'M1X' MacBook Pro set to arrive in 'several weeks'

2

Comments

  • Reply 21 of 55
    mpantone said:
    ppietra said:
    "high-end M1 chips"
    seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
    Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.
    This assumes that all Apple needs to do is to rev the CPU cores which does not seem like a wise assumption.

    Apple will make improvements on the GPU side AND the Neural Engine. I would expect the M1X (or whatever Apple ends up calling it) will have massive improvements on the latter. They are introducing more machine learning algorithms in macOS Monterey and my guess is that Apple will accelerate moving certain tasks to the ML cores as the transition to Apple Silicon continues. 

    These are performance improvements that aren't easily quantifiable in today's CPU benchmark suites. Looking at Apple's SoCs through the lens of common benchmarks will soon be obsolete unless those benchmark authors can capture ML performance in a way that is relevant to real world usage.
    Machine learning doesn’t solve math throughput and many other things, and Apple still needs to keep up with each new CPU ARM architecture version and evolve its microarchitecture to improve efficiency between all components.
    williamlondonnadriel
  • Reply 22 of 55
    Now we’ll see if they actually care about the environment or just using it to save money by removing needed accessories from the iPhone. 

     Bring on a usb c to MagSafe cord instead of making everyone buy new MagSafe cords (2021) just 4 years after making everyone buy new usb c cords (2016) and bricks, which was just 4 years after releasing MagSafe 2 (2012).
    williamlondonMplsPnadriel
  • Reply 23 of 55
    rcfa said:
    Not happy about the lack of touch bar.
    The Moment the revised edition was made with a separate physical ESC key, everything was fine.

    The only instance where the touch bar wasn’t an asset but a drawback was during a Boot Camp Windows recovery boot, when one was supposed to press an Fn key before the touch bar drivers to enable it acting as function keys was loaded, but that was easily fixed by temporarily attaching an external USB keyboard.

    If Apple does indeed do away with the touch bar entirely, and not just some entry level models, it’s a pity.
    Agreed. I like the touchbar and will miss it.
    williamlondonfastasleepspheric
  • Reply 24 of 55
    Being that the new iPhone is releasing, it makes sense that the next generation of M series is releasing as well. 

    They may want to take it slow with the numbering however and just call it m1x or m1 pro. But in reality, it will be what we’d think of as an M2 or M2x. It’s not just going to be an M1 extended. 
  • Reply 25 of 55
    tht said:
    ppietra said:
    Marvin said:
    ppietra said:
    "high-end M1 chips"
    seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
    Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.
    The iPhone has a lower thermal limit and they will all be manufactured on the same 5nm+ process. There were some tests posted of the A15:

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/06/iphone-13-a15-chip-performance-continues-dominance-over-android-rivals

    It showed around 15% gains vs A14, which is to be expected from the 5nm+ process.

    M1 is faster than A14:

    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1
    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=a14

    The equivalent M-series chip this year should be around 15% faster than M1 just like A15 vs A14.

    They could call it M2/M2x, they are marketing terms. It will likely ship October/November, which is a year since the M1 Air. They can refresh the Air with a 3TFLOP M2 chip (4/4-core CPU, 8-core GPU) and have a 6TFLOP M2x with 2x the CPU and GPU (8/4-core or 10/2-core CPU, 16-core GPU).

    There was a rumor about a 32-core GPU but they could just increase the clock speeds. M1 GPU is clocked at 1.28GHz, they could boost that to 1.6GHz (or higher) for an extra 25% performance boost to get a 7.5TFLOP 16-core GPU. It would need to be 32-core to come close to an Nvidia 3070 mobile but a 16-core like that would perform similar to a 3060. A 24-core GPU would be somewhere in between.

    A 27"+ iMac would be better with an M2x Duo option but a 7.5TFLOP GPU would be ok on the entry model, the current entry level is a 4TFLOP 5300 and goes up to a 7.6TFLOP 5700 XT. This way they could get away with 32GB RAM per chip and have 64GB on the higher iMac duo option.
    Single core centred tasks aren’t that affected by thermal throttling.
    A 15-20% performance improvement for the A15 would make it around 9% better than the M1, while the new TSMC process states only 5% performance increase at isopower.
    The rumored SoC going into the Macbook Pro 14&16 models are rumored to have 8 p-cores (performance cores), 2 e-cores and 16 GPU cores, as well as support for 32 GB of RAM, maybe 64 GB, which implies 2x the memory channels, and, probably has larger caches as well. These are not "M1" SoCs in lower end Macs and iPad Pros which have 4 p-cores, 4 e-cores and 8 GPU cores, nor are they A14 or A15 SoCs that go in iPhones and lower end iPads, which have 2 p-cores, 4 e-cores and 4 GPU cores, and lower memory performance and capacities.

    They are all physically different chips that are manufactured independently of each other. They may share the same CPU and GPU core microarchitectures, or they may have different microarchitectures between them, but all of them are designed for performance commensurate for the box they are going in. The larger the chip, and especially for Apple as this is new territory for them, the longer it takes to design and get it shipping, so that's why everyone thinks the transition to Apple Silicon will take longer for the higher performance machines. Not a surprise that the M1X seems to be taking so long. I do think the pandemic has added about 6 months to their schedule as well.

    So, an upcoming A15 or M2 with 1.15x single core performance over a M1X is not that meaningful when the M1X has 2x the performance cores. Same story on the GPU performance. People buy the more expensive machines because they have more performance, and the M1X will have above 80% to 100% more CPU and GPU performance than the M1 or M2 depending on how they set the clocks.
    It’s that meaningful when the m1x can have the new generation architecture with 2x the performance cores. All of the sudden, the gains go WAY up. Ridiculous to use last gen tech on computers that haven’t even come out yet when the new iPhone releases before they do. 
  • Reply 26 of 55
    Yes it does take time to tape out the interconnects even assuming that they make ZERO changes to the core micro architecture (there are always changes).  Then they need to create new masks, test the masks, and run a pre production test run.  But all this is moot—production for the M1X has already been done this spring.  They might have another batch coming, but what has already been produced has Firestorm and Icestorm cores.  We don’t even have a name for the A15 performance/efficiency cores, let alone any indication that they have been mapped into an M-series SoC.
    fastasleepspock1234spheric
  • Reply 27 of 55
    mcdavemcdave Posts: 1,927member
    ppietra said:
    "high-end M1 chips"
    seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
    Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.
    It's odd that the iPhone is the first product with the new architecture. Surely going forward it makes sense for the high-performance devices (Macs & iPad Pros) to sport the high-performance Apple Silicon.

    Maybe we should see M2X MacBook Pros unless they're on a 2-year refresh as opposed to annual for the iPhone but this wouldn't compete well with Intel/AMD who seem to have upped their game.

    Either way, I don't think core-counts are their plan. I think they'll improve audio & video capability with dedicated silicon not brute-force mathematics and negate the reason to have an 18+ core Xeon.
    9secondkox2argonaut
  • Reply 28 of 55
    rcfa said:
    Not happy about the lack of touch bar.
    The Moment the revised edition was made with a separate physical ESC key, everything was fine.

    The only instance where the touch bar wasn’t an asset but a drawback was during a Boot Camp Windows recovery boot, when one was supposed to press an Fn key before the touch bar drivers to enable it acting as function keys was loaded, but that was easily fixed by temporarily attaching an external USB keyboard.

    If Apple does indeed do away with the touch bar entirely, and not just some entry level models, it’s a pity.
    That's exactly my reaction.  I just hope Apple has something else up its sleeve rather than just going back to antiquated legacy F-keys.
    fastasleep
  • Reply 29 of 55
    ppietra said:
    tht said:
    ppietra said:
    Marvin said:
    ppietra said:
    "high-end M1 chips"
    seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
    Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.
    The iPhone has a lower thermal limit and they will all be manufactured on the same 5nm+ process. There were some tests posted of the A15:

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/06/iphone-13-a15-chip-performance-continues-dominance-over-android-rivals

    It showed around 15% gains vs A14, which is to be expected from the 5nm+ process.

    M1 is faster than A14:

    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1
    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=a14

    The equivalent M-series chip this year should be around 15% faster than M1 just like A15 vs A14.

    They could call it M2/M2x, they are marketing terms. It will likely ship October/November, which is a year since the M1 Air. They can refresh the Air with a 3TFLOP M2 chip (4/4-core CPU, 8-core GPU) and have a 6TFLOP M2x with 2x the CPU and GPU (8/4-core or 10/2-core CPU, 16-core GPU).

    There was a rumor about a 32-core GPU but they could just increase the clock speeds. M1 GPU is clocked at 1.28GHz, they could boost that to 1.6GHz (or higher) for an extra 25% performance boost to get a 7.5TFLOP 16-core GPU. It would need to be 32-core to come close to an Nvidia 3070 mobile but a 16-core like that would perform similar to a 3060. A 24-core GPU would be somewhere in between.

    A 27"+ iMac would be better with an M2x Duo option but a 7.5TFLOP GPU would be ok on the entry model, the current entry level is a 4TFLOP 5300 and goes up to a 7.6TFLOP 5700 XT. This way they could get away with 32GB RAM per chip and have 64GB on the higher iMac duo option.
    Single core centred tasks aren’t that affected by thermal throttling.
    A 15-20% performance improvement for the A15 would make it around 9% better than the M1, while the new TSMC process states only 5% performance increase at isopower.
    The rumored SoC going into the Macbook Pro 14&16 models are rumored to have 8 p-cores (performance cores), 2 e-cores and 16 GPU cores, as well as support for 32 GB of RAM, maybe 64 GB, which implies 2x the memory channels, and, probably has larger caches as well. These are not "M1" SoCs in lower end Macs and iPad Pros which have 4 p-cores, 4 e-cores and 8 GPU cores, nor are they A14 or A15 SoCs that go in iPhones and lower end iPads, which have 2 p-cores, 4 e-cores and 4 GPU cores, and lower memory performance and capacities.

    They are all physically different chips that are manufactured independently of each other. They may share the same CPU and GPU core microarchitectures, or they may have different microarchitectures between them, but all of them are designed for performance commensurate for the box they are going in. The larger the chip, and especially for Apple as this is new territory for them, the longer it takes to design and get it shipping, so that's why everyone thinks the transition to Apple Silicon will take longer for the higher performance machines. Not a surprise that the M1X seems to be taking so long. I do think the pandemic has added about 6 months to their schedule as well.

    So, an upcoming A15 or M2 with 1.15x single core performance over a M1X is not that meaningful when the M1X has 2x the performance cores. Same story on the GPU performance. People buy the more expensive machines because they have more performance, and the M1X will have above 80% to 100% more CPU and GPU performance than the M1 or M2 depending on how they set the clocks.

    I was quite explicit that I was talking about single core centred tasks. Those are not affected by the number of cores, and if the A15 adopts the new ARM v9 instruction set, things might get weirder, compared with an M1 based SoC! 
    The point of mentioning this is about public perception, in other words how this detail affects marketing, the risk of some backlash.
    Affects marketing? The general public doesn't understand much less care about any of these nerdy details.
    edited September 2021 williamlondon
  • Reply 30 of 55
    ppietra said:
    Marvin said:
    ppietra said:
    "high-end M1 chips"
    seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
    Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.
    The iPhone has a lower thermal limit and they will all be manufactured on the same 5nm+ process. There were some tests posted of the A15:

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/06/iphone-13-a15-chip-performance-continues-dominance-over-android-rivals

    It showed around 15% gains vs A14, which is to be expected from the 5nm+ process.

    M1 is faster than A14:

    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1
    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=a14

    The equivalent M-series chip this year should be around 15% faster than M1 just like A15 vs A14.

    They could call it M2/M2x, they are marketing terms. It will likely ship October/November, which is a year since the M1 Air. They can refresh the Air with a 3TFLOP M2 chip (4/4-core CPU, 8-core GPU) and have a 6TFLOP M2x with 2x the CPU and GPU (8/4-core or 10/2-core CPU, 16-core GPU).

    There was a rumor about a 32-core GPU but they could just increase the clock speeds. M1 GPU is clocked at 1.28GHz, they could boost that to 1.6GHz (or higher) for an extra 25% performance boost to get a 7.5TFLOP 16-core GPU. It would need to be 32-core to come close to an Nvidia 3070 mobile but a 16-core like that would perform similar to a 3060. A 24-core GPU would be somewhere in between.

    A 27"+ iMac would be better with an M2x Duo option but a 7.5TFLOP GPU would be ok on the entry model, the current entry level is a 4TFLOP 5300 and goes up to a 7.6TFLOP 5700 XT. This way they could get away with 32GB RAM per chip and have 64GB on the higher iMac duo option.
    rcfa said:
    Not happy about the lack of touch bar.
    The Moment the revised edition was made with a separate physical ESC key, everything was fine.

    The only instance where the touch bar wasn’t an asset but a drawback was during a Boot Camp Windows recovery boot, when one was supposed to press an Fn key before the touch bar drivers to enable it acting as function keys was loaded, but that was easily fixed by temporarily attaching an external USB keyboard.

    If Apple does indeed do away with the touch bar entirely, and not just some entry level models, it’s a pity.
    Every component adds to the cost of the laptop. When they introduced the touch bar, the prices went up around $300. They must have brought the costs down a bit since then as the 13" MBP with touchbar starts at $1299 now but the M1 Air and M1 13" MBP have the same spec except for the 8-core vs 7-core GPU, the Air is $999 and the MBP is $1299. Matching the chips, it's $1499 vs $1249 so the touch bar plus touch id has to be adding somewhere in the region of $250-300 to the retail price, which is far more cost than the functionality it offers.

    I've used laptops with and without the bar for a couple of years and the bar has only made things worse. I have one without a physical escape key and sometimes the bar removes the escape button and restarting the touch bar process shows it again.

    https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/379627/esc-button-from-touchbar-has-disappeared

    In theory the shortcuts should be more efficient for some things like emoji or menu items but they just haven't been for me, the buttons are pretty small, hard to read and require looking down at the bar. Touch id is nice but I would be happy to see standard buttons for audio, exposé and brightness again, especially if it brings the prices down by $100-200. It would be great to see the 16" start at $1999 like the pre-touchbar 15" models instead of $2399 because then that extra can go into getting 32GB RAM, which is far more useful for creative work.
    Single core centred tasks aren’t that affected by thermal throttling.
    A 15-20% performance improvement for the A15 would make it around 9% better than the M1, while the new TSMC process states only 5% performance increase at isopower.
    The M1 single core speed is faster than the A14 because it's clocked higher at 3.2 ghz.

    The base M1 MacBook Pro has more than a single GPU core and touchbar advantage over the Air ... it also has a 100 NIT brighter display and an active cooling system.

    The A15 will probably still be slower than the M1 since the M1 has four high performance cores, and the A15 two. Even if Apple manages to increase the core speeds by 20% again this year that still wouldn't compensate for doubling the number of high performance cores - or are we talking about single core speeds?
    williamlondon
  • Reply 31 of 55
    MplsPMplsP Posts: 4,038member
    rcfa said:
    Not happy about the lack of touch bar.
    The Moment the revised edition was made with a separate physical ESC key, everything was fine.

    The only instance where the touch bar wasn’t an asset but a drawback was during a Boot Camp Windows recovery boot, when one was supposed to press an Fn key before the touch bar drivers to enable it acting as function keys was loaded, but that was easily fixed by temporarily attaching an external USB keyboard.

    If Apple does indeed do away with the touch bar entirely, and not just some entry level models, it’s a pity.
    I've had a Touch Bar on my MBP for 5 years. I've gotten used to it but rarely do I find it useful for much more than what I could do with the plain function keys and on a regular basis my fingers will overshoot the number keys and touch the Touch Bar, triggering some action I don't want.

    Regardless, it's been an orphan 'product' since the day it was introduced. They put in in the MacBook pros but never added it to any of the desktops and never even expanded it to the entire line of laptops. It was often counterintuitive, made you look down at the keyboard to use it, and was prone to accidental inputs. (Oddly, though, when I intentionally touched the icon to change keyboard layouts it would fail to register more often than not.)

    The fact that they never expanded it to desktops meant developers were put in a quandary about how to implement it and couldn't use it for any major workflows lest they strand desktop users.  If you used both a desktop and a laptop you either had to continually adjust when going back and forth or never bothered to use it at all. About the only thing I really found it useful for was skipping through ads on YouTube. 

    When it was first introduced, a lot of people called it a gimmick. Turns out they were pretty much right. I'm glad to see Apple is saving the money and using for other things.
    edited September 2021 spock1234muthuk_vanalingamDetnatornadriel
  • Reply 32 of 55
    mattinozmattinoz Posts: 2,483member
    robaba said:
    I’ve been without a Mac at home now for several years—would love a M1X Mac Mini to do the kinds of 3d sculpting that my iPad Pro just isn’t up for.  Wonder if we’re going to see a three-tiered headless Mac set-up: Mini (Mn); Mini Plus (MnX); Pro (MnX chiplet).
    Saw a comment the other day about how Apple uses product numbers for iPhone not other products and wonder if they might transition to that for Macs and iPads with AS. 
    All the M1 Macs and iPadPros could stay next year and have both M1 & M2.  So MacMini M1 & M2 maybe even M3 on sale at the same time. To me If they did that it would make more sense to build a brand on each chip tier.

    If Apple are going to have to tap a Chiplet structure to cover the full range why not go there now?

    2 Processor chiplets  A(2+4) and M(4+4)
    Chiplets for special stuff - InHouse or Licensed Model, Afterburner FPGA, GPU options. 
    Then 
    "Southbridge" T Chiplets with unified memory controller and everything else needed to bring it together to suit a model. 


  • Reply 33 of 55
    mcdavemcdave Posts: 1,927member
    Now we’ll see if they actually care about the environment or just using it to save money by removing needed accessories from the iPhone. 

     Bring on a usb c to MagSafe cord instead of making everyone buy new MagSafe cords (2021) just 4 years after making everyone buy new usb c cords (2016) and bricks, which was just 4 years after releasing MagSafe 2 (2012).
    What are you talking about? I didn't have to buy a new USB-C cord or brick, they came with my M1 MBA. I do seem to have more than enough cables and bricks left over from the years.
    williamlondon
  • Reply 34 of 55
    ‘Arriving in several weeks’? Who writes these headlines? 

    Newsflash! Everything is arriving in several weeks, including flying cars. Rumors are are supposed to tell what’s arriving in the next few weeks. 
    williamlondon
  • Reply 35 of 55
    MplsP said:
    rcfa said:
    Not happy about the lack of touch bar.
    The Moment the revised edition was made with a separate physical ESC key, everything was fine.

    The only instance where the touch bar wasn’t an asset but a drawback was during a Boot Camp Windows recovery boot, when one was supposed to press an Fn key before the touch bar drivers to enable it acting as function keys was loaded, but that was easily fixed by temporarily attaching an external USB keyboard.

    If Apple does indeed do away with the touch bar entirely, and not just some entry level models, it’s a pity.
    I've had a Touch Bar on my MBP for 5 years. I've gotten used to it but rarely do I find it useful for much more than what I could do with the plain function keys and on a regular basis my fingers will overshoot the number keys and touch the Touch Bar, triggering some action I don't want.

    Regardless, it's been an orphan 'product' since the day it was introduced. They put in in the MacBook pros but never added it to any of the desktops and never even expanded it to the entire line of laptops. It was often counterintuitive, made you look down at the keyboard to use it, and was prone to accidental inputs. (Oddly, though, when I intentionally touched the icon to change keyboard layouts it would fail to register more often than not.)

    The fact that they never expanded it to desktops meant developers were put in a quandary about how to implement it and couldn't use it for any major workflows lest they strand desktop users.  If you used both a desktop and a laptop you either had to continually adjust when going back and forth or never bothered to use it at all. About the only thing I really found it useful for was skipping through ads on YouTube. 

    When it was first introduced, a lot of people called it a gimmick. Turns out they were pretty much right. I'm glad to see Apple is saving the money and using for other things.
    The Touch Bar may be somewhat of a gimmick and mostly orphaned, but it has one trick up its sleeve that has saved me days of my life: the video progress bar on the Touch Bar can be used to fast forward through most mandatory ads, which is super-convenient when e.g. watching online news. Unless there’s another way to do this, not having a Touch Bar will mean waiting for up to a minute until an ad is through. Doesn’t sound like much, but guesstimating that I use it to skip perhaps a dozen 30-second ads per day, over the five years I’ve had my MBP that adds up to 182.5 hours!!

    Edit: sorry MplsP, I just realized you mentioned this already for YouTube, another place where the Touch Bar saves a lot of time  -  my 182.5 hours are a gross underestimate, then!
    edited September 2021 nadriel
  • Reply 36 of 55
    I’m waiting for is improved graphics and 32GB RAM, to be more suitable for high resolution multi layer video compositing type of workflows.
  • Reply 37 of 55
    So my 16” MacBook is finally going to be significantly deprecated?  Oh well, it’s been a good run: nearly 2 years as the current model, and is still good for many things, especially productivity applications.

    I also use Windows a lot.  Probably more than macOS these days.  I play some PC games, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel so bad.  I just know that the new screen and a cooler, quieter, snappier, laptop with significantly longer battery life will give me hardware envy.

    It’ll be very interesting to see how certain Windows games perform in Parallels: which perform better; and which worse or don’t work at all compared to the previous MacBook running them natively in Boot Camp.  I’ve played Death Stranding in Windows and though the MacBook throttles heavily at times due to a flawed and insufficient cooling system (yeah, none of the big YouTube Apple shills like MKHD, iJustine etc mentioned that), it was still playable.
    edited September 2021 nadriel
  • Reply 38 of 55
    ppietra said:
    tht said:
    ppietra said:
    Marvin said:
    ppietra said:
    "high-end M1 chips"
    seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
    Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.
    The iPhone has a lower thermal limit and they will all be manufactured on the same 5nm+ process. There were some tests posted of the A15:

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/06/iphone-13-a15-chip-performance-continues-dominance-over-android-rivals

    It showed around 15% gains vs A14, which is to be expected from the 5nm+ process.

    M1 is faster than A14:

    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1
    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=a14

    The equivalent M-series chip this year should be around 15% faster than M1 just like A15 vs A14.

    They could call it M2/M2x, they are marketing terms. It will likely ship October/November, which is a year since the M1 Air. They can refresh the Air with a 3TFLOP M2 chip (4/4-core CPU, 8-core GPU) and have a 6TFLOP M2x with 2x the CPU and GPU (8/4-core or 10/2-core CPU, 16-core GPU).

    There was a rumor about a 32-core GPU but they could just increase the clock speeds. M1 GPU is clocked at 1.28GHz, they could boost that to 1.6GHz (or higher) for an extra 25% performance boost to get a 7.5TFLOP 16-core GPU. It would need to be 32-core to come close to an Nvidia 3070 mobile but a 16-core like that would perform similar to a 3060. A 24-core GPU would be somewhere in between.

    A 27"+ iMac would be better with an M2x Duo option but a 7.5TFLOP GPU would be ok on the entry model, the current entry level is a 4TFLOP 5300 and goes up to a 7.6TFLOP 5700 XT. This way they could get away with 32GB RAM per chip and have 64GB on the higher iMac duo option.
    Single core centred tasks aren’t that affected by thermal throttling.
    A 15-20% performance improvement for the A15 would make it around 9% better than the M1, while the new TSMC process states only 5% performance increase at isopower.
    The rumored SoC going into the Macbook Pro 14&16 models are rumored to have 8 p-cores (performance cores), 2 e-cores and 16 GPU cores, as well as support for 32 GB of RAM, maybe 64 GB, which implies 2x the memory channels, and, probably has larger caches as well. These are not "M1" SoCs in lower end Macs and iPad Pros which have 4 p-cores, 4 e-cores and 8 GPU cores, nor are they A14 or A15 SoCs that go in iPhones and lower end iPads, which have 2 p-cores, 4 e-cores and 4 GPU cores, and lower memory performance and capacities.

    They are all physically different chips that are manufactured independently of each other. They may share the same CPU and GPU core microarchitectures, or they may have different microarchitectures between them, but all of them are designed for performance commensurate for the box they are going in. The larger the chip, and especially for Apple as this is new territory for them, the longer it takes to design and get it shipping, so that's why everyone thinks the transition to Apple Silicon will take longer for the higher performance machines. Not a surprise that the M1X seems to be taking so long. I do think the pandemic has added about 6 months to their schedule as well.

    So, an upcoming A15 or M2 with 1.15x single core performance over a M1X is not that meaningful when the M1X has 2x the performance cores. Same story on the GPU performance. People buy the more expensive machines because they have more performance, and the M1X will have above 80% to 100% more CPU and GPU performance than the M1 or M2 depending on how they set the clocks.

    I was quite explicit that I was talking about single core centred tasks. Those are not affected by the number of cores, and if the A15 adopts the new ARM v9 instruction set, things might get weirder, compared with an M1 based SoC! 
    The point of mentioning this is about public perception, in other words how this detail affects marketing, the risk of some backlash.
    Affects marketing? The general public doesn't understand much less care about any of these nerdy details.
    Exactly because the general public doesn’t understand is what is the problem, because in todays age with social media these details can be spun out of proportion by a small number of people.
    edited September 2021 nadriel
  • Reply 39 of 55

    ppietra said:
    Marvin said:
    ppietra said:
    "high-end M1 chips"
    seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
    Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.
    The iPhone has a lower thermal limit and they will all be manufactured on the same 5nm+ process. There were some tests posted of the A15:

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/06/iphone-13-a15-chip-performance-continues-dominance-over-android-rivals

    It showed around 15% gains vs A14, which is to be expected from the 5nm+ process.

    M1 is faster than A14:

    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1
    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=a14

    The equivalent M-series chip this year should be around 15% faster than M1 just like A15 vs A14.

    They could call it M2/M2x, they are marketing terms. It will likely ship October/November, which is a year since the M1 Air. They can refresh the Air with a 3TFLOP M2 chip (4/4-core CPU, 8-core GPU) and have a 6TFLOP M2x with 2x the CPU and GPU (8/4-core or 10/2-core CPU, 16-core GPU).

    There was a rumor about a 32-core GPU but they could just increase the clock speeds. M1 GPU is clocked at 1.28GHz, they could boost that to 1.6GHz (or higher) for an extra 25% performance boost to get a 7.5TFLOP 16-core GPU. It would need to be 32-core to come close to an Nvidia 3070 mobile but a 16-core like that would perform similar to a 3060. A 24-core GPU would be somewhere in between.

    A 27"+ iMac would be better with an M2x Duo option but a 7.5TFLOP GPU would be ok on the entry model, the current entry level is a 4TFLOP 5300 and goes up to a 7.6TFLOP 5700 XT. This way they could get away with 32GB RAM per chip and have 64GB on the higher iMac duo option.
    rcfa said:
    Not happy about the lack of touch bar.
    The Moment the revised edition was made with a separate physical ESC key, everything was fine.

    The only instance where the touch bar wasn’t an asset but a drawback was during a Boot Camp Windows recovery boot, when one was supposed to press an Fn key before the touch bar drivers to enable it acting as function keys was loaded, but that was easily fixed by temporarily attaching an external USB keyboard.

    If Apple does indeed do away with the touch bar entirely, and not just some entry level models, it’s a pity.
    Every component adds to the cost of the laptop. When they introduced the touch bar, the prices went up around $300. They must have brought the costs down a bit since then as the 13" MBP with touchbar starts at $1299 now but the M1 Air and M1 13" MBP have the same spec except for the 8-core vs 7-core GPU, the Air is $999 and the MBP is $1299. Matching the chips, it's $1499 vs $1249 so the touch bar plus touch id has to be adding somewhere in the region of $250-300 to the retail price, which is far more cost than the functionality it offers.

    I've used laptops with and without the bar for a couple of years and the bar has only made things worse. I have one without a physical escape key and sometimes the bar removes the escape button and restarting the touch bar process shows it again.

    https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/379627/esc-button-from-touchbar-has-disappeared

    In theory the shortcuts should be more efficient for some things like emoji or menu items but they just haven't been for me, the buttons are pretty small, hard to read and require looking down at the bar. Touch id is nice but I would be happy to see standard buttons for audio, exposé and brightness again, especially if it brings the prices down by $100-200. It would be great to see the 16" start at $1999 like the pre-touchbar 15" models instead of $2399 because then that extra can go into getting 32GB RAM, which is far more useful for creative work.
    Single core centred tasks aren’t that affected by thermal throttling.
    A 15-20% performance improvement for the A15 would make it around 9% better than the M1, while the new TSMC process states only 5% performance increase at isopower.
    The M1 single core speed is faster than the A14 because it's clocked higher at 3.2 ghz.

    The base M1 MacBook Pro has more than a single GPU core and touchbar advantage over the Air ... it also has a 100 NIT brighter display and an active cooling system.

    The A15 will probably still be slower than the M1 since the M1 has four high performance cores, and the A15 two. Even if Apple manages to increase the core speeds by 20% again this year that still wouldn't compensate for doubling the number of high performance cores - or are we talking about single core speeds?
    I will repeat it again, SINGLE CORE performance.
    There are apps where having more CPU cores counts for little.
    williamlondonnadriel
  • Reply 40 of 55
    s.metcalf said:
    So my 16” MacBook is finally going to be significantly deprecated?  Oh well, it’s been a good run: nearly 2 years as the current model, and is still good for many things, especially productivity applications.

    I also use Windows a lot.  Probably more than macOS these days.  I play some PC games, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel so bad.  I just know that the new screen and a cooler, quieter, snappier, laptop with significantly longer battery life will give me hardware envy.

    It’ll be very interesting to see how certain Windows games perform in Parallels: which perform better; and which worse or don’t work at all compared to the previous MacBook running them natively in Boot Camp.  I’ve played Death Stranding in Windows and though the MacBook throttles heavily at times due to a flawed and insufficient cooling system (yeah, none of the big YouTube Apple shills like MKHD, iJustine etc mentioned that), it was still playable.
    Rosetta should be the correct answer to none native games. I have to admit I am curious how they will run
    Whoops, sorry, you said Windows....

    My macbook pro (16") throttles whenever the ambient temp goes over 80F. So that is quite annoying...
    edited September 2021
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