The A13: 6 cores. The A14 is widely rumored to have 8. The MacBook chips won't be mobile chips like the A12/A13/A14. They are going to be desktop and server class chips with 12 cores.
We don't know the core breakdown ...
A 12 core SOC, 8 high performance and 4 efficiency, has been rumored since April:
People seem to forget that AMD has been writing drivers for Metal and Metal 2 since their inception. They know Apple's accelerated graphics stack, Metal Frameworks, Core Image, CoreGraphics, etc. and know OpenCL better than Apple and has carried that torch to OpenCL 3.0.
Apple knows it isn't going to best AMD laptops but since they never ``used'' AMD laptop APUs they'll only compare themselves to Intel. They'll accept 90% performance of Intel and talk about the future, but ignore the fact they'll be 30% behind AMD before Zen 3 and will never leap frog them because they chose ARM as their future.
Seeing as they had to pay Samsung $950 Million for missing their contractual agreements with them I think they'd have been better off investing that into a growing relationship with AMD for High End and ARM for general Consumer.
Apple will never surpass AMD's roadmap and CPU/GPU performance designs, but they have never intended to do so. They just want to be competitive for Intel until some years later when ARM runs out of steam and they'll switch over again to x86 down the road.
What I learned at NeXT and what we brought to Apple was that the CPU architecture is hot swap capable if you design the OS correctly. We had HP PA-RISC, Sun SPARC, Motorola 68k and x86. We would have had DEC Alpha as well. We then added PowerPC and the latest is ARM.
PA-RISC died in 2005. SPARC is dead except for Fujitsu Server designs. Moto 68k is long since dead. Alpha is long since dead. PowerPC (Power ISA) is server and moving forward.
ARM and x86 are both moving forward. OS X works on both. Eventually, a successor must arise from one or both.
AMD Zen 4 design is nearly complete and will be by this year with samples in the Spring of 2021. AMD's next roadmap will also be revealed next Spring. Typically that means four or five more generations. RNDA 2.0 GPGPUs are about to arrive along with CDNA 1.0 for the Server Machine Learning/AI world.
Zen 4 is DDR5 and beyond, along with PCIe 5.0/6.0 [we know 5.0 minimally].
You’re gonna use an eight-core with unknown power consumption to compete with a ultra low-power 15W variant.
Comments
good. Makes me looks like an AMD hater.