wizard69

karmadave said:

Interesting that Apple would announce the A14 on the iPad Air and not their flagship iPhone. Perhaps 5nm yields as such that the iPhone was delayed? In any case, the A14 is a very impressive piece of engineering. I would expect that Apple will also use the A14 in their future Macs. In any case, the iPad Air looks like a killer upgrade!

Yes!   A14 is a bigger update than many seem to realize.   1/4 of the chip is dedicated to Neural Engine AI/ML type processing, that is huge.   That Apple would allocate that much die space to Neural Engine should highlight where Apple is going with future software including the OS.   I see A14 as Apples transition to a new world of software, an introductory platform really.   As such we should see a future version of Siri operating largely locally on the iOS device, possible as soon as next years WWDC.

headfull0wine said:

iGlass maybe?

How about Apple Super Symmetric - Glass

indiekiduk said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

indiekiduk said:

An ARM Mac released before the OS it runs is released? Sounds plausible

While the language in the post should make it clear that we are very skeptical about the data, an event doesn't mean shipments same-day. A case in point is the iPhone, which will start pre-orders a few days after the event also before the iOS that supports it is available, with shipments between seven and 10 days later.

iOS GM is usually the day after the event which for iOS 14 will be Sept 16th. macOS usually doesn't release til October.

exactly which is why the time frame is about right for plausibility.

indiekiduk said:

An ARM Mac released before the OS it runs is released? Sounds plausible

Why not.   if the hardware is to be released in October that gives them a month to finalize Mac OS.   Historically we are in about the right time frame for development to come to an end and candidate releases to hit developers.

I'm not saying I put much faith into these rumors just that the development process at Apple should be wrapping up about now.

foregoneconclusion said:

Rayz2016 said:

An in-house GPU eh?

This is where the bun fight starts. 

I would imagine that the MacBook would continue to use the SoC style GPU just like the iPad. It will be interesting to see what Apple does for higher end hardware like the MBP or iMac line. Will it still be integrated, or will they do a discrete version of the GPU?

I would suspect that most chips will ship with integrated GPU support.   Having a base GPU across all platforms gives Apple considerable advantages.   The only big question in my mind is how they address the Mac Pro.

By the way I can see Apple going the chiplet route like AMD and offering up the GPU as a chiplet that sits along side the processor chiplet.   This could explain some of the conflicting info we are getting.   A chiplet approach would make it very easy to scale the number of ARM processors in a Mac.