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Apple Seeds Third macOS Sierra 10.12.1 Beta to Developers

a_coorn said:
There's support for the Polaris 480/470/460 GPUs, I am not sure about the possible switch to ARM, but I don't think they can match the performance of a quad-core, hyper threaded Skylake chip yet.
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I dunno about that. Geekbench 4 went to a lot of effort to make benchmarks comparable, regardless of what platform.

According to GB4, the CPU in the iPhone 7 has better per-core performance than my 2012 i7 15" cMBP. And just over half the multicore — but then it's got half the cores (when doing resource-intensive stuff).

Now, this is in a handheld device with no cooling. In a phone. Imagine what they could throw in and design when they have the size of a laptop.

Honestly, I'm so, so excited.
 
I wish i could unsee that.....


smacrumon said:
Sierra 10.12.1 on Late 2016 MacBook with Fusion 3D Touch trackpad.


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robeddie said:
It's the one OS Apple makes that isn't designed for babies or really old people, the two target groups who get confused by a real file management system
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There was a time when people said similar things about a graphical operating system.

And there are plenty of people whose iPads help them to achieve incredible work. Industries such as science, medicine, graphic design — you know, those industries that are dominated by babies and really old people.
 
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keysofanxiety said:
I dunno about that. Geekbench 4 went to a lot of effort to make benchmarks comparable, regardless of what platform.

According to GB4, the CPU in the iPhone 7 has better per-core performance than my 2012 i7 15" cMBP. And just over half the multicore — but then it's got half the cores (when doing resource-intensive stuff).

Now, this is in a handheld device with no cooling. In a phone. Imagine what they could throw in and design when they have the size of a laptop.

Honestly, I'm so, so excited.
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Yeah, but they're not doing quite comparable workloads as far as iOS vs macOS are doing, additionally x86 gives you access to a lot more software, especially if you're a developer like me.
 
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a_coorn said:
Yeah, but they're not doing quite comparable workloads as far as iOS vs macOS are doing, additionally x86 gives you access to a lot more software, especially if you're a developer like me.
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True that iOS isn't anywhere near as heavy as OS X. However benchmarking software just chucks numbers at a CPU and calculates how quickly it does the task (forgive my poor description). So by that, would it matter what OS it was running? Would that affect the benchmark so significantly?

I know that Apple are now accepting the bit code of apps, rather than the binaries. So theoretically, most existing apps released in the last 6 months can be recompiled for ARM, without any work necessary from the developer.
 
keysofanxiety said:
Can any clever people here delve through the innards and have a look at supported CPUs/GPUs?

That ARM chip being added has piqued my interest (boy, that's putting it lightly — I couldn't be more excited at the thought), but I wonder if there'll be a homegrown GPU in the next Mac as well.

Roll on October!
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Bold:
Did I miss something.:confused:
 
keysofanxiety said:
True that iOS isn't anywhere near as heavy as OS X. However benchmarking software just chucks numbers at a CPU and calculates how quickly it does the task (forgive my poor description). So by that, would it matter what OS it was running? Would that affect the benchmark so significantly?
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Yes.
 
keysofanxiety said:
True that iOS isn't anywhere near as heavy as OS X. However benchmarking software just chucks numbers at a CPU and calculates how quickly it does the task (forgive my poor description). So by that, would it matter what OS it was running? Would that affect the benchmark so significantly?

I know that Apple are now accepting the bit code of apps, rather than the binaries. So theoretically, most existing apps released in the last 6 months can be recompiled for ARM, without any work necessary from the developer.
Click to expand...

Well yes, benchmarks just measure how quickly CPUs do number crunching, but running macOS makes the CPU a lot more taxed, resulting in fewer resources being available to run the benchmark as compared to iOS.

In regards to app compatibility, yes apps submitted to the mac AppStore with the 'bytecode' option enabled could THEORETICALLY be auto-recompiled for ARM, but there's a lot of pro and power apps that are not in the app store, additionally not being x86 you Mac just became somewhat less of a general purpose computer by not being able to run virtualisation tools or indeed standard Windows and Linux distributions, nor any useful, but no longer updated piece of software.
 
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a_coorn said:
Well yes, benchmarks just measure how quickly CPUs do number crunching, but running macOS makes the CPU a lot more taxed, resulting in fewer resources being available to run the benchmark as compared to iOS.

In regards to app compatibility, yes apps submitted to the mac AppStore with the 'bytecode' option enabled could THEORETICALLY be auto-recompiled for ARM, but there's a lot of pro and power apps that are not in the app store, additionally not being x86 you Mac just became somewhat less of a general purpose computer by not being able to run virtualisation tools or indeed standard Windows and Linux distributions, nor any useful, but no longer updated piece of software.
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Thank you for the detailed response. :)

There's been word on the grapevine about Windows being compiled for ARM — not a watery Windows RT, but a proper version. However I haven't read anything that definitively supports this and I'm not sure how effective virtualising the x86 code would be.
 
justperry said:
See if I can find those lines of code myself.
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If you do, please let me know! I'm convinced it's genuine as others have reported it too. However I'm dumb as a stump when it comes to this sort of thing, so I can't personally verify.

Regardless, I'm so excited.
 
keysofanxiety said:
Thank you for the detailed response. :)

There's been word on the grapevine about Windows being compiled for ARM — not a watery Windows RT, but a proper version. However I haven't read anything that definitively supports this and I'm not sure how effective virtualising the x86 code would be.
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No problem :)

You could emulate x86 code, but it's so complex that anyone who seriously tried, failed.
In addition x86 is a CISC architecture vs ARM is RISC, (x86 can execute more complex machine instructions and is not limited to one instruction per clock cycle), which would result in x86 code being emulated on ARM to take about 50% hit compared to native execution, which is huge.

Out of curiosity, what makes you so excited about ARM in the MacBook?
I fail to see any obvious benefits apart from battery life, where Intel is catching up faster than ARM is in terms of performance.
 
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a_coorn said:
Out of curiosity, what makes you so excited about ARM in the MacBook?
I fail to see any obvious benefits apart from battery life, where Intel is catching up faster than ARM is in terms of performance.
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I guess I got a little blind-sighted by the ludicrously powerful benchmark results of the iPhone 7. How much of that can be comparable due to the OS is up for debate, however it's difficult to argue that they're stunningly good for something with no cooling, that you hold in your hand. I wonder whether a larger chip with cooling could really stick it to Intel.

I'm mainly excited about the prospect because it is, to me, the culmination of Jobs' vision. It's what Apple is, at its core (pardon the pun). Apple software running on Apple hardware. In-house design and optimisation. A hardware pipeline completely in Apple's control. Seamless hardware and software. Computers which are screamingly good. A Mac that is... a Mac.

I guess I must be sounding a little misty-eyed about what CPU goes into a computer. :oops:
 
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