Report: Apple Silicon iMac Featuring Desktop Class 'A14T' Chip Coming First Half of 2021

amartinez1660 said:
It’s ok, I got a 2020 27” recently. Yours will last long and it will serve its purpose for years to come, they are truly great machines. Plus you might save yourself from the potential 1st gen quirks if any.

I’ll be buying popcorns nevertheless, haven’t been excited for technology like this in a very very long time. Let alone for something that I won’t probably even buy soon.
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My concern with the next 27” iMac is that the memory may not be user upgradable
incoherent_1 said:
The concern, at least for me, isn’t the CPU. It’s almost certain the new products will come with a redesigned form factor. As an owner of a 2016 MBP (Gen 1 of the current design) I can say Apple burned a lot of its customers.

Mine has been in for repairs at least 5 times — the keyboard was the main issue, but one of the batteries was also faulty (because they had to add a new one every time the keyboard was replaced), and the coating on the screen was defective and created marks all over it (entire screen had to be replaced). The repairs were covered by the warranty and recall but the time and productivity lost was notable.
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one 1st gen Mac laptop I had was in for repairs over 6 months of the firsts year I had it, another was in twice for the keyboard, soo totally get the reticence to plumb for 1st gen
 
Northgrove said:
I'm a little surprised the Mac mini isn't going ARM early on given its lower usage in the home and industry. Sounds like a good and fairly low-impact early product for this. They have some balls to begin with laptops of all things!
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As it could make sense to start with the Mac Mini for risk minimizing reasons, it wouldn't on the side of making the most out of the now available non-desktop Apple Silicone advantages since Mac Mini seems not to have thermal issues or need for lower power consumption.

And yes. Apple has shown their b.. guts regularly in the past.
 
rmanbike said:
And along with these new silicon chips will be a desktop or laptop where NOTHING is upgradable, what you purchase is what your stuck with!
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This'll also suck for IT/repair shops because non upgradeable means extremely hard to repair.
 
I don’t really understand how ARM works. Are these chips basically module so they can keep stacking on additional modules as they see fit? Is the desktop cpu basically just sharing the A14 name but completely different due to all its modules?
 
FlyingTexan said:
I don’t really understand how ARM works. Are these chips basically module so they can keep stacking on additional modules as they see fit? Is the desktop cpu basically just sharing the A14 name but completely different due to all its modules?
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These are all “system on chips” (SoCs). That is a single chip which has an entire computer on it - the CPU, GPU, often also the RAM, and all the interconnects. In a PC, those are separate chips and you can mix and match them, but in an SoC they are all integrated.

That all lowers power consumption a lot, and since you know those components are paired for life, you can build all kinds of custom units (so not just a CPU and GPU - maybe also a machine learning coprocessor or whatever) and integrate it all more tightly together, for better performance than you get by bundling off-the-shelf parts together.

SoCs are not exclusive to ARM. The next-generation consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series X) use SoCs with Intel-compatible CPUs and desktop-class GPUs supplied by AMD. In their case, they integrate custom IO units with hardware decompression, which gives them amazing SSD performance. Thats the future that SoCs enable.

Apple’s SoCs include their ARM-based CPU cores with its Secure Enclave and other customisations, the Neural Engine, Image processors, and a huge number of other custom units. Those are the A-Series chips.
 
I certainly won’t be first to jump on this generation. I’m kinda torn though because I plan on purchasing an iMac next summer or fall and I’m wondering if I should be on the safe side and go with the last generation 27 inch Intel iMac or the second generation Apple Silicon iMac (would technically be first generation of the larger model they plan to launch next year).
 
dmylrea said:
It's gonna suck when your new iPhone 13 with A15 is faster than the iMac you bought a few months back with A14X!

Now we have to worry whether our iPhone is faster than our desktop? I see it already...
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Well... the A14 has about the same level of performance of the A12X.

This means that if the pace of improvement remains the same your A14X iMac will be slower than your iPhone after 3 generations, or 3 years.

Sounds pretty acceptable to me, to be honest. If you care about performance, you'll probably want to upgrade your Mac every 3 years anyway.

Who needs to worry is people that will be stuck on x86 processors. Soon even their fastest option for a new computer will be slower than the base iPhone SOC.
 
I'm due to upgrade my late 2012 27" iMac - but 3"s is too much screen real estate to give up. Guess I'll wait for the 27 - P.S. Big Sur will have to wait as well, since late 2012 is not supported and Apple site will not let me even see Big Sur Beta - Guess it knows what running on...
 
Sakurambo-kun said:
It'll be interesting to see how they perform. Current iMacs are very slow for desktop PCs, especially on the GPU front, and they often throttle due to poor cooling. When you look at the cooling required for the likes of the i9 and Zen 3, as well as the 3080 and 3090 it's obvious silicon with performance of anywhere near that level are not in Apple's sights.
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the 2020 model has very descent GPU and CPU configurations
 
I bought the 2019 iMac as I got tired of waiting for a new one. It's become my workhorse since I've been home due to the pandemic.

Hoping I get a long life (and support) out of the machine before joining the ARM adventure. Let's hope it lives up to the hype — I dread what the price tag will be though.

Perhaps a new era for gaming awaits, too?
 
Not sure how I feel about buying a $2000 imac with the same processor a snot nosed 12 year old carries around with him on his iphone 12. Yes, I realize the T means more horsepower and magic powder, its just the visual that gets me...
 
soyazul said:
the 2020 model has very descent GPU and CPU configurations
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Agreed. The 2020 model has the fastest consumer chips from both Intel and AMD. I don't even consider the 3080 or 3090 a viable option with how absolutely scarce they are. Apple doesn't need to compete with those right now.
 
FlyingTexan said:
I don’t really understand how ARM works. Are these chips basically module so they can keep stacking on additional modules as they see fit? Is the desktop cpu basically just sharing the A14 name but completely different due to all its modules?
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These processors are called SoC‘s (systems-on-chip). On one piece of silicon, there is a traditional CPU (containing multiple Arm cores, caches, etc.), and then there are on-chip buses that connect that to other on-chip modules, such as a GPU, machine learning cores, network-support circuitry, etc.

So two different A14 chips may share the same design for their CPU cores, but differ in the NUMBER of cores, different GPUs, etc.
 
Sakurambo-kun said:
Faster than Intel eh?

I hope you have a hat, as I'll be asking you to eat it. These are CPUs intended for telephones. The idea of putting them into desktop PCs is frankly absurd.
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Two fast + four slow cores beat a quad core iMac. I personally expect 4+4 cores beating most non-pro Macs, and 8+4 core beating anything currently non-pro into a pulp is a possibility.
 
manu chao said:
Under which rock have you been living? There are tons of benchmarks of the A12X (in the 2018 iPad Pro) that show that processor to be faster than a lot of laptop processors, in particular naturally compared to 2018 laptops.
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I think three years ago or so Apple announced that their fastest iPhone back then ran faster than about 90% of all non-Apple laptops sold. Of course 90% of all laptops have rather low-end chips, but then iPhones today are _a lot_ faster than those three years ago.

And the Silicon chips are _not_ designed to go into an iPhone. You can take an iPhone chip and get passable performance, but the Silicon chips will have at least twice the cores, and significantly higher clock speed.
 
springsup said:
there is a transition technology, so Intel apps will still work, but don’t forget the biggest thing: iOS Apps will run natively on Apple Silicon Macs.

So overall this is going to be a big win for app availability.
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I expect that I will have to do some extra work to support mouse, menus, command keys, and support users who want a desktop app and a mobile app working together.
 
Sunshower said:
It will be really interesting to see how Apple differentiates the different models with the different AS chips. I could imagine the A14, A14X and A14T for Mac likely having greater power draw than the iPad/iPhone versions.
I'd imagine this could be a likely scenario:
MacBook/MacBook Air 12/13' - A14, 8/16gb ram - £999
MacBook Pro 13/14' - A14X, 16/32gb ram - £1,499
MacBook Pro 16' - A14X/T (mobile equivalent) + Apple GPU, 16/32/64gb ram - £1,999+
iMac 24/30(ish)' - A14T + Apple GPU, 16/32/64+ - £1,799+
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Apple stated that the Macs will get their own family of SoCs so unlikely to see basic A14 or even A14X in them.
 
currocj said:
Not sure how I feel about buying a $2000 imac with the same processor a snot nosed 12 year old carries around with him on his iphone 12. Yes, I realize the T means more horsepower and magic powder, its just the visual that gets me...
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I don't care much about what snot nosed 12 year olds are doing. Not since I was thirteen.
 
firewood said:
Mini's are already ARM. Developers have them.

Weak. Why not 10,000 cores so you can run your video filters faster than one of the Top 500 supercomputer in the National Labs? You could put the cooling tower in your back yard!
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Whats a point of using apple silicon in desktop and using 5nm chips if they still cannot have a lot of cpu cores ?
 
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