Apple Transitioning Macs to Custom Chips With 'Incredible' Performance Starting Later This Year

[PortoMavericks]

So why NVIDIA write windows driver?
AMD could get all those secret inside nvidia silicon, no?

Are you seriously asking this question?

Because Apple is Apple.

 

[cmaier]

They do...3rd party devs don't. Its not the Mac/OS i'm talking about. Its the 3rd party apps that will need to be transitioned over.

You could count the number of apps where the developers actually would need to know anything about Arm on one hand. Unless you are doing some seriously low level stuff, you don't need to know anything about the processor.

 

[Jyby]

Science Rules!

 

[jayb3]

So why do I need a Mac now? I should be able to run MacOS on my iPhone or iPad. Just need a large screen to dock into now.

 

[cmaier]

Tim Cook said himself that Apple’s ARM chips are designed for minimal power consumption - which is great for phones and tablets, but silly for computers. Computer processors need to be designed for performance!

Power consumption is all but irrelevant on a desktop Mac, but even on notebooks, Macs have demonstrated that they are capable of using Intel and having great battery life. At best it might be a little better for the environment, but I think it is probably the screens that use the most electricity, and Macs are a very small percentage of computers anyway.

This makes me feel like my computer is going to be forced to run on a cell phone CPU - a cell phone CPU that is AWESOME, but it is awesome for cell phones. Why would I want it on my computer?

I hate to say this, but this is the first time in years I am thinking about possibly switching to Windows. I’m not saying that to try to rile anybody up, but I mean, I’m basically losing all my existing software either way now.

That's not how it works. If you design for low power consumption than you can increase the clock rate when you don't care about power consumption. If you design for high power consumption, then reducing the clock rate to reduce power consumption doesn't work nearly as well.

 

[jvlfilms]

Fortnite is easy to run. I want to see how the new ARM Macs run a real game like WoW Shadowlands coming out later this year.

I couldn't get Fortnite to run like that on my cMP 09' running Win10 and with a full sized graphics card, let alone at over 60fps.

 

[illutionz]

They were demoing those apps on a maxed out Mac Pro. Of COURSE it's going to scroll smoothly. Would be pretty scary if it didn't on one of those beasts. What about a lesser, more realistic machine?

You're making no sense. The demo is running on ARM based machine with A12Z which is the processor powering iPad Pro.

 

[Squozen]

The gaming performance looked quite unremarkable. I have played Shadow of Tomb Raider and the graphics are far superior on any gaming PC. They got smooth framerate by going to a VERY low resolution (nobody plays in 1080p anymore), and the graphics quality was set extremely low - it looked like the old Tomb Raider games from the 00's.

It was running the Mac app, which means it probably looks like garbage on a Mac compared to a gaming PC as well.

 

[ph001bi]

It’s the end of gaming on Macs (bye bye bootcamp). And if parallels can’t run Windows, it’s also bye bye Mac in business environments

In my organisation only 5% of Mac users use something like VMWare or Parallele. Bootcamp isn't used at all. We don't use Macs to run Windows, we use Macs to run MacOS and nobody cares what CPU is used as long as it works.

 

[Stephen.R]

the Silicon Macs

As opposed to those intel monsters that use CPU’s etched in marble.

what is it with people getting the names of Apple products wrong?

 

[Squozen]

My guess is that AMD will create custom GPUs for them

Oh dear.

 

[BeatCrazy]

Might make sense for the first ARM Mac to have the 12” MacBook come back as “PowerBook”? That way you can’t ‘accidently’ buy the wrong MacBook Air while shopping at Best Buy? Then they can have the fan less ARM design match *but not beat* the current 13” MBP.

 

[Toby_95]

They did not show the demo running from the Mac mini, they showed it from that special in house iMac that is said to have an A12Z cpu but they did not commented on the gpu that it might or might not have. It could be the gpu from the A12Z or it could be a Radeon Pro 5600M or even something more powerful that they have in house.

No they didnt... that was a Mac mini with an Apple display

 

[cmaier]

Yeah I mentioned that if you read my entire thing.. But they can’t release an Arm chip that would fit in an Intel socket

I did read the whole thing, but you didn't explain that when you said it wouldn't work you were just talking about the socket. Obviously they would have to design an add-in board that acts as the bus master.

I am sure there will be mac pros with an arm motherboard in the future, though. Perhaps even multiple sockets.

 

[motulist]

From a pure computational power perspective, this is great, but I fear it will also come with increasingly limited software abilities, as has been happening already for the past several years.

 

[macbwizard]

Still can use my 2006 MBP using 2g ram on 10.6.8
So why not last.

But a 2006 PowerBook is way obsolete

 

[Meatwad]

Now Apple will be able to make the thinnest and slimmest iMac ever. Bezel free. Perhaps even with a touch screen.

They already do. It's called an iPad.

So why NVIDIA write windows driver?
AMD could get all those secret inside nvidia silicon, no?

That literally makes no sense.

 

[cmaier]

No they didnt... that was a Mac mini with an Apple display

No, it as a mac mini with an a12 in it.

 

[MRrainer]

Let's see how long my 2018 Mini gets updates. Only bought in 2020. D'uh.

The only good thing is that they might never release a newer Intel Mini anymore.
So, I don't have to worry that a newer version may come out next year.
It's the end of FOMO, in a way ;-)

 

[djjeff]

Because just like others here a substantial portion of my work depends on me using Windows in VMWare. I can't do that with an ARM machine. If it had been possible they would have shown Windows running and not Linux. I also like the flexibility of booting into Windows to play games occasionally. That's all gone with this platform now. I'd have to dramatically alter my workflow to use this and if i'm doing that I might as well switch to Windows.

That makes a lot of sense.

 

[Jyby]

Science Rules!

 

[Squozen]

BUT you have to give it back.

View attachment 925990

When Apple transitioned from PowerPC to Intel the Pentium 4 dev kits were swapped for iMacs, so the devs got a better machine than they'd paid for. I expect the same will happen here.

 

[ssls6]

Intel is at a dead end, they cannot turn off large portions of their Silicon nor provide the flow through that you can with RisC chips. Only apple can currently pull this transition off (changing horses quickly). I think Qualcom may be a winner from this transition with respect to other PC hardware makers (depending on windows for ARM). The fact uSoft has office working says they are viewing the same transition.

I'm sure it will be notebooks first and then desktops. Apple's design teams still have finite bandwidth.

 

[maxsquared]

Wonder if terminal apps things like brew and node and etc will need to be re compiled for ARM as well.

 

[Wilderness-1902]

Apple's own GPU's. The whole point is not to have third party CPU/GPU's. All Apple Silicon. Tim even showed the 1000x GPU gains. Clearly no more Nvidia or AMD.

eGPU setup dies too?