Apple's Phil Schiller and Anand Shimpi Provide Insight Into A12X Chip in New iPad Pro Models

[Horselover Fat]

I find it strange to emphasize the GPU performance of iOS devices and even compare it to a gaming console while at the same time being on a platform that has nothing to offer to 'serious' gamers: A CPU/GPU that won't run most well known games and virtually nobody wants to code for (compared to the quality of outstanding titles from other platforms). A UI that only allows for a very narrow bandwidth of game types. An ecosystem/shop that enforces games of questionable quality/revenue mechanisms. I'm not saying there are no great games on iOS but these are either an exception or mostly rely on easier 3D or 2D graphics.

The only devices with less relevance to 'serious' gaming are pocket calculators. Even a Mac has more to offer and that is a hard thing to achieve. But lets wait for the transition to ARM on their desktops.

 

[threesixty360]

At the end of the day the more Apple make it fit the needs of the minority who want to replace their laptops the more compromised the simplicity and robustness of the device will be.

I am very worried Apple will listen to these people and mess up the whole thing.

Honestly, no chef uses a Swiss Army knife to make food. They use the best knife they have to cut whatever they need. And sometimes those knives cost bucks because if you want to do a particular job that’s what you need.

Maybe some of you guys feel Apple is patronising you because it can’t be the “do all” machine they seem to allude to in the marketing.

But that’s “marketing”! There a company trying to sell stuff just like everybody else. And as long as they are not lying that’s fine.

But the reality is none of you guys can use an iPad Pro the way you want to use a primary work machine becuase of certain workflow issues. And for that reason there are laptops and desktops in the range, some as light and as portable as the iPad. Maybe you might like both? The options are all there.

But to continuously downgrade the iPad and make it out it’s bad or lousy because it can’t do this few things the way you want them is just crazy. Like the verge review that gave its 7.5 when they have previously given the machines a 9. Is it really a 7.5 machine? Seriously?

The thing can manipulate a 50mg raw file faster than most desktops I’ve ever seen and yet it’s an average product?

That just sounds salty and mean to be honest. If I were on the design team of this product I would be upset with that.

 

[jb-net]

While Apple A-Series Chips impressive on so many levels, don't forget that we are still talking about ARM chips. Besides Benchmarking x86 are so much more powerful on different levels. On Notebooks and Desktops x86 are still in their own league (don’t be fooled by some benchmarks). As a customer I’m still hoping for more progress on Intel’s side than on Apple switching too early to their own chips.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Apple A-Series on Tablets and Smartphones because they are the best ARM chips on the market. But Desktop CPUs are different, way more complex than an optimized Geekbench Benchmark can capture.

 

[threesixty360]

While Apple A-Series Chips impressive on so many levels, don't forget that we are still talking about ARM chips. Besides Benchmarking x86 are so much more powerful on different levels. On Notebooks and Desktops x86 are still in their own league (don’t be fooled by some benchmarks). As a customer I’m still hoping for more progress on Intel’s side than on Apple switching too early to their own chips.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Apple A-Series on Tablets and Smartphones because they are the best ARM chips on the market. But Desktop CPUs are different, way more complex than an optimized Geekbench Benchmark can capture.

I don't actually understand this. The benchmarks run the exact same operations for each processor. What is it about the x86 that would make it better if the exact same process can be performed faster on the ARM?

And if it is about running a long process and their are heat issues, then in a bigger machine Apple could put the exact same cooling solutions that cool x86's and the ARM would still out perform the x86 chip right?

The reality is x86 is bogged down by 30yr old architectural decisions and needing to remain compatibility with a windows eco system of thousands of OEM's. There was never any reality to x86 being the best way to use a piece of silicon. The issue has always been no other company could afford to produce a chip with a different architecture at scale to challenge that 30yr old design. So the whole computer world has just believed that x86 is the only way anything can be done.

Now Apple has the money and scale to challenge the narrative we are now seeing a different story.

 

[ipponrg]

Maybe some of you guys feel Apple is patronising you because it can’t be the “do all” machine they seem to allude to in the marketing.

Apple's marketing is the big elephant in the room that people continue to keep ignoring.

MacRumors nay/yes-sayers aside, it's one of the major and highly underrated reasons why they are as successful as today.
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The issue has always been no other company could afford to produce a chip with a different architecture at scale to challenge that 30yr old design. So the whole computer world has just believed that x86 is the only way anything can be done.

Now Apple has the money and scale to challenge the narrative we are now seeing a different story.

Let's assume PC architectures continue to stick with x86 instead of ARM. Even if Apple decides to push their ARM agenda, do you really think Macs globally will overrun PCs? Apple will most likely never sell their ARM chips to 3rd parties which basically means there is no narrative here.

 

[threesixty360]

Apple's marketing is the big elephant in the room that people continue to keep ignoring.

MacRumors nay/yes-sayers aside, it's one of the major and highly underrated reasons why they are as successful as today.
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Let's assume PC architectures continue to stick with x86 instead of ARM. Even if Apple decides to push their ARM agenda, do you really think Macs globally will overrun PCs? Apple will most likely never sell their ARM chips to 3rd parties which basically means there is no narrative here.

They will eventually. They are doing with mobile where the vast majority of chips sold come from Qualcomm et al. Apple only supplies it's chips to 20% of the market and it beat the other 80% to 64-bit and now clock speed and usable cores are destroying the competition. And that is from an ARM based architecture that all their competitors have access to.

In the x86 world it's even worse for Intel. If you look at the power increases over the years Intel has barely moved. On the laptop front, a modern i7 is probably 20/25% faster than the one they released 5 or 6 yrs ago.
They just increase the cores and try to offload things like video playback or GPU stuff. Essentially, in terms of x86 Moores law has been dead for a while.

Apples chips are doing this performance with no fans, and massive space constraints. If they were to stop the heat considerations etc.. I'm pretty sure there architecture would out perform anything Intel could manage to put out eventually.

I think they would do good to sell A series chips to their competitors like Samsung do. Thats another $10 billion business there and would really give Qualcomm / Intel headaches. I don't see why not. Being that the chip isnt really the reason Apple do well and competitors still have to design systems / hardware. Apple selling A10 and lower to the market would be a game changer.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

The thing can manipulate a 50mg raw file faster than most desktops I’ve ever seen and yet it’s an average product?

It doesn't matter how fast something is, if it doesn't do what you need it to do. iOS is still too locked down for professional use, so manipulating a raw file doesn't matter if nobody is doing it. I'd love to have the horsepower in the form factor of the iPad, but I run a virtualized server cluster on my Macbook Pro, which I can't do on iOS, making all of that horsepower - in all honesty probably more power than my current MBP has - useless.

 

[threesixty360]

It doesn't matter how fast something is, if it doesn't do what you need it to do. iOS is still too locked down for professional use, so manipulating a raw file doesn't matter if nobody is doing it. I'd love to have the horsepower in the form factor of the iPad, but I run a virtualized server cluster on my Macbook Pro, which I can't do on iOS, making all of that horsepower - in all honesty probably more power than my current MBP has - useless.

For you it's useless because your wedded to a legacy environment.
Some kid will come who is new to this, pick up a camera, plug it in and will be editing on RAW files on the bus to school and get really good at it. And they will do it faster and better than you because they are not inhibited by an older way of doing something.

I'm not a big camera guy and more into music production and I've seen the exact same thing happen. Older producers wedded to big consoles, outboard gear etc.. and then there are producer like Steve Lacy (produces a band called the Internet) making whole records on his iphone!

Apple knows this. Thats why it skates to where the puck will be not where it is right now.

Btw, I'm not saying that the ipad pro is perfect. No it frustrates me too. Sometimes just getting sound samples into the thing seems like a big chore compared to doing it on a computer. Apple will solve a lot of this. They will make it easier to read of drives I'm sure of it.

But I'm excited by what you can do with these little things now. I know there are kids who dont know the old world and have plenty of free time to learn how to use this stuff really well. And in a few years they will be making ridiculous art/music or whatever on these things. And us older heads will not be able to handle it.

 

[cmaier]

While Apple A-Series Chips impressive on so many levels, don't forget that we are still talking about ARM chips. Besides Benchmarking x86 are so much more powerful on different levels. On Notebooks and Desktops x86 are still in their own league (don’t be fooled by some benchmarks). As a customer I’m still hoping for more progress on Intel’s side than on Apple switching too early to their own chips.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Apple A-Series on Tablets and Smartphones because they are the best ARM chips on the market. But Desktop CPUs are different, way more complex than an optimized Geekbench Benchmark can capture.

x86 is not inherently more powerful than ARM.

 

[ipponrg]

They will eventually. They are doing with mobile where the vast majority of chips sold come from Qualcomm et al. Apple only supplies it's chips to 20% of the market and it beat the other 80% to 64-bit and now clock speed and usable cores are destroying the competition. And that is from an ARM based architecture that all their competitors have access to.

In the x86 world it's even worse for Intel. If you look at the power increases over the years Intel has barely moved. On the laptop front, a modern i7 is probably 20/25% faster than the one they released 5 or 6 yrs ago.
They just increase the cores and try to offload things like video playback or GPU stuff. Essentially, in terms of x86 Moores law has been dead for a while.

Apples chips are doing this performance with no fans, and massive space constraints. If they were to stop the heat considerations etc.. I'm pretty sure there architecture would out perform anything Intel could manage to put out eventually.

I think they would do good to sell A series chips to their competitors like Samsung do. Thats another $10 billion business there and would really give Qualcomm / Intel headaches. I don't see why not. Being that the chip isnt really the reason Apple do well and competitors still have to design systems / hardware. Apple selling A10 and lower to the market would be a game changer.

I agree I think it would do good as well or at least inspire competitors to do more.

But let's be real. They won't get into the OEM business. Apple has never been an OEM. There is nothing here that indicates they will change this strategy.

The best case scenario realistically is that Apple is completely independent from its current chipset dependencies. I see Apple currently putting more weight on ASPs/revenue/profit more than user growth. Otherwise they'd do better in appealing to lower income tiers and/or 2nd rate countries. How this bodes for Apple long term is still TBD.

 

[Abazigal]

Apple's marketing is the big elephant in the room that people continue to keep ignoring.

MacRumors nay/yes-sayers aside, it's one of the major and highly underrated reasons why they are as successful as today.

I think marketing tends to get a bad rep because people associate it with deceptive advertising.

In reality, Schiller is tasked with figuring out which product features will matter to consumers and then helping to explain those features.

So the marketing dept is a lot more powerful at Apple than people give it credit for.

 

[smulji]

Apple comes up with two SOC designs (which are essentially variations of one design) every year. That's compared with dozens of models from Intel. How exactly switching to their own chips is going to improve "availability" of chips?
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The apps that need a lot of power usually run in non-interactive mode or require large screens to display the complex objects that they generate. None of it suits the tablets. Tablets are good for media consumption (especially the lighter tablets, 13" gets it too far) or sketching (very few customers). Apple might be running into a dead end with these performance and price increases for iPads.

Tell that to Adobe. They don't seem to agree with you.
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That's why they don't call it a computer, they call it an iPad.

Actually if you go on Apple's iPad section of their website, here's what they say=> "Like a Computer. Unlike Any Computer."

What Apple doesn't call the iPad is a Mac. Slight but very important difference. It's a computer but it's not a Mac. And isn't suppose to be.

 

[falainber]

Tell that to Adobe. They don't seem to agree with you.
[doublepost=1541725920][/doublepost]
Actually if you go on Apple's iPad section of their website, here's what they say=> "Like a Computer. Unlike Any Computer."

What Apple doesn't call the iPad is a Mac. Slight but very important difference. It's a computer but it's not a Mac. And isn't suppose to be.

Why would you use a tablet for complex photo/video editing? We have desktops for that. Tablet is for doing things on the go or on a sofa.

 

[Abazigal]

Why would you use a tablet for complex photo/video editing? We have desktops for that. Tablet is for doing things on the go or on a sofa.

You just answered your own question. I might be outside, or the photo doesn’t require very complex edits that can still be reasonably done on a tablet. The convenience of being able to edit while outdoors in the field just might offset having to wait till I am back in the office before being able to work on them.

It about using the best tool for the job, and I believe there is a place for iPads in all this.

 

[falainber]

You just answered your own question. I might be outside, or the photo doesn’t require very complex edits that can still be reasonably done on a tablet. The convenience of being able to edit while outdoors in the field just might offset having to wait till I am back in the office before being able to work on them.

It about using the best tool for the job, and I believe there is a place for iPads in all this.

Have you ever seen people editing their photos outdoors on iPads? Me neither. And why would anyone do it? Complete waste of time.

 

[Michael Goff]

Isn't Anand just a paid/employed marketing mouthpiece? It's probably nothing more than ARM A76 SoC with larger custom cache and compiler tweaks to skew synthetic benchmarks that don't represent real world performance. Until it runs MacOS any real performance advantage is not fully utilized.

No, it’s a little more than that. They don’t use ARM reference designs. There’s a reason why the license they have is called “ARM compatible”. It has an architecture license for this reason.

 

[Abazigal]

Have you ever seen people editing their photos outdoors on iPads? Me neither. And why would anyone do it? Complete waste of time.

Funny that you should ask.

http://austinmann.com/trek/ipad-pro-photographer-iceland

Review by a photographer who uses his iPad Pro to edit and share pictures.

One of my favorite things about iPad has always been how elegantly it showcases photographs. When displaying an image full screen, it basically transforms into a big, beautiful digital picture frame, ready to pass around a group or rotate 180° to show a friend across the table. Now without a home button on the new iPad Pro, there are literally no buttons, no controls, absolutely nothing except your photo on screen, and they look better than ever on this vibrant Liquid Retina display.

Using the Apple Pencil means I can make very natural yet precise adjustments to BCCC, with organic, free-flowing movements instead of lasso selections or mouse-controlled brush strokes. This is why world-class retouchers have been using Wacom tablets for years, and now with the new iPad Pro, iOS 12, and new software from Lightroom CC all together, we can easily and quickly make natural edits like these on-the-fly.

It’s really easy to sit just about anywhere (even with a steering wheel in your face) and not just use it, but use it to its full extent. Another cool feature in this scenario is eSIM. Because the iPad Pro is connected to cellular, even in the middle of nowhere Iceland, I could quickly share the images without even thinking about my connection, WiFi, hotspots, etc. Time wasn’t mission critical on this shoot, but in a scenario where time is of the essence, this kind of workflow could be a game-changer.

I’ve been editing/writing here in a restaurant in Vik, Iceland, and here’s a quick demo I did with an image to show you how fast this thing is:

Just a few excepts.

 

[Burger Thing]

Funny that you should ask.

http://austinmann.com/trek/ipad-pro-photographer-iceland

Review by a photographer who uses his iPad Pro to edit and share pictures.



Just a few excepts.

I wonder if he also shared how he imported pics. As a Pro Photographer surely he would use Lightroom CC. Did he enjoy the experience to connect the camera, import the pics into the Photo App first and then import them to Lightroom CC via this detour?

The Verge nailed the review, when they criticized that certain workflows have a looooooooot of room for improvement because iOS has too many limitations. The hardware is so powerful now - the software not so much.

 

[Abazigal]

I wonder if he also shared how he imported pics. As a Pro Photographer surely he would use Lightroom CC. Did he enjoy the experience to connect the camera, import the pics into the Photo App first and then import them to Lightroom CC via this detour?

The Verge nailed the review, when they criticized that certain workflows have a looooooooot of room for improvement because iOS has too many limitations. The hardware is so powerful now - the software not so much.

Theverge likely has a valid argument that importing photos is a pain and has a lot of room for improvement, but what they omitted is that once you get past this stage, the editing process is actually quite enjoyable. Enough to make users willing to put up with the initial hassle.

The beef I have with Theverge’s review is that it felt like a hit piece through and through. Reading it, I had the impression that Nilay had already settled on the narrative right from the very start - that the iPad was a poor laptop replacement. This is a very easy narrative to sell (and going by the comments - over 800 last I checked, he may well have succeeded), but it also doesn’t do the iPad justice in that in the process of bashing the iPad over what it can’t do, you gloss over the things that it does legitimately do better than a laptop.

And there are plenty.

 

[Burger Thing]

Theverge likely has a valid argument that importing photos is a pain and has a lot of room for improvement, but what they omitted is that once you get past this stage, the editing process is actually quite enjoyable. Enough to make users willing to put up with the initial hassle.

The beef I have with Theverge’s review is that it felt like a hit piece through and through. Reading it, I had the impression that Nilay had already settled on the narrative right from the very start - that the iPad was a poor laptop replacement. This is a very easy narrative to sell (and going by the comments - over 800 last I checked, he may well have succeeded), but it also doesn’t do the iPad justice in that in the process of bashing the iPad over what it can’t do, you gloss over the things that it does legitimately do better than a laptop.

And there are plenty.

To me the main message was, that the iPad could be so much more, if software would get loosened up a bit to make finally use of the plenty powerful hardware. He was right in many ways: it’s an experience on rails and the iPad could benefit tremendously, if it would offer more flexibility. Today for example, i was quickly editing a Word Document and only had my iPad. I had to refer to something, which was on another doc. Wouldn’t it be great to have for example the possibility to have 2 or more docs open at the same time to swip from one screen to another and access them easily?

And again, the stuff importing file stuff like pics. If apple like Lightroom could import RAW and JPEG directly, it would make the experience better. Not worse. It would take nothing away from the ability where the iPad excels.

And reading through the discussion here, there are probably hundreds of comments concluding the same: hardware is limited by software. That has to change. And I applaud The Verge to address these issues to shake Apple up a bit. I rather take that review then some of the awkwardly glowingly positive spins of those, who want to make sure to get invitations to the next big thing.

 

[Baymowe335]

And I quote my source that says they have called it a PC replacement:
https://www.recode.net/2016/8/4/12371298/apple-ipad-pro-pc-replacement-pc

Damn it feels good to come to a debate with facts.....

Yeah, and it does what most people use a PC for, which is why you've seen iPad outsell PCs and laptops. This isn't complicated.

No one thinks you do complex Excel modeling or run Access and ODBC links from your iPad. It's just no one does that in their free time.

 

[cmaier]

To me the main message was, that the iPad could be so much more, if software would get loosened up a bit to make finally use of the plenty powerful hardware. He was right in many ways: it’s an experience on rails and the iPad could benefit tremendously, if it would offer more flexibility. Today for example, i was quickly editing a Word Document and only had my iPad. I had to refer to something, which was on another doc. Wouldn’t it be great to have for example the possibility to have 2 or more docs open at the same time to swip from one screen to another and access them easily?

And again, the stuff importing file stuff like pics. If apple like Lightroom could import RAW and JPEG directly, it would make the experience better. Not worse. It would take nothing away from the ability where the iPad excels.

And reading through the discussion here, there are probably hundreds of comments concluding the same: hardware is limited by software. That has to change. And I applaud The Verge to address these issues to shake Apple up a bit. I rather take that review then some of the awkwardly glowingly positive spins of those, who want to make sure to get invitations to the next big thing.

The software will change. Apple is aware of it.

iOS 13 will have:

- multi-user support
- improvements to multitasking UI
- addition of certain UI controls for interoperability with Marzipan (e.g. global color and font pickers, menus, multiple tabs in apps)
- multiple instances of an app simultaneously
- containers for files outside of the app’s documents directory (e.g. a file system more like Mac)
- new files.app
- dark mode
- support for external storage

 

[Mars56]

I think this is all amazing work and I love it.
However, I need to remember one very important point, and I think we must all remain aware of this.

These Apple chips are stunning. BUT they are only running iOS.

Let's see how they actually stack up against even current competition once they have the burden? or running a full OS such as MacOS or Windows.

If they can do that amazingly well, if not better THEN they will have my full admiration.

Or let's think of it another way, how well would the best Intel chip run iOS if Intel built it to run iOS ?

yeah it's kind of neat how they optimize hardware and software, I agree.