Apple Silicon transition may hit its two-year target with 2022 Mac Pro
Apple's plans to complete its two-year Apple Silicon transition will still be on time, a report claims, with 2022 Mac launches expected to include an updated MacBook Air and a new Mac Pro.
On launching Apple Silicon, Apple advised it was on a tight two-year schedule to transition away from Intel processors to chips of its own designs. Given the first M1 Macs landed in November 2020, Apple has until November 2022 to stay on target.
In Sunday's "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman believes Apple will "barely hit its two-year timeline" for Apple Silicon. While the time may be fairly tight, it also appears that Apple is preparing to complete some of the trickier and higher-performance launches towards the end of the period.
According to Gurman, "M1X" Macs are on the way in the "coming months," possibly coinciding with Apple's typical fall announcements. The rumored updated Mac mini will apparently arrive "soon after that."
Into 2022, the full transition will take place "by the end of next year," and will include a MacBook Air with MagSafe support. Other rumors have put forward an updated MacBook Air, including different enclosure color options, and even the use of mini LED screen technology.
However, the main launch towards the end could be a new Mac Pro.
Expected to be smaller in size, roughly half that of the current Mac Pro, the Apple Silicon version is anticipated to use chips with higher core counts, possibly including 20-core and 40-core variants.
Gurman believes rumors about a final Intel Mac Pro are true, with one more apparently planned for launch. Rumors from July point to a Xeon W-3300 family CPU being used in an update, in parallel to Apple Silicon.
Read on AppleInsider
On launching Apple Silicon, Apple advised it was on a tight two-year schedule to transition away from Intel processors to chips of its own designs. Given the first M1 Macs landed in November 2020, Apple has until November 2022 to stay on target.
In Sunday's "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman believes Apple will "barely hit its two-year timeline" for Apple Silicon. While the time may be fairly tight, it also appears that Apple is preparing to complete some of the trickier and higher-performance launches towards the end of the period.
According to Gurman, "M1X" Macs are on the way in the "coming months," possibly coinciding with Apple's typical fall announcements. The rumored updated Mac mini will apparently arrive "soon after that."
Into 2022, the full transition will take place "by the end of next year," and will include a MacBook Air with MagSafe support. Other rumors have put forward an updated MacBook Air, including different enclosure color options, and even the use of mini LED screen technology.
However, the main launch towards the end could be a new Mac Pro.
Expected to be smaller in size, roughly half that of the current Mac Pro, the Apple Silicon version is anticipated to use chips with higher core counts, possibly including 20-core and 40-core variants.
Gurman believes rumors about a final Intel Mac Pro are true, with one more apparently planned for launch. Rumors from July point to a Xeon W-3300 family CPU being used in an update, in parallel to Apple Silicon.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
During the WWDC 2020 keynote, Johny Srouji explained that Apple Silicon's focus was performance-per-watt. Not benchmarks. He pounded this concept again and again during his segment.
Because of Intel's ineptitude in advancing their process technology, they had to throw efficiency out the window to keep up with AMD. So Rocket Lake (10 nm Ice Lake architecture backported to the 14 nm node) generates massive amounts of heat and tops out at 8 cores. Hell, Intel even had to come up with a new platform which will probably be abandoned after one generation.
Intel can beat Apple on single-core performance but at a massive power load. However that's not the sole usage case. Apple's big.LITTLE implementation on M-series SoCs is superior to the competition and for the PC market, there is no competition yet from Intel nor AMD.
Apple has improved price-per-watt to the point that ASi can beat Intel handily. That's why they shipped ASi last fall. They have been working on this for years and have been advancing faster than Intel.
This is same thing that happened with their M-series SoCs. Apple's performance-per-watt on mobile silicon has advanced faster than their competitors.
As mentioned by KTR, the hardware-software integration is better. This includes that managing big.LITTLE both on PC silicon and mobile silicon, the latter has provided Apple many years of experience. My guess is that Apple has been running macOS on A-series SoCs as well as prototype M-series SoCs on Macs for YEARS in their labs.
And Apple is really just getting started with machine learning on Macs. I expect Apple to pull ahead over the next couple of years when considering multiple tasks and usage cases as more tasks get handled by the Neural Engine instead of having the CPU cores do it. You wouldn't see this superiority in a standard artificial benchmark. Those benchmarks don't include machine learning because AMD and Intel currently don't have any machine learning silicon in their CPUs.
Apple does not design their CPUs and GPUs so they can be King of Cinebench or King of Furmark.
New hardware will require new operating system support and based on their development cycle, that's the most likely scenario. Apple basically likes to have their holiday product lineup shipping by mid-November so a late Q4 delivery is unlikely (in recent years only the low-volume Mac Pro shipped late in Q4).
It’s been all over the news the last few days. Don’t you read news.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/dell-cant-sell-some-alienware-gaming-pcs-in-6-us-states-anymore
Is the 2 year goal from the time they announced the transition or from the date they introduced the first M1 MacBook? I suppose Apple gets to decide that, either way I see no reason so doubt their ability to achieve the goal and no reason to complain because they haven’t announced everything only one year in.
I expect that the 16" MBP will have 8/10-core CPU plus 16/32-core GPU and these are also suitable for the iMac and would be around 40-60W.
The normal 27" iMac can handle 300W, iMac Pro 500W so they can 2x-4x the above and this would be within 150W/300W. A 40TFLOP 300W chip in an iMac would make some fan noise at max load, the <150W part would be very quiet. Not many tasks will be able to max out a 40TFLOP chip so they could decide to only put it in the iMac and no longer bother with the Mac Pro, especially considering the massive efficiency boost on 3nm.
Putting a 300W chip in a Mac Pro enclosure would run pretty quietly at max load and it would make sense to have the highest-end chip exclusive to the Mac Pro. But the size of this target audience has to be around 50k units per year now. This would likely grow at a lower price point but it's a minuscule target audience vs the other models.
By transitioning the 27" iMac and 16" MBP this year, they will have transitioned over 99.5% of their customer base well within their self-imposed timeline.
The remaining <0.5% of the customer base is a small amount of people and it would be worth waiting for 3nm parts for the highest-end to make it perform as well as possible within the significantly lower power profile and even then it's still within the timeframe Apple estimated, even with the chip shortages and pandemic acting against them.
Intel will be able to survive because Windows is not going anywhere and non-Apple ARM chips are way behind Apple. Eventually they will get better and unless Intel can learn to develop ARM chips successful they will be left behind.