Intel has been building up this year to its eventual release of its first widely available consumer 10nm Core processor, codenamed “Ice Lake”. The new SoC has an improved CPU core, a lot more die area dedicated to graphics, and is designed to be found in premium notebooks from major partners by the end of 2019, just in time for Christmas. With the new CPU core, Sunny Cove, Intel is promoting a clock-for-clock 18% performance improvement over the original Skylake design, and its Gen11 graphics is the first 1 teraFLOP single SoC graphics design. Intel spent some time with us to talk about what’s new in Ice Lake, as well as the product’s direction.
Wild wild prediction:
Apple will not be realeasing Macs with these 10nm Intel CPUs. Instead they will switch to ARM and pit their ARM chips against the older Intel Chips. Makes for much better marketing.
Nope, not gonna happen this Christmas. The current Macs are all way faster than anything ARM can bring to the table and I don’t think their software tooling is ready for this. The only product this made sense for used to be the MacBook “Nothing” and that has been killed recently.
Intel is still too far ahead of ARM for a company that only makes highend machines to switch, even if that company happens to have the fastest ARM-chips.
When
* Apple announces that every iOS app can now easily be ran from the Mac-Store
* …and that such apps run well on both Intel and ARM
* ……and that they have a “fix” for the non-touchiness of MacOS
* and that all Mac-programs can easily be compiled for Mac-with-ARM
* …and that such programs run well enough on ARM
at THAT time they might make some of their models available with ARM, or re-introduce the MacBook “Nothing” with ARM.
Apple would love to do this, but currently the “more mobile” benefits aren’t high enough to counter the negatives like “Prog X is dog slow and Prog Y isn’t even available”
We are already seeing these kinds of cross-over products on the Windows side at the entry/low-end level, but not mid/high-end and even at the entry/low-end they are mostly just experiments. ChromeBooks and iPadPro’s are trying to go the opposite route and aren’t a great solution yet either.
avgalen,
Apple is likely working on their own ARM chips. ARM is just a licencing business – it depends on the licensee to explore what the design is capable of. Apple isn’t just limited to the ARM chips that are being produced, but can make their own. Apple seems to be investing on the technology and personnel, so talking about raw performance of current market options is moot.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/macbook-move-apple-hires-key-arm-chip-designer-pointing-to-shift-from-intel/
Apple isn’t a technology company, it’s a work/lifestyle company, and the mistake we tech nerds always make is to assess them from a purely tech spec perspective.
Wild wild wild prediction. In the future (3-5) yearswill try to get rid of both Arm and x86/64 in favor of RISC-V to avoid royalties.
kragil,
People have been drumming up support for ARM for many years now. Apple could probably sell an ARM laptop, it’s actually something I wish I had with linux, but I certainly wouldn’t pay a premium for one. x86 still dominates for heavy workloads, although typical desktop users may not need very beefy CPUs anyways.
For my applications, I consider performance important. I just ordered an odroid n2 to test out it’s embeded capabilities.
https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-n2/odroid-n2
I try to stay on top of embedded ARM SBCs, they always sound great, but so far I’ve always been left at least a bit disappointed, Hopefully this will change! To be honest, they’re ok for desktop uses, I’m just looking for something with more omph for realtime applications. I’m probably barking up the wrong tree and should go with an FPGA instead, but I haven’t found anything sufficiently open in FPGA world for my tastes – the last thing I want is to get stuck on a vendor locked toolchain.
Pinebook Pro, but not a powerbeast…
Kochise,
The pinebook looks pretty good. I don’t use a laptop as a daily driver except when I travel. I still require ethernet to connect to servers/switches/routers, and I’d rather not have to carry dongles. For better or worse, the lack of ethernet ports is becoming par for the course. More storage options would be nice too. At least it has a decent resolution (1920 x 1080). So many x86 laptops have such low resolution that it makes them useless in my book, in this day and age I can’t believe this is still an issue!
I think it’s a great value for what you get, but I wish there were a workstation grade version at a $300-400 price point.
What I’m kind of curious is, how hackable is it ? Could one just replace the logic board with a pi 4 and have everything magically work? I know arm is very different in many respects with the whole devicetree set up, but I think that should be possible? Right? So maybe in the future you could just swap out the innards to upgrade. Anyone know?
That’s the innards of the Pinebook (not pro) … doesn’t look designed for swappability…. though it would be swappable if they kept the same connectors and general layout. it certainly isn’t a pineboard + laptop adapter light you might think given the name. apparently it doesn’t even have any exposed GPIO on the board…
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/img_2815-2.jpg