Those iGPUs are pushing a lot more pixels then on the phone, so while the iGPU on MBPs may have faulted it a bit, I'm sure Apple's GPU would do the same pushing that many pixels.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple's Custom Mobile Chip Designs Gradually Expanding to Include Graphics Hardware
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The Mac range is out of sync more because of Apple's own fault. Even if new chips are slow to come there are all sorts of other improvements Apple could make. Shipping brand new desktops with 5400 RPM hard drives or trying to sell a 3 year old Pro machine that's not really a Pro machine has nothing to do with Intel.
Apple is following the money trail and the Mac just doesn't make profits like the iDevices do.
i dont know about that, i play on my mb pro, on OS X. granted, not all games are available (i do miss BF), but over all its a good experience.
As an engineer (and a shareholder), this makes me really happy to hear. A common perception of Apple is that they just assemble parts from other companies into a sleek case, write some decent software for it, and make ridiculous profit margins using their expert branding and marketing schemes. The reality is that they are one of the top engineering companies in the world. Poached talent and overdue Mac updates notwithstanding, stuff like their A, S, and now W series chips prove they have some serious mettle and foundational solidity, down to the nitty-gritty ones and zeroes, in a market that is in constant flux. While I miss Steve, I believe Tim is doing a great job to make sure Apple stays true to their roots of real creativity and ingenuity on the engineering side of things. Personally I can't wait for them to (hopefully) ditch Intel and make their own damn Mac chips.
Its called expanding on the discussion. If the discussion pertains to bringing chip fab in-house... then discussing bringing more of the company's chip outsourcing (such as Intel) in house is a perfectly normal part of the conversation. Chill out man. Maybe go get some coffee...
Edit: Are you seriously suggesting that anyone participating in an online discussion can only mention or discuss exactly what was mentioned in the original article? What then, i ask, would be the point of opening it up to any discussion. I mean, it would all be in the article already.
Fixed that for you. I laugh when people definitively state that Apple will never depart Intel. Ever. Not sure how people think they can say that Intel owns PC chip manufacturing from now until the end of time.
[doublepost=1477583415][/doublepost]
I would think that the cost savings would get fed into a faster advancement cycle of new chips (as opposed to how slow Intel moves these days). The consumer gains in more ways than one. If you had to choose between similar speed quality with a lower price point, or a much faster speed quality with the same price point, which would you choose? The answer to that is different for everyone, but for me personally i think that we are better off with a better product at the same price.
For years, many of us Mac enthusiasts have worried that Apple would go out of business. If they did, it would be a sad day, and we would have to go a different road. Yet a company making a profit is somehow suddenly such a bad, horrible thing. Wrong. It provides stability in product environment, job stability for many people, etc.
[doublepost=1477583561][/doublepost]
You can safely ignore the people that jump on Apple for making such a horrible gaming machine. They are not really Mac users. They are people that are here to find a reason to bash Apple. No-one that is really a Mac user is under any misconception that these are intended as gaming machines.
[doublepost=1477583958][/doublepost]
I agree. And while i love iDevices, i am first and foremost a Mac computer enthusiast. My fear is that they will stop caring about being a computer company, and just want to be a iDevice company.
Last edited:
Mac Pro, not MacBook Pro. Nobody expects a laptop to be the best for games, so the bar for a good gaming laptop is a bit lower. A few actually have desktop graphics in them, but that's quite rare.
If integrated GPUs (iGPUs) are "evil" and all Apple is doing is building iGPUs then where is this "a lot of potential here"?????? Apple dumping Intel's iGPUs for Apple iGPUs is still an iGPU.
The likelihood of Apple jumping into the discrete GPUs space is extremely unlikely. There is no volume there. The vast majority of the Apple line up does not use dGPUs. Apple isn't going to sell these GPUs to anyone else. So there is no volume potential there at all. With little to no way to reasonably pay off the R&D expenditure Apple isn't likely to go down that road.
That would be very surprising because Apple does not need or want $100 CPU-GPU combos inside of its iPhones and iPads. The run rate of Macs hovers around 12M snd the average selling point is considerably higher than that of an iOS device. Apple chip of tomorrow would likely be in the same say of Intel's of today. It would be a cheaper processor for slower results. That is nice if trying to dramatically drive down the average selling price of Macs. Is Apple going to do that? Highly unlikely.
Hands aren't getting any smaller and eyes aren't getting dramatically better. The keyboard and screens are likely to be about the same size they are now so "shrink" is what? The ever more anemic thinner? At some point that is just a cruel, unimaginative joke. Battery life is good. More than one socket is useful for a wide variety of use cases. etc. etc.
Apple's ARM chips are optimized for phones and mobile tablets. The lack of distractions is one of the primary reasons they have a competitive edge. Apple doing a separate track of CPU-GPU just for Mac makes little sense as there is no where near as much volume or revenue there.
Apple has made transition when the whole Mac line up could switch to the new architecture. Everything switched from Moto 68K to PowerPC. Everything switched from PPC to x86.
Cherry picking off some Mac Mini and entry level MacBook isn't the whole Mac line up. Semi permanently splitting the Mac ecosystem into two different architectures is highly dubious. Cranks up ecosystem development costs with little return over the long term.
[doublepost=1477586329][/doublepost]
Apple using the general ARM architecture and does there own, customized implementation. The have a "architecture" license. Some software code goes into CPU but the internal execution isn't exactly the same as the "bulk" implementation can directly buy from ARM.
This may be similar in that much of the external interfaces are the same but the internal implementations are tweak. If doing "down as close as possible" to the hardware then relatively minor differences would show up but would largely just look the same. ( similar to optimization for a specific Intel CPU model. ). Apple probably is taking more control of the drivers too. ( because Apple doesn't let folks go all the way down to the hardware. )
Like with ARM implementations they are coloring inside the lines. They have enough influence that the general trends in arch are going their way but incremental optimizations are kept in house.
If someone bought Imagination Tech and took PowerVR off in a direction Apple didn't like then they have enough resources to "fork" and continue on until they found a long term solution they could "share" R&D costs on. It think what is off base is the notion being spun off these articles that Apple is trying to go off into their own completely proprietary GPU. I don't think there is much evidence of that.
[ Imagination Tech bought MIPS a while back. I suspect Apple thinks that is a distraction and more in-house folks are a hedge against a distracted ITech getting lost. ARM has been cranking up their efforts with their GPU families (Mali, etc.) so ITech's competition is higher now. If Apple becomes the only major player who sole interest is PowerVR then buying ITech means Apple would have a MIPs part they don't want or need. ]
Sure... you buy a PC gaming rig rather than a Mac if all you wanna do is play games. My main point is more that you can't get a decent GPU in anything other than a Mac Pro and that the integrated chips being rolled out are complete rubbish (whether you're trying to use them for gaming, or whether it's for 3D design).
[doublepost=1477595309][/doublepost]
LOL that's so cute how you say 'do not compare'.
The adequacy of GPUs can definitely be compared. An iPhone 6S Plus runs at 1080p and the GPU is pretty well the BEST mobile GPU out there. At the device's native screen resolution the GPU can pump out everything required so it is more than adequate for the device.
Most new Macs have 'Intel Iris' graphics or an 'HD 6000' - you wouldn't wanna do 1080p gaming on either of them. The 5k iMac has a mid-range AMD Radeon R9 M390... while it's respectable that this can handle 5k desktop clicking and web browsing, again... you'll be turning the quality settings down and scaling your resolution down to 1080p or less (the iPhone's resolution) if you wanna run games.
Not saying we are all gamers but lets be frank, this is a good test of how adequate a GPU is for the device. Comparative to what's expected of it, an iPhone's GPU is far more adequate than Intel Iris and HD 6000, both of which are basically just the chip manufacturer using up a little bit of spare space on their chip without getting too serious.
iGPUs are bad because they're usually afterthoughts. A iGPU designed to be high performance isn't necessarily guaranteed to be bad. Apple can make a SOC with decent GPU performance if they want.
NVidia did it with the Shield tablet.
[doublepost=1477596423][/doublepost]
No, but they can keep their current profit margins and price and use the extra cost savings to add some other tech and still get the same profit margin.
What hole have you been hiding in? Intel implementations about 5-7 generations back stuffed iGPU into the "extra" space. . Here is the floorplan of a Gen 7 implementation.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10610...six-notebook-skus-desktop-coming-in-january/2
You think that GPU area that is bigger than the CPU area is an afterthought when during the layout and design process? Same relative floorplan percentage with the modern AMD iGPUs. Most of the logic transistors are allocated to the GPU (and media) functions.
One of the major reasons why Intel's mainstream implementations have been stuck at 2-4 x86 cores is because the majority of the last 3-4 transistor budget growth has been allocated to bigger iGPUs. Intel is getting better at making iGPUs.
The only right thing to do right now for apple is to create PadOS or iOS pro or something like that for the iPad Pro. And release a Smart Keyboard cover with a trackpad and or even a touch bar.
When the Smart Keyboard is connected people can choose for regular touch iOS or an optimised iOS version for Keyboard /trackpad controls. With a different gui and some sort of file management.(some sort of macOS light) .
This is the only way too speed up development of apps for an arm based mac in the future or hybrid tablets/macs.
So a scalable os (from watchOS to macOS) with a fully scalable arm architecture for each purpose.(for instance : a11x for iPad Pro , a11z for the mac, a11v for Apple TV , a11 for the iphone , the 2 low power cores of the a11 for the Apple Watch , etc)
Last edited: