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

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Comments

  • Reply 41 of 55
    I guess I would be disappointed by any new mac that cannot run VirtualBox, Windows 10, Windows 11 and Linux variants. As such, I take out the old Mac mini Server (late 2012) and upgraded it to macOS Catalina, upgraded storage to SSD and kept 16GB memory. Wow, amazing, now I have everything I needed. If, M1X MBP can migrate everything from my revived MMS, I’m glad to keep it, or I’ll return it back to Apple.
    williamlondon
  • Reply 42 of 55
    zoetmbzoetmb Posts: 2,654member
    geekmee said:
    Regardless, we are overlooking the most important part of this report…
    Once again, Apple has taken all the oxygen out of the room!!
    I think that once the M1x Macs drop there will be a lot of sleepless nights for those manufacturers on the x86 side of the fence.

    I was just watching an Intel ad on YouTube where some supposed creative was saying he gamed and created and needed a lot of graphics power which he couldn't get on a Mac <snicker>.

    A lot of those ads just won't work any more, and I expect to see pretty amazing graphics performance - without the Wintel copying graphic workload overhead - as well as some impressive battery life.
    I disagree regardless of the level of the new Macs performance.  Users lock into hardware brands the way they lock into a political party or religion.  Once they choose to believe something, they stick with it.  And a very large percentage of Wintel users are in offices where users don’t get to choose their own machines and where bulk buys of Dells or whatever are relatively economical. 

    Macs are still perceived by many as overpriced and Apple long ago lost its reputation as “it just works”.  

    If you think about what most  users do on their computers: email, social media, photo organization and maybe some post processing, and streaming, with a relatively few doing high intensity tasks, the performance granted by the new processors  isn’t needed by most, with the potential exception of better battery life. 

    IMO, the new machines might get more people to upgrade their existing Macs sooner, but I don’t think they’re going to attract many converts.

    Unfortunately, Mac sales are becoming an ever smaller minority of Apple’s overall business.  

    JMO.  
    williamlondonnadriel
  • Reply 43 of 55
    ppietra said:
    that is just your assumption!
    There is nothing that stops Apple from having a new architecture ready for both kinds of SoC - they basically did that last year, one month between launches is nothing. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have the resources to develop more than one SoC at the same time, they did it a few times with the X series SoC.
    And there is no proof that they actually made a M1X, or thought about using a M1X, it could have been an M2X all along.

    The weird part is launching a new Mac CPU that is already outdated by a new iPhone SoC, where some software will have better performance on an iPhone than on a brand new high end MacBook Pro.
    Yeah, I agree.  The big question is what's behind the delay with getting the MacBook Pro's to market?  Is it something unrelated like availability of mini-LED screens or is it based on Apple's plans for newer cores.  The A15 is likely to be based on ARMv9.  It's very possible that Apple is waiting for these cores for their higher end machines as well.  If we would have had laptops in June or July, I would have expect an M1x (A14 core) based machine.  Given that we're now expecting something after the A15 is released, I'm thinking it's likely the higher end laptops will be something more like an M2x.  At least it should be at this point.

    Marvin said:
    No, it's not.  If you'll notice even in the links you provide, the M1 based devices are clocked higher than the A14 mostly because of the form factor they ship in.  The M1 has the same core performance as the A14.  In a laptop or a Mac mini, you can afford to clock it higher as you have a bigger battery and better heat dissipation.  If Apple were to ship an A14 in a Mac mini for example, they could clock that higher as well.
    williamlondonspock1234nadriel
  • Reply 44 of 55
    zoetmb said:
    I disagree regardless of the level of the new Macs performance.  Users lock into hardware brands the way they lock into a political party or religion.  Once they choose to believe something, they stick with it.  And a very large percentage of Wintel users are in offices where users don’t get to choose their own machines and where bulk buys of Dells or whatever are relatively economical. 

    Macs are still perceived by many as overpriced and Apple long ago lost its reputation as “it just works”.  

    If you think about what most  users do on their computers: email, social media, photo organization and maybe some post processing, and streaming, with a relatively few doing high intensity tasks, the performance granted by the new processors  isn’t needed by most, with the potential exception of better battery life. 

    IMO, the new machines might get more people to upgrade their existing Macs sooner, but I don’t think they’re going to attract many converts.

    Unfortunately, Mac sales are becoming an ever smaller minority of Apple’s overall business.  

    JMO.  
    The facts don't support your opinions.  The M1 chip has generated a lot of buzz throughout the industry.  Apple has taken a fresh look at what's possible with PC architecture and has produced results that have not been matched by Intel or AMD.  Apple still needs to demonstrate that they can scale this approach to higher end devices, but there is little doubt that they can. 

    As for Mac sales, I suggest you try looking at actual numbers and see how Mac sales have spiked rather dramatically over the past year.

    https://sixcolors.com/post/2021/07/apple-posts-81b-quarterly-results-charts/
    fastasleepspock1234
  • Reply 45 of 55
    XedXed Posts: 2,519member
    zoetmb said:
    IMO, the new machines might get more people to upgrade their existing Macs sooner, but I don’t think they’re going to attract many converts.

    Unfortunately, Mac sales are becoming an ever smaller minority of Apple’s overall business.
    Is that really a concern when it's still a major profit center, a growing profit center, and pinnacle to SW developers for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS? If this was something that wasn't important to Apple would have invested so much time and money in the M-series chips for the Macs? I don't see the Mac going anywhere but up.

    PS: I do think this move is going to yield better financial results for switchers than their old Switchers and Get A Mac campaigns starting 2 decades back. Being able to run iOS/iPadOS apps natively on an M-series Mac could be very attractive to buyers.
    spock1234
  • Reply 46 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.
    If rumors are correct, I'll be getting a 16" with 32 GB RAM, 32 Cores, and a 2 TB SSD.

    My hope is that running ARM Win under Parallels, Win games will run at full resolution using Win x86 translation with Parallels intercepting DirectX calls and routing them to Metal. The standard Win bottleneck of placing requests in main memory, compressing them, transmitting them over PCIe, receiving them into graphics memory, decompressing them, and then executing them will be mostly eliminated allowing Apple Silicon GPUs to punch waayyy above their weight.

    Well, that's my hope anyway ☺️.
    williamlondonfastasleepspock1234
  • Reply 47 of 55
    techconc said:
    zoetmb said:
    I disagree regardless of the level of the new Macs performance.  Users lock into hardware brands the way they lock into a political party or religion.  Once they choose to believe something, they stick with it.  And a very large percentage of Wintel users are in offices where users don’t get to choose their own machines and where bulk buys of Dells or whatever are relatively economical. 

    Macs are still perceived by many as overpriced and Apple long ago lost its reputation as “it just works”.  

    If you think about what most  users do on their computers: email, social media, photo organization and maybe some post processing, and streaming, with a relatively few doing high intensity tasks, the performance granted by the new processors  isn’t needed by most, with the potential exception of better battery life. 

    IMO, the new machines might get more people to upgrade their existing Macs sooner, but I don’t think they’re going to attract many converts.

    Unfortunately, Mac sales are becoming an ever smaller minority of Apple’s overall business.  

    JMO.  
    The facts don't support your opinions.  The M1 chip has generated a lot of buzz throughout the industry.  Apple has taken a fresh look at what's possible with PC architecture and has produced results that have not been matched by Intel or AMD.  Apple still needs to demonstrate that they can scale this approach to higher end devices, but there is little doubt that they can. 

    As for Mac sales, I suggest you try looking at actual numbers and see how Mac sales have spiked rather dramatically over the past year.

    https://sixcolors.com/post/2021/07/apple-posts-81b-quarterly-results-charts/
    It wasn't long after the M1 devices were released when the M1 Mac Mini became the most popular PC in Japan.

    There are a lot of switchers - especially the technically adept who aren't deeply embedded in the Windows legacy ecosystem - who have switched to M1 machines due to their price/performance/power efficiency advantages.

    Others have held off for a model with more oomph ... which the M1's eight high performance cores and up to 32 GPUs should provide.

    Apple Silicon is just plain faster and snappier than x86 models unless the clocks are boosted waaayyy up which exponentially increases the heat produced (which then must be removed with heroic cooling solutions). The places where M1 lose out is when you need lots of graphic power and multiple CPUs for slogfests for tasks which can be easily multithreaded (like transcoding). M1x should cure some of that, adding four more locomotives to the train and doubling or quadrupling the graphics performance.

    For zillions of discrete tasks (like file servers) the CPUs with a zillion cores will continue to dominate - but that's not where Apple Silicon seeks to compete.

    There will always be Windows users who won't or can't switch - enterprise Microsoft MCSEs and those who need Windows and all its underlaying baggage - but a lot of the more OS agnostic have been coming over in droves.
    williamlondonspock1234
  • Reply 48 of 55
    ppietra said:
    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.
    I disagree. The point was, the vast majority of people buying Macs do not care if there is a tiny hamster running in a wheel inside much less what ARM v9 or a nanometer is. Most of those that even know what Apple Silicon is don't care about the technical differences between the A14 or A15 is or the M-variants and only know it's new and fast. Anything spun out of proportion is argued about by bleating neckbeards in tech forums and are largely unheard by 99% of people buying Macs, hence not a marketing problem.
    Detnatormuthuk_vanalingamStrangeDays
  • Reply 49 of 55
    ivanh said:
    I guess I would be disappointed by any new mac that cannot run VirtualBox, Windows 10, Windows 11 and Linux variants. As such, I take out the old Mac mini Server (late 2012) and upgraded it to macOS Catalina, upgraded storage to SSD and kept 16GB memory. Wow, amazing, now I have everything I needed. If, M1X MBP can migrate everything from my revived MMS, I’m glad to keep it, or I’ll return it back to Apple.
    I mean, you could just look this stuff up already since we have had Apple Silicon Macs for a year now. VirtualBox only runs on x86 hardware, and cannot run on Apple Silicon. Those OSes you want to run will have to be their respective ARM variants run through Parallels or VMWare Fusion. Also, this: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/13/microsoft-says-windows-on-arm-will-not-support-apple-m1-macs
    edited September 2021 StrangeDays
  • Reply 50 of 55
    zoetmb said:
    geekmee said:
    Regardless, we are overlooking the most important part of this report…
    Once again, Apple has taken all the oxygen out of the room!!
    I think that once the M1x Macs drop there will be a lot of sleepless nights for those manufacturers on the x86 side of the fence.

    I was just watching an Intel ad on YouTube where some supposed creative was saying he gamed and created and needed a lot of graphics power which he couldn't get on a Mac <snicker>.

    A lot of those ads just won't work any more, and I expect to see pretty amazing graphics performance - without the Wintel copying graphic workload overhead - as well as some impressive battery life.
    I disagree regardless of the level of the new Macs performance.  Users lock into hardware brands the way they lock into a political party or religion.  Once they choose to believe something, they stick with it.  And a very large percentage of Wintel users are in offices where users don’t get to choose their own machines and where bulk buys of Dells or whatever are relatively economical. 

    Macs are still perceived by many as overpriced and Apple long ago lost its reputation as “it just works”.  

    If you think about what most  users do on their computers: email, social media, photo organization and maybe some post processing, and streaming, with a relatively few doing high intensity tasks, the performance granted by the new processors  isn’t needed by most, with the potential exception of better battery life. 

    IMO, the new machines might get more people to upgrade their existing Macs sooner, but I don’t think they’re going to attract many converts.

    Unfortunately, Mac sales are becoming an ever smaller minority of Apple’s overall business.  

    JMO.  
    LOL Mac revenue was up 29% year over year this past quarter, and was 14% of Apple's total revenue. So while it's "just your opinion", your opinion is wrong.
    spock1234StrangeDayswilliamlondon
  • Reply 51 of 55
    techconc said:
    ppietra said:
    that is just your assumption!
    There is nothing that stops Apple from having a new architecture ready for both kinds of SoC - they basically did that last year, one month between launches is nothing. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have the resources to develop more than one SoC at the same time, they did it a few times with the X series SoC.
    And there is no proof that they actually made a M1X, or thought about using a M1X, it could have been an M2X all along.

    The weird part is launching a new Mac CPU that is already outdated by a new iPhone SoC, where some software will have better performance on an iPhone than on a brand new high end MacBook Pro.
    Yeah, I agree.  The big question is what's behind the delay with getting the MacBook Pro's to market?  Is it something unrelated like availability of mini-LED screens or is it based on Apple's plans for newer cores.  The A15 is likely to be based on ARMv9.  It's very possible that Apple is waiting for these cores for their higher end machines as well.  If we would have had laptops in June or July, I would have expect an M1x (A14 core) based machine.  Given that we're now expecting something after the A15 is released, I'm thinking it's likely the higher end laptops will be something more like an M2x.  At least it should be at this point.

    Marvin said:
    No, it's not.  If you'll notice even in the links you provide, the M1 based devices are clocked higher than the A14 mostly because of the form factor they ship in.  The M1 has the same core performance as the A14.  In a laptop or a Mac mini, you can afford to clock it higher as you have a bigger battery and better heat dissipation.  If Apple were to ship an A14 in a Mac mini for example, they could clock that higher as well.
    actually the M1 cores are slightly faster than the A14 cores, even when you compensate for clock speed difference. It is probably because of the cache size and latency.
    nadriel
  • Reply 52 of 55

    ppietra said:
    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.
    I disagree. The point was, the vast majority of people buying Macs do not care if there is a tiny hamster running in a wheel inside much less what ARM v9 or a nanometer is. Most of those that even know what Apple Silicon is don't care about the technical differences between the A14 or A15 is or the M-variants and only know it's new and fast. Anything spun out of proportion is argued about by bleating neckbeards in tech forums and are largely unheard by 99% of people buying Macs, hence not a marketing problem.
    It is not about what people understand, it is about how the news are spread. Just look at what happened with the M1 launch, to how much traction and praise Apple got from it. Look how much it sales grew, higher than the average PC company.
    If it was the way you think, it wouldn’t make a difference, for all you care it could even just use an iPhone chip... Understand this, the image that is created about a product matters, and in a big transition you want good buzz.
    williamlondon
  • Reply 53 of 55
    ppietra said:

    ppietra said:
    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.
    I disagree. The point was, the vast majority of people buying Macs do not care if there is a tiny hamster running in a wheel inside much less what ARM v9 or a nanometer is. Most of those that even know what Apple Silicon is don't care about the technical differences between the A14 or A15 is or the M-variants and only know it's new and fast. Anything spun out of proportion is argued about by bleating neckbeards in tech forums and are largely unheard by 99% of people buying Macs, hence not a marketing problem.
    It is not about what people understand, it is about how the news are spread. Just look at what happened with the M1 launch, to how much traction and praise Apple got from it. Look how much it sales grew, higher than the average PC company.
    If it was the way you think, it wouldn’t make a difference, for all you care it could even just use an iPhone chip... Understand this, the image that is created about a product matters, and in a big transition you want good buzz.
    Yes, I get it — what I'm saying, however, is that the people who know about the M1 aren't going to care if the next Mac chip is based on last year's iPhone chip's architecture or whatever. All they'll need to know is it's newer and faster than the M1, which it will be. That's all.
    StrangeDayswilliamlondonthttechconc
  • Reply 54 of 55
    ppietra said:
    actually the M1 cores are slightly faster than the A14 cores, even when you compensate for clock speed difference. It is probably because of the cache size and latency.
    Nope.  I have an iPhone 12 Pro (2.99 Ghz) and an iPad Pro 11" (3.2 Ghz).   My 12 Pro scores 1602 in single core - Geekbench 5.  My iPad Pro (M1) scores 1712.   Take the 1602 / 2.99 = 535.78... (points per Ghz).  Multiply that by 3.2 (adjust for M1 clock speed) = 1714.51...   The speed difference is almost exactly the difference in clock speed.  
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