wizard69

entropys said:

What COVID upheaval? There is no reason for constrained production in China. 

China reports it has only had 86,000 cases in total, and only 24 new cases Nationwide yesterday! 

You can't believe anything China says about Covid.

williamlondon said:

MacBook to rival 12" Core M with super long battery life, no fan and lots of power would be one way to demonstrate to Intel *how* to build great, modern chips.

Intel is basically shipping crap across their entire product line.    All sorts of companies are showing them how to build modern chips.

To b perfectly honest I have high hopes for Apple's "Apple Silicon" Macs as I hope that it slowly shifts the industry away from a focus on X86.   I'm not sure if I will buy because honestly I'm hoping that we some signs that Apple is correcting some of their behavior issues.   So while a purchase might be up in the air, I'm hoping for the type of success for Apple that moves the industry to major changes.

In a nut shell a laptop that actually lasts for an intense 8-12 hour work day would be industry changing.

mjtomlin said:

mattinoz said:

IF Apple doesn't debut a new ARM core or other suitable function in the ASi family to make the Mac chips a family of their own then performance needs to be stellar (+3x on Intel) or there will be questions.  

Shove an A14x in job done attitude would sure knock the confidence in the transition. 

While Mac ASi will be based off the A-series, they will not be the same nor used across the different product lines. They will have a lot in common as many of the logical units will probably be the same; ISP, ANE, etc. But I would be very surprised if they used the same CPU and GPU cores - even though it is reasonable that they could - Apple is perfectly capable of designing new Mac specific CPU and GPU cores. And, in fact, they already said the GPU cores would be "bigger". There are other factors that support a new series of chips as well; PCI support, VT-x like capabilities, disparate RAM (hopefully upgradeable), much less need to be energy efficient on the desktop, etc.

However, I don't think CPU performance needs to be what you think it does. It really only needs to match what we have now. The benefits will come from the other parts of the SoC. I do expect much better performance on the low end, especially in MacBooks. And then just slightly better on the high end. Apple is mainly looking for a smaller thermal baseline than anything else. This is where Intel has utterly failed and why MacBook Pros have had throttling issues.

As for CPU performance there is always a pressing need for more performance, so I would want to see Apple offer considerably better performance.    I really don't think Apple will have a problem here but I also don't think that CPU performance is the reason for Apple Silicon.

I frequently say that the reason behind Apple Silicon is to have access to the Silicon itself.   This allows for two things that are frankly more important than the CPU cores in the chip.   First is the importance of special function units like video decoders/encoders, photography accelerators and other special function blocks.   These are extremely important as such accelerators save CPU cycles and greatly lower power usage.   

The second issue is the future of computing where AI / Machine Learning technology will be of extreme importance.   We can already see that Apple considers this to be important simply by looking at photos of the A14 chip.   Almost 1/4 of the chip is dedicated to these technologies.   Moving forward I can see Apple simply focusing more and more on these technologies as Mac OS morphs into an OS that is highly integrated with AI concepts.    Imagine Siri running locally with far more performance than you see today.

mattinoz said:

mcdave said:

mattinoz said:

22july2013 said:

mattinoz said:

IF Apple doesn't debut a new ARM core or other suitable function in the ASi family to make the Mac chips a family of their own then performance needs to be stellar (+3x on Intel) or there will be questions.   

I hold a very high standard for Apple, but even I wouldn't say "performance needs to be 3x Intel or else."

speed, an additional function or both.

I want gain for the pain. 

What pain?

It is a transition that has a version number jump that indicates compatibility breaking changes. 

There will be pain. 

It will only be painful if you allow it to hurt.   If you have the habit of making mountains out of mole hills then you will hurt.   If you have a personality that looks forward and understands what Apple is doing, you will feel happiness while navigating the few mole hills you find.

mattinoz said:

IF Apple doesn't debut a new ARM core or other suitable function in the ASi family to make the Mac chips a family of their own then performance needs to be stellar (+3x on Intel) or there will be questions.  

Shove an A14x in job done attitude would sure knock the confidence in the transition. 

Nonsense!!    First off Apples cores are already the best in the business outperforming Intel and maybe even AMD's cores.   Beyond all of that Apple is looking towards to the future and frankly the ARM cores are not anywhere near as important as other components to the SoC.   All one has to look at is the current A14 chip and the area dedicated to AI technologies.    I'm sure Apple Silicon will have good ARM cores and lots of them but that is not the primary reason for Apple Silicon.

As for A14 it already performs better than many laptop chips and an A14X chip would only increase the performance.   An easily imagined A14X would be a knock out for the laptop market in ultra compacts like the Mac Book.    Since Apple also has publicity stated that they have other more capable chips coming I have no doubt that their laptops will be the state of the art and will be what all others are bench marked against.