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New cores (A15)
- Thread starter cmaier
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I wold be very surprised if Apple made a "thick and heavy" laptop. The 16" is already big enough and it's cooling capacity should be enough to deal with the energy efficient Apple Silicon. This is probably some sort of mistranslation of the original Chinese source or some other misunderstanding.
The REvil leak in April depicted a thicker curved side profile of the main chassis. Honestly, if the bottom panel is not dished, it may be the same or nearly the same thickness. Another member pointed out that the 100 Wh aviation limit prevents taking advantage of the extra space with a lithium battery pack, though perhaps there exists a loophole-- physical separation of batteries, such as a dual pole reed switch between battery modules 🤷♂️
Those renderings looks like crap and the dimensions are not legible, so I am really not sure how to interpret all this. Well, we will see in a couple of hours 😀
At any rate, if the new MBP is indeed much thicker, it will be a disaster for me. I really don't want to move to a 14"...
If there would be a loophole, someone would already be using it, me thinks.
Andropov
macrumors 6502a
Agreed. I think the only way would be Apple lobbying to have that 100Wh limit moved upwards.
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The only thing I can think of is to ask forgiveness for using a loophole vs permission.
I sure hope not. I don’t feel comfortable carrying a bomb around. The current 100Wh laptops are already bad enough.
One of my big fears of the new models is that they run hot and loud. We have never seen ARM chips really pushed to their limits and if you look at AMD's chips, which are on a TSMC node that isn't a million miles away from Apple's, they still need big coolers and in many configurations can be very loud laptop chips. I think this fear is a real one!
I wonder if the A15 focus on efficiency was with a nod to addressing this kind of issue on the Mac side of things.
The upside of course will be that in return these will be very powerful chips and the fans are there for a reason.
The other is that Apple makes some design missteps. And... if the laptops are like the renders I fear that these will not be my favourite shape. I don't really like hard straight-edged laptops all that much. I have had a couple of Razer Blades that adopt this design language and I fear the new MBPs will end up looking a bit too Razerish and not distinctive enough (notch aside...).
Above all though, for me the real deal killer would be keeping the touch bar! (I appreciate many disagree)
I wonder if the A15 focus on efficiency was with a nod to addressing this kind of issue on the Mac side of things.
The upside of course will be that in return these will be very powerful chips and the fans are there for a reason.
The other is that Apple makes some design missteps. And... if the laptops are like the renders I fear that these will not be my favourite shape. I don't really like hard straight-edged laptops all that much. I have had a couple of Razer Blades that adopt this design language and I fear the new MBPs will end up looking a bit too Razerish and not distinctive enough (notch aside...).
Above all though, for me the real deal killer would be keeping the touch bar! (I appreciate many disagree)
Seriously? There are ways of segregating energy storage so they cannot chain a runaway condition.
They will probably run hot under full load — which is kind of what one wants, unless you are prepared to leave the performance on the table. The strategy that makes is to define a thermal budget and try to get best possible performance out of that budget. So if the new 14" defines the budget at, say, 40W, then the new Mac hardware is expected to reach 40W under full load.
However, there is a big difference to the current x86 CPUs. They can already reach the thermal budget with only few cores doing work (or even a single core, in small laptops). E.g. AMD Zen3 needs 15-20W to achieve a level of peak performance M1 can get to with 5W. This is a big practical difference, since situations where you are actually pushing the machine to its limit are very very rare. Even even there Apple can afford to reduce the limit somewhat, because they are likely to be 50-100% faster than any x86 CPU at the same (real) power consumption threshold.
That is likely so that the chips can be clocked higher and get higher performance.
Andropov
macrumors 6502a
Fear not. The M1 is already plenty fast, and is almost silent.
Yeah, there must be like, 10? people in the world who disagree.
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In a way that would not majorly impact the portability of the machine? Building a containment over every battery cell? 😉
Apparently I need to familiarize myself with the regulation, however, I’m pretty sure a passenger may carry multiple devices and doesn’t have to have devices separately contained. I thought the regulation had to do with electrically connected cells…
It's not a very rational fear. M1's performance per watt ratio is far ahead of everything AMD and Intel make in the same thin-and-light notebook category. This isn't just the CPU, Apple's GPU efficiency is awesome too (even compared against market leader Nvidia). That's a great technology foundation for bigger and faster machines which are still very low power.
The worst case is that they kept the maximum sustained power target the same as the Intel 16" systems. If they did, expect it to be possibly double the speed with similar thermals and fan noise. But it won't be hot and loud all the time; Intel's individual cores in an i9 can use over 15W each at max frequency while M1 cores only use about 5W at max freq. No more fan blast just because a couple tabs in your browser have bad javascript which pegs a core at 100% load.
Sometimes more because some measurements only look at the core wattage, not the rest of the chip such as memory controller and IO controller.
I believe it could be. Of course it’s relative. No way will it be an inch thick like the old pre-retina machines. But a bit thicker and therefore heavier? I think it’s possible. The flatter design will make it look thicker than it is like the iPhone.
Those x86 chips are running at far higher frequencies though. Apple is just on another level with their IPC which is why they match the performance at only ~3GHz.
There's no reason to make the laptop thicker when Apple Silicon will drastically reduce power requirements and heat.
I mean, just look at the iMac M1. They went thinnnnnn.
Apple wants to show off the true advantage of Apple Silicon, which is faster, cooler, lasts longer, thinner designs.
Andropov
macrumors 6502a
And yet they keep referring to those nonsensical TDP figures, trying to sweep it under the carpet. I've heard it's a very common tactic...
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TDP is mostly a marketing term, it doesn’t fully reflect the power draw of the product across all the operating modes. The times when TDP referred to maximal power draw are long long gone. One can say that turbo boost has both saved and condemned x86 - it gave the systems the ability to scale, but also completely messed up the expectations and consumer understanding of these systems.
m.x
macrumors 6502
I'm trying to find the original source. Maybe the guy used "密"? That has many meanings (close, dense, thick / intimate, close / fine, meticulous / secret, confidential). The quote "very thick, thick and heavy" is suspicious...
HDMI and MagSafe definitely thicker than USB-C. Maybe they want to make the Pro the Pro and differentiate from the consumer models. Most people would probably prefer a little thicker if the battery life was insane like 20 hrs. We can only guess at this point.
The leak did say two bigger fans. That doesn’t sounds like a translation error.
Current 13" Macbook Pro is already 20 hours.
I expect the 16" to go well beyond 20 hours without increasing in size. Also, the 16" already has the maximum allowed battery size to board a plane.