When it comes to their desktop computer products they don't really cater to anyone any more. That's a big part of the problem.
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Bloomberg: Apple's First Arm Mac to Launch by 2021 With 12-Core Processor
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No, they are perfectly capable of licensing chips from ARM and customizing them to their liking. They haven’t licenses the ARM Neoverse N1 before because they haven’t been making workstations with their chips yet. But I am assuming when and if they do replace Intel with ARM in their pro machines then they will use that as a base.
But they don’t have to. They could keep doing what they are now. Doing that will allow them to save money. Or licensing more chip designs from ARM will mean they will need to heavily invest and bump up production on new CPU’s. If they do that, then expect pricars to stay the same on the new MacBook’s and Mac’s. The Apple tax might even get a little higher for a little bit.
I wouldn’t say that. I think Apple really listened to their high end professionals (people who do audio work for studios or video production like on movies). They gave them customization options. Allow them to change out SSD’s, add RAM change our graphics. Really the only thing you can’t change is the processor. But I don’t know that one, maybe the CPU isn’t Soldered on. Actually that makes me want to watch a take down or the Mac Pro to find that out.
And they have always made some of the best laptops in my opinion. I love how light they are and how quick everything loads. And their trackpad is still one of the best in the industry.
The 2019 Mac Pro CPU is socketed, but this is probably the last CPU to use the LGA-3467 socket, which means this motherboard is a dead end for everyone outside of those who want a higher core count Xeon in a few years, which is in and of itself problematic because these are tray CPUs, not boxed and they tend to be scarcer and more expensive than they are now. My advice is buy the highest core count you can afford, and then pray you can get a tray CPU off of the used market in the future. The whole beast is impressive, but Apple chose to build it at a crap time in Intel’s history. PCIe 3.0 isn’t horrible, but there are an awful lot of PXE chips making things go because even x64 lanes off the CPU isn’t enough to do what Apple wants to do, which is on Intel. The price isn’t awful, but it should have the 5700 as the base GPU and 512GB as standard SSD, so you get some benefit to the T2 RAID 0 Apple uses in the iMac Pro.
I don't even know if that's true. The line-up today? Sure. Zen 2 is great. The roadmap for the next five years? Well… I'm not sure that looks so bad for Intel.
[ But yes, Apple is more impressive than either of the two, at least as far as single-core performance is concerned. In multi-core, Intel seems to do much better so far, and AMD even better. (For example, the A12X has eight cores, but they only deliver 4.14 times the single-core score. The high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro with a 9980HK also has eight cores, and does 6.25 times the single-core score. Techniques like HyperThreading probably help there. But AMD does even slightly better — Renoir's 4900HS seems to average 6.45.) ]
[ edit ] I've put the above in brackets because, as @Gerdi pointed out, it's misleading: Apple doesn't have eight high-performance cores; rather, only half of them are high-performance.
The unanswered question is how well Apple would do at a much larger thermal ceiling.
Yeah, I think that's right.
(Unfortunately, it might mean that I'll have to check out. Much of my work is x86-specific.)
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I wasn't addressing ARM at all, and you don't have to explain how architectures work.
It would be doable, but for one year? No way. It doesn't make sense for the support overhead alone.
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Makes sense. But that kind of further proves that Apple should start making their own chips. It took Apple at least three years to make and design the new case and internals. Maybe even longer because we don’t really know when they started work on this. Apple time line just didn’t mesh with Intel’s time line.
I'd rather not see a Mac Pro with ARM, thanks.
*Barges in some more.
The Mac Pro is 'absolutely' *NOT* a high-end machine unless you take a 'cheese grater' to your wallet.
It's entry config' is a heap of junk in a 'nice' Apple box. (Nothing new there...)
You really don't care? About what? (Who knows.) Who cares that you don't care?
I care (and so do many Mac users) about value, performance, price and efficiency. And Apple are a distant memory in that regard since about 2008. They care more about nickle and dime upsell and profit over product.
Apparently has nothing to do with it. £1000 for a lump of 'stand.' That's Apple right now. \What the market will tolerate.'
£6k buys you access to a very low end gpu that is years out of date. A years out of date gpu is *NOT* 'high spec' or a 'high end' machine. Apple has to put the specs in there to call it 'high end.'
Probably? Who knows what Apple will do with AMD cpus or at all. But if they cared so much about efficiency, power, cores, price, value, performance like their PR department boasts about...maybe they'd include them. So their PR and Marketing are empty of substance to match their boasts. They fail comparison.
Gone Apple is...consumed by the dark side.
AMD's lead. It takes Steve Job's reality warping magic to excuse Intel's last 5 year's away and the current two year plus + malaise against AMD. And you don't have it. 'Small window' has been happening for quite a while now. + + + + (more +) Technology is about right now. And right now, neither Intel or Apple are a good deal. AMD have been beating the 'snot' out of Intel for a while now. And sure, you can consult a mystic ball as to when Intel will bring comparable performance to Macs. (1 year? 2 years? More delays? With rumours swirling over arm next year?) Or Value. In the meantime, Apple Macs and their customers suffer that mediocrity of their own volition.
Intel. They're hot. Late. Inefficient. Expensive. They got greedy. Not alone in that if you look at Nvidia. You know? Like Apple with their desktops, laptops, iphones, iPads and stands...and iPad keyboards... G-ree-dy. That's what happens when you don't have competition.
Azrael.
Right now, Intel seems to be roughly on a two-year schedule for these CPUs. Which, sure, we'd like something more frequent, but I don't think it's a real issue. (Why hasn't Apple upgraded the iMac Pro to Cascade Lake-W 2200, though? Can Intel not deliver in adequate volume?)
My guess is if the Mac Pro gets moved to ARM, we don't really see anything more frequent than every two to three years, regardless.
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Yes yes yes and the wheels should be $70, not $700. We get it.
But nobody is excusing Intel's last 5 years, so…
It's gotten a lot better since the launch of the Mac mini (2018), the Mac Pro, getting rid of the weird Touch Bar-less low-end Pro and the weird 12-inch MacBook not-quite-Air, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and now the Ice Lake MacBook Air. I hope we'll see an upgrade to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac mini soon, but it's much easier to pinpoint one Mac product and say, "this is the one you should be getting" than it was even just two years ago.
If no one is excusing Intel over the last 5 years then no one excuses Apple for their similarly lacklustre update schedule for Macs. They own crap gpus. They own the keyboard on the laptops. They own the 6 years to create a 'high end' (Entry level) tower. They own the outrageous prices for medicore spec. They talked efficiency in the move from PPC to INtel. Where is that efficiency now? The competition has more cores. More value. More efficiency.
$700. For wheels. 'Yes. Yes.' But they are 'high end' wheels...
Why hasn't Apple? (Consult the same crystal ball for Intel's failure to deliver significant progress over the last give years or being stuck on the same node...)
Twins of Evil. Static design. No competition. Complacent. Marketing over Products. Milking the 'product' because 'greed.' Profits.
Dunno. Wheels seems as good an answer as any. HP can do a decent 32 inch AiO for £3k with sound specs £2k cheaper than iMac Pro. Wheels. Why haven't Apple gone AMD? 'Wheels.' Explains everything.
Customers want good performance now. Not in 'two' years (or more given broken Intel promises...) time.
Azrael.
I guess we‘ll talk about this in a few years again. But fear not - you won’t be the first to have been fundamentally wrong regarding the future of computing.
I may be wrong, but there are so many powerful x86 workflows out there that won't move to ARM.
If they do move to ARM, I'll likely have to leave the Mac Pro once it becomes unsupported / dies.
So far, no one in this thread or the related ones was able to point out these „powerful x86 workflows“ that cannot translate to ARM. Maybe you can succeed at that?
Yeah, I agree. I expect the “Pro Mac’s” (iMac Pro/Mac Pro) to be updated every 3-5 years (and to be the last converted to ARM) and then the laptops and iMac and Mini every 2-4 years (like the iPad Pros).
And that’s because I don’t think Apple really plans on beefing up iPhone Processors to Mac Pro. They will probably make a new line of processors for that and that will take time. Which is why I think the iMac Pro and Mac Pro will be the last processors updated.
Which also means the transition to ARM will be longer and people worried about support for their Intel apps probably don’t need to. Developers will have time to switch over their apps to make sure everything works. And the devices that aren’t being updated might get a new refresh (and like you said, the iMac Pro is due for a CPU Update). But I don’t think the Mac Pro will get new a CPU update until ARM since it just came out. And I don’t think it will take more then three years for Apple to get this done)
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What exactly do you think won’t move over? Is it something like Citrix or tailored specific to one company or something like that?
Making a "new line of processors" does take time - but you seem to somehow assume they start just about now. That might or might not be true. Maybe they already have one in their labs …
However, I also believe that at least the Mac Pro will still be on Intel for some time - but more so because it wouldn't be so clever to develop an Intel Mac Pro and then discontinue/replace it after one year.
Compiling large codebases for x86 machines is a simple yet important workflow in my mind.
Which wouldn't be very significant if Apple has no more x86 machines this code could run on.
Not quite that relevant for a Mac, is it?
x86 compilations, vendors might only support x86 binaries etc.
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Mac isn't the target...
Oh, excuse me. At the time I posted this was a thread titled "Apple's First ARM Mac to Launch by 2021" in a Mac specific forum.