Don’t get the Developer Transition Kit if you need Thunderbolt support. I just looked up the specs of the Mac mini they are using for that kit. It does not have Thunderbolt, only USB 3 (probably 3.1 gen 1 and gen 2 as it says 5Gbps and 10Gbps speeds). That doesn’t surprise me since Intel owns the rights to TB3. I don’t know what the commercial Macs will have. Is USB4 ready yet for consumer use? I haven’t seen anyone sell a USB4 product yet. FYI, the Transition Kit with Mac mini running an A12Z is $500 with priority given to those who already have a Mac app in the store.
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Apple Transitioning Macs to Custom Chips With 'Incredible' Performance Starting Later This Year
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I think the difference is that backward compatibility is a bigger deal for Microsoft, so they prioritized 32-bit compatibility. New Windows apps are supposed to be written to run on ARM directly. Since they have a Mac ARM version of Office, my guess is that they will release a native Windows ARM version soon.
Apple was still “beleaguered” in those days, they are not anymore. iMac G3 (Bondi Blues) we’re everywhere, except maybe Eastern Europe.
Does any one know which Mac will be the first to get an ARM processor?
I hope it will be an 27"'ish iMac with and ARM processor in it.
I hope it will be an 27"'ish iMac with and ARM processor in it.
You can very literally do that right now to eg run pre-Catalina apps on a Catalina mac.
I was going to replace my 2013 rMBP that's starting to show its age with the 2020 10th Gen 1TB as another 5+ year machine.
Now do I drive this into the ground for probably another year minimum until ARM MBPs or MBAs are out and stress tested; or grab an i5 Air as a bridge machine, deal with occasional throttling for my use, and maybe go ARM iMac and keep the i5 as a floater?
Now do I drive this into the ground for probably another year minimum until ARM MBPs or MBAs are out and stress tested; or grab an i5 Air as a bridge machine, deal with occasional throttling for my use, and maybe go ARM iMac and keep the i5 as a floater?
Yeah I'm also wondering about the GPU's in the Apple silicon macs. The CPU's they have rival intel already, but the GPU of A12Z is 10 times less powerful than the AMD Vega II they ship. Or 5 times less powerful than 5600M. These dGPU's are quite a bit above the Apple Silicon for now. So we have to wait and see if they incorporate some custom GPU we have not heard about, or simply go with dGPU from AMD.If the demo was running on an A12Z, it would be the integrated 8-core GPU.
I don't know what kind of external PCIe bus exists for A-series chips (if they even have one?) so I don't think they could even add in a graphics card if they wanted to.
I would think future notebook / iMac versions would have a choice of SOCs with Apple or AMD GPUs, maybe connecting directly via Infinity Fabric in the latter case. A Mac Pro or xMac might be a different story though.
Apple A12Z Bionic GPU - Benchmarks and Specs
Specifications and benchmarks of the Apple A12Z Bionic GPU GPU.www.notebookcheck.net
We do? To my knowledge Apple has not yet released any desktop ARM based Macs nor have they provided any benchmarks. Did I miss it?
The reason we have a12z is because the a14 was reserved for the miniLED ipad that was supposed to come, but wasn’t ready. So instead they filled in with a spec bump.
During the Intel transition, consumers were much are attentive to the raw processor speed numbers. Higher numbers = better computer. That was a huge reason for the transition from PowerPC to Intel - Apple needed to level the playing field so that they could at the very least say, "We're just as fast, we use Intel too. Now let us talk about Mac vs. Windows."
Times have changed. Average customers know their computer is fast enough. If anything, they're concerned about hard drive space and ram, maybe GPU if they're into gaming.
With that said, I'm not concerned about speed benchmarks. What I want to know is how apple's silicon will impact battery life on notebooks. That was the real focus of their presentation: power vs. performance.
Times have changed. Average customers know their computer is fast enough. If anything, they're concerned about hard drive space and ram, maybe GPU if they're into gaming.
With that said, I'm not concerned about speed benchmarks. What I want to know is how apple's silicon will impact battery life on notebooks. That was the real focus of their presentation: power vs. performance.
I think traditional Unix stuff will be ok. When the Mac transitioned from PowerPC to Intel open source projects just targeted the Mac Intel binary format.
Not necessarily, they will want to show that they are still supporting Intel to some degree. Also the ARM chips aren’t ready yet, will be at one more intel refresh on a few of the products to fill the gaps
What they have right now is very early versions running on repurposed iPhone/iPad chips so they aren't going to show benchmarks at this point, it would be meaningless for the released versions of the first ARM Macs. I think they're confident the new Macs are going to get a substantial performance increase (which is more complex because that may also involve battery and heat factors depending on the device), but they may not even know what it's going to be exactly until they've completed the transition. At that point they can give actual numbers. Even if the engineers have some idea, it would not be wise to release numbers right now.
I'm guessing that we will see 16 hour battery life macbooks with faster processors than the current 13" MBP soon.
You might no better than me, but didn't he also mention all the software then currently available on Intel? I think that was a major selling point.
macOS - Apple Developer
Learn about the cutting-edge new features of macOS that you can use to build powerful apps and compelling games.
I'm excited about this transitioning. Glad to see Adobe finally moving into optimizing their software to the Mac. Yes, I'm cautious but optimistic. As a designer, it's very cool the possibility to use all Apple tools and OS integrated as one. This could be a game-changer.