Intel chips in Macs in favour of its own design of ARM-based CPUs.

The arguments in favor of Apple designing its own Mac processors are exactly the same ones that led the company to design its own A-series chips for iOS devices. Apple gets total control – something the company values highly.

Control of costs is part of it, of course. Tim Cook in particular got to the position he’s in today in large part by demonstrating a mastery of the supply-chain, and a significant goal there is to keep costs as low as possible in order to maximise margins. Apple eliminates royalty fees by designing its own chips, and that will further boost margins.

But while cost is of course one motivation, there are two even more important benefits to Apple-designed CPUs …

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Bloomberg reports that Apple is currently developing a new ARM-based chip that could appear in future MacBook Pros as soon as this year. According to the report, the new Mac chip may be used for low-power tasks that currently rely on Intel’s chip to process.

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Update: The acquisition by Softbank was completed on 5th September, for £24M ($32M). TechCrunch notes that ARM is being delisted from the London Stock Exchange today, and will be run as a standalone business within Softbank. The sale is not expected to have any impact on Apple, which licences ARM technology for the A-series chips it uses in iOS devices.

ARM, the British chip designer responsible behind the A-series processors used in Apple’s iOS devices, looks set to be bought by Japanese telecoms company Softbank.

The deal will need to be approved by shareholders, but with ARM recommending it and a valuation 43% above last week’s closing price, it looks likely to go through. It is, however, possible that other companies may make their own bid for the company.

Both Intel and Apple have been suggested as potential bidders …

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MacBidouille is the source of an interesting new rumor [translation] that Apple is currently experimenting with new ARM-powered Mac variants that include a Magic trackpad built into the system’s keyboard. The company is also reportedly working on a new version of OS X that will be compatible with these ARM machines.

According to MacBidouille’s sources, Apple is developing three new machines with this configuration: the aforementioned iMac and Mac mini as well as a 13″ MacBook, presumably a MacBook Air. The iMac and notebook are both said to have “4 or 8” quad-core arm64 processors, while the Mac mini has only four.

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We reported over the weekend that there was some confusion over exactly how Apple’s new Lightning digital AV adapter works and why it lacks the ability to carry a native 1080p signal. One theory is that Apple was using an AirPlay wireless streaming protocol, but we’ve since learned that is not the case. According to a post  that purports to be from an anonymous Apple engineer explaining how the cables function, Apple does not use Airplay protocol. It instead uses the same H.264 encoding technology as AirPlay to encode the output into the ARM SoC. From there, the data is decoded and sent over HDMI:

It’s vastly the same thing with the HDMI adapter. Lightning doesn’t have anything to do with HDMI at all. Again, it’s just a high speed serial interface. Airplay uses a bunch of hardware h264 encoding technology that we’ve already got access to, so what happens here is that we use the same hardware to encode an output stream on the fly and fire it down the Lightning cable straight into the ARM SoC the guys at Panic discovered. Airplay itself (the network protocol) is NOT involved in this process. The encoded data is transferred as packetized data across the Lightning bus, where it is decoded by the ARM SoC and pushed out over HDMI.

Perhaps even more interesting is that Apple could improve the quality with future software updates since the firmware is stored in RAM as opposed to ROM. The poster noted that Apple deemed the quality “suitably acceptable” but *will* make improvements with future iOS updates:
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The hacked apart cable costs as much as a Roku because it has the same kind of horsepower

The fine software developers over at Panic are working on some new AV software, and they are investigating Apple’s new-ish Lightning Digital AV Adapter. What they found is that unlike the earlier 30-pin module, the Lightning adapter doesn’t carry a native 1080p signal. In fact, when mirroring, Apple says the optimum resolution is 1,600-by-900, and, when that signal is shown on a 1080p display, it is likely up-converted, showing artifacts consistent with streaming and uncompressing video data

Before it is ripped apart, via Amazon

What’s more interesting is that they split open the cable and found a full ARM processor with 256MB of RAM to process video signals inside the adapter cable. We knew way back in September that the 8-pin adapter wouldn’t carry video natively, but Apple was able to build a cable. How? Panic thinks that it is actually streaming an AirPlay network signal through the cable, and the ARM processor is decoding it.

Why would Apple do this? It’s likely Apple wants to move people to AirPlay wireless streaming to Apple TV, so this is just a stopgap solution. Rather than making a larger Lightning cable, it sacrificed on wired video-out quality and HDMI (And VGA?) cable costs.

Update: Our friends at Braeburn and an anonymous Apple Engineer sent along their takes on the situation below:

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