In researching my piece for the upcoming de Programmatica Ipsum issue on cloud computing, I had thoughts about Apple, arm, and any upcoming transition that didn’t fit in the context of that article. So here’s a different post, about that. I’ve worked at both companies so don’t have a neutral point of view, but I’ve also been in bits of the companies far enough from their missions that I don’t have any insider insight into this transition.
So, let’s dismiss the Mac transition part of this thread straight away: it probably will happen, for the same reasons that the PowerPC->Intel transition happened (the things Apple needed from the parts – mostly lower power consumption for similar performance – weren’t the same things that the suppliers needed, and the business Apple brought wasn’t big enough to make the suppliers change their mind), and it probably will be easier, because Apple put the groundwork in to make third-party devs aware of porting issues during the Intel transition, and encourage devs to use high-level frameworks and languages.
Whether you think the point is convergence (now your Catalyst apps are literally iPad IPAs that run on a Mac), or cost (Apple buy arm chipset licences, but have to buy whole chips from Intel, and don’t get the discount everybody else does for sticking the Intel Inside holographic sticker on the case), or just “betterer”, the arm CPUs can certainly provide. On the “betterer” argument, I don’t predict that will be a straightforward case of tomorrow’s arm Mac being faster than today’s Intel Mac. Partly because compilers: gcc certainly has better optimisations on Intel and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that llvm does too. Partly because workload, as iOS/watchOS/tvOS all keep the platform on guard rails that make the energy use/computing need expectations more predictable, and those guard rails are only slowly being added to macOS now.
On the other hand, it’s long been the case that computers have controller chips in for interfacing with the hardware, and that those chips are often things that could be considered CPUs for systems in their own rights. Your mac certainly already has arm chips in if you bought it recently: you know what’s running the OS for the touch bar? Or the T2 security chip? (Actually, if you have an off-brand PC with an Intel-compatible-but-not-Intel chip, that’s probably an arm core running the x86-64 instructions in microcode). If you beef one of those up so that it runs the OS too, then take a whole bunch of other chips and circuits off the board, you both reduce the power consumption and put more space in for batteries. And Apple do love talking battery life when they sell you a computer.
OK, so that’s the Apple transition done. But now back to arm. They’re a great business, and they’ve only been expanding of late, but it’s currently coming at a cost. We don’t have up to date financial information on Arm Holdings themselves since they went private, but that year they lost ¥31bn (I think about $300M). Since then, their corporate parent Softbank Group has been doing well, but massive losses from their Vision Fund have led to questions about their direction and particularly Masayoshi Son’s judgement and vision.
arm (that’s how they style it) have, mostly through their partner network, fingers in many computing pies. From the server and supercomputer chips from manufacturers like Marvell to smart lightbulbs powered by Nordic Semiconductor, arm have tentacles everywhere. But their current interest is squarely on the IoT side. When I worked in their HPC group in 2017, Simon Segars described their traditional chip IP business as the “legacy engine” that would fund the “disruptive unit” he was really interested in, the new Internet of Things Business Unit. Now arm’s mission is to “enable a trillion connected devices”, and you can bet there isn’t a world market for a trillion Macs or Mac-like computers.
If some random software engineer on the internet can work this out, you can bet Apple’s exec team have worked it out, too. It seems apparent that (assuming it happens) Apple are transitioning the Mac platform to arm at start of the (long, slow) exit arm make from the traditional computing market, and still chose to do it. This suggests something else in mind (after all, Apple already designs its chips in-house, so why not have them design RISC-V or MIPS chips, or something entirely different?). A quick timetable of Mac CPU instruction sets:
- m68k 1984 – 1996, 12 years (I exclude the Lisa)
- ppc 1994 – 2006, 12 years
- x86 and x86-64 2006 – 2021?, 15 years?
- arm 2020? – 203x?, 1x years?
I think it likely that the Mac will wind down with arm’s interest in traditional computing, and therefore arm will be the last ever CPU/SoC architecture for computers called Macs. That the plan for the next decade is that Apple is still at the centre of a services-based, privacy-focused consumer electronics experience, but that what they sell you is not a computer.
