A14X Chip for First Apple Silicon Mac and New iPad Pro to Enter Mass Production in Fourth Quarter

[Jony Ive and Co.]

There is a release of Apple Watch this morning? an Event is Scheduled for the 15th. BTW, guessing what the future may hold and being wrong is not a lie. Lying is saying something that you know to be untrue, or should know to be untrue, by definition, guessing at the future cannot be a lie, because it involves uncertain future events

No there was no release this morning; what I meant was that Jon Prosser claimed with certainty (in his toxic arrogant manner) that there would be a release, but that obviously didn't happen.

I'm just angry at Jon Prosser's attitude, and the fact that he still refuses to apologize or even directly acknowledge that he is wrong. Of course guessing isn't lying (for the general public of us), but Jon Prosser shouldn't be "guessing" and raising our hopes 😂 if he isn't 100% sure (of course no one can be 100% sure, so he might as well just not report at all)

 

[jlocker]

The question is will this first MacBook chip have 8 cores with hyper threading? My current MacBook Pro 16 has 8 cores and hypertheading so it can run multiple threads on a single processor giving 16. The other 4 cores on this chip are for energy management and security. Good first start for Apple but not a game changer on the high end of the Mac Market.

 

[0924487]

Gonna need a lot more than 8 performance cores for it to be useful, even if those are super fast. I am expecting 30 odd cores in my next desktop and perhaps at least 12 in a MacBook Pro.

What about for the 12 inch MacBook?

There you go.

 

[0924487]

Apple promised developers multiple times that there will be a shipping ARM64 macOS product by end of year, with remaining lines transitioning over the next 2 years.

With the pandemic situation in the US and politics and sanctions going on here, it's difficult.

 

[BGPL]

They are going to sandbag the first two models, just like the first iPhones. About the 3rd or 4th rendition, the device gets a "retina" display that it should have had the first time. In this case, more cores. They need to leave room for growth, so don't expect jaw dropping speeds in the first year. They have a lot to learn, and once they put more R&D into the processors and figure out cooling, we are going to see some amazing stuff. Not to mention Intel getting off their butt to compete.

 

[firewood]

12 cores is obviously a lot of people that aren't using their machines for much. And you missed that I am expecting 30 for the desktop and wanting at least 16 for mobile. I am already able to max out 24 cores and had 12 cores in 2010.

12 and 24 are silly numbers. Typical Mac customers (Apple's target for 99% of their production volume) use far less. And *real* high-end customers complain that racks (plural) in an infiniband cluster aren't enough. Anyone needing 100's of docker images is spinning almost all of them up in a private cloud or using some cloud provider, not running merely 12% to 24% of them locally heating up their lap.

 

[robinp]

What if the A14X had the ability to be doubled or quadrupled up as a multiprocessor system, eg:

- A14X
- A14X2 (two chips)
- A14X4 (for chips)

If these higher end versions of the A14 allow for running on multi-processor motherboards, then apple could have a really flexible platform with essentially only two CPUs, the A14 and the A14X. Imagine what a Mac Pro with 4x A14X chips in it would be like 🤯

 

[Jorge Arturo]

If Apple is going to use iPad chips in full fledged computers I am worried...

Since the 2018 iPad Pro their silicon on those iPads has been proven to be as capable or more than a computer (laptop or desktop), there's plenty of evidence for that on benchmarks and test doing the same actions, like video editing 4K movies in the iPad vs a MacBook Pro, and the iPad had incredible results

 

[ruka.snow]

12 and 24 are silly numbers. Typical Mac customers (Apple's target for 99% of their production volume) use far less. And *real* high-end customers complain that racks (plural) in an infiniband cluster aren't enough. Anyone needing 100's of docker images is spinning almost all of them up in a private cloud or using some cloud provider, not running merely 12% to 24% of them locally heating up their lap.

Yup how silly of me to want to see Apple put their best foot forward and maybe push computers out of the lul they have been in for the last decade. How silly of me and all those people buying the Mac Pro, AMD Threadrippers, 8k capable R5 cameras. How could anyone want to do local development as stipulated by their company? Or I dunno, how most development is done?

 

[jlocker]

What if the A14X had the ability to be doubled or quadrupled up as a multiprocessor system, eg:

- A14X
- A14X2 (two chips)
- A14X4 (for chips)

If these higher end versions of the A14 allow for running on multi-processor motherboards, then apple could have a really flexible platform with essentially only two CPUs, the A14 and the A14X. Imagine what a Mac Pro with 4x A14X chips in it would be like 🤯

Yes, that would be possible, the old Power Mac computer's were RISC processors and Apple did that. But remember that would increase power usage on the system. This could be the option for iMac as they transition to a new desktop.

 

[cmaier]

What if the A14X had the ability to be doubled or quadrupled up as a multiprocessor system, eg:

- A14X
- A14X2 (two chips)
- A14X4 (for chips)

If these higher end versions of the A14 allow for running on multi-processor motherboards, then apple could have a really flexible platform with essentially only two CPUs, the A14 and the A14X. Imagine what a Mac Pro with 4x A14X chips in it would be like 🤯

Given that these are socs, it would make much more sense for apple to just plunk more cores onto the die.

 

[bluecoast]

That's a very difficult thing to say, TSMC don't usually go around with their yield specifics.
From what I've seen their 5nm chips have strong yields - better than what they had with 7nm at this stage due to EUV simplifying a number of patterning steps.

So to answer your question, I don't know. If I had to take a wild stab in the dark, maybe 80% +/- 5%. We don't know the die size of these A14 chips so it's impossible to say how many per 300mm wafer, maybe 550 chips if they are around 100mm^2 so ~450 usable. These are all very rough numbers but they aren't unrealistic.

Also I'm a TSMC shareholder and EEE, so I follow this stuff pretty closely - TSMC is miles ahead of the pack.

Thanks. Was asking as I was trying to work out whether a launch of a new iPad Pro/Apple Silicon Mac was possible this year.

Being conservative: 5000 wafers * 450 chips = 2.25m chips pcm.

If that’s roughly accurate, it seems like a November launch might just about be possible - but surely just for either the iPad Pro or the AS MacBook (I’m betting on the latter).

 

[ghanwani]

Far more excited about this rumor than the September 15 event.

 

[Jyby]

They didn't promise anything.

The aim was to have the first AS based Mac shipping before the end of the year.

They said “expect to ship by the end of this year”... Given the lead times on these I still think they are on track. I think the article is inaccurate and if Apple expected to ship this year they wouldn’t have started chip manufacturing so late. Covid would have not affected Apples chip manufacturing that much. Especially with the gobs of money they have.

 

[robinp]

Given that these are socs, it would make much more sense for apple to just plunk more cores onto the die.

Maybe. I don’t know how much bother it is to prepare and tool up for a whole new die. One that (for the Mac Pro) might only manufacture a few thousand of them. Seems unlikely to be viable to me but then I’m no Fabrication expert.

Then there is the whole question of managing stock and supply chain. If you only have a couple of different parts that you can assemble in different configurations it would help with that significantly.

 

[Jyby]

The question is will this first MacBook chip have 8 cores with hyper threading? My current MacBook Pro 16 has 8 cores and hypertheading so it can run multiple threads on a single processor giving 16. The other 4 cores on this chip are for energy management and security. Good first start for Apple but not a game changer on the high end of the Mac Market.

Yeah but it is probably 8 high performance and 4 energy cores on a 12” MacBook... Then in a few years you will get something even better for high end computers.

 

[robinp]

Yes, that would be possible, the old Power Mac computer's were RISC processors and Apple did that. But remember that would increase power usage on the system. This could be the option for iMac as they transition to a new desktop.

I don’t think RISC has anything to do with it. Some of the cheesegrater Intel Mac Pros had dual CPUs too.

Its more about whether the CPU is designed for working in multiprocessor systems. The interconnects become quite important from what I remember back when it was a more common thing.

 

[Jyby]

With the pandemic situation in the US and politics and sanctions going on here, it's difficult.

They said they expect to ship end of this year during the peak of Covid back in June. I highly doubt they are impacted by Covid with regards to making the hardware. They probably have all the PPE and money to make things smooth.

 

[chucker23n1]

I wouldn't go that far, this is a very common setup for developers today.

50+ Docker images on your local dev machine is "very common"? Come on.

They'll even be a few monolithic apps that you'll still have a dozen Docker images for the database, redis, elasticsearch, varnish cache, mailing service, etc.

It doesn't sound very "monolithic" to me. It sounds like an architectural nightmare that only makes sense for massive teams, in which case… why on earth aren't you sharing a build host somewhere.

And with all that you still want to run your IDE or code editor, iTunes, Teams, Outlook, and gosh knows what else.

Ah yes, those definitely each need multiple cores…

 

[chucker23n1]

More and faster cores are preferable, however, more cores are better than all else in many cases. Batch processing images is just one example that even people that just use the pre-installed apps would benefit from more cores.

X cores at Y*2 GHz is always prefereable over X*2 cores at Y GHz, not only because of Amdahl's law, but because a ton of code simply won't scale to more than one core anyway.

I don't see what the resistance is here? We don't want better computers?

Of course we do.

My "resistance" is that your claims are hyperbolic.

AMD has been putting Intel to shame on multicore performance and only just caught up on single-core, but I guess some people want Apple to get a free ride here, might as well just stick with Intel if they aren't going to push past.

Intel is 30% ahead of AMD on single-core performance on Tiger Lake. Hardly "caught up". If you want many cheap cores, AMD is currently a good option, but that's simply not the common case.

 

[dinobear]

Enter production in the 4th quarter? So the first iphone powered mac will be Dec 31.
Looking forward to seeing what apple will pull off here actually. I'm sure it's going to be great

 

[bluecoast]

Maybe. Or, the new 12” MacBook has category-beating performance with the MAC14Z SoC. Apple then uses that to sell you the new iPad Pro, which has now been upgraded to the incredible new MAC14Z SoC as well.

If this is going to happen, it’ll be an interesting marketing problem to explain why the same chip is used in the entry level MacBook & the iPad Pro.

I know that other hardware features make a machine ‘pro’.

However it strikes me that having a ‘pro’ level chip and then using different versions of that architecture across the iPad and Mac ranges is going to be easier for Apple to communicate (and for users to not feel short changed).

 

[kp98077]

Bloody digitimes repeating 6 month old news. 🤦‍♂️

Can’t wait for the 14” or 16” arm MacBook Pro.😍 going to be along wait, mid next year. 🥺

Guess apple has a crap load of the current 13” and 16” chassis they need to clear out first. 😂🥺

So the 13 will be mid 2021?

 

[Altherekho]

Oh that the 12-inch A14X based MacBook should really sell when available.

Still don’t understand apart the Os they will use in what this tonga macs will differ from the ipad pro if they use the same cpu.

 

[Altherekho]

Or you could just change your perspective and consider that they might be using "fully fledged computer" chips on their iPads.

So Jailbreak will rule !