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Developers Begin Receiving Mac Mini With A12Z Chip to Prepare Apps for Apple Silicon Macs
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Agreed. The Final Cut Pro ARM native demo with real-time filtering was more impressive.
It's the first time we have hands on of a ARM chip running macOS. I'm sure there will be some things uncovered. NDA or not, information will find its way out.
ARM Macs won’t be CPU dependent - like the IPad there will be several chips on board. The Dev transition devices only has the CPU, not the neural engine etc.
I think you're confusing yourself. A12Z is a complete SoC, it has everything on it, these Mac Mini have the exact same SoC as the A12Z from iPad Pros. Apple already confirmed this several times in their sessions.
There are no several chips, A12Z is a single chip. The Mac SoC will be the same thing, they're not making a standalone CPU at all.
What you may have heard was that Apple said the upcoming Mac SoC will have something that's not in A12Z, so devs shouldn't assume what they see in DTK will be in final production units.
Expect the upcoming A14 series of CPU to be identical across the board for iPhone, iPad, Macs, AppleTV, and etc to have the same feature set, just different number of cores, clocks, and so on.
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Absolutely, unarguably correct. To put it simply - if you have agreed to the NDA - “if the info isn’t posted somewhere on Apple.com, you cannot share that info”.
The XDR display works with non-Thunderbolt computers too. Notably, you can connect it to the USB C iPad Pros (but not at 6K resolution).
There will be a serious NDA with these Macs. And they surely don't want to have to return theirs.
Lol no kidding.
Well consider Apple Arcade's.
They showcase, even for kids, subpar graphic toy games like crossy road in keynotes, imagine what they are used to.
Tomb Raider is like Crysis in 2007 for them.
Possible link to benchmarks here (I personally wouldn't read too much into it, but there isn't any other news):
There will not any T series in the Apple Silicon Macs, that is only useful for Intel Macs where there's no SoC with the same features.
In other words, the A12Z SoC already has the features from T2, M1, etc. There is no need for a separate chip.
A12 has M12 included as already shown by Apple on their page:
I have kind of mixed feelings about all this. Mostly because my 2018 Mini is barely half a year old now ;-)
But OTOH, it's fascinating that Apple could pull this off.
Even if you absolutely hate this move, you have to give kudos to Apple for sticking to iPad and pushing Apple silicon to where is.
"Only Apple could do this".
But OTOH, it's fascinating that Apple could pull this off.
Even if you absolutely hate this move, you have to give kudos to Apple for sticking to iPad and pushing Apple silicon to where is.
"Only Apple could do this".
Geekbench running under Rosetta 2
even running emulation, it already is an excellent performer, Multi-core just about matches the 2020 MacBook Air quad core.
eperm-d995af6e2ef02771 - Geekbench
Benchmark results for an eperm-d995af6e2ef02771 with a VirtualApple processor.
browser.geekbench.com
even running emulation, it already is an excellent performer, Multi-core just about matches the 2020 MacBook Air quad core.
Building a computer with two Intel processors only works for the highest end chips that are designed to be not alone on a motherboard. I'd think that a motherboard with one Intel and one ARM processor will have the same problems, just a little bit worse. I don't think this is going to happen.
It would be conceivable that someone builds a mini-PC with just a USB-C cable, and some software on the Mac to let it share the keyboard and mouse, and the monitor.
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Go to a store, buy an iPad Pro, and you do know where things stand today. The hardware is an iPad put into a Mac mini case.
Two possibilities: Either Pierre Dandument loses his device, or he has never had one.
What else could it be?
there are already quite a few result of developers just getting their machines and running Geekbench
eperm-d995af6e2ef02771 - Geekbench 5 CPU Search - Geekbench
browser.geekbench.com
Not only is it under a beta version of Rosetta but it seems to be limited to four core or Rosetta may not be able to use all eight core yet (4p/4e but Apple said all 8 can be used at the same time for the same task). If you look at the same A12Z iPad Pro, you'd see they detect 8 core and has twice the multi-core score.
If this is the same A12Z which is like 7-8W and Macbook Air at 15w (even the CPU is power hungry compared to Ryzen), we're already seeing potentially twice the performance of Intel if Apple scales their SoC to 15W.
Note that upcoming A14 will be on 5nm node too.
The $500 gets you one year rental. $500 for one year rental of a Mac mini is not a good deal in my book.
Yea, I think that's either Rosetta is not yet ready to use all 4p/4e at the same time or Rosetta will be limited to p cores only for emulated apps. Still, it's emulated, half A12Z perf on an unstable build.
We'll have to wait to see how it evolves in the next three-four months.
Rosetta just statically translates (usually), so it shouldn’t affect how many cores are used. Could be that the os, itself, doesn’t yet schedule threads on all cores, or, more likely, it doesnt use the ”little” cores, at least for a12 (not a lot of reason for apple to spend time tuning the thread scheduler for a12, after all)