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That is if your code doesn’t contain any low-level calls to hardware-specific features (or you embed third-party libraries that do). It’s the code in large software packages that contains some very old stuff, that will cause complications. The bigger the code base the higher the risk that it has some old dependencies and the more monumental the task of going through all of it.

The good thing is that if your library wasn't updated for 64-bit then you've ditched it already. The 64-bit transition shook out all the crufty libraries, so getting things to work on ARM shouldn't be hard. The problem is that many of the library devs probably don't have an ARM Mac, so they're just going to build it and post it for others to test.
 
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not going to change a thing for apple and where they're headed ... AAPL knew about these chips for quite a while, they are still not delivering what AAPL wants/needs

Exactly this. I thing we all agree that Tiger Lake is the biggest jump Intel has managed in last 5 years, with the GPU improvement being really impressive. There is little doubt that Apple had access to engineering samples (or at least the performance data) long time ago. And they still decided to move with their own chips. To me it tells that Apple is really confident. My prediction still stands: I expect desktop-class Apple CPUs outperforming both Intel and AMD CPUs by at least 10-20% in single core performance. All Apple needs to do to achieve this is to make A13 run at peak 3.3-3.5 ghz without blowing up the power consumption (should be doable on the new process).
 
It’s still very possible these chips make it into a future MacBook Pro. If Apple is planning on a two year transition, they won’t let the machines not ready for a Apple Silicon chip go stagnant.
Yeah but these are for 13” MBP and the 13” MBP is rumored to be updated either late this year or early next year using Apple Silicon. It will be among the early ASi Macs so no sense in putting Intel in a few months before that, especially since they were just recently updated already.
 
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I'd REALLY like a new MacBook Pro with these. The current 16" are nice, but lack WiFi 6. They have the same old WiFi that my current 2013 MacBook Pro has.
 
Thunderbolt 4 Is a superset of USB 4.

Not exactly.

As far as I can tell (and you have to read between the lines of a lot of marketing fluff) Thunderbolt 4 is USB4, except that a lot of the features that are optional on a USB4-branded port are required for Thunderbolt 4 certification.

E.g. the USB4 standard can support 40 Gbps data (based on Intels now open TB3 tech) but it's an optional part of the spec, so your shiny new computer could have a port labelled "USB4 port" but not actually support anything faster than USB 3.1. If it's TB4 certified then it must have that 40Gbps mode (which, snark aside, is an improvement).

If you look at this comparison chart carefully...


...you'll see it is comparing the minimum requirements for PCS with TB4/TB3/USB4/USB3 branding, not the maximum capabilities of those technologies. E.g. people are already rocking 6K displays and 2m 40Gbps cables on their old TB3 ports - and 4K or better displays and 60W charging on USB-C ports - it's just that the minimum specs don't require that.

All that fluff makes it as clear as mud what, if anything, TB4 can actually do that either TB3 or fully-tricked-out USB4 can't or if it is just a re-brand of TB3 (4-port peripheral controllers and having TB built in to the CPUs does sound new - but it's hardly a major upgrade to the standard...).

Still, what Intel is doing is a bit better than what the Lords of Confusion (aka. the USB IF, aka. the committee designed by a camel) with their "USB4!!! (actual USB4 not included)" branding. .
 
I'd REALLY like a new MacBook Pro with these. The current 16" are nice, but lack WiFi 6. They have the same old WiFi that my current 2013 MacBook Pro has.

That's largely on Apple. The chipset in the new MBP 13" four port supports WiFI 6, yet the overall system only does Wi-Fi 5. Pretty good chance Apple is just punting completely on Intel WiFi 6 implementations completely. And their discrete WiFI controller partner doesn't have WiFi 6 for laptops yet. [ only have made something to interface with Apple SoC that is bleeding edge]

So even if Apple picked up another Intel CPU+chipset in a "last round" update of the MBP 16" , it is pretty likely it would still be stuck on WiFI 5. (just like the four port MBP 13" is stuck with WiFI 5. )

It is going to be cheaper for Apple to take WiFi modules from iPhones and stick them into Macs. ( same component , higher volumes. )
 
Exactly this. I thing we all agree that Tiger Lake is the biggest jump Intel has managed in last 5 years, with the GPU improvement being really impressive. There is little doubt that Apple had access to engineering samples (or at least the performance data) long time ago. And they still decided to move with their own chips. To me it tells that Apple is really confident. My prediction still stands: I expect desktop-class Apple CPUs outperforming both Intel and AMD CPUs by at least 10-20% in single core performance. All Apple needs to do to achieve this is to make A13 run at peak 3.3-3.5 ghz without blowing up the power consumption (should be doable on the new process).

Best of luck on that fools wish.
 
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The performance gains don't look all that impressive.

Are you kidding? They doubled the speed of the GPU. So now it's more than half the speed of the GPU in an iPad Pro. :D

(Half kidding, half not.)


My understanding is they have removed AMD drivers from the Apple Silicon builds of Big Sur... maybe my understanding is wrong. Sure would make life difficult for eGPUs on TB3/4 as well.

For now, they probably have. AMD will probably have to make significant changes to make their drivers work correctly on ARM. Also, I suspect that AMD ships their drivers to Apple as a binary blob, which means Apple probably can't rebuild them for ARM even if the drivers do build and work correctly. I'd imagine that will be a multi-month bringup that will happen some time between now and whenever the first ARM-based Macs with an AMD discrete GPU appear.
 
it is a great and welcome update:
faster processing speed
much faster integrated Xe graphics,
Thunderbolt 4,
USB 4,
PCIe Gen 4 -- much faster ssd
WiFi 6

lets hope it comes to the mac - on the other hand the xps 13 2in1 is waiting ...
 
Don't count Chipzilla out yet. They were in a similar position 15 years ago, when the Pentium 4 was a dog and AMD passed it by.
AMD passed it only because they bought NexGen. I joined the K6 team shortly thereafter, and proceeded to ruin it.

Intel has no NexGen's to buy.
 
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I don't think that comparing these figures is that straightforward. Geekbench is a bit weird in this regards: it is basically a sequence of very brief bursty workloads.

Yes, true. I hope we'll see an additional "sustained load" measurement in Geekbench 6.

And you're right that a 45W CPU will be a better choice for such workloads. Hence why I have one.

Still, these improvements will make it to Tiger Lake-H and/or Rocket Lake-H (assuming both of those actually ship) in about half a year. And I do think we'll see a sizeable improvement, quite unlike, say, Coffee Lake Refresh to Comet Lake.

Ice Lake and Tiger Lake have more agile dynamic clocking subsystem, they can burst up and down a bit faster, which may skew the numbers one is getting. I think longer, intense workloads are a better basis for comparison. Notebookcheck did publish some preliminary Cinebench scores, based on them Tiger Lake is around 5-7% faster at the same clock, which is not bad, but also not particularly impressive when we consider that we are comparing it to a 5 year old architecture (albeit optimized to it's limits). Intel has managed to push Skylake to around 5.0 Ghz, I am wondering what will be the limit of the new Willow Cove.

5-7% faster than Skylake? Or than Comet Lake in particular? Either way, that's pretty bad.

At the same time, we don't know anything about power consumption. TDP is meaningless here — it refers to the CPU running 100% on base frequency. One thing seems to be clear — Willow Cove is more power-efficient running at lower frequency (a 3.0ghz Willow Cove core will consume similar amount of energy as a 2.3ghz Sunny Cove — that's a 30% improvement here). But we have no idea how much energy it needs to boost to 4.8ghz.

TDP will indeed be exceeded in these bursts, but that's true of basically any CPU these days, including Apple's (leaving aside that Apple doesn't actually give any TDPs that I know of).

It still works as a relative measure: these 15-28W parts draw more power and are more powerful than the 7-15W ones. And the future 45W parts will draw more power and be more powerful than the 15-28W ones.

At any rate, the GPU alone is a huge improvement.

That, too.
 
No mention at all yesterday of NVIDIA blowing the competition away with their new Ampere RTX 3000 series lineup, while Apple is about to transition to in-house graphics across the line.

I have no doubt Apple can compete on CPUs in the desktop space - but common, them dropping AMD graphics from Apple Silicon macs and not working with Nvidia due to a past feud is just going to cripple them in the graphics space. Even the new PS5 and Xbox Series X look pretty pathetic compared to these new chips.

They've been pushing developers to use Metal for their graphics, to wean them from any certain graphics hardware.

They could possibly use any vendor's equipment, as long as it works with the API.
 
I am waiting to read posts on the macrumors forums in a couple years bemonaning the death of the Intel Mac's and how users wish that they still had a Intel Mac to purchase. All those that are so gung ho about the switch to a new processor will have to live threw a lot of pain as the transition happens.

Things that once worked will no longer work. Things that were fast are not that fast right now until code is rewritten. Will Apple succeed with transitioning to the new Apple processors? Yes but it is going to come with up's and downs during a processor transition. Just ask the users that had to transition from OS 9 to OS X with hardware changes it was not a easy transition.
 
Thank you Intel, it was the news I was looking forward to. Now I can make plans to build my next PC gaming rig with an i7 Tiger Lake and an nVidia RTX 3080 with 64GB of RAM.
 
It looks like you think native support is any amount of work.

The reality is: You start Xcode, you go to project settings, you turn on the ARM architecture, build - that's it. Developers have the hardware for testing in their hands, so any reasonably important app will be ready when the first ARM Mac is released.

Howdy gnasher729,

I take it, that you are not a developer? It is very naïve to think that is all it takes is a quick re-compile to get a program to work on Apple Silicon, From a pure "will it run" idea, what you say is technically true. The program will open, but there is no guarantee that it will run very well. It may run very slow, or it may run too fast (not likely but possible), things that just worked before may cause the program to hang as it takes too long to execute, causing the OS to assume the program has hung. It is more complex than just a recompile. For simple applications, that do not require a ton of computational power to run, they should perform fine, even if a bit slower due to their design, but performance sensitive applications will need to be tweaked a bit to run effectively. The Apple Silicon uses the ARM instruction set, which is RISC, meaning that it runs fixed-length simple (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) instructions. Program instructions that take only one instruction on an Intel CPU, will have to be broken down into multiple instructions on RISC, running more instructions of course takes more time. There are things that can be done to mitigate this (pipelining, increasing the number of instructions that can be executed per clock, etc..), but it has to be done. That is why Apple made the dev kits available so early, and also why they announced that your iOS apps can run, because I imagine that for a little while at least, these apps will perform better than the initial set of recompiled apps. Good luck!

Rich S.
 
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