ARM-based MacBook Air test sample spied

http://www.reghardware.com/2011/05/27/apple_arm_air_spied/

by fvbock • 15 years ago

44 41 15 years ago

furyg3• 15 years ago

<sarcasm>I can't wait to have the PPC vs i386 arguments all over again... </sarcasm>

Seriously though, what are the implications for virtualization software (Vmware, VirtualBox, etc) on an ARM platform?

I'm all for innovation, but the fact that MacOS/Linux/Windows/BSD all currently support one common architecture has been very convenient, in recent years.

tobylane2• 15 years ago

They will want to support x64 on ARM anyway, because Windows is going on it. If Apple was to do this, now is a good time. Have a Windows program, and a Mac port you care about? Port both (hopefully). That's assuming anyone other than VM and driver companies will notice the change and will have to code for ARM.

rbanffy4• 15 years ago

> They will want to support x64 on ARM anyway, because Windows is going on it.

Could you explain that?

runjake• 15 years ago

x64 is a specific 64-bit derivative of the x86 architecture, ARM has it's own 64-bit arch. Microsoft is porting Windows 8 natively to ARM.

Supermighty• 15 years ago

I love the idea of lower power ARM devices, but the first thing my mind goes to is visualization. What are the implications?

VirtualBox has been a boon for me for virtual server environment testing.

rbanffy4• 15 years ago

You quite probably won't get decent x86 emulation speed out of an ARM processor. It takes an order of magnitude more transistors than an ARM has just to make an x86 out of hardware. You can do code translation on the fly, but doing that and keeping your virtual environment anything like the server you are trying to emulate.

When it comes to simulating servers, I've been opting for things like lxc and openvz. OSX should be able to use BSD's jail.

raganwald• 15 years ago

In the novel "Shogun," Toranaga has Blackthorne build a ship, secretly burns it down and has him build another. The ships are meant as bargaining tools for Toranaga's negotiation with the Portuguese, who control sea trade with Japan.

A working Macbook-anything running an A5 chip would be extremely useful for Steve Jobs when negotiating terms with Intel, even if in the end he "burns" it.

hugh32• 15 years ago

The fact that we know about this supports this idea. Apple is quite capable of keeping much bigger secrets than this when it tries.

rospaya• 15 years ago

Anyone wants to speculate on battery life?

phamilton• 15 years ago

I'd wager it's going to be similar to current levels. The past few Apple refreshes didn't change battery much (Macbook Pro actually dropped in battery life.)

Once battery is good enough, weight optimization is the next step. I bet these will be beyond ultra light.

hucker• 15 years ago

It didn't really drop in battery life, it was just that Apple's testing protocol was revised to more accurately describe real-life usage.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

An Asus Transformer with a keyboard can last about 15h, because it has a battery in both the tablet and the keyboard, while still remaining reasonably lightweight and thin.

If Apple keeps the same size of the Macbook Air you'll probably see ~100% improvement in battery life compared to the current Macbook Air. If they decide to make it even thinner and lighter, than it won't gain that much in battery life, but I'm sure it will still be a significant improvement (definitely more battery life than an iPad).

tianyicui• 15 years ago

If this new MacBook Air has a touch screen to run all the current iPad apps, while all OS X apps can simply re-compile to an x86/arm Universal app to run on it, it would definitely be my dream laptop.

hugh32• 15 years ago

A touchscreen MacBook Air with a clever hinge so that you can flip it around and use it as a tablet would be pretty sweet.

I know there have been some attempts at this kind of laptop-tablet form factor in the past, but has any manufacturer ever actually managed to solve the hinge problem?

agravier• 15 years ago

I didn't know it was a problem. I have a Viliv S7 (touchscreen, flip-to-tablet netbook) since maybe a couple of years, no issue with the hinge.

tptacek2• 15 years ago

"The iOS-like Mac OS X 7 Lion"?

beaumartinez• 15 years ago

Mac OS X Lion (Mac OS X version 10.7, don't ask me why they stated it as Mac OS X version 7) is getting some iOS features[1], hence the comparison.

[1] http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/

tptacek2• 15 years ago

Ah, thanks.

jws• 15 years ago

How about MacBook Express[1]? - ARM based, Mac App Store only for applications[2], no touch screen[3]. Users can be given a trojan free experience and Apple gets a big stick to nudge developers into the Mac App store?

This would rule the casual, unsophisticated user market. HN readers might have one as a second machine, but would probably get a "real" MacBook with the x86 and the freedom to code.

[1] Initially I thought MacBook Light, but then that's why I'm forbidden to name products. Express is already in the Apple product vocabulary and doesn't carry a negative connotation.

[2] Require a cryptographic signature from the Mac App store before any code can be executed. Remember, this gets complicated when you have interpreters on the platform, you have to control the input to them as well or only permit them in sandboxes. (Developers get some sort of testing exemption.)

[3] I don't think touch screen is a part of it. As great as it is for things on a tablet, the ergonomics on a laptop are awkward, and you need to design the application UI twice for people with and without.

Someone• 15 years ago

About that [3]: the first thing I thought is that Apple must have some innovative idea about the ergonomics of a touchscreen on such a device.

A laptop that supported desk accessary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_Accessory)/Side kick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SideKick)-like use of iOS apps would be a way to lure existing iOS users to such a device.

And for naming: the OS would be Mac OS X Singapura :-)

wtracy2• 15 years ago

Just thinking out loud: How about a device like the Nintendo DS (normal screen above, touch screen below) scaled up to a normal laptop size?

spullara• 15 years ago

This was my thought as well. Recompiling your application for ARM that has already been accepted in the Mac App Store would be pretty straightforward. It would also mean that the only productivity applications on the device would be new ones - Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite would probably never qualify.

meric• 15 years ago

Looking closer! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258693

bigmac• 15 years ago

I've been expecting this for awhile. At the LLVM developer's conference in November, there were tons of compiler engineers working on the ARM backend, but I didn't meet anybody working on the x86 backend.

Granted, iOS is important and runs ARM exclusively, but I would've expected more love for the x86 backend given how important the laptop segment is for Apple. It made it seem like x86 was not of long-term importance for Apple.

mmastrac2• 15 years ago

I think that Apple is going to move to a side-by-side x64/ARM model with the ARM chip running the full OSX kernel and the x64 chip being an on-demand auxiliary processor available for user-space applications that haven't or can't be recompiled for ARM (ie: VirtualBox) or need more horsepower.

The new interconnects on the Intel chip should ensure that both CPUs can access RAM and various peripherals without performance suffering. Apps can then choose whether to be run as native ARM or x64. The core apps will all run on ARM, allowing x64 chip to sleep and the new Macbook Airs to boast 20+ hour runtimes when performing core tasks only.

I haven't seen anyone else with this theory, but it makes a great deal of sense that Apple would push this. They have control over most of the stack: the ARM CPU, the kernel and the motherboard design. More details here - I'd be interested in hearing if others think this is feasible:

http://grack.com/blog/2011/05/07/how-apple-can-make-use-of-a...

Jeema3000• 15 years ago

It's certainly possible I think, but what you're talking about is more-or-less asymmetric multiprocessing, which (according to Wikipedia at least) is generally more complicated to implement at a hardware level:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing#Alter...

mmastrac2• 15 years ago

Exactly, this is just an asymmetric MP configuration. Note that this isn't exactly groundbreaking either. Others have already been using QPI to hook FPGAs up as accelerators. I don't doubt that it's a complicated technical endeavour, but Apple is certainly home to a number of talented engineers:

http://www.nallatech.com/Latest-News/xilinx-demonstrates-int...

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4207772/Xilinx-demos...

justincormack• 15 years ago

Getting the two to interoperate eg cache invalidation would be hard without Intel cooperating I think. Running as independent systems but maybe sharing some pci devices might be easier. They would have to run two OS kernels anyway as mixing a dual architecture kernel would be hard.

X-Istence• 15 years ago

The Mach kernel uses messaging as its core component, that is what it is built on. Messaging means it becomes easier to share state since it is all messages anyway.

watmough• 15 years ago

This is a wild idea, but there is precedent in the example of the dual-graphics systems.

That said, I'd be very surprised if Apple implemented this initially in the MBA first. Maybe the MBA will move to A5, then down the road, the high-end laptops will go dual Ax/x86. One approach might be to expect a multi-core Ax machine with a single Ax core dedicated and custom designed to emulate an x86... Might be worth keeping an eye on Apple job ads, since we know they have used emulation techniques in the past, such as Rosetta.

jodrellblank• 15 years ago

I haven't seen anyone else with this theory

I was going to post and suggest it, but was too afraid of looking like a doofus.

On the one hand, VMWare Fault Tolerance keeps two virtual machines on two separate hosts in sync down to the CPU instruction. VMotion moves running processes around live. Suspend to RAM and Disk do work on running processes, and Apple have a two-video-card model in production, and 32/64bit tolerance, and have had PPC/Intel combined tolerance, and dual core, dual CPU computers exist. These are all mildly supporting evidence that such low level trickery and successful complex solution might be possible.

On the other hand, I have no idea what two different classes of CPUs working on the same motherboard would mean, or how much complexity and bugs it would introduce, or how much cost. Or whether they'd be better off spending the effort on reducing power use somewhere else. Or whether they could deal with running the kernel on Arm and Virtualbox on Intel and still dissipate the heat while also having much reduced battery life.

My biggest counter is that low level stuff seems to be a lot harder in practise than the higher level discussions always make it sound.

Klinky• 15 years ago

What if they just put iOS on it & have it run iPhone & iPad apps. Add some first party support from Apple where they develop some cloud based apps/services that take advantage of the extra hardware(e.g. keyboard) & differentiate it from the MacBook Air by naming it the "MacBook Cloud"?

hexis• 15 years ago

Supposedly, OS X ran on intel chips for years before Apple made the switch for their products. I've got to imagine that Apple has been running OS X on their own chips, even if they have no specific plans to make the switch.

bergie• 15 years ago

I'd buy this immediately. MBA has the perfect form factor, and I'd rather have great battery life than a fast processor.

captaincrowbar• 15 years ago

I don't think the legacy x86 code issue is anywhere near as big a hurdle as many people seem to think, because Apple have a weapon there that Microsoft doesn't have, and Apple didn't have (at least to anywhere near the same level) during the 68k/PPC and PPC/x86 transitions: Xcode.

Just about every native Mac app these days was developed and built on Xcode, and Xcode already supports ARM targets. The only remaining obstacle is porting AppKit to ARM, and if (as the original story suggests) Apple already have hardware running OSX-on-ARM, they must have already done that. That means most Mac apps can be ported from x86 to ARM with little more effort than changing the target in a dropdown list and hitting Build.

(For those not familiar with Mac development: AppKit is the GUI library, part of Cocoa, used in most modern Mac apps. iOS apps use a slightly different GUI library, UIKit. At the moment AppKit only targets x86/x64 and UIKit only targets ARM, at least in the officially released versions.)

Microsoft can do something similar with .NET, as others have pointed out, but .NET apps don't dominate the Windows software ecosystem to anywhere near the same extent that Xcode+Cocoa dominates the Mac one.

(One thing I'm quite certain we're not going to see is the hypothetical dual-CPU ARM+x86 machine that some people are speculating about. For the simple reason that, if you're going to put an x86 in the box anyway, why bother with an ARM as well?)

ARM-based MacBook Air test sample spied

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