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While I can see that helping the cause, I think in general Intel's lack of innovation, i.e., cannot get off 14nm technology. You can only go so far with adding cores, you need real innovation
And how is apple innovative the last 10 years? Inventing a useless touchbar? Having awful cooling solutions. Using potato cams in their laptops ? I don't see any innovation the last 10 years except for the airpods and the iPad pro 2018. Anything else is just the same formula for years and years. Hopefully, the arm transition could be a huge innovation for Apple.
 
There are a LOT of compelling reasons to switch, which is what makes this such a good decision. However, the transition will be expensive for Apple, so more wood for the fire is always going to be a driver.

Expensive to Apple is a laugh.

All they had to do was open the cash register to make the Qualcomm problem go away.
 
lol what a small issue from five years ago to say "lets do it ourselves" and then likely cause thousands of other little issues and problems as a result. Not like the transition will go perfect - Apple has never made their own desktop chips. Intel has been making chips for decades.

The first Tesla Model S's in 2012 were groundbreaking for sure - but ended up having almost the whole cars replaced with revised parts in & out of warranties - because, you know, making cars is hard.

Apple is not the only ones that had issues with Skylake, MS did as well with their Surface Pro and went back and forth with Intel over issues for nearly a year with the Surface Pro. It was assumed that MS was at fault, now we know otherwise.


Apple’s has been designing their own silicon for over a decade now and they’ll do just fine with desktop chips. Nice try random Intel PR person, but no dice.
 
P.S. I mean, if they manage to run the A12 cores at 3.5 ghz in under total TDP of 30Watts, they will probably at least match any desktop (!!) CPU Intel is currently shipping. That should de enough for a 13” laptop.
Throttling up the frequency might be possible, but if Geekbench is even remotely accurate they don't even need to get into that, they just need to get at least six A13 (or future A14) cores working.

The current, as-is, 2.7Ghz A13 in the iPhone 11 registers single-core performance only 7% slower than the fastest single-core chip Intel (or AMD) makes, the desktop 3.7GHz Core i9-10900K. The A13 is basically equivalent in single-core to a desktop Intel Core i9-9900K @ 3.6GHz and faster than any i7 and anything that AMD makes.

It's a little hard to guess what the performance hit of more cores is, but you can kind of get an idea by pretending they could do multiprocessor instead of a single die. 3x A13, each of which has a 6W TDP so 18W TDP total, would be faster than any laptop Apple currently sells, and competitive with a top-of-the-line iMac. Pretending an 8-core "A13Z" was similar to 4x A13, it would have a TDP of 24W and approach the performance of a desktop 12-core i9. A hypothetical 10-core, equivalent to 5x A13, would be 30W and faster than anything other than 24+ core Xeon or Threadripper CPUs, so competitive with 125W chips.

All of which is to say Apple doesn't need to do a thing to clock speed, they just need to be able to maintain around the same performance and per-core thermal envelope when adding more than 4 cores. Even making it to 6 would be highly competitive for laptops or iMac-style desktops at a fraction of the power draw.
 
So why wouldn’t they just switch to AMD instead (who are just killing it right now)? Apple just wanted a walled garden for all their products, not just their phones.

And it's their perfect right to do so, as that has always worked out well for them and for their customers.
 
Tile based rendering has been supported on the desktop since 900 series by Nvidia and since Vega series by AMD. It has already been brought to desktop.

I suppose you are referring to the investigations done by David Kanter from real world Technologies?

If I understood all this correctly, the consensus is that modern desktop GPUs indeed utilize tile-based cache architecture, but they are still immediate mode renderers. Apples GPUs use deferred rendering. It’s not the same thing. And Aple exposes the tiles to the developer, which means that advanced rendering is possible without ever needing additional memory or bandwidth.

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All of which is to say Apple doesn't need to do a thing to clock speed, they just need to be able to maintain around the same performance and per-core thermal envelope when adding more than 4 cores. Even making it to 6 would be highly competitive for laptops or iMac-style desktops at a fraction of the power draw.

True, but personally I’d like to see more improvements to single-core perf. If the ARM MBP is not at least 15% faster here than what Intel can offer, I won’t contemplate an early switch
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The super bad cooling system in apple laptops has to do with both the fact that intel CPUs are generating a lot of heat, but also apple needs to improve their cooling engineering.

Oh please. Confidently dissipating 90 Watts in a slim enclosure without bottom facing exhaust vents is far from being “super bad”.
 
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Oh please. Confidently dissipating 90 Watts in a slim enclosure without bottom facing exhaust vents is far from being “super bad”.

The thermal design in the MBA is inept. It definitely gives you pause about Apple's adherence to quality.
 
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The problem with intel is that the CPU has become too bloated due to instructions after instructions added all them opcode it’s become a minefield and made the CPU so inflexible and too power demanding over the years, ARM was created all them years ago in the UK by Acorn with some Apple involvement to create a CPU for a desktop that was powerful cheep and based on RISC that helped in power consumption but Acorn no more but the ARM lived on threw portable mobile devices because it was so power efficient and now it’s coming back to the desktop as power is key users are no longer plugged into the wall they run from batteries and intel CPU is not ideal but ARM is
 


At this week's WWDC, Apple confirmed its plan to switch from Intel to custom processors for its Macs over a two-year transition period. Apple said that the switch is all about platform consolidation and performance advantages, but at least one former Intel insider claims that quality control issues with Skylake chips was the reason Apple finally decided to to ditch Intel.

16-inch-macbook-pro-intel-10th-gen.jpg
There have been rumors suggesting Apple has an interest in Arm-based Macs for years now, but it was only on Monday that Apple confirmed the plan, satying it expects its first Mac with custom silicon to launch by the end of 2020.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that a redesigned iMac due in the fourth quarter of 2020 will be one of Apple's first two Mac models with a custom Arm-based processor, with the other being a future 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Following Apple's announcement about its switch to custom silicon, Intel said it will continue supporting the Mac through its transition, but insisted that its processors are still the best option for developers.

Article Link: Former Intel Engineer Claims Buggy Skylake Chips Hastened Apple's Switch to Custom Silicon

This guy is the Intel version of me! :) (Remember that time I explained why bulldozer was going to suck and everyone said i was a fake? Good times.)
 
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Skylake is when Apple became self aware. That was Judgement Day.

It was simply that Apple had accumulate enough knowledge on testing CPU's, by building the A4 in 2011. PC market nose dived in 2008, and INTEL executed mass layoffs 2009/10. Employment contracted again 2016/17 = desktop CPU R&D was delayed - again.
 
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And how is apple innovative the last 10 years? Inventing a useless touchbar? Having awful cooling solutions. Using potato cams in their laptops ? I don't see any innovation the last 10 years except for the airpods and the iPad pro 2018. Anything else is just the same formula for years and years. Hopefully, the arm transition could be a huge innovation for Apple.
What’s Dell done for you lately?
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Skylake is when Apple became self aware. That was Judgement Day.
I see what you did there.
 
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The thermal design in the MBA is inept. It definitely gives you pause about Apple's adherence to quality.

That we can fully agree on. I assumed the poster I replied to was talking about the MacBook Pro however.
 
The lack of innovation from Intel slowed product cycles and left a lot of us using Macs from more than 8 years ago. Having control over processor development (and quality control) will allow Apple to innovate and evolve the platform for more frequent compelling refreshes.
 
The thermal design in the MBA is inept. It definitely gives you pause about Apple's adherence to quality.
[/the

The thermal design is just fine for a 10W chip. It’s actually pretty clever. The confirmation will be when Apple puts their own chip in it next year.

50+ pages of modders on the MacBook Air page think they are better engineers than Apple’s and the best they have done is extract about 10% faster performance by transferring more heat to the bottom of the notebook.
 
By controlling their own silicon (which could only have happened as Apple's fortunes grew), Apple will now be able to set their own roadmap for innovation.

Case in point: MBP where 2 ports are reduced speed - because the INTEL CPU did not have enough PCI lanes.

The comments mostly blame Apple: total ignorance of CPU-TDP, or DRAM which has to match the CPU-interface.
 
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What’s Dell done for you lately?

I still have a bad taste in my mouth from when Dell was shipping DOA boards and systems. I had one client that had a dead main board, and it took Dell THREE TIMES to get a working board. THREE TIMES!!! The last time, they tried to blame me for the failure. Um, yeah, no. And later, I heard they were sued for that very thing. Yeah, Dell is crap. Their support was 'world class', THIRD world class. The experiences we had with Dell support were just insane, and we were resellers! If they can't support resellers, they are burning bridges they can't afford to burn. Plus they burned a client of ours, and they never bought Dell either after that hot mess. A bad experience makes a low price too high...
 
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so what does apple silicon guarantee, longer battery life? the speed of 10th gen is good enough for what i do. but if the apple silicon offers tremendous all day battery life i'm willing to wait.

Quieter (or no fans), improved battery, improved speeds and optimization

Possibly lower prices as well

It’s going to be a big upgrade all around
 
And how is apple innovative the last 10 years? Inventing a useless touchbar? Having awful cooling solutions. Using potato cams in their laptops ? I don't see any innovation the last 10 years except for the airpods and the iPad pro 2018. Anything else is just the same formula for years and years. Hopefully, the arm transition could be a huge innovation for Apple.

In the last ten years? I mean, besides HiDPI displays (that revolutionized the PC market), Thunderbolt, energy-efficient wide gamut displays, security coprocessors, new keyboard switches (that one didn’t go very well admittedly), not much I suppose. Of course, they also had their hands full developing the most efficient consumer CPU and GPU as well as hardware machine learning accelerators, but this probably doesn’t count since it wasn’t for their desktop platform. Of course, turns out, all of this stuff is coming to their desktop as well, so yeah...

Or are you talking about software? Well, for one, they developed an entire new programming language and a declarative DSL for defining user interfaces (that’s some pretty advanced stuff). Or a new efficient API for programming GPUs.They also made a new file system optimized for SSDs. What else... ah, all the crazy machine learning stuff that lets you perform rather accurate motion capture with a mobile phone camera. Stuff like that.
 
so what does apple silicon guarantee, longer battery life? the speed of 10th gen is good enough for what i do. but if the apple silicon offers tremendous all day battery life i'm willing to wait.
It offers them control of their future. It means they don't rely on another company to deliver a key part of their product. It also gives them a competitive advantage because they can throw money at it and customize it to their needs.
 
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The thermal design is just fine for a 10W chip. It’s actually pretty clever. The confirmation will be when Apple puts their own chip in it next year.

The MBA gets hot and makes tons of fan noise because there is not an efficient path to dissipate the heat. That's not "just fine."

this is fine.jpeg
 
My first Mac was G5 Tower now currently rMBP mid 2012. However, showing it’s age but it’s been a great laptop. New dawn of Apple Silicon coming our way and time to embrace. I will be purchasing.
 
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