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Apple Transitioning Macs to Custom Chips With 'Incredible' Performance Starting Later This Year
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Yeah? Are you a chip designer for Intel or AMD?
I am someone who uses Windows for desktop and Apple for mobile. I shoot food photography, design cookbooks, and make feature films (my last movie was shot in 8K Redcode raw).
In 2+ years, around the time of A16, I can see this switch upending and converting me to Mac.
It’s finally a true differentiator between Mac and PC. I just don’t care about OS. I care about performance in Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere, and InDesign.
With Intel, Apple’s prices are a hard pill to swallow, especially when I can build something uniquely suited to me for less on the Windows side.
If Apple optimize their chips and make these heavy duty apps sing, the side by side comparisons are going to get VERY interesting. Especially with apps like Lightroom Classic which are still sluggish even on high end systems.
What I’m most interested in is performance across codecs. Sure it can play 3 ProRes 4K streams now, but how will it be with Redcode raw or some awful web codec. My system can edit 8K raw but goes to its knees when trying to edit 8 hour 1080p archive videos I download off of Twitch.
DNGs are snappy but how will it handle the multitude of camera specific raw photos?
If and when their benchmarks outperform Intel for non-native files, it could once again be foolish to be a content creator on PC, something I haven’t felt in several years.
In 2+ years, around the time of A16, I can see this switch upending and converting me to Mac.
It’s finally a true differentiator between Mac and PC. I just don’t care about OS. I care about performance in Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere, and InDesign.
With Intel, Apple’s prices are a hard pill to swallow, especially when I can build something uniquely suited to me for less on the Windows side.
If Apple optimize their chips and make these heavy duty apps sing, the side by side comparisons are going to get VERY interesting. Especially with apps like Lightroom Classic which are still sluggish even on high end systems.
What I’m most interested in is performance across codecs. Sure it can play 3 ProRes 4K streams now, but how will it be with Redcode raw or some awful web codec. My system can edit 8K raw but goes to its knees when trying to edit 8 hour 1080p archive videos I download off of Twitch.
DNGs are snappy but how will it handle the multitude of camera specific raw photos?
If and when their benchmarks outperform Intel for non-native files, it could once again be foolish to be a content creator on PC, something I haven’t felt in several years.
WAIT
Will I be able to run macOS on my iPad? 🤔
Will I be able to run macOS on my iPad? 🤔
Interesting that the whole workshop seemed to be running Mac pros. Does this mean they can make it fit the new Mac Pro, or simple offer a logic board update with it being modular
it's funny all the negative posts totally contradict what was presented. I knew a lot of people cannot read but by looking at this thread at 50% cannot understand and listen either.
So this is a bad year to buy a Mac then... I'll squeeze another year to my 12yo iMac. It's funny that it will last almost the full intel cycle (its an early 2008)
It's a little more complicated than stated in your analogy.
And in those PPC days you rarely saw a Mac in the wild.
But since the Intel transition, they’re everywhere.
My MBP cost a few thousand dollars but the software running on it cost way more. A lot of it has been custom written over the past 10 years and some of it was written by companies that no longer exist.
Apple have a history of being cavalier with users' code inventories as they stagger every decade or so to the latest greatest CPU platform. Sure, there may be a brief compatibility period, but then it'll be just as it was before - no 68k code, no PPC code (2011), no 32bit code (2019) and at some point no x86_64 code. Meanwhile many flavors of linux are still compatible with ancient 1992 binaries. Its not even as if Apple license you to use older OSs in a VM to maintain compatibility, you have to get a cludgy hackintosh solution and spend hours in the command line, probably never getting some things to work properly.
This is not a day I've been looking forward to.
Apple have a history of being cavalier with users' code inventories as they stagger every decade or so to the latest greatest CPU platform. Sure, there may be a brief compatibility period, but then it'll be just as it was before - no 68k code, no PPC code (2011), no 32bit code (2019) and at some point no x86_64 code. Meanwhile many flavors of linux are still compatible with ancient 1992 binaries. Its not even as if Apple license you to use older OSs in a VM to maintain compatibility, you have to get a cludgy hackintosh solution and spend hours in the command line, probably never getting some things to work properly.
This is not a day I've been looking forward to.
Single core Geekbench:
2019 ARM A12Z iPhone 11 Pro 1327
2019 27" iMac Core-i9 1243
2019 Xeon Mac Pro 1143
iPhone/iPad multi-core doesn't beat Intel laptops and desktops YET, but that's only because they don't need that many performance cores in a phone or tablet, but it's not far behind and the performance will be higher for an ARM chip specifically designed for a laptop/desktop. Apple's chip performance curve is increasing much faster than Intel's.
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That has more to do with memory than CPU. So yes a MBP with 32GB memory will do multitasking much better than an iPad with 6GB of memory. I'm pretty certain after todays demo that even A12Z is insanely powerful. They ran tomb raider on the damn thing, emulated FFS!
So.... limited computing will be Apple's new motto. No thanks.
AMD is mopping the floor with Intel. Apple has a lot to prove to claim it has better processors than Intel or AMD. Cherry-picking limited benchmarks does not an argument make.
The dumbing down of the desktop. Some of us actually want differentiation between desktop and devices.
Big Sur = iPad OS
Big Sur = iPad OS
A12Z passively cooled beat a lot of the higher end laptops in terms of performance. Compare this to an ACTIVE cooled A-series processor could lead to BASE configurations having 8-12 cores + 4 low-performance cores, and many more things. The ability to actively cool an A-series SoC will blow away any Intel processor today.
Actually, Intel's curve is not getting any higher lately. Their 2019 chips are faster than their 2020 chips under some tasks. Intel dropped the ball long time ago. They are still at 14 nm. A14 is going to be a 5nm chip.
In an ironic kind of way, it's possible that running Windows Arm on a Mac is what will help it go mainstream. So far Windows on ARM laptops with the exception of the Surface X ran mobile CPUs. We can expect some very good performance on the Apple CPU.
THey shipped G5s long after the Intel transition and dropped support two years later. Think critically... not what they showed, but what they didn't show. If they could run Windows in bootcamp they would have shown it because they know that's a big concern. They couldn't even show it running in Parallels, even in emulation.
No, let's keep passive cooling. I bet that they can get a passively cooled A14 to beat intel laptop chips. Think about it, laptops that don't go crazy hot or crazy loud.
I remember being at a demo where (after signing an NDA) they showed a Motorola 68040 against a pre-release PPC601 and the performance jump was phenomenal - render dropping from 50 to 5 seconds in Isodraw.
The PPC to Intel jump wasn’t as drastic but the other improvements merited the transition.
The performance shown today of a 2-year old mobile chip in a Mac Mini running Tomb Raider, Final Cut Pro etc is more exciting than the PPC demo I witnessed so many years ago.
• Chips running cooler means thermal throttling should hopefully be a thing of the past (i9?)
• As they’ll be cooler, desktops should be able to run so much quieter - amazing for audio creation and video post production.
• Power draw being so much lower means laptops could easily have tremendous running time on battery.
• Ability to run iOS apps natively opens up a whole new market to developers - easier to look for apps on the Mac than a phone or tablet screen.
The PPC to Intel jump wasn’t as drastic but the other improvements merited the transition.
The performance shown today of a 2-year old mobile chip in a Mac Mini running Tomb Raider, Final Cut Pro etc is more exciting than the PPC demo I witnessed so many years ago.
• Chips running cooler means thermal throttling should hopefully be a thing of the past (i9?)
• As they’ll be cooler, desktops should be able to run so much quieter - amazing for audio creation and video post production.
• Power draw being so much lower means laptops could easily have tremendous running time on battery.
• Ability to run iOS apps natively opens up a whole new market to developers - easier to look for apps on the Mac than a phone or tablet screen.
I haven't been as excited about following tech since the original iPhone.
This is going to be fun.
This is going to be fun.