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Apple Executives Discuss the New A14 Chip and Apple's Approach to Chip Design
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Is pwning people at Overwatch serious productivity?
Well, I’m a pro gamer and an aspiring Twitch variety streamer, including playing Overwatch and DJing EDM. Apple chips are whack compared to Kirin and AMD. You ain’t going to outspec my gaming rig.
Apple’s XDR crap monitor can’t even output 144hz, that makes speedrunning games impossible. So much for “pro”monitor.
This is not surprising. Tomorrow is the big reveal for the A14, that’ll talk about just how powerful and cool it is in various detailed ways (they “discussed” the A14 at the iPad event, but carefully didn’t say much more than “Oh yes, it’s ver’ naaahs”¹). They’re not going to show their hand before the big event.
¹ (preceded, of course with, “Well, I’ll ask ‘I’m, but I don’t think ’e’ll be very keen— ’e’s already got one, you see.”)
There was a recent report that said something like A14 variants that were 8 core (4 + 4), 12 core (8 + 4), and 16 core (12 + 4) are what is destined for the ARM "MacBook". Each model have 4 high efficiency cores and the rest high performance cores.
That really blurs the line on what a MacBook and a MacBook Pro are. I assume Apple will keep having consumer/Pro marketing and models, but where the segmentation will begin is very curious given how dramatically this changes things.
And great with OVERPRICED machines ! Only Covid can destroy this.
You can put that back in your pants, nobody has any interest in comparing. Apple has the capacity to stomp all over AMD if they choose to do so, but they’re not really aiming at the comparatively tiny gamer PC market, now, are they?
I think Apple is on the right track. They are making their ecosystem more tightly nit and compatible (with each other) and that is why I love my iOS+MacOS combo. If I could have a 12" Macbook that has a 24-hour battery life for when I travel that would be perfect.
Energy efficiency while maintaining power is the next logical step.
It's unfortunate that we will be losing x86 compatibility, however, I assume a good amount of nonprofessional Mac users would never notice a difference. And those who exclusively use MacOS designed software would not be too inconvenienced either.
In Apple's eyes, those who use Bootcamp or VM software are a minority and either have a solution lined up or don't find their segment to be a significant loss.
EDIT: Apple computers were never intended for competitive gaming, so that is the most useless argument someone can come up with. Go get yourself a Razer or something of that nature and play your silly games.
Energy efficiency while maintaining power is the next logical step.
It's unfortunate that we will be losing x86 compatibility, however, I assume a good amount of nonprofessional Mac users would never notice a difference. And those who exclusively use MacOS designed software would not be too inconvenienced either.
In Apple's eyes, those who use Bootcamp or VM software are a minority and either have a solution lined up or don't find their segment to be a significant loss.
EDIT: Apple computers were never intended for competitive gaming, so that is the most useless argument someone can come up with. Go get yourself a Razer or something of that nature and play your silly games.
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Yep (though I don't agree that Moore's law is dead. It's just Intel that can't keep up).
As i've said before, this reminds me of the old days where different companies controlled their own stack from software down to cpu (or, at least, the ability to choose oddball cpus from a wide variety of those available). That gave us some of the most beloved machines in history - commodore 64, Macintosh, Amiga, etc. Hell, you had the TI-99/4A running a TMS chip, Apple II running 6502s, Z80s, 68ks, etc. And you got rapid advancements in form factors, software features, user interfaces, etc.
I'm betting they bring in a new suffix like A14D for desktop class, even though it'll go in a laptop. Maybe add another for the "Pro" A14DX, or A14DP( 😂 )
I have to disagree with what you are saying there as the gaming market is huge.
The same hardware is also valid (except 140mhz minitors) for a lot of 3D creatives (like me)
The GPU is just as important as the CPU and I for one am focussed on what Apple does with this to compete against nvidia / amd in a meaningful way. Of course all developers need to have optimised for metal too.
Who’s trying to out-spec your gaming machine? In any case, it doesn’t seem that you understand what Apple Silicon is all about.
My bet is M1 (M from Mac), they will not want any resemblance to the name and numbering of the iPhone processor.
How many professionals are speedrunning games?
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There are already m-series processors.
Apple motion coprocessors - Wikipedia
The interesting part is this:
“You could in theory do many of the things the Neural Engine does on a GPU, but you can't do it inside of a tight, thermally constrained enclosure.”
I have long suspected that the GPU will in ASi be relegated back to being a GPU rather than a GPGPU.
“You could in theory do many of the things the Neural Engine does on a GPU, but you can't do it inside of a tight, thermally constrained enclosure.”
I have long suspected that the GPU will in ASi be relegated back to being a GPU rather than a GPGPU.
Apple computers are not made for competitive gamers. An XDR display is a professional photo and video editing tool to produce accurate high-quality images.
That is a possibility, but they already have Axx processors that are faster than a lot of main stream processors, and they might want to stick with that, plus their- marketing might swing it so that "iPhones have desktop processors" instead of their desktops have iPhone processors.
isn't that special (CL). I seriously doubt AMD is LTBO, they have targeted a different market segment and have created some serious silicon, but still, a different market segment.
I am slightly afraid that the A14 CPU for laptops will just be slightly better iPad CPU. I was expecting big gains thanks to active cooling ... but knowing Apple they might just go with low power chips to make new laptops even thinner.
one thread? 1984 is calling and wants its comment back. Seriously, most apps are multi-threaded and have been for a long, long time. You can see the threads running, just do a long running task like handbrake and call up the performance monitor, on a 4 core/8 thread machine, you can see all 8 queues maxed out. That is from the multi-threading. End of discussion
So someone made the wrong choice in 2013, using the letter M for a coprocessor... But I still don't think Apple wants to use the iPhone processor's name and numbering scheme on the Mac processor.