ARMazing?
Are Apple’s new Macs actually an attack on Amazon and Google?
Could the new CPU architecture be part of a secret cloud play?
Normally I don’t speculate on news even less on rumors. But at that point, it seems all but given that Apple will introduce Macs with their own silicon. So this article will speculate why Apple could actually choose to go that way.
Apple just announced a move to Mac computers based on their own chips at their World Wide Developer Conference. Apple’s chips are based on the ARM architecture. ARM is an architecture for chips that drives almost all of the current phones, among them the Apple iPhone. For their personal computer lineup, Apple has been using Intel CPUs for almost 15 years. According to rumors that era is coming to an end. Instead, Apple is announced to switch to its own CPUs based on the ARM architecture. Arm is a company that licenses it’s architecture to other vendors for the actual implementation as chips. The current iteration is a 64-bit RISC processor architecture.
The chips will be based on the processors inside future iPhones and iPads.
Apple has long been praised for the performance and power efficiency of their chips, while Intel has been struggling to keep up with performance and energy efficiency.
When the rumors came out, articles were written, about how hard it is going to be to move end-user applications to the new architecture, would it be necessary to recompile? Would there be an emulator provided that could transparently run Intel binaries?
What about the Cloud?
When I read those rumors my first instinct was, why is no one talking about the cloud?
Amazon just made the second generation of their own CPU, called Graviton 2 generally available. Graviton 2 has a great performance to price ratio, better than current Intel instances. And you know what architecture Graviton 2 chips are based on? ARM.
Now ARM is not always ARM, customers license the IP from ARM (the company) and create their own silicon with whatever configuration they want. This means that Apple ARM chips could have the same instructions from Amazons, but the code may not run as fast. Developers could develop their applications on an ARM Mac and then use AWS Arm chips to run it.
Developing on an Intel CPU and running on an ARM is always going to have some difference that could manifest itself in unexpected side effects.
But if you can develop and run on the same architecture it suddenly becomes a lot more interesting to run on ARM cloud servers.
Now hold on, if Apple is supposed to be moving their complete lineup to ARM, why wouldn’t they move their own datacenters to that chip.
Apple’s Cloud Play
Apple’s ARM chips are energy-efficient and performant, which is at a premium in the datacenter. It’s one thing to have a laptop run one hour or two longer but in a datacenter with thousands of CPUs, it makes even more sense to use power-efficient processors.
Also, the pricing for their own silicon is going to be very competitive versus Intel chips, even with the volume discounts Apple is sure to be getting.
So now we have all the pieces in place, a developer environment, that runs on ARM chips and datacenters that run on these or similar chips at a very competitive price/performance ratio.
The next step would then be to rent out their clouds to run other peoples applications. They could offer an integrated development environment, with XCode, a line-up from phone to Mac Pro machines and most importantly a very competitive price/performance ratio.
I don’t think they would have been able to compete with AWS, Google, Azure and other cloud providers with the current technology.
But with their own silicon, based on ARM and a complete developer-environment, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Update: Matthaus Woolard pointed out that this could also be part of a FireStore competitor. Cloud with “a very apple twist to it.”
Disclosure: I do not own stock of any of the companies mentioned in this article. This article is highly speculative, don’t act on it.
