Apple’s ditching Intel in favour of its own silicon – a two-year transition

Apple has started one of the largest transitions in its history, a move which will differentiate its Mac products from all others in the PC market. Apple’s ditching Intel’s processors, and to replace them they are looking towards their own silicon. 

Within the smartphone and tablet markets, Apple is a silicon leader, offering ARM-based designs which deliver unrivalled performance levels. The combination of Apple’s tight software integration and the platform-specific silicon optimisations have allowed Apple to deliver some of the world’s best ARM processors. Now, Apple believes that they can scale these designs into the high-end market, creating a unified ecosystem which scales from iPhone to Mac Pro. 

Why now? 

The simple fact of the matter is that Apple believes that it can innovate at a faster rate than Intel within the CPU market. Since 2015, practically all of Intel’s mainstream processors have utilised the same fundamental CPU code design, spanning from Skylake to Kaby Lake to Coffee Lake to Coffee Lake-R and then Comet Lake. During that same time, Apple has transformed its Apple mobile silicon, delivering the fastest smartphones and tablets on the market. 

With its transition to Apple silicon, Apple will create a truly scalable software/hardware ecosystem and give themselves full control of its future devices. Apple will no longer be held back by slow progress from Intel, or be burdened by issues from 3rd party processors. When using Apple silicon, issues stemming from Intel are cut from Apple’s product stack, removing pesky speculative execution issues (which are seemingly uncovered monthly for Intel processors) while distancing themselves from 3rd party delays. 

When using Apple silicon, Apple will have full control of its Mac roadmap and be free from reliance on Intel. This move is a double-edged sword, as Apple will need to execute its designs well to make this transition worthwhile, but if Intel’s recent history is anything to go by, Apple has a lot to gain here. 

Apple believes that it can do a better job at innovating within the high-performance CPU market, hoping to enable new features while delivering better performance per watt characteristics. Think of how long Intel has delayed its 10nm manufacturing process and how that impacts customers like Apple. Intel’s performance in recent years did little to discourage the company’s plan to move to its own silicon. 
 
   

The Software Side – Big Sur

With Big Sur, Apple will be offering users an OS that’s fully built using Xcode 12, using Universal 2 application binaries to make the OS compatible with both Intel and Apple processors. Developers will also be able to use to make Universal 2 application binaries to make applications which run on Intel and Apple silicon. 

Big Sur will start Apple’s transition away from Intel processors, though it is worth noting that Apple plans to release new Intel-based Macs during this transition period. Apple’s first Apple-powered Macs will release this year, and new Intel-based Macs are coming. 

With Big Sur, Apple will also allow users to run Linux through their Visualisation technology and allow iOS and iPadOS applications to run on Macs without any modifications. Apple has also created a translation technology called Rosetta 2 to translate existing Mac applications so that they can run on Apple-powered silicon without an update.  

Moving forward, Apple plans to utilise a common architecture across its entire product stack, using the same Neural Engine for machine learning, CPU core designs for compute and the same hardware acceleration features to speed up a wide variety of workloads.