These new Macs will be good for browsing and light duty tasks.
Well, if you actually watch the video, then you'll see "light duty tasks" like Maya, 4k FCPx and Shadow of the Tomb Raider running on the existing A12Z, which was designed for the iPad -
and 2 out of those 3 were x86 binaries running via Rosetta 2. Mainly showing that such apps are more dependent on the GPU and hardware codecs than they are on CPU core performance - but that's kinda the point, since that's how the ARMs in the majority of Mac models are going to outperform Intel's iGPUs.
No they don't. ARM CPUs will never be as powerful as x86. That's just a plain fact and always will be.
No, those are the "alternative facts". The actual fact is that ARM cores consist of a RISC processor, while x86 cores consist of a RISC processor
plus the extra hardware to translate x86 CISC ops to RISC micro-ops, so x86 cores will always be bigger and more power-hungry than ARM cores. If Intel or AMD make a 16 core processor, ARM can either fit more cores into the same area and thermal constraints, or fill the extra space with GPU, "neural engines", hardware codecs and such - which are increasingly more significant in terms of performance than having a slightly faster core.
The actual fact is that A12 chips in low-power, passively-cooled iPads have already been benchmarked at speeds that rival i7-based 15" MacBook Pros... and while synthetic benchmarks
do tend to over-estimate real-world performance, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander - those actively-cooled i7 systems are already martyrs to thermal throttling on sustained workloads. Meanwhile, all the A12 series needed to do to prove itself was to outperform the MacBook Air.
We haven't seen an Axx chip designed for an actively-cooled desktop/laptop yet. Just an A12 designed for a 6mm-thick tablet.
When they get round to the Mac Pro it will be something like 28 core Xeon vs. 32 core Axx with on-die Afterburner.
