You are. There is no development gap. These things are developed in parallel.
www.macrumors.com
I agree - but... I think a spec bump to 16GB will be used as justification to bump the price of the entry level MacBook Pro models.
Apple already did that. You can't buy a Mac Studio or MacBook Pro with 8GB.
Eh, I don't know. If 1000/1200 is replaced with one 1100 model, it works out to be about the same for Apple in terms of overall revenue, but only if they don't lose customers by raising the entry level price. So there isn't much to gain for them, and every potential to lose. And no real benefit to customers as many are more interested in that $999 price point than 16 GB of RAM.
It would make sense.
Apple is setting the precedent now for the M-Series SoC to be on a two-year cadence even while the iPhone Ax SoC is refreshed on an annual basis. I don’t see this cadence changing especially with chip process changes running at a fairly consistent 18-24 month cadence.
They spun an Ax chip for iPads along with the A chip for phones nearly yearly from A5 to A12 (and M1, essentially a rebranded A14X). Things went a little different as the iPad line expanded and the A chips got more powerful.
There is no faster SD card standard. SD Express is not even available to major vendors.
Not really. The first Ax chip was the A8X which came out in October 2014. Then just about one year later the A9X came out in September 2015–slightly less than one year. A10X was June 2017 or about 20 months after the A9X. The A12X came out in end of October 2018. Another 16 months later. The A12Z is probably irrelevant to the discussion since it appears to be an A12X with one GPU core turned back on. Finally the M1 was the longest iteration coming in on November 2020, a little over two years after the A12X.
Something I'd really like to see with the M2 that I haven't seen mentioned yet is:
-A move to the ARMv9-A instruction set
Back with the A7, Apple basically pioneered AArch64 (being the first implementation by almost a year.) While Apple Silicon is certainly pushing ARM in completely new ways on the desktop (their interconnect technology is insane for example) it'd be nice to see them stay ahead of the curve as far as the base ARM feature-set is concerned.
(Not a software dev but the new Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2) and Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) both sound nice, as do some of the other features.)
One of the difficulties I feel we're already seeing with Apple Silicon is that Apple has a bunch of proprietary tech that, while really cool, is going to take a lot of work for devs to get the most out of. Putting some energy into having the latest ARM features would hopefully take some of the pressure off both by ensuring that we get to take advantage of the latest optimizations devs are making for use across the entire ARM ecosystem, while also putting Apple in a position where it can leverage its position to push for faster adoption of those features.
Obviously for this to happen I'd imagine the A16 would have to be based on v9, and the M2 based on that. I don't know that the likelihood is super high but hey, I can dream right
Also just to reiterate what's already been said by others the M2 really needs to have support for at least 2 (external) displays (3 including the internal) on the base configurations (or, even better decouple # of displays supported from the SOC config.)
Good point. And actually now I believe it will. Snapdragon 8gen1 already adopted ARMv9, so I can't think that Apple would want to be behind. So that could mean the M2 will be alongside the A16 instead of the A15.Something I'd really like to see with the M2 that I haven't seen mentioned yet is:
-A move to the ARMv9-A instruction set
Back with the A7, Apple basically pioneered AArch64 (being the first implementation by almost a year.) While Apple Silicon is certainly pushing ARM in completely new ways on the desktop (their interconnect technology is insane for example) it'd be nice to see them stay ahead of the curve as far as the base ARM feature-set is concerned.
(Not a software dev but the new Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2) and Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) both sound nice, as do some of the other features.)
One of the difficulties I feel we're already seeing with Apple Silicon is that Apple has a bunch of proprietary tech that, while really cool, is going to take a lot of work for devs to get the most out of. Putting some energy into having the latest ARM features would hopefully take some of the pressure off both by ensuring that we get to take advantage of the latest optimizations devs are making for use across the entire ARM ecosystem, while also putting Apple in a position where it can leverage its position to push for faster adoption of those features.
Obviously for this to happen I'd imagine the A16 would have to be based on v9, and the M2 based on that. I don't know that the likelihood is super high but hey, I can dream right
Also just to reiterate what's already been said by others the M2 really needs to have support for at least 2 (external) displays (3 including the internal) on the base configurations (or, even better decouple # of displays supported from the SOC config.)
No, Apple made more proprietary extensions to ARM than just AMX - unless you're only thinking of things which add additional instructions?
No, Apple made more proprietary extensions to ARM than just AMX - unless you're only thinking of things which add additional instructions?
Scroll down to "tl;dr" first, then read the rest of it if you're interested in the details. SPRR and GXF are a really cool pair of features, imo, used both for security and to accelerate JIT engines (the latter by making it very fast to flip pages of JITted code between RW- and R-X permissions from userspace).
In addition to SPRR and GXF, there's also the special mode bits for Rosetta. There's one which makes a core obey x86 style memory ordering rules instead of more relaxed ARM-legal rules, and another which (iirc) makes it possible for plain Neon computational instructions to produce bit-exact results compared to their SSE equivalents. (The IEEE 754 standard has enough wiggle room that different compliant implementations are permitted to produce slightly different outputs from the same input data. The choices on how to use that wiggle room in x86 SSE are slightly different from Neon, so this was necessary to achieve x86 emulation which is both fast and exact.)
There's probably other stuff I haven't read about or don't remember.
The first AX chip was the A5X in 2012. Quickly replaced by the A6X the same year. Next was A8X 2 years after. In the timeline of AX chips we've mainly gotten the even numbered ones, with a few odd numbered ones sprinkled in:
Nice find! However after looking at it, I don't think it is really comparable. This is a touch screen, and has a 512 GB SSD standard. I don't consider the touch screen to be a benefit at all, but it certainly drives up the price of the laptop significantly. And with twice the storage of the MacBook Air, there is that to consider too.
It is sensible to think that because:
