M1X MacBook Pro still expected to launch in October
Apple is still planning to launch new MacBook Pro models equipped with the "M1X" chip and improved graphical performance, a report claims, with a launch expected in an October event.
Apple is rumored to be preparing a second special event for the fall, following after its earlier "California Streaming" presentation. While there's a lot of products on Apple's potential launch roster, a report highlights that the MacBook Pro lineup will probably get the most attention for the second showing.
In Sunday's Bloomberg "Power On" newsletter, Mark Gurman insists Apple will be launching Macs with the "M1X" chip, which is "still on tap for 2021." The first updates will be in a "new range of MacBook Pros in the next month and a higher-end Mac mini at some point," with the additional reasoning that Apple tends to use October to launch Mac updates
Gurman believes the change to the M1X will provide a more "graphics-intense and professional-focused" Apple Silicon experience than the M1. Two variations are thought to be developed by Apple, Gurman writes, with both featuring a 10-core CPU consisting of eight high-performance cores and two high-efficiency cores.
The difference in the versions will be in the GPU, as there are apparently variants with 16 graphics cores and 32 cores.
Previously, Gurman's forecast on the M1X MacBook Pro models, thought to be the 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro, said there will not be a Touch Bar in the model, though they will apparently have mini LED-backlit displays and MagSafe magnetic charging.
Read on AppleInsider
Apple is rumored to be preparing a second special event for the fall, following after its earlier "California Streaming" presentation. While there's a lot of products on Apple's potential launch roster, a report highlights that the MacBook Pro lineup will probably get the most attention for the second showing.
In Sunday's Bloomberg "Power On" newsletter, Mark Gurman insists Apple will be launching Macs with the "M1X" chip, which is "still on tap for 2021." The first updates will be in a "new range of MacBook Pros in the next month and a higher-end Mac mini at some point," with the additional reasoning that Apple tends to use October to launch Mac updates
Gurman believes the change to the M1X will provide a more "graphics-intense and professional-focused" Apple Silicon experience than the M1. Two variations are thought to be developed by Apple, Gurman writes, with both featuring a 10-core CPU consisting of eight high-performance cores and two high-efficiency cores.
The difference in the versions will be in the GPU, as there are apparently variants with 16 graphics cores and 32 cores.
Previously, Gurman's forecast on the M1X MacBook Pro models, thought to be the 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro, said there will not be a Touch Bar in the model, though they will apparently have mini LED-backlit displays and MagSafe magnetic charging.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
I also had a dream that my current AirPods (V2) broke apart when taking them out of my ear. That must be a sign that the new version is going to be released too.
If true, these are going to obliterate anything other than “ high end” desktop workstations. GeekBench scores will shake the PC industry
Apple still has a ways to go before being a serious threat to the gamer PC GPUs but they are catching up rapidly. With 16 cores, the M1X could be in the same ballpark as the 5700 MX GPUs found in the 2020 iMac. With 32 cores, it could beat the current crop of AMD GPUs and newly released Intel GPUs with only NVIDIA having a clear advantage but only for very high end GPUs that are not obtainable in the market. The M1X could become the fastest integrated GPU on the market offering far greater performance per watt than any other GPU on the market.
Will server manufacturers be banging on Apple's door demanding chips? Is Apple thinking about making a gaming console? Where is the Mac Nano? Does Apple's management have the vision needed to take full advantage of the disruption they have created?
So now I eagerly await the next round. I'm hoping for being able to get at least 64GB of RAM - and curious as to how Apple will handle RAM in the next chips. Will it still be closely coupled for blistering speed? I hope so - soldered on or not. May splurge on a large SSD this time too. Hopefully give it some extra life - not crazy the drives are soldered on - and maybe in the larger ones they won't be?
Should be interesting to see. My Apple Card is ready!
Remember Apple already own the chip design. All they need now is a spread of partners across the world to make their chips.
C:S is not ARM native but there is a Mac native version that ran great. Indeed you wouldn't know it wasn't ARM native from the way it performed - performance was amazing - as long as I didn't load all my asset and mod subscriptions from the Steam workshop, were the lack of RAM really killed performance. Windows games running either via Crossover or the Windows ARM preview in Parallels also performed way better than I expected and Crossover has gotten a major update to WINE since I had my MacBook Air. I only ran into graphics issues with a couple of games - shader issues - that I'm sure will get worked out at some point.
Of course there are no details from Apple on the next round of hardware - what a shock. But if they are going to replace all of their Intel models they are going to need Apple Silicon Macs that are at least equal to what they have shipping on Intel, and that means at least 64GB of RAM on the highest end laptops. Once again there is no substitute for actual RAM if you have applications that truly demand it and I would be shocked if the highest end Apple Silicon MacBook Pro's couldn't go to at least 64GB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff <--
Video editing, large photo editing, compiling large applications - there are lots of situations where there simply isn't a substitute for raw capacity. Speed isn't going to replace the basic need for desk space to spread your stuff out to work on (one way to think of RAM). Shuffling stuff on and off the desk faster is interesting, but not having to shuffle stuff in the first place is faster still
If you noticed my comment about the original M1 MBA's (maybe the MBP and mini as well) slower external storage write speeds, this can be a problem for all workflows. Hopefully Apple will address this on the newer Macs with enough fast and wide PCI buses using the fastest Thunderbolt/USB4 interface designs. There are external single NVMe blades capable of running at 2800Mbps (faster than the M1 internal storage) but these speeds have been benchmarked on specialized PCs, not Macs. It doesn't matter how fast your external storage is if the USB4 ports can't deliver data fast enough. I added a TB3 external SSD to a family member's iMac who bought the base version with the snail-pace 5400 rpm HDD. This increased her R/W speed by nearly 10x.
One last thing. We all need to remember that the initial M1 Macs were designed to be Apple's new entry level Macs, even though they blew everything Apple was selling in single CPU speed. This becomes the new bottom line with the only way to go is UP⬆🔝
If you're video editing from what I understand there are some optimizations that developers can do to speed up processing to keep things out in the GPU and render intermediate results to tile memory, but outside of the use of unified memory for both CPU and GPU everything is pretty much as it was before.
I think a lot of the talk about double the RAM effectiveness just has to do with the amazingly good implementation of virtual memory under macOS.