Apple's A12Z Under Rosetta Outperforms Microsoft's Native Arm-Based Surface Pro X

zorinlynx said:
Does anyone have speculation as to why they didn't use their fastest A-series chip, the A13, for this developer Mac?
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I believe the A12Z, with its 8 GPU cores, is better suited to drive multiple high resolution displays than the A13 is. That’s probably a significant factor for developer workstations.
 
blackcrayon said:
I don't know, but I have no idea how Apple is going to know who benchmarked their machine unless Geekbench stores and publishes the serial # :)
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They probably log the IP address, but possibly not the MAC address. Hopefully Apple doesn’t care enough to pursue them aggressively, it doesn’t seem worth it.
 
So if we look at the bigger picture here, a 2 year old iPad processor is delivering this kind of performance.

Apple are going to release ARM Macbooks with processors that are way more powerful than in that mini , which could be fanless , battery life will be at least as good as current MacBooks but likely be better with ARM. We will have native ARM Adobe and Microsoft Office, decent x86 emulation, and on top of this iPad/iPhone apps will also work on the Mac.

Thats one hell of a competitive advantage over some Dell, HP etc running Windows.

Then in the future these processors could maybe start to really perform way ahead of Intel giving running say Photoshop on Mac a massive performance advantage over Photoshop on Intel Windows the future starts to look very interesting. Then if developers start adding support for existing features such as Continuity to their apps, being able to pull an app running on your iPhone to your Mac with one click would make this whole Apple eco-system insane.

There is so much potential over the next decade and I hope it makes the Mac even more popular.
 
MRrainer said:
Things like these make me wonder where the an Alien Spaceship is that they’re slowly raiding for „new“ stuff.
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Here’s a good place to start looking:

3A48A8CD-3D89-4965-9706-EF75D64D46A1.jpeg
 
CarlJ said:
This sounds an awful lot like a guess. I don’t recall Apple saying anything about how linked the forthcoming Mac processors are to the upcoming (not yet named but presumably A14) iPhone processors. They might be based on the A14, or they might just be relatives.
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But is there anyway they could be worse?
 
JPack said:
Probably related to power delivery.

The iPhone Xs had power delivery issues which resulted in unstable 3DMark, as reported by Anandtech. The logic board wasn't designed for desktop use.
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Maybe but they clearly aren't running the same logic board and this is the A12Z, which I don't think has the same issue (in the iPP). I don't point it out as any indication of the performance of future consumer products. I'm more curious if it is an indicator of how Rosetta 2 is running (like R2 seems to ignore the low-power cores) or if the under clock is true for the system in general.
 
zorinlynx said:
I'm a gamer.

Earlier this year I finally just invested in a dedicated Windows machine for gaming.

It's a MASSIVE relief to not have to worry about what changes Apple is making that may affect gaming. To not have to maintain a separate Boot Camp install. To just sit down and play my games while having MacOS running just to the right so I can do other things while I play. It's also nice to have a Windows machine around to run the occasional Windows-only software, like Hackchi to add games to my SNES Mini.

If you can do this, I highly recommend it. Then you can use each computer for everything it's best at.
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This is finally what I ended up doing. A Dell g7 7790 with a 2060RTX for gaming and a trusty 2015 i7 15” macbook pro for everything else. LOL. So many fewer headaches than I had with my dual-boot hackintosh...
 
jlocker said:
To get to a level of a xeon processor it is going to take Apple about 4 years, and Intel is still going to be improving the Xeon workstation and server processors. So if you need a machine now you might as well get it and in 4 years then evaluate xeon vs Arm. I loved the PowerPC and it was a RISC processor but Apple has a long way to go to get to a workstation/server level. Get a machine get Applecare and enjoy a system for the next 4 years. Yes they should be about to match a i5 soon but then the i7 and then the i9.
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128-core ARM chips (ARM Neoverse N1) already exist in servers, which outperform more expensive & power hungry Xeons. Apple just needs to base their silicon on existing ARM designs.
 
jlocker said:
To get to a level of a xeon processor it is going to take Apple about 4 years, and Intel is still going to be improving the Xeon workstation and server processors. So if you need a machine now you might as well get it and in 4 years then evaluate xeon vs Arm. I loved the PowerPC and it was a RISC processor but Apple has a long way to go to get to a workstation/server level. Get a machine get Applecare and enjoy a system for the next 4 years. Yes they should be about to match a i5 soon but then the i7 and then the i9.
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I doubt it. The fastest supercomputer is running on ARM chips. If you look, there are already several ARM-based processors that compete head-to-head with Xeons in server based tasks. Yes, Apple's professional computers are more media-based but Apple already has a leg up there so I don't see where they will be "catching up". There are some questions about which, what, and how Apple will scale up to those performance levels but it isn't uncharted territory. It is not a question of if they can just how will they do it (SVE2? stick with NEON? Custom SIMD? How many cores?)

If you run X86 dependent programs and a critical workflow, I wouldn't plan on upgrading right away. Even the best emulation has hiccups and not every program will ever get recompiled/updated, not to mention quickly. However, don't kid yourself into thinking the Xeons will rule the roost for four more years—especially since they already don't!
 
jlocker said:
To get to a level of a xeon processor it is going to take Apple about 4 years, and Intel is still going to be improving the Xeon workstation and server processors. So if you need a machine now you might as well get it and in 4 years then evaluate xeon vs Arm. I loved the PowerPC and it was a RISC processor but Apple has a long way to go to get to a workstation/server level. Get a machine get Applecare and enjoy a system for the next 4 years. Yes they should be about to match a i5 soon but then the i7 and then the i9.
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Oh you know exactly what kind of CPUs Apple has prepared? Even though all we have ever seen are CPUs designed for iPad and iPhone?

Apple says they want to replace their whole intel lineup in 2 years. I doubt they will release something that is slower than their previous offering.
 
gnomeisland said:
Maybe but they clearly aren't running the same logic board and this is the A12Z, which I don't think has the same issue (in the iPP). I don't point it out as any indication of the performance of future consumer products. I'm more curious if it is an indicator of how Rosetta 2 is running (like R2 seems to ignore the low-power cores) or if the under clock is true for the system in general.
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Neither the iPhone nor iPad logic boards were designed to run on a desktop. They are limited thermally by a lack of cooling. As a result, the SoC is limited to around 6W. The VRM components are likely designed for that in mind.

When you pair the chip with proper cooling, it will likely draw more than 6W.

The DTK is obviously not designed as a consumer product. But it makes sense Apple threw this together using existing parts so developers can start building software.
 
johngwheeler said:
128-core ARM chips (ARM Neoverse N1) already exist in servers, which outperform more expensive & power hungry Xeons. Apple just needs to base their silicon on existing ARM designs.
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"Exist" as in 128 core chips were announced one week ago and will begin to be sampled to customers in Q4 2020 I believe? (To complete with AMD's 64 Core 128 thread x86 chips which do exist in servers.)

As nice as efficient portables are, it's nice to be able to run good, existing software too. Were it not for the real benefit of running iPad apps on your laptop or PC i wonder if the benefits of conversion would still outweight the costs.

Apple sell so many portables, and portables continune to be more and more in demand so perhaps even in spite of the iOS apps benefit, this would be worthwhile?

B
 
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