Apple Saying Goodbye to Intel Processors

The second most popular consumer OS in the world is built on a BSD-derived UNIX 03 certified kernel.

I'd hardly call it "dead".

What exactly is a BSD-derived UNIX 03 certified kernel?

Agreed; and server-side, my brother-in-law is a Systems Architect for a major bank here in Canada. They're not using CentOS or Debian. :) I forget now whether the systems we were talking about were on IBM or HP.

Although smaller numbers of servers are using a bona fide UNIX these days I still have the impression that most of the real backbone of our society is a UNIX of some sort, with IBM (AIX) and HP (HP-UX) being the main players. I am not sure how popular Oracle's Solaris is anymore. I also think of the number of single-use devices (firewalls, toasters) that would have an embedded BSD is significant.

IBM bought Red Hat for good reason. BSD UNIX is nothing to write home about as Linux beats it in every aspect. Virtualization support in BSD UNIX is very poor and can't touch KVM in Linux. As for the closed source UNIX type systems, they're on their way out.
 
What exactly is a BSD-derived UNIX 03 certified kernel?

OS X/macOS is built on BSD UNIX. It is certified as UNIX-compliant per the UNIX 03 specifications along with HP-UX, AIX, and a couple of others.

I think it's rather wrong to call UNIX "dead" when there are OSs in current development that the Austin group considers compliant and permits them to carry the UNIX trademark. Again, one of those OSs is an incredibly popular desktop OS.
 
i3 and i9 are almost never used.

I'm typing this from a quad i7 MBP, but i9s are in all but the base model 16" configs. The i3 MBA is the "stripper" model at an entry level price to appeal to edu customers. It's unfortunate that the entry price is what-to me-is kind of a crummy model now. Even though it's dated now, I still use a 13" 2012 MBP decently often when I need to handle optical disks(my big 2012 15" that's still my primary computer lost its ODD in favor of more storage a long time ago) and even with a dual i5 base config(albeit 16gb RAM and an SSD) it's still fairly capable even in 10.15. Unfortunately, since there are basically 2 computers that officially support Catalina and have built in ODDs, disk utility is kind of sucky My first Mac was the late 2011 version of this, and I'd still use it for ODD duties if not for the fact that I like have USB 3.0 in the 2012.
 
All this and somehow Intel stock is still not a buy.

The problem Intel has is the 10nm and 7nm future, more specifically whether owning your own fab for logics make sense. The latest demands now come from mobile market and GPU and the market will pay for whatever money can buy. AMD can tag along these market to make better CPU than Intel now. If Intel wants to compete they either have to become a better foundry or spend a lot of money to build the better internal fab. The money isn't there when they are a monopoly. They need to find a way to efficiently use their old fab (they don't have the product) and build new fab (they cannot share cost with others). Their current leadership doesn't know what to do and their share holders are expecting monopoly profit margin (70%).

If they don't split up fast they will become Motorola very very soon, then active investors will come in and demand a split up. They might as well do it right now instead.
 
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OS X/macOS is built on BSD UNIX. It is certified as UNIX-compliant per the UNIX 03 specifications along with HP-UX, AIX, and a couple of others.

I think it's rather wrong to call UNIX "dead" when there are OSs in current development that the Austin group considers compliant and permits them to carry the UNIX trademark. Again, one of those OSs is an incredibly popular desktop OS.

Linux vs BSD vs UNIX doesn't matter these days. You have new things that support them all and old things will ask for specific version of a particular OS. Things get ported over back and forth.
 
I'm using an Intel i9, 9900KF processor in mama's gaming rig, and it's pretty stout. It cranks right up to 5ghz in turbo, does not need water cooling and even with 4K gaming, it's really never taxed.

I like that the AMD Ryzen 5000 series has amazing specs and now claims to be the best gaming processor. I won't believe it until a year has passed. Quite often initial hype and initial "test results" don't match real world experiences. Last year AMD claims failed to materialize and the Ryzen 7 and 9 ended up being almost 10% slower than the Intel competition in gaming tests. Nor were they money saving choices. However, I do like the fact that Ryzen offers 16 core processors.

She is using the Nvidia 2080RTX video card and that is not really good enough. Turn on ray tracing and it starts to stutter. Plus it runs stupidly hot all the time. The gaming bottleneck remains the video cards.
 
I'm using an Intel i9, 9900KF processor in mama's gaming rig, and it's pretty stout. It cranks right up to 5ghz in turbo, does not need water cooling and even with 4K gaming, it's really never taxed.

I like that the AMD Ryzen 5000 series has amazing specs and now claims to be the best gaming processor. I won't believe it until a year has passed. Quite often initial hype and initial "test results" don't match real world experiences. Last year AMD claims failed to materialize and the Ryzen 7 and 9 ended up being almost 10% slower than the Intel competition in gaming tests. Nor were they money saving choices. However, I do like the fact that Ryzen offers 16 core processors.

She is using the Nvidia 2080RTX video card and that is not really good enough. Turn on ray tracing and it starts to stutter. Plus it runs stupidly hot all the time. The gaming bottleneck remains the video cards.

Please show us some benchmarks that clearly show where Ryzen is slower than Intel, in what games, and in what applications. I don't side with either and I run both. Granted, I use AMD Threadripper and Intel X Series CPUs (Socket LGA 2066). AMD eats Intel's lunch when it comes to productivity and security. Because of all the security flaws in Intel CPUs, VM performance has dropped for me at least by 20%. This is just some of the stuff that Intel fanboys conveniently don't want to talk to. I paid for my Intel CPUs, and as such, I don't have to defend them. If anything, I am very critical of their screw-ups.

I can tell you for sure that AMD is playing hardball. They could have released the Zen 3 architecture found in the 5000 series three years ago on 14nm. They didn't do it because their roadmap includes incremental improvements. If they deliver 15% to 20% improvements with every release, it ensures that everyone upgrades, and because they maintain motherboard compatibility (unlike Intel), it ensures that everyone keeps upgrading.

All that AMD has done with Zen 3 is to move from a 4 core CCX to an 8 core CCX, effectively halving L3 Cache latency. Due to how the Zen architecture works, moving data around cores is very energy-intensive, so every time AMD eliminates a bottleneck and lowers latency, power consumption also goes down. AMD has designed Zen to be highly modular and very easy to improve upon. Zen 3 is the final nail in Intel's coffin. The only chance that Intel has now is to innovate and go to a similar architecture as AMD has. It is rumored that Zen 4 will run four threads per core, and considering the IPC improvements that AMD is making, that looks like something that is very doable.

If you're only gaming, then it doesn't really matter, Intel will do a great job for you and the security patches meant to fix years of neglect on the part of Intel engineers will not affect you much, if at all. However, if you're using Intel in a server/data center environment, you might want to look at AMD solutions if you value your money, time, and most importantly, your security.
 
Intel is currently still king for sheer FPS, but I’m curious to how Zen 3 will compare in the real world.

I know this says 10900K, but they included the 9900K in their charts.
 
Intel is currently still king for sheer FPS, but I’m curious to how Zen 3 will compare in the real world.

Don't know (guessing it's going to be great) but any way you slice this, competition is a wonderful thing! I do think those predicting Intel's demise are missing the fact that Intel is still very competitive.

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I'm using an Intel i9, 9900KF processor in mama's gaming rig, and it's pretty stout. It cranks right up to 5ghz in turbo, does not need water cooling and even with 4K gaming, it's really never taxed.

I like that the AMD Ryzen 5000 series has amazing specs and now claims to be the best gaming processor. I won't believe it until a year has passed. Quite often initial hype and initial "test results" don't match real world experiences. Last year AMD claims failed to materialize and the Ryzen 7 and 9 ended up being almost 10% slower than the Intel competition in gaming tests. Nor were they money saving choices. However, I do like the fact that Ryzen offers 16 core processors.

She is using the Nvidia 2080RTX video card and that is not really good enough. Turn on ray tracing and it starts to stutter. Plus it runs stupidly hot all the time. The gaming bottleneck remains the video cards.

Your mom is either a hardcore gamer or very rich. Unfortunately most people don't buy machines like that. Most people do fine with i5 and integrated graphics, and they either want a cheap desktop that last or a portable laptop that has long battery life.
 
I do think those predicting Intel's demise are missing the fact that Intel is still very competitive.

No, it's not. The fact that it can still "hang in there" in gaming scenarios doesn't mean anything. Its performance is subpar for productivity and server workloads when compared to AMD and it doesn't help that Intel CPUs are riddled with security flaws, and patching those flaws takes away even more performance. Intel has money and government contracts and Uncle Sam won't let Intel byte the dust. However, it's far away from its glory days and if history rhymes with the current situation, Intel might look at a long five years before they're competitive again.
 
I can tell you for sure that AMD is playing hardball. They could have released the Zen 3 architecture found in the 5000 series three years ago on 14nm. They didn't do it because their roadmap includes incremental improvements. If they deliver 15% to 20% improvements with every release, it ensures that everyone upgrades, and because they maintain motherboard compatibility (unlike Intel), it ensures that everyone keeps upgrading.

All that AMD has done with Zen 3 is to move from a 4 core CCX to an 8 core CCX, effectively halving L3 Cache latency. Due to how the Zen architecture works, moving data around cores is very energy-intensive, so every time AMD eliminates a bottleneck and lowers latency, power consumption also goes down. AMD has designed Zen to be highly modular and very easy to improve upon. Zen 3 is the final nail in Intel's coffin. The only chance that Intel has now is to innovate and go to a similar architecture as AMD has. It is rumored that Zen 4 will run four threads per core, and considering the IPC improvements that AMD is making, that looks like something that is very doable.

If you're only gaming, then it doesn't really matter, Intel will do a great job for you and the security patches meant to fix years of neglect on the part of Intel engineers will not affect you much, if at all. However, if you're using Intel in a server/data center environment, you might want to look at AMD solutions if you value your money, time, and most importantly, your security.

They don't own the fab anymore. They need to pay by each processor or wafer made. If older tech is cheaper then it make sense for them to keep using the older tech, I don't think 3 years ago they were trying to delay things when they were not way ahead of Intel, more like they won't make money doing it.

Intel due to production capacity will still sell more than AMD in volume, no matter how bad their processors are. In large OEM you will always have more Intel processors than AMD, even if their role switch and AMD end up selling fast processors and Intel selling low end stuff, for a while.

I think the trend in the future is the frequency and IPC improvement will slow down, and more workload will switch to parallelism. We are starting to see this in DX12 and Vulcan, we are seeing retired Xeon server CPU doing well with new motherboard recycled into consumer bundle, their processing power is amazing for scrap price. This will likely steer the future. I do see that enterprise will lease high core count servers (even AWS, Google, Azure), then when they are retired the OEM will sell them to an off brand OEM to rebuild into semi new PC with high core counts and then lease them again as CPO machines. This means the initial machine can afford higher chip prices to sustain these expensive manufacturing processes.
 
Your mom is either a hardcore gamer or very rich. Unfortunately most people don't buy machines like that. Most people do fine with i5 and integrated graphics, and they either want a cheap desktop that last or a portable laptop that has long battery life.

Ha! I refer to my wife as "mama". And, yes I can afford a gaming rig.

I understand that gaming is not among the majority of computer uses. However, gamers and gaming does drive the technology.
 
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dont they use AMD recently for their new macbook air?
Nope. They get a dual core Intel i3-1000NG4, quad core i5-1030NG7, or quad core i7-1060NG7. Both the i3 and i5 have a 1.1Ghz base clock while the i7 gets a 1.2ghz base clock, and boost up to 3.2, 3.5, and 3.8Ghz respectively.
 
Ok, so they are dumping Intel, I assume it safe to say there will not be any impact to existing Apple computers and updates well, well into the future, correct?
I ask, because I am completely moved into the Apple sphere and loving it, with a new iPhone and Mac mini last year, now thinking of dumping my last windows system on my laptop, though rarely used anymore. I am thinking about a basic MacBook Air with I3.
 
Ok, so they are dumping Intel, I assume it safe to say there will not be any impact to existing Apple computers and updates well, well into the future, correct?
I ask, because I am completely moved into the Apple sphere and loving it, with a new iPhone and Mac mini last year, now thinking of dumping my last windows system on my laptop, though rarely used anymore. I am thinking about a basic MacBook Air with I3.
Yup - Their devices are sold with a support life cycle that they'll honour.
 
Nope. They get a dual core Intel i3-1000NG4, quad core i5-1030NG7, or quad core i7-1060NG7. Both the i3 and i5 have a 1.1Ghz base clock while the i7 gets a 1.2ghz base clock, and boost up to 3.2, 3.5, and 3.8Ghz respectively.


i just checked last week in my area, i saw the mackbook air using AMD Ryzen 7, i think 4000 series if im not mistaken
 
i just checked last week in my area, i saw the mackbook air using AMD Ryzen 7, i think 4000 series if im not mistaken


The two current Air models are both Intel-based.

Comparison of all Macs, all models listed have Intel CPU's:

The MacBook Pro is available with AMD graphics.
 
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