I believe that they will introduce a new line of processors for the desktop line of Macs. Maybe the M in M1 stands for mobile? If so, maybe they come up with a D series for desktops.
With the chip shortages everywhere, I wouldn’t bet anything will be available until June except for airtags if they release it.
M = Mac. Mac mini with M1 is already out, so why would it mean mobile? The A series is their mobile chip.
I don’t understand why people are overthinking the names/numeration of the M series. Maybe the next one is M1X. Maybe it’s M2. Who cares?
I believe that they will introduce a new line of processors for the desktop line of Macs. Maybe the M in M1 stands for mobile? If so, maybe they come up with a D series for desktops.
With the chip shortages everywhere, I wouldn’t bet anything will be available until June except for airtags if they release it.
The M means Mac. Apple's mobile processor is the A-series. They should have a more capable desktop variant of the Apple Silicon chip, one that supports more than 16GB RAM, more than 2TB storage, more than two USB ports, and hopefully discrete graphics (discrete graphics cards are still significantly faster than the M1). The current iMac supports 128GB RAM, 8TB storage, 4 USB/2 USB-C Thunderbolt. Apple won't downgrade the iMac to the M1 limitations.
I think it's highly unlikely the will use discrete graphics cards, especially not anything from AMD/NVIDA. While "integrated graphics" have a bad name, the M1s GPU is something entirely different in design in the way that it shares unified memory with the other processing cores. Moving to a "discrete" card in the traditional sense would undermine that, so anything from AMD/NVIDA are likely off the table. I could see Apple creating some sort of off die module but it would have to access the same unified memory space on a high speed bus.
As it stands now the M1's GPU is 3x faster than INETL's i7 GPU and doubling that would put the M1x somewhere in between the M5300 and M5500 AMD GPUs in the MacBook Pro, which is fast enough for the low and middle tier iMacs, unless they can be clocked up. In the end, we'll likely to see several tiers of SOCs (M1, M1x, M1ex with different memory and GPU configs) unless they can find a way to link modules with the unified memory.
In short, I cannot see them abandoning unified memory since it's one of the things that makes the SOC so fast, power efficient and inexpensive to manufacture.
This is a really great article that explains the advantage of the new architecture.
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I don’t understand why people are overthinking the names/numeration of the M series. Maybe the next one is M1X. Maybe it’s M2. Who cares?
As it stands now the M1's GPU is 3x faster than INETL's i7 GPU and doubling that would put the M1x somewhere in between the M5300 and M5500 AMD GPUs in the MacBook Pro, which is fast enough for the low and middle tier iMacs, unless they can be clocked up. In the end, we'll likely to see several tiers of SOCs (M1, M1x, M1ex with different memory and GPU configs) unless they can find a way to link modules with the unified memory.
In short, I cannot see them abandoning unified memory since it's one of the things that makes the SOC so fast, power efficient and inexpensive to manufacture.
This is a really great article that explains the advantage of the new architecture.
Why Is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast?
https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-3262b158cba2