APPLE’S TRANSITION

Two-year plan unveiled

APPLE’S DECISION to ditch x86 processors and move to ARM-based chips for all its machines has caused a stir. Now we are starting to get an idea of what’s in store as development kit is distributed, based around the existing A12Z Bionic chip, along with beta software. There are no meaningful direct benchmarks yet, its not the final hardware, or software, and there’s lots of emulation going on. However, developers have been impressed. Apple’s new iPad Pro already runs an A12Z chip, and it’s no slouch, holding its own against a MacBook Pro armed with a Core i5-8257. The next version will be based around this, although exact details are still fuzzy. We can expect a SoC version with more cores, higher frequencies, and integrated GPU. Some analysts are predicting performance hikes of between 50 and 100 percent when ARM MacBooks land.

While Apple gave little away about the silicon at the World Wide Developers Conference, except that it was going to be “truly profound.” It did want to talk about its software, and unveiled Universal 2. This is a classification for executable files that will run on x86 and ARM. The software detects what you have and proceeds accordingly. Many of the big productivity applications, Photoshop and the like, have already been ported. The original Apple Universal binary from 2005 did the same job during the transition from PowerPC chips to x86, and this is the third time Apple has switched tracks now. The plan is for the full transition to take two years, and will kick off with MacOS 11 (Big Sur), and the ARM-based 13inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

If Apple has waited this long to jump, we can assume it is confident. Intel and AMD have some thinking to do. The A-Series ARM chips have had a record of improvements. ARM chips are also gaining ground in supercomputers and server farms, as well as dominating mobile devices, leaving x86 silicon in the middle.