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

AceFernalld said:
'Exciting new Intel Macs in the pipeline' - guess that's the new iMac. Still think it's odd to continue releasing Intel Macs, especially redesigned, 'exciting' ones after this transition has already been announced.
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Well, the new iMacs in the pipeline were already on the drawing board, so it makes sense they wouldn't just stop producing iMacs for two or three years. Besides, they said all Intel Macs would be continued to be supported for years.
And if Apple ceases Bootcamp with their transition to ARM, it may be a good reason to buy an Intel iMac.
 
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NickName99 said:
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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I had a liquid cooled G5 2.7 GHZ. Bought the first 3.2 GHZ Mac Pro. Damn that machine was fast.
 
iBug2 said:
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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They could have integrated GPUs in the smaller models and a switchable GPU (integrated+discrete) in the models which are not restrained by power consumption.
 
The minimal power argument makes no sense. Laptops and desktops still need to run thermally well and efficient for optimal performance regardless of form factor.

So lower wattage -> less heat -> less throttling -> better performance

What am I missing?
 
Stephen.R said:
... Apple’s A series have been 64bit since the a7.
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I'm not questioning the 64bit part.

Will these chips be AArch64 compliant? or will it be easy to work with other AArch64 binaries? or if AArch64 binaries can be built from code, can Apple Silicon (64bit) binaries be compiled from that same code?
 
Tekguy0 said:
They could have integrated GPUs in the smaller models and a switchable GPU (integrated+discrete) in the models which are not restrained by power consumption.
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Maybe but even if that was the route they went down. I don’t think we will be seeing the AMD or Nvidia brand anywhere in sight
 
I wonder how the battery life will be on ARM based MacBook Pro laptops. After watching the keynote I am not pessimistic about the transition, but of course we are missing a lot of information about important details. What are the limitations of Rosetta 2? What are the performance penalties? How fast will developers adjust? Will it be possible for virtualisation vendors to bring their own solutions to the Mac?
I was happy though to see that Apple thought about virtualisation. Now we have to wait and see how well everything was implemented. One thing I found strange though. Why announce that more Intel Macs are coming, on the same event you announce the transition to Apple chips? That I don't really get it, but maybe Apple wanted to reassure people scared or worried that their investment to Intel based Macs is not a bad choice.

For me it is important that Microsoft provides a native MS Office version, along with all of its software that is currently available on Macs (Teams, Skype, etc). Apart from that I will wait for the end of 2021 before making any hardware purchases.
 
Detektiv-Pinky said:
No, they won't. The Macs are not selling in large enough quantities to justify a custom chip design. It will maybe have a a few more cores enabled, but nothing dramatic.
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Yes they will. They will use the same core design, but different top level designs, different number of cores, and different SoC blocks. The whole point of SoC design methodology is to allow it to be very simple to design different chips based on the same technology.
 
Toby_95 said:
Maybe but even if that was the route they went down. I don’t think we will be seeing the AMD or Nvidia brand anywhere in sight
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Sure. Perhaps we will see what is basically a high TDP iPad Chip ~15-30w with an optional "Accelerator" made by Apple to handle heavy graphical and compute lifting.
 
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jvlfilms said:
The minimal power argument makes no sense. Laptops and desktops still need to run thermally well and efficient for optimal performance regardless of form factor.

So lower wattage -> less heat -> less throttling -> better performance

What am I missing?
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It's about performance per watt. Look at the performance of an iPad at 18/29W and compare that to the performance of a MacBook at 30/61/96 watts. If you ran three iPad Pros together you'd have a lot more compute power than a MacBook Pro with the same thermal envelope.
 
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spazzcat said:
Can we wait until there are benchmarks before the whining starts...
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No we need to start whining right away. I'm mostly looking forward to this. My one fear is that for work I use some fairly specialized software so we'll have to see how long it takes to get that running on the ARM based macs. But for all of my personal use, I think ARM based iMacs and Macbooks should provide an excellent tool.
 
iBug2 said:
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?
Click to expand...
at this point all we can infer is because the A12z has comparable GPU in compute performance to a Xbox one S which itself has similar performance to a PC with about a Radeon HD 5850 thats the level of performance we can expect give or take for optimizations.

atleast out of the Dev Box but who knows what they will have on a future Mac Pro equivalent in 2 years or whenever the do the highend.
 
pankajdoharey said:
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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That really is awesome. I’ve been fascinated with emulation, ever since I played with Basilisk II back in the 90s to emulate a 68k Mac on my PowerPC Mac.

I’ll definitely be reading up on Remill, it sounds revolutionary.
 
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