Did he?
AFAIR that plastic mini was supposed to be the pedestrian version with a M2 in early 2022.
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New High-End Mac Mini: Everything Rumors Say We Can Expect
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Did he?
AFAIR that plastic mini was supposed to be the pedestrian version with a M2 in early 2022.
And, sadly, nope...
Running 50 minutes, I thought they had time for 'Oh, and one more thing', and the intro of an M1 Max equipped Mac Mini, but no...
But, riffing for a minute, how cool would that be?!?! An M1 Max revving in a Mac Mini? Wow...
I struggled to define the Mini. Is it a headless unit, and a 'thin client', or is it a potentially fierce raging firehouse of power, just waiting to be tapped. Thermals would have to be dealt with, but a Max powered Mini would be a perfect gaming machine, and being small would be a perfect brick to build a powerhouse compute tower for creating killer movies, animation, and music. Oh well... Something to dream on I guess...
Running 50 minutes, I thought they had time for 'Oh, and one more thing', and the intro of an M1 Max equipped Mac Mini, but no...
But, riffing for a minute, how cool would that be?!?! An M1 Max revving in a Mac Mini? Wow...
I struggled to define the Mini. Is it a headless unit, and a 'thin client', or is it a potentially fierce raging firehouse of power, just waiting to be tapped. Thermals would have to be dealt with, but a Max powered Mini would be a perfect gaming machine, and being small would be a perfect brick to build a powerhouse compute tower for creating killer movies, animation, and music. Oh well... Something to dream on I guess...
Would make sense with the cooling systems and thicker case being employed for the MacBook Pros.
The M1 Pro and M1 Max look set for iMac 27" replacement for sure - and possibly a low SKU Mac Pro (yes, the mythic xMac etc etc etc)
my bet is they still do have issues with chip availability - and they wanted to prioritize MBP production before putting this chip in iMacs and minis.
early 2022 for big iMac and "one more thing" mac mini IMO, all with big M1 inside.
god i do want a Mac mini Max so badly
early 2022 for big iMac and "one more thing" mac mini IMO, all with big M1 inside.
god i do want a Mac mini Max so badly
If Apple were putting all that into a Cube style case at the same time as the iMac 27" refresh it might be interesting. With all the mentions of catering to professionals it would be idiotic to go with a compromised case for the sake of ultra thin design sensibilities of the past the they've spent an entire presentation rowing back some of the design choices made in 2016.
What reason now would Apple have to not relaunch the Mac Pro to start from $1699-1799 and put the MacBook Pro 14" guts inside it and replicate the port selection outside in a silent cooling case - for the people who need or want silent performance while fixing the wireless issues of the current Mac mini design?
This would replace the $1099 i5 2018 Intel Mini which would be some uplift. We would need to see some benchmarks of the base 14" MacBook Pro against the Coffee Lake i5 from that Mini to see what angles Apple would take with it. Remember that the i5 with 16Gb RAM at Apple prices would retail for $1299 so Apple would need to justify the price hike.
also very disappointed with the lack of Mini update too, but think LeeW might well have a point about M1 Pro/Max shortages or even yield rates ... looking at the various "specs" of M1 Pro and M1 Max, there is a serious amount of CPU binning going on with the new chip(s) ...
M1 Pro 8-core, 14 core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core, 14 core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core, 16 core GPU
M1 Max 10-core, 24 core GPU
M1 Max 10-core, 32 core GPU
Looking at the launch graphics, the Max seems quite a bit larger than the Pro, so wouldn't be surprised if a single wafer is used to create both variants, but still if failure rates are high, yields will be low and there is a level of desperation to get built units of new MacBook Pros out the door, hence the lower spec offerings than in the presentation.
Also makes me wonder if there are two versions of M1 Pro out there ... true Pros that work perfectly and those with failed 4x memory busses that are repurposed M1 Max's as M1 Pros.
M1 Pro 8-core, 14 core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core, 14 core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core, 16 core GPU
M1 Max 10-core, 24 core GPU
M1 Max 10-core, 32 core GPU
Looking at the launch graphics, the Max seems quite a bit larger than the Pro, so wouldn't be surprised if a single wafer is used to create both variants, but still if failure rates are high, yields will be low and there is a level of desperation to get built units of new MacBook Pros out the door, hence the lower spec offerings than in the presentation.
Also makes me wonder if there are two versions of M1 Pro out there ... true Pros that work perfectly and those with failed 4x memory busses that are repurposed M1 Max's as M1 Pros.
Possible but unlikely as could introduce serious side effect crippling performance to below M1Pro level.
I guess the looked at what is most common to fail and created the SKUs accordingly, everything else gets tossed.
Just like with base M1 failing more then 1 GPU or anything else.
parts bining and disabling cores is a reality of chip provisioning and has been a thing for decades.
intel core chips are more than just family, slowing i9’s make an i7, disabling cores, cache and features make an i5 etc etc.
Knowing what little I know about ship fab, I would seriously doubt that they would use one wafer to do multiple chips. The 'Max' is a surface hog, and adding some of those would be a waste of space. I can't remember the failure rate of chips, and I'm sure it varies a bit, but they likely have two fab machines (likely many more) pumping out wafers with the same chip from each machine. One thing I noticed early on is that the 'newer' fab wafers look like a mobile home, in that they run the formica flooring and carpeting across multiple areas of the 'floor' for a single unit. I was surprised, in the early 80's to see perfectly good flooring running under the carpet and even the walls. They just stretch the plywood (if you're lucky) across multiples of the floor surfaces needed, and run the vinyl flooring across the whole lot, and then run carpet like a bandaid that also tends to run under walls. So early wafers had large gaps at the edges where there was no chance of having a workable chip, and today's fabs run the printing process all of the way across the surface of a wafer, producing fractions of a 'chip'. It might be wasteful in the short term, but they can crank out more chips, and don't need to alter their printing process.
It's fascinating how chips are made, but I would doubt that they would mix the lithography on a single wafer. Not meaning they don't, but they would have a large line of chips crowding out the smaller ones a little. *shrug*
And that failure rate. It's what killed that 'wafer scale integration' company Apple was a co-investor in. The wafers warped, and all other kinds of badness...
Sure, but they are all the same size and have the same RAM interface (+ the RAM gets added much later).
So how would a Max with a (half)failed RAM interface be turned into a Pro?
- Leaving on the unusable RAM chips (if the defect is detected after assembling the SoC)
- Leaving those spaces blank on a Max-SoC
- Creating a special SoC with space for a Max-die but only Pro level RAM
None of these make much sense.
There is no fundamental reason why they couldn't fill the borders of a round "Max" wafer with small chips (down to a basic A15 or even S7) to cut down dead space.
Wether that makes sense in terms of logistics/handling is another question.
I was hopng the rumors were true but I wasn’t surprised no announcement was made. It’s quite possible there isn’t going to be a Mini Pro and maybe the Mini will get updated next year with an updated M chip. I could see the Mac Pro getting the M Pro chips before the Mini.
I sold my M1 Mac Mini earlier this week thinking they would announce the "pro" version of the Mac Mini today, man I feel stupid. Now I'm in desperate need of a desktop. I'm considering buying the new MacBook Pro M1 Max and connecting it to an external monitor and just treating it like a desktop, is that stupid to use a laptop as a desktop? I don't need portability. Should I just wait for the new Mac Mini or iMac to come out? I'd be waiting until at least early next year right? I don't know if I can wait that long. I need a powerful computer to edit 8K video files on. Right now these new MacBooks are the most powerful Apple computers available, right?
I took the comment as mixing Pro and Max chips on one wafer. Possible, sure, but I'd wager that the Pro chip would outsell the Max, so mixing on wafers, hmm... Why? Who knows.
Regarding your earlier comment, a 'half failed Max' would be scrapped on the wafer. The cost of a chip is in the finishing of it. Testing the potential chip on the wafer, would pass/fail it quickly, and fails would be tossed. Going through the whole process to assemble the carrier and install RAM would add so much more cost to a failed chip. If they aren't tested on the wafer, they would be tested prior to being added to the memory assembly. (I haven't seen anything to make me believe that Apple would use a partially failed M1 class chip. Their yields must be high enough they don't worry about it. Who knows)
Any failure on a pre-assembled chip would be a complete waste of time to do anything with it but toss it. At that time, it's a printed slice of exotic chemicals. I seriously do not see a 'failed Max' becoming a 'Max' SOC. It makes no sense. Apple didn't announce the availability of an 'M1 Max Jr' chip.
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Mixing smaller chips with bigger ones would reduce the rate of wasted space on the wafer, in a sense putting 10 S7s into the corners not useable for Max chips would result in 10 "free" S7s.
That was kinda my point, reusing failed chips a lower SKU only makes sense if you have many that fail that way.
Doing that with a SKU that would require extra work to make it work only makes sense if you a really bigger number fail that way.
Hence we get the cut down version of the Pro and Max but no Max gutted down to a Pro.
First comment: I wouldn't think they would waste the time unless they needed to for some reason. Given that they 'print' the wafers with unusable chips on the edges, making the process be more aware of the edges of the wafer, and treating those areas differently would somewhat needlessly complicate the whole process. Wafers are cheap. The processing to final wafer isn't exactly cheap, but it's a lot cheaper than the processing to final assembly. Each wafer ahs to be sliced and anything that complicates that process could result in decreased yields. Imagine a pizza with sections of it that are smaller and have to be cut differently. Imagine the cost of a single slice of pizza 'costing you' $0.50, and the slice of pizza 'finished' costing people $250.00. Would you risk decreased yield? Plus the processing of the slivers of the wafer would likely end up being too complicated for automation. It would be far easier and cost effective to run wafers of all the same chips because they would be handled the same way. KISS, you need more Max, run more Max. Need more straight M1's, run more M1's. If the wafer cost were to dramatically skyrocket, I can see industry mixing chips on wafers, but that's not likely to happen as processing is far more expensive than the processing of the wafers.
But anyway...
Makes me wonder what a Max+ chip would be...
Tangent warning: I remember the wafer scale integration company. It was Trilogy Systems, and it was a HUGE face plant for the industry. Apple contributed money for its startup, and in the end, its unwinding coined the term 'crater' for such ventures that blew through so much investor money. Some of what they discovered in their attempts is in use today, but unfortunately most of it was a disaster. I had read that they were looking into actually stacking substrate chips in a package to allow for all of the ancillary components to be in one physical package, but even that eventually failed. Physics is the law, and sometimes laws really suck...
A Mac Mini with a Max chip, 8 TB ports, 10GBe, cooling duct attachment with a serious thermal management system. I might not be able to afford it, but that would be awesome! I can see that being a rack mounted super computer dwarfing the current leaders. I can dream...
Dunno, but I kinda remember reading somewhere that they are in short supply to, which if true would make "price" somewhat an afterthought.
As to "slice it different" thats really a question on how you would align the smaller chips relative to bigger one.
In end it might be something like "would increase the total number of S7 chips produced by 1%, wouldn't be enough to impact supply issues, not worth the hassle".
When a new Mac Mini wasn’t announced I started to think, maybe this event was about portable Mac’s, ie Laptops. When you start talking about the Mac Mini now your getting into the category of Desktop Mac’s including iMac’s and Mac Pro’s. Those have always been considered the powerhouse workhorses that, because they are stationary, can be larger and more powerful. I’m thinking, the M powered Desktop class of Mac’s will need more power and capability than any portable device and get bumped up to an M2, M2 Pro, M2 Max class of processor and also have even more Memory and GPU capabilities. I don’t think they’ll be announced until Spring 2022.
I live near a domestic wafer 'pig' manufacturer, and they seem to be really extremely busy. Don't know what with.
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Nothing you choose to do is stupid unless you think so... or it harms/kills you... especially "sticks & stones" stuff like the opinions of strangers. Who cares what other people think? There are pools of people who think everything Apple is stupid. There are pools who think everything non-Apple is stupid. You probably make some use of Apple and non-Apple things. What strangers think doesn't affect whatever benefit you get out of them. Trying to get an endorsement from a collective of strangers is a futile pursuit. There's always naysayers about EVERYTHING!
Lots of people use laptops as desktops exactly as you describe. There are even companies that make docks to simplify the hookups and provide some desktop-like ports too. Look at https://www.brydge.com/pages/docking-stations as only one example of this.
Yes, Max chip MBpros seem to be the most powerful Macs available (except maybe some kind of loaded Mac Pro). So power users wanting maximum Mac Power but not able to pay up for a loaded Pro should do exactly what you are thinking if they need a new Mac now.
All rumors say the "just wait" is probably until Spring at least. In Apple terms, Spring usually means MARCH/APRIL. That seems plausible based on Apple announcement cycles and rumors about next Apple announcement timings in the past. If you wait until Spring you may be able to get the guts of the new laptops in a new iMac or maybe the rumored Mac Mini Pro or perhaps Mac Pro Jr. Or maybe chip constraints drag on and a targeted Spring event becomes a WWDC event? Nobody but Apple knows.
I was thinking about doing the same, but I didn't sell my old machine. I'm going to wait, or not buy a Mac at all, who knows. I'm pretty ticked off at Apple right now. (Still like the iPads and the Watch!)
As for the most powerful computers available, only in the Mac laptop category, you can get more powerful computers in x86 land and the Mac Pro, of course.