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

[fs454]

It took Apple six years to build a stinkin' Mac Pro. Why should we believe that they can make a chip that can keep up with Intel let alone overtake Intel?
While Intel often gets the blame, Apple has been historically slow to adopt Intel's latest chips. The latest and greatest Intel chips invariably show up in Dell, HP and Lenovo PC's first.
Will Apple be playing games to slow down Intel Macs to hide the slowness of ARM Macs? This isn't beyond Apple.
If it becomes obvious that Apple made a mistake by switching to ARM, will they ever admit it and switch back? I'm thinking "No."
Why does Apple refuse to acknowledge that they are using ARM cores? Does that have anything to do with ARM's failure to get a foothold in the server market as predicted? Intel trounced ARM and is making money hand over fist there.

Apple is "historically slow" to adopt new Intel chips because the new chips are an absolute joke most of the time. They've barely been able to show year-over-year improvement in performance like they used to, why would Apple move a finger or their whole supply chain for barely any gains? You sound like a conspiracy theorist - not mentioning ARM because of a failed server market or intentionally crippling intel machines to show their silicon is king? Yikes.

Apple never mentions ARM, they built the chips themselves and are going to take credit for it rather than crediting the architecture like they do with their other SoCs. Just like they don't go trouncing around calling their other machines "x86" or "x64".

Just like they do in the mobile space, the chips are going to blow away the Intel versions in macOS performance with native apps. Taking an industry leading mobile chip and scaling up clocks, TDP, and core count on in-house ARM chips for a computer that doesn't need to stay in a 4W power envelope running off of a tiny battery is going to yield incredible results.

 

[SteveW928]

And Apple spent 5 years developing them, then sold them as the future of Professional Workstations. Then this stunt happens. Instead of moving to AMD Zen and becoming best of breed now, they hope to be something in 3-5 years hoping the Joe Public is stupid enough not to realize that even Intel systems today won't remotely resemble those in 3-5 years and all the work Jim Keller's team have put in. The biggest payoff from Keller is AMD whose road map is solid for at least ten more years, living on cutting edge the entire time.

Apple did this to exploit more profit, not give a better product.

How do you know Apple aren't better chip designers at this point, or in the future, than Intel or AMD? Look what they've done in the phone/tablet realm.
But, yes, it is a good point that AMD/Intel aren't going to sit still.

Sure, more profit, or more competitive pricing. We'll have to see on the better.

So we can safely assume you are at least 15. /s

No doubt. I'm old enough to remember the Motorola 68xxx --> PPC transition, and even pre-Mac.

FWIW: AutoCad is over 30 years old.

Oh yeah, I was just making the point that a LOT of professional software is much older than 15 years. You made me do a search though, and I didn't realize AutoCAD was around back in the early 80s! I remember installing it on Macs in the early 90s though.

It's funny, when I took drafting in high school, the teacher tried to get us to use an early CAD system on a Mac he had in the classroom, and it was REALLY bad (wasn't AutoCAD). So bad, that at that point, I couldn't see the point. But, a few years later, I had some pretty neat DTP/CAD type software on my Atari ST (and some early rendering software) and was hooked. I couldn't afford a Mac until the LC, but my roommate had a Mac II.

 

[glindon]

They didn't really share any benchmarks or comparisons beyond that vague graph.

This probably stems from the fact that there is no product for sale at this time. We already know the benchmarks for an A12Z running in an iPad with constrained thermals. Now expand that benchmark to a Mac mini form factor with (most likely) a fan and giant heat sink (compared to an iPad), being able to run without throttling and having 16gb of ram. All that being said, the ARM Mac going on sale “at the end of the year” will not be using the A12Z cpu but rather be based on the A14. Since that cpu architecture won’t be shown until the next iPhone, of course Apple is not going to give us benchmarks. I do look forward to developers with Mac mini kits to give us some actual benchmarks soon but the actual Mac you will be able to buy will be much faster than it.

 

[puelocesar]

With VM still there. There's no reason it can not be done in macOS 11 on ARM.

Xquartz is so bad it's better to virtualize Linux and have a good X11 implementation
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And that was running on an A12Z, which is just a 2018 iPad A12X with one additional GPU core. Two generations old.

Depending on how Apple plays this whole thing out, we could finally have decent gaming on Macs. I'm expecting next gen level graphics in the next years

 

[glindon]

2 year phase in/phase out. The first one is the developer kit which is based on the mac mini.

That mac mini running a A12Z will probably trounce the current mini just because of the graphics (pounding Intel graphics into dust).

I expect a purpose-built A-series desktop processor to be much much much faster. Speed cranked, heat-sinked, cooled, etc.

It's gonna be fun.

Oh... and in before the complainers. I'm not complainin'.

Here’s hoping that the prices can come down since something like the 16” MacBook wouldn’t need a $600 Intel cpu inside. Also let’s hope for no more i7/i9 type configurations and upsells. You just get a 16” MacBook and they all have the fastest A series and four for that model year. You just pick your ram and SSD size.

 

[Catman8976]

I think today ARM is the standard.

ARM is a standard in mobile devices not desktops or laptops.
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Not even close. No way they ever go back to X86 ever again. This is a really dumb take, sorry.

How do you know without benchmarks, or any unforeseen problems that may occur.

 

[tillsbury]

The limited Demos on a custom Mac Pro with a lot of RAM and Afterburner were slow.

This is the only time I'll reference my old boss, Steven P. Jobs.

I'm guessing part of the reason you don't work there any more is that you didn't listen to what they were saying?

The demos used a two year old iPad chip. He showed "about this Mac"

 

[MyopicPaideia]

Initial reaction is that in 3-5 years Apple is going to have the best performance of anything out there. For those running Bootcamp and doing Hackintoshs it's probably time to consider something else (Windows or Linux I guess?). Personally I'd be more than happy for a iPad/iOS like interface for my Mac as long as I had the ability to do more developer type things.

Well you get your wish! macOS Big Sur has basically gone over to the iOS/iPadOS UX paradigm completely. They all look pretty much exactly the same now! (I think this is an awesome thing, as an iPad-as-my-primary-device user). You still get all the power and flexibility of macOS but now a unified architecture and a unified UX across pretty much the entire Apple ecosystem.

 

[firewood]

Hmm, I kind of doubt that. Obviously more more Intel graphics, but you're not going to get GPU performance like AMD/Nvidia unless Apple builds something similar. The GPU in your iPad Pro isn't even close.

Work out the GPU shader Texel/TOPs per Watt and they are quite close. The main disadvantage is that they (currently?) share the power and heat sink with all the application CPUs on the same silicon die.

 

[Stephen.R]

Hope there will be a motherboard for MAC PRO 2019 owners when Apple Processor is out.

Why? Does yours not work now?
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Thunderbolt versus USB.

You surely mean FireWire vs USB (but also simultaneously, USB vs ps2/parallel)

 

[theotherphil]

So many of these random questions people are posting are answered in the State of the Union video. My favourite quote, less than 10 mins in, "We have developed a family of CPU's specifically for the Mac. In practical terms, this enables performance greater than ever seen before".

There's lots more interesting stuff such as exactly how Rosetta works, virtualisation and how easy it is to port applications. They specifically state "MacOS is going to continue working exactly how it has in the past", implying no locked up, walled garden people keep catastrophising about.

 

[fokmik]

Based on the info and beta access, dev kit...the late Macbook/imac ARM based, will have rounded edges, for sure the imac will have faceID and both will run on the next gen A14 silicon 5nm

Rosetta kill around 4-10% of performance, if you "think" this is NOT ok, think that emulation of the surface pro X arm, the emulation kills up to 62% !

 

[MyopicPaideia]

How is your Mac obsolete? It still does everything it did 4 hours before you posted?
How is it an "enlarged ipad" when it is running macOS and apps not available on the iPad like Maya (if that isn't "pro" enough for you, what is?)

Enough with the doom and gloom already. If you are on the bleeding edge of performance, you aren't keeping your computer for the 5-6 years it would take to actually end the life of the Mac you bought this morning. If you are a pro, you don't care about the silicon, only what it can do for you. Do you really care about Intel, AMD, PowerPC, or A12Z if it delivers your product to your clients faster than the last one with fewer bugs? If so, why?

I would have liked to see more specific benchmarks, and I suspect we did not because they were not impressive enough.
A12Z might be a placeholder for A14Z, for the really "wow" numbers.

Here here! Agree with all of this, and especially the A12Z placeholder comment. This is exactly why the graph was fuzzy and there were no hard performance numbers. The A12Z is not the processor the first commercial machine is going to use, most obviously. People complaining about this are almost being purposely obtuse.

They are going to use a variant of the new A14, and they want to show their true performance cards on release of that chip with that machine and no earlier. They weren’t going to wow anyone by saying that the A12Z Dev Kit Box performed at an equivalent of an i7 coupled to a mid-range dGPU, so why would they do that, especially because no production MAc is going to release running that chip?

If I were Intel, that demo yesterday with an A12Z running Tomb Raider pretty flawlessly as a Rosetta 2 translation as well as Maya(!?!?) running that smoothly on Mac mini A12Z hardware, well that would scare me. Don’t you worry all complainers and doomsday sayers, when the A14xXx is released, Apple will toot their horn if there is anything to toot about...
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It should be interesting to see what the first Apple Silicon Macs are that roll out, and when. They're taking a couple of years for the transition so it'll probably just be consumer level stuff at first. I can't imagine we'll see any this year beyond the Dev Mac mini.

Yeah, but Tim said the first commercial release would come before the end of the year, so I fully expect an October event releasing the first Apple Silicon Mac (Notice how they have never, ever, ever used the term “ARM“...ever)

 

[smulji]

This. I want to know if BootCamp will be dead after this transition.

you can bet on it.
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One big question. My order of iMac 2019 is still awaiting and will get delivery next month. Should I cancel or it will be OK run for next 8/9 years ? Most of the iMac can run smoothly about 10 year without too much problem but I think I heard that Tim said will only support intel Mac for only 2 years ? what will happen after two years ?

I would cancel it. Not because of ARM but because there will be a new iMac this Fall.

 

[MacCheetah3]

AMD is not as good as everyone wants them to be and the Apple Silicon is the best possible road for Apple at this point.

I don’t know about the Ryzen series but the series prior had better spec numbers versus Intel CPYs though ultimately their per clock cycle performance was notably less. Were they bad? No. However, they weren’t nearly as superb as a general customer would presume — and I say this as a very strong former AMD/ATI fan.

 

[smulji]

Yeah, I was a bit surprised by that... But I suppose the bigger effort, in a way, is on the software side. For hardware, they're in kind of a great place, I'd think, since they've been running these fast, low-power systems for many years now. Really, they now have the opportunity to "unwind" a little, worrying less about heat dissipation and power consumption. I mean, to achieve higher-end desktop performance, that is (those will both still be important, I'm sure).
I was excited to see that Logic Pro X was already running on A-series. Would be curious to know how it stacks up—for example, against my 16" MacBook Pro.... ?

They didn't release benchmarks because of right now developers only have access to a Developers Test Kit which is not using the actual Apple Silicon in the upcoming ARM Macs.
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Based on the info and dev kit
-bootcamp will still available after sept/oct with the release of windows10 arm to buy

Where did you see or read this?
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I agree with you. This is buidling a huge walled garden to only suit what Apple wants you to do. I to will be leaving this platform. I'm sick of what that have done with iOSingfying everything to the point that it's hard to even understand where they are headed. Big Sur looks identical to iOS iPad. MacOS will sadly disappear. I'm sticking with Mojave until I can work out how to migrate my entire life to Linux. I'm done.

But Linux will run on Big Sur via virtualization

 

[smulji]

while it may work as a stop gap (due to the number of existing iOS apps and the potential for missing/slow x86 apps on an arm Mac) I doubt it’ll be “slick”. they wouldn’t have spent all that time and effort trying to get iPad developers to use catalyst if they were going to get as-good (which is still not as good as truly native macOS) apps for free with the arm transition

Agree. I remember during the iPad reveal in 2010, Forstall made a big deal about how iPhone apps would run unmodified on the iPad making many apps available for the latter device. It was just a stop gap until iPad-optimized or iPad-first apps started to become available. Even one could still do that, no one wants to because the bar for iPad apps has been seriously raised. Same will happen with iOS / iPadOS apps on macOS (at least I hope).

 

[nickgovier]

.

 

[smulji]

You don't think they have an estimate of what it is going to be? They made a big deal again with performance vs power consumption but then didn't provide any examples.
They gave a lot more info in 2005 on the PowerPC to Intel switch.

Even if Apple knows, they are not going to tip their hat until the hardware is officially for sale and software compiled for AMR is officially available.

 

[MyopicPaideia]

I wonder if the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the back of the Mac mini work on the new DTK model? If it has them at all? Since Thunderbolt is an Intel Technology, and the DTK doesn't have an Intel Processor at all. Maybe USB4??

Nope. Confirmed only 10Gb/s USB-C. USB4 will bring Thunderbolt 4 to the Apple Silicon Mac.
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The 2018 iPad Pro was benchmarking as fast as a MacBook Pro, and in some cases faster last year. If you use a keyboard and Mouse with an iPad and attach it to a monitor using USB-C you basically have an Arm laptop. However for my needs I have a lot of concerns.

You mean an ARM Desktop in that use case...exactly how I use my 11” iPad Pro as my only work machine.

 

[iDron]

Quite interesting to see what this means for Windows VM. Apple has a developer website that indicates VM virtualizing x86_64 machines can not be run by Rosetta. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/about_the_rosetta_translation_environment

On the other hand, they showed a parallels icon with the windows logo in their keynote and I assume a big number of serious users do use Windows VM. So I wonder if Parallels could get a kind of x86 emulation built in or if Apple will include this kind of stuff themselves... It is too big of a market to just cut Windows off entirely I feel.

 

[Billiejoe87]

I'm more and more convinced apple will alienate pro users, but keep general consumers who like continuity etc with the transition to ARM based mac's.

People who use Macbook Pro's, iMac Pro's, Mac Pro's etc. Are actually probably more inclined to just start booting into Windows if apple cuts off Mac OS updates to us. As much as I earlier thought it to be the case, these Mac's will never be obsolete the way Power PC's were when apple discontinued them, as we actually have a choice to just bootcamp windows which will work until the computer dies.

Regular customer's such as students, mums and dads etc. Will actually probably not even notice the processor is different, and probably like the fact that there will be significant design overlap with iPad's and iPhone's making it easy to move from one device to the other.

 

[cmaier]

Quite interesting to see what this means for Windows VM. Apple has a developer website that indicates VM virtualizing x86_64 machines can not be run by Rosetta. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/about_the_rosetta_translation_environment

On the other hand, they showed a parallels icon with the windows logo in their keynote and I assume a big number of serious users do use Windows VM. So I wonder if Parallels could get a kind of x86 emulation built in or if Apple will include this kind of stuff themselves... It is too big of a market to just cut Windows off entirely I feel.

It’s really not so big a market that it’s worth apple’s time. They may, as you suggest, work with some partner to add the ability.

 

[anshuvorty]

I don't know about you, but these are some pragmatic, real-world and simple performance benefits I am expecting from the Kuo-predicted-13-inch MacBook Pro-running-Apple-Silicon-SoC, set to be released later this year:

• I wanna see 10+ hours of battery life! Not “marketing battery life” or battery life that Apple proudly displays on their marketing websites, but 10 practical and real-world hours...or even better 20+ hours...make it so that if I forget the charger, I am not doomed! Make it so that you make it a habit for me to forget the charger!
• I wanna see laptops that can play Youtube without spinning up the fan. I wanna see laptops that play multiple Twitch streams in 1080p60 without fans spinning up or lagging...
• I wanna see that Reddit doesn't lag when I scroll through image-heavy subreddits or Pinterest...The iOS counterparts Apps don't lag and I don't expect ARM-based Macs to lag either.
  

 

[MyopicPaideia]

Apple's custom chips have so very different than any ARM chips out there. It will be impossible to run MacOS on anything other than ARM chips moving forward.

There is a reason they didn’t mention the term ARM once at all in the keynote. It is because Apple’s ISA is probably not compatible fully with the standard ARM instruction set. Well it probably is, but they have probably implemented so many custom instructions in order to integrate functionality fully optimized with their custom chip designs that macOS probably won’t even run on anything other than Apple Silicon at all.