wizard69
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Apple suggests it won't sell Apple silicon to other companies
rob53 said:
Totally agree. Why should Apple support other computer companies? All this would do is give Congress another reason to investigate their monopolistic activities.verne arase said:Good.
Let them make their own cake.Actually congress could investigate them for not selling the processors. Congress can investigate Apple for any imagined or real excuse they can come up with so Congress has nothing to do with this issue.The best reason for Apple to start selling chips is to have a wider base to spread development expenses across. Apple could literally get silicon customers to pay for the development process.
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How Apple A-series chips stack up against Intel Macs
tht said:
I think it is possible to put in an active cooling system for a 6 mm thick device like an iPad, so 15W to 30W SoCs are possible. The display should be wedged shaped where is tapers to the thinness of Apple's current laptop displays. I'm also all in on have the front cams stick out like they do on phones. The logic board also needs to be as close to the hinge as possible so the laptop can stay balanced.danvm said:
I have the same experience with temperature as you in my MBP 13" 2017. The keyboard gets hot when running some applications and doing video conference. Looking forward how the new Apple notebooks improve this issue.tht said:My biggest complaint with my work-issued 2018 MBP15 is that it runs hot when I have it connected to an external monitor and using the builtin keyboard. The top surface gets hot, heating up the keyboard! I really like the butterfly keyboard a lot more than the work-issue Macally one, and my work from home setup is bit too space constrained for an external keyboard anyways.
What you propose is was MS did with the Surface Book. You'll have to sacrifice some inches in the screen, with the benefit that you mentioned. I think it could be possible with the new, smaller SoC's.Hopefully they can have a 25 W SoC that keeps the keyboard and top case cool while providing better performance than Intel systems. Actually, I think they can put the logic board behind the display by the hinge if it is long skinny like the iPad Pros. That'll remove the primary source of heat from the keyboard and keep it nice and cool at all times.
Not that I think they would do it. It's just the transition to Apple Silicon represents a big opportunity to redesign a laptop inside and outside, and I hope Apple takes it. Apple Silicon logic boards will be smaller than Intel boards by quite a bit, and with lower power, the batteries can get smaller too. This provides some opportunities for design. They can do some pretty wild things.These low power chips enable all sorts of possibilities in both the laptops and the iPads to get a bit more performance with passive systems. For example they could simply machine the case into a more performant heat sink and mount the SoC directly to the optimized shell. The shell already impacts thermal performance but this would be a more direct usage of the shell as a traditional heat sink. The trick is to design in the fins so that they look acceptable. We might be only talking a few whats more capability for passive cooling but that could have a big impact. Other possibilities include carbon fiber heat sinks to spread the heat even faster. I don't ever see 15 to 30 watts. sustained, in an iPad though, it is just foo much no matter how good your heat sinking is. The real trick in these very compact or thin devices, like an iPad or Mac Book, is getting good sustained performance to avoid the machine crapping out from continuous use. You don't want frequency scalling to impact the feel of the machine like it did on the old Mac Books.In any event yeah these ARM chips should make for some interesting new products from Apple. The question is will this be the first round of machines or will the real innovation come in round two. I'm actually holding off on buying an AMD laptop as I'm really interested in seeing ARM done right in the PC space. Unless Apple goes nuts with pricing or screws up Mac OS i could see getting back into the Mac laptops as secondary machines. If Mac OS gets locked down even more I can see myself rejecting based on that issue alone.
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How Apple A-series chips stack up against Intel Macs
The problem with this article is that presupposes that Apple Silicon in the new Macs will look like the SoC in Apples cell phones. I really doubt that this will be the case except for possibly in a Mac Book replacement and new innovative solutions. Instead I'm expecting Apple to deliver laptop and desktop optimized chips that likely will be a significant departure from the cell phone solutions.Why do I say this, simple performance still matters! To get there Apple will likely implement fast caches, wider memory systems, larger GPU's, more cores and other enhancements that they don't have the power budget for in a cell phone. I still expect Apple to target a 15 to 25 watt chip in the Mac Book Air replacements and 45+ watts in the Mac Book pro segment. The difference is these will likely be honest power numbers instead of the phoney TDP power numbers you have to work with from Intel. That is Apple will design around the max power output of the SoC and design a cooling system around that so that throttling doesn't happen often. With the tech they are expected to use, Apple should be able to easily get the same performance as seen with Intel at half the power usage.So without any major changes keeping the same power level on 5nm should allow for about a 20% increase in performance. Now combine that with an increased power budget and we can easily see 50% faster Apple silicon over current shipping examples. It is a question of adding up all the potential improvements; you have increased IPC, a process shrink, a much higher TDP due to better cooling, wider RAM access, increased caches and most likely more or improved special function blocks. While 50% might be a bit wild, I'm pretty sure people will be surprised at how fast the optimized chips will be relative to current A series.So here is my guess as to what will b delivered. First the Mac Book will come out of hiding with an A14(X) with few if any changes. We already know that A series runs Mac OS perfectly fine and that Apple will likely want to keep this design passively cooled. Next up will be actively cooled Mac Book Airs, for this discussion we can call them the C series. C series will likely require some optimizations to bump performance even more that what would be allowed by active cooling. This would likely mean larger caches, and wider paths to RAM and likely more I/O or better I/O. For the rest of the Macs lets call the processor going into these the Z series. Z series of course needs to compete on performance which is different than what is focused on in the Air and MacBooks. So obviously Z gets a lot more cores, how many depends upon Apple and the likely hood that they implement SMT. But the minimal Apple will need 12 core processors if no SMT is offered. Otherwise they have zero potential of competing with AMD and its 8 core monolithic chips. Note that this assumes that the A and C series have core counts of 8 and below covered. At the extreme end, say a 16" Mac Book Pro they will likely need 16 -24 non SMT cores. There is a lot of variability here, for example Apple could dedicate a lot of die space to a truly powerful vector unit attached to each core. If that vector processors is 2000 bits wide it will take up space on the die that would otherwise go to more conventional cores. Even how Neural Engine is implemented can be a factor in the final core count. In any event to be competitive they will need cores and it might surprise people how many actually get implemented. As for the GPU on the Z processors I'm not expecting huge advancements here as I can not see Apple getting away from external GPU's for high performance. Yes the integrated GPU's will be "better" but there will be support for external solutions, the real question is this: is AMD still in the game. Speaking of AMD, Apple could take a move from AMD's playbook and go the chiplet route, this could allow for a much better in package GPU or it could mean nice core count increments like we see in AMD's products.There are even more wild possibilities here. Imagine a SoC with on package HBM memory for example. Apple is not afraid of HBM like the low cost producers so HBM supporting processors could give them another huge edge. Another possibility would be teaming up with AMD and using infinity fabric as a channel to a high performance computer engine like CDNA or an Apple designed solution. These sorts of ideas sometimes challenges conventional wisdom but Apples Macs are already compute challenged. Without significant aggression on Apples part they will eventually loose market share to HEDT and similar performance solutions. If AMD can move some of heir up coming super computer technology to the high performance desktop market in the 2022 time frame Apple will have a big embarrassment on its face even worse that the Mac Pro. So if Apple isn't thinking real hard about how they will compete with the likes of Thread Ripper in the 2022 time frame they are going to have problems. So if people are not expecting very high core count solutions from Apple they are going to be surprise. This is so critical I would NOT be surprised if they have a working relationship with AMD right now to do some form of a chiplet for the high end machines.
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Apple silicon Macs to support Thunderbolt despite shift to ARM
sflocal said:Countless of "Apple is doomed" websites and iHaters that just KNEW thunderbolt would die with Intel are now quickly going back and removing comments and stories and pretending it never happened...Over the last couple of weeks, since WWDC, I've seen more idiots on the web than I can ever remember. These are native English speakers too, so that is no excuse. I'm not sure if they are twisting stuff Apple has written on purpose to get hits on their sites or movies, but all they do is make themselves look ignorant.Even this nonsense about Thunderbolt is just that. Even if Apple dropped Thunderbolt it would be replaced by something different. Apple wouldn't do that though because of their investment in Thunderbolt.
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Apple silicon Mac documentation suggests third-party GPU support in danger
I really don't get why people stress out about the capability of the DTK. Honestly how much clearer does Apple have to state that the machine does not represent shipping hardware???? Really it blows the mind that people can't understand the simple statements that come from Apple.jonahlee said:See the thing that worries me most are the little things in apple's actions already. If they have behind the scenes test hardware for all their configurations already, and yet they couldn't manage to get to get Thunderbolt into their developers machine. Does that mean thunderbolt is gone for them, or they couldn't get it working? Either way is not a good thing considering how much they have leaned on Thunderbolt for pro work over the past years.
And the whole idea of no external graphics card, just everything on one the chip again means less chance of expansion and more chance of just having to keep upgrading the machines every few years. The thing that was so great about the old macpro was the ability upgrade the graphics card, and graphics on the chip are not going to be upgradeable.
And then there is the whole getting companies to support it, it is great that Adobe is working on it, but what about AVID. It took them this long to support Catalina and that is with AMD graphcis.
As for the no external graphics card where in the hell does it say anything about that in the posted graphic??? Now I would fully expect Apple to not stay with the status quo on the Mac Pro when it comes to expansion, The fact is expansion has done nothing to accelerate Mac Pro sales. If any thing they have a dog of a machine on their hands.