That is a huge and unlikely “if”.
The ARM part of Apple Silicon is not the big deal. It is what Apple is doing in the rest of the silicon, that no one else can come close to doing, that is the big deal.
There is no platform that uses ARM outside of Apple Silicon that would have the power to run Roon. What Apple is doing is quite unique.
The ARM Cortex-X1 is no slouch. And it wont be stifled by being made to run exclusively Apple software.
Don’t want to run Apple OS on it, but Roon OS, which would need to be compiled for ARM-64 in addition to x86-64 for Intel and then there could be an alternative ROCK.
Sure. But that processor was designed with less constraints on power usage and it still doesn’t beat Apple’s SoC in the latest iPhones. Just think what Apple might do with no constraints on power usage or real estate.
People need to realize that Apple can and has spent a ton of money are R&D and IP. I can guarantee they have exclusive agreements with TSMC as well. No company is better situated than Apple to extract the most from ARM architecture.
Apple is doing this because Intel cannot keep up. Think about that…
not likely… Apple is not at all friendly to this type of thing. I wrote about this in the past when talking about opinionated software. I explicitly used Apple and Google in this example:
Apple being highly opinionated on which operating systems work with their hardware makes it uninteresting to do the work to fight them.
The world will catch up. Apple may or may not be ahead at that point, but that’s irrelevant.
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Apple are only interested in the Apple ‘ecosystem’ though, which will stunt their ambition sooner or later. Especially if these ARM based Macs don’t sell well, and Id say that’s a distinct possibility as the Mac market is not exactly huge. In that case the rest of their SoCs will have the same power restrictions as they have always had. There is no reason to believe that AMD, Intel, Nvidia etc wont catch up. They build chips for a wider range of scenarios than Apple can/will. And one of them may even buy ARM in the near future, although I personally hope that doesn’t happen.
Well, you guys can say that. But, let’s look at the mobile market. Has anyone caught up with Apple’s SoC yet? No, they have not. Every time they think they will, what they come up with does not perform in the real world as well as expected AND Apple comes out with a better SoC anyway.
Everyone else is invested in the Intel or Intel-compatible world. No one is going to take the time or money to create an SoC using ARM technology for the laptop/desktop that rivals what Apple is doing…not even ARM.
But they already are, and they are also creating server-grade CPUs with ARM cores as well. As with everything this will all move beyond what Apple’s niche will restrict them too because they only play in their consumer space.
Don’t change the meaning of my quotes. Yes, there are some servers out there using ARM technology. But, they do not rival what Apple is doing. ARM-based servers catching on is far from certain. So who knows how much might be invested in SoC development.
Annoying isn’t it?
Whether someone creates a SoC to rival Apple’s or not is fairly irrelevant as @danny had pointed out. Apple wont let you play in their walled garden so if their chips are faster so what ? If you want a ROCK on ARM, it isn’t going to be running on anything made by Apple. That doesn’t mean it wont be possible on other ARM-based hardware which could be perfectly performant for that task. The Apple cheerleading is missing the point.
@Speed_Racer, I think you are missing something.
Roon’s performance needs are not going up over time (well, not much). CPU speed is getting faster at a much faster rate than Roon can use it.
If CPUs keep getting faster and faster, it wont matter if you have the fastest (Apple), just that you have fast enough (everyone else).
Is the current fastest ARM CPUs, fast enough? Maybe Apple’s SoC is right now, but everyone will catch up to Apple’s current fastest. Let’s say the next ARM down from Apple today, is 50% as fast. In 2 years, let’s say both double in performance. Roon will be just fine on everyone else’s ARM, and even better on Apple’s, but no ROCK for Apple’s chips so it’s useless.
Then there’s this -
Is there a ROCK build for an existing ARM processor? Easier to go fanless, low-energy, cool.
Nope.
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Apple’s current Apple Silicon is more than fast enough for Roon and really nothing like any other ARM-licensed product available today or even expected in the next 2 to 3 years. The best ARM anything else out there probably isn’t ready.
Hopefully it gets other Arm vendors to create faster SOC system’s that will be quick enough for Roon, and open enough to run Linux. All the while being low power
I think Microsoft is probably hoping for the same thing as well
Mike
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It looks like Microsoft are heading down the same route as Apple and are planning to develop their own ARM based silicon. In both cases though the likelihood of it being open enough to run something like Roon OS seems slim.
Best we can hope is that a company like Qualcomm or similar steps up to produce an open SOC with similar (or sufficient) performance
Tim I hold out more hope on the Microsoft side, as such a large amount of Azure workloads run on Linux (though they are generally partnering with Qualcomm).
Qualcomm only seems to do the bare amount necessary each year to make their SOC faster (while improving ML and graphics capabilities), and this will hopefully be the competition they need to spur development. Sadly I think this could take several years to catch up, unless they have been holding back on us.
Mike
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Microsoft does not have the engineering prowess in place to do what Apple has done. Apple has been designing their own SoCs for 13+ years.
Let’s not forget that Apple has a special licensing agreement with ARM since Apple was one of ARMs founding partners. Apple also has a long and tight relationship with TSMC. Where is Microsoft going to go to get 5nm technology? AMD’s processors and SoCs are made by TSMC as well. Can TSMC handle Apple, AMD, and Microsoft?
No one has the investment in SoC design that Apple has. The fact that Apple licenses ARM IP for their SoCs should not encourage one to believe that other ARM licensees are anywhere close to what Apple has done. Apple is certainly not going to help anyone else out, that’s for sure. I think my “2 or 3 years” to have another ARM SoC like what Apple has today is overly optimistic.
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