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Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't just lack of performance numbers, there were no actual products announced. They would have had to tip their hand on a lot of info that is not helpful to customers or their ability to keep selling Intel stuff.

One big question though will be how this devkit benchmarks against the current maxed Intel mac mini. I'm curious if GPU performance beats the current BlackMagic eGPU. (rx 580)

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> there were no actual products announced.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they also didn't announce any actual hardware when they introduced Intel Macs.

Interestingly, for the PowerPC->Intel transition, they also had an Developer Transition Kit: https://www.macstories.net/stories/this-is-not-a-product-the...

I believe the first Intel product announced was the [EDIT: iMac - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_(Intel-based)#1st_generat...] MacBook Pro at Macworld in January of 2006, long after it was announced at WWDC in 2005.

I think concerns about how Apple will handle the transition can generally be addressed by the relatively smooth transition from PPC to Intel. Apple has literally done this before.

Apple transitions CPU architectures every 10-15 years.

6502 -> 68k in 1984 via hard-cutover [edit: see cestith's reply, there's more to this story than I knew]

68k -> PPC in 1994 via emulation

PPC -> x86 in 2006 via Rosetta JIT translation

x86 -> ARM in 2020 via Rosetta 2 static recompilation

You could even argue the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X was a transition of similar magnitude (although solely on PowerPC processors), with Classic Environment running a full Mac OS 9 instance [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_macOS_components#Class...

They also had the IIgs which was the 65c816 in 16-bit mode. The Lisa was in 1983 before the Mac, and it was a 68k.

A 65c816 runs 6502 code natively.

Yes, in 8-bit mode. The IIgs runs with the processor in 16-bit mode from everything I've read about it. It might be able to swap modes to run older Apple software, but the IIgs is a 16-bit machine.

I disagree that 6502 -> 68k was a "transition." The Apple II and Mac were two separate product lines. The three major early home computer companies (Apple, Atari, Commodore) all did this.

Though Apple did sell a card that allowed 6502 apps to run on a Macintosh.

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

This is true, but note it was released in 1991, many years after the Mac's introduction. By that time, the Apple II was definitely on the way out. The last hold outs (schools...) probably needed encouragement.

To be honest, this entire plan looks like copy-Paste, kinda like how Star Wars Episode 7 is kinda a remake of A New hope?

Rosetta 2, Universal 2, The DTK Program demo on ARM,, it's the same plan.

The last time it went very well, so following the same playbook seems a good idea.

This is business, not some entertainment-value focused venture.

Apple did great last go-around, and they are leagues ahead of Microsoft or any other tech company in such a massive/successful platform shift.

This is their 3rd architecture shift btw - 680x0 -> Power -> Intel -> ARM. They practically wrote the book on how to do it right.

Not divulging their hand may be a thing. But they could at least have said something (rehashed) about the A12Z: "it performs better than the CPUs currently shipping in the Mac mini by X% in Y benchmark".

I'm not intrisically excited for a new Apple product, but if they could have told me, we can deliver 50% extra battery life in your new MacBook at comparable performance, that would build up some hype and maybe mindshare.

> not helpful to [...] their ability to keep selling Intel stuff.

I hope that that's it. If we're going through the pains of a platform transition, I'd like to get something out of it.

> Not divulging their hand may be a thing. But they could at least have

Let's say that the new numbers are mindblowingly good. So then what? Nobody buys anything from them until next year because they're all waiting? Yikes. This way fewer people will be mortified of the idea of buying something right now instead of waiting.

AKA the Osborne effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

> But they could at least have said something (rehashed) about the A12Z: "it performs better than the CPUs currently shipping in the Mac mini by X% in Y benchmark".

It's a kit to allow developers to prepare for transitioning their applications to ARM, for future retail MacOS/ARM devices. It's not a new Mac Mini, and it doesn't make sense to compare the retail machines to this dev kit (which is probably running a yet-to-be-fully-optimised OS)

I'm guessing they're not planning on releasing any A12Z products. They kept going on about how "scalable" their platform. I'm betting they launch with a significantly more powerful processor (they could easily double core counts and up clock frequencies for a laptop-class processor) on a next-gen process (i.e. 5nm). They probably don't even know what the performance will be like yet.

I think the lack of hardware and lack of benchmarks are related. Apple doesn't know yet what the thermal throttle will be on an A12Z MacBook until they start testing the cooling system.

There is no reason why rx580 would not be supported on ARM or why there would be any meaningful performance delta. AMD does not have any kind of “secret-sauce” driver for that, it is simply LLVM targeted to that architecture that converts HLSL/GLSL/SPIR-V into the architecture specific code.

It's an integrated GPU so it isn't going to compete against serious dedicated GPUs, and no one should expect that. I imagine much like existing Apple devices (and Windows laptops) with dedicated GPUs it will switch as necessary. But at least the integrated GPU will be better.

I can assure you that performance will not come anywhere close to an RX580, much less to a more modern Radeon 5700.

Where do you think it will fall? Do you think these will be compatible with eGPUs?

I think the 5700 series is eGPU compatible on macOS.

These fail because Apple is orders of magnitude away from Nvidia and AMD in performance, plus this is a chip with a very limited TDP. I think they will fall a bit slower than current AMD APUs.

    “PC guys are not going to just figure this out.
     They're not going to just walk in.”

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