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A passively cooled A12Z outperformed most laptops in benchmarks and is equivalent to an Xbox One S graphically. A cooled A-series chip can have a BASE core count of 8-12 cores, maybe more and a much more powerful GPU. With multiple Low-performance cores and a lot of the other coprocessors and everything else A series chips has. Imagine having active cooled dual A series chips in a Mac Pro.

So, about as much CPU power as my 2,1 Mac Pro. Or about 1/4 of my current system.
 
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Apple's silicon is ARM-based.
They’ve only been using the instruction set from ARM for several years now (that’s my understanding). They haven’t touched a reference design from ARM since I think the A7?

Note that behaving as BIG.little isn’t the same thing as using an actual ARM design, it’s an organizational/performance scheme.

Apple has been doing completely native chip design for several years now.

Again, that’s my current understanding.
 
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We all expected this move but what we maybe didn’t all expect was a total transition to their Apple silicone across the board.

This feels like regime change lol! Just a decade ago people would’ve laughed at the suggestion that Intel would be in this position.

If Intel and AMD (but especially Intel) do not seriously get to work then I see many other players eventually going with this Apple model.

Intel’s biggest mistake was neglecting the trend towards mobile 15 years ago just as Hollywood and Blockbuster failed to see the move to streaming allowing Netflix to come in and reinvent the industry. Today the movie theater distribution model is under serious threat.
 
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I had already postponed replacing my Retina MBP until 2021 after hearing the rumours over the past few months.
Now it looks like there will be some truly exciting devices to be launched next year. I may have to wait for another 12 months, but I'm expecting to be able to buy a MBA or MBP with significantly improved power, battery life and graphics.
 
It’s a dev kit. I’m pretty sure the intel transition kits didn’t have FireWire ports on them.

Apple is all-in on tb3. I was sceptical about the arm rumours in general but even I don’t think they’d just drop all tb3 compatibility

Let's hope so. Now that I think about it the precursor to Apple dropping TB3 was in UBC support on the LG Ultrafine 4K / 5K screens, the iPad Pro 2018 not having TB3, and the Pro XDR Display being compatible with USB C input.

I personally did not think much of this and have continued to invest heavily in TB3 thinking it was the future. Now my complete studio is TB3 based and I'll be SOL within a few years.
 
Home brew itself is not a binary. It’s a ruby script.

the tools it installs, it is specifically designed to install from source: it will compile the tool on your Mac. That it can install prebuilt binaries was (poorly) tacked on later.

I just now saw on the homebrew docs that you can force it to build as opposed to using bottles (or casks). That's great - I'm going to opt for that on my Intel Macs.

Will all that code compile on "Apple Silicon"? That would be good to test out on the Dev Transition Kit
 
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Wow, so it kind of is recompiling and recompiling somewhat. Thanks for the link. They sure didn’t have that tech for the 68k and PowerPC emulation layers back in the day!
Yup This technology is amazing to say the least, and Apple practically hires 50% of staff working on LLVM anyway so it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine some of the best minds in compiler tech are behind this.
 
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Do you really think that folks routinely pay for an upgrade every piece of software, everytime a new version comes out?

How many older copies of MicroSoft Office are still being used today? I'd say more than the latest copy of Office.
You specifically called out 32 bit Software going back further than the x86 architecture (I think that was you anyway).

Are you suggesting your normal consumer is running 10+ year old software? I ask because I’ve never run across a single “normal” (read: not a tech enthusiast) person that even remotely understands that VMs are a thing....so who is this mythical consumer you seem to be alluding to, other than your unique use case of course (which is legitimate)?
 
This is terrifying for those of us with loads of TB3 devices. How is this going to pan out? Intel could always say piss off to Apple in regards to Thunderbolt.
TB3 intel removed the licensing fee heck even on AMD you can get thunderbolt compatible USB-C addin cards they just can't use Thunderbolt ™ branding.
so thats not a worry and its going to be even more lax requirements considering the USB4 spec requires TB3 operability

IMO This is terrifying for those of us that are multiplatform that offset the constant price increases on the apple-side by ignoring our PC upgrades and opting for bootcamp

untill i see serious virtualization benchmarks I'm skeptical of its performance for more than casual apps not to mention will it have USB, TB and PCIE passthrough so us pro's that still use NVIDIA for CUDA wont be screwed.

the announcement confirmed it would be a much faster transition i was hoping for a base 5-7 years where i could atleast hackintosh if apple continued to neglect the performance per $ conscious small business pros like myself.
 
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We all expected this move but what we maybe didn’t all expect was a total transition to their Apple silicone across the board.

This feels like regime change lol! Just a decade ago people would’ve laughed at the suggestion that Intel would be in this position.

If Intel and AMD (but especially Intel) do not seriously get to work then I see many other players eventually going with this Apple model.

No one else can afford this other than maybe Amazon.

Apple is the only major technology company that focuses on vertical integration like this. It is ridiculously expensive.
 
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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.
Just wait it out you never know Apple might surprise you with performance of the Chip that will come out by the end of the yr.
 
You should be okay as USB4 specification was released late last year that includes backward compatibility with TB3 - it’s near enough the same!

It's not. The hardware specs are the same but the protocols aren't the same. Manufacturers have to consciously take USB4 compatibility into account when developing their TB3 products. Thunderbolt 3 devices that are already out probably weren't developed with USB4 forward compatibility in mind..
 
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So will the ARM GPU be just as powerful as a separate AMD or NVIDIA GPU?
So far nobody has any idea since no Apple SoC had an dGPU. But probably they will want to design the GPU themselves as well. If you do this transition, why do it half assed and keep using AMD dGPU's?
 
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But come on. We can finally have the PowerBook G5 Steve promised us over a decade ago.

To be fair, I was a java programmer during the Intel transition, and when I got an early Core Duo MacBook Pro, it was literally three times as fast as my PowerBook G4 at compiling Java. Not even a G5 PowerBook could have matched that.

I bet this transition will be a ridiculously huge performance boost for 13” MacBook Pros. They’ll probably rival 8-core i9 processor 16” MacBook Pros, and get better battery life.
 
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