This is where I think the professionals are a tiny, captive market that, if they’re willing to buy in to Apple’s vision, then they’d be willing to run the new system side by side with the old one while the kinks are worked out. Even when replacing old with new of the same general hardware, no real professional goes all-in on day one. They bring their workflow to the new system and over time they figure out what’s broken. This way, they can report the bug and always finish their work on their tried and true system. If those users can push the system hard and get to the point where there’s no blocking issues, then rolling out to the general public would be child’s play. One main reason why I think this is because it would be a VERY valid reason as to why the new MacPro has taken SO long to be ready for the market. 🙂
And, synthetic benchmarks only tell part of the story. Apple knows what every class, every library does, knows how it should compile and has a good idea of how fast it should execute as they’re evaluating any new chip architecture changes. The raw speed numbers could very well be worse than a Xeon. But, it could still run macOS and macOS apps faster than any Intel processor. It’s a CPU custom designed to run the software and not a generic part like Intel’s. Additionally, given that Apple has been quite adept at beating any and all comers on a performance per watt basis, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that they’d be able to scale that success.
