It’s not really a new chip so I’m not really sure what you would expect developers to find. It’s essentially an iPad in a Mac mini, as far as the processor goes anyway.
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Developers Begin Receiving Mac Mini With A12Z Chip to Prepare Apps for Apple Silicon Macs
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Mine made it to in my city last night..... given they shipped with ups I might get it by Friday if I’m lucky
Joking aside, says it to dev who hadn’t returned G5 Intel DTK lol. I pretty sure small number of Mac Mini Bionic won’t return to Cupertino for someone collectible sake. Finding old G5 DTK is like treasure, I think this Mac Mini DTK would have similar value in distant future.
The fact that Tomb Raider runs on it is the amazing part, considering it's running under emulation. Seriously, even at 1080p, that's a good performance for a mobile chip doing emulation.
All these negative comments about performance of a 2 year old CPU setup to port apps?? Are this many people negative or just ignorant? Feel free to be as negative as you want when the actual first computers come out, until then just chill the heck out.
No one should have been thinking that as they explained what was happening. You do understand that Tomb Raider was un-optimized software running through emulation in Rossetta 2, right? I was watching it through a clear feed and it looked great for what it was and considering it was running on a two-year-old chip from a tablet — again, though emulation.
Even the original poster who said "amazing" was clear that was in the context of how it was being done (sure, it's not amazing relative to a high dollar gaming rig).
I wonder what was driving the demo machine ... ? A 12Z (like the DTK), or some newer design.
iPads don't run Chrome
Mine does, it's open right now
[automerge]1593436873[/automerge]
The DTK is like Fight Club and we all know that first rule, and the second ...
[automerge]1593436932[/automerge]
Obviously, all that aside, sure I'd like to know more as well, heck, I'd take the most minimal leak, even just a "Yes, the graphics performance is substantially beyond an Intel based Mini"
It is beta hardware and software, running emulated graphic-software for a completely different processor instruction set. The fact that it was playable in real-time shows potential.
Also, it ran 3 simo streams of 4K in Final Cut Pro, while making edits in real-time.
I'm pretty critical with Apple as of late, but give credit where credit is due.
Guys people are really missing the point of that demo if that's what they're taking away from it.
What we saw was a relatively demanding x86 game running smoothly under Rosetta 2 on ARM hardware. Even if it's at 1080p and low settings that's fairly incredible. Anyone familiar with the PPC-Intel Rosetta will tell you binary conversion performance was nothing like that, especially regarding AAA 3D games at the time.
What you're basically doing is judging a French man by how spotty his German grammar is. The fact he speaks German fluently at all is impressive!
Wait until a high end Mac game is released that's actually compiled for the ARM chip before judgment. And then this is only an iPad CPU for the dev kit! We can expect a real ARM Macs to be a lot more powerful.
Reading the document, it sounds like those that have them have to be hush, hush about everything.
Can't even see the unit!
Seems like it would be reasonable and feasible to offer an A-Series processor card for the new Mac Pro towers to dynamically switch based on the software being run (similar to the way external GPUs are activated only when called upon). Is there a technical reason why it's not possible? Also vice versa: Future A-based Mac Pros could have Intel coprocessor boards for Bootcamp and legacy apps?
It’s feasible but a lot of engineering work. A-series has no innate ability to communicate over that sort of bus, for starters.
UPS has been the worst lately. I've had packages "Out for Delivery" that never make it to my house that day. Maybe the next day. I've tracked them on a map (UPS member) and they are literally a couple blocks away and skip my house and go back to the depot. What they do deliver is terribly mishandled. Large boxes with punch holes, slices and you-name-it.
I don't count on getting anything from UPS on-time.
The tweets break 2.2e (unless those developers had written authorization from Apple, which is possible but not likely) but they didn't post images of the kit. They posted images of the box or card insert. Those aren't strictly prohibited because they are not images of the computer (2.2d). That's a moot point, of course, because the tweets break 2.2e.
That's the reason you won't get one of them.Which we don't care as we want it.
So people will benchmark it. Nothing will stop that.
In fact, it would be the first thing I would do with this.
My personal take is that it is going to represent the entry level Mac power. Remember this is a 2 year old processor, although still state of the art in many department outside of Apple. But they are there to make sure the initial porting works. Nothing more.
For what is wroth the original DTK in 2005 had a Pentium 4 inside. None of the Intel Mac officially released later had a Pentium 4. So the DTK was about getting developers on board with x86. You can do more fine grained optimisation later once the real product is out.
The DTK is the same.
Still wondering what would happen once ARMv9 is out. ( Unless ARMv9 is backward compatible with ARMv8, or may be ARMv9 is v8 without the aarch32)
I just installed Schroedingmark on mine. I can either run the test or tell you the results, but not both.
(my kid won’t let me tell her dad jokes anymore, so now you must all suffer)
(my kid won’t let me tell her dad jokes anymore, so now you must all suffer)
exactly this. In the interview with John Gruber, they said that the DTK is basically what they can do without even trying to make a chip specifically for Macs. So anything these can do, will easily be the crappiest end of the scale, compared to Apple Silicon Macs that will come out.