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Comment by leemailll | Hacker News Reader

I suspect apple will release comps with amd cpus, but hackintosh with amd is already good to go

They are stuck with intel because of thunderbolt.

actually Asrock release X570 for ryzen2 with PCIE4 and thunderbolt 3 (https://www.anandtech.com/show/14455/asrock-x570-aqua-heavie...).

It seems they are also coming out with a Thin-ITX form factor motherboard, which up until now has been limited to Intel platforms.

Now that’s some great news. I want an AMD Apple system now.

The downside is the motherboard is pretty expensive. And I don’t think many people would buy a motherboard more expensive than the cpu on board. ASRock might offer a few more X570 mb with tb3, but I haven’t checked

If it's baked into an iMac / Mac Pro, what proportion of the potential market are actually going to delve that deeply into the components? I'd wager probably single digit %.

Thunderbolt is an open protocol now. They are not stuck.

Is that true though? As far as I know the Spec has been donated to USB and will be included / published as USB4 by the end of this year.

So until USB4 is out, it is not Open "yet". And even if USB4 is out, there is no guarantee USB won't mess up with only USB4 4x4 that support Thunderbolt 3 40Gbps.

That's my understanding as well, we only have Intel's word at this moment that TB would be open but it's USB4 that'll have the open "TB features" and they will co-exist; not USB4 replacing TB at all.

Here's the Verge article[1] that also speaks to this:

> Although USB 4 will integrate Thunderbolt 3’s features, Intel says that the two standards will coexist. While USB 4 is open, Thunderbolt 3 is not, and Intel requires manufacturers to be certified to use it. It also offers these manufacturers more support with reference designs and technical support. USB 4 might have the same specs, but Intel provides other Thunderbolt 3 services that go beyond the hardware itself.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/24/15685096/intel-thunderbol...

I doubt that, think of the amount of r&d they pour into arm for mobile. ARM will be their next platform for Macs.

Probably correct but making mobile CPUs is still a level below making the monsters our desktops are blessed with(Think of all the different SIMD etc. extensions the average Intel CPU) has these days

> Think of all the different SIMD etc. extensions the average Intel CPU

Most programmers don't care whether a CPU has AVX512 support. Most programmers will use a library or an OS service that'll abstract that away and pick a certain code path appropriate to the running CPU.

I don't think a human being can get a full understanding of a modern x86 without major brain surgery that is not yet available.

Virtualization support as well.

Practically all mobile chips support virtualization. In fact, Qualcomm always runs your OS (on both Android phones and Windows laptops) under its own tiny hypervisor.

If apple complete the switch to arm I guess the hackintosh will go into hiatus for a long time. But the recent release of Mac Pro might delay the change for sometime. However this also depends on whether the t2 chip will be forced on in later os

Intel is known for aggressive licensing terms with their business partners, so I'm sure Apple can't do it anytime soon.

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