22july2013

Rayz2016 said:

winston2010 said:

22july2013 said:

I presume this article is talking about 32 cores being on the same die. If true, that's good to hear. But don't see why Apple couldn't put multiple physical packages with N-cores each on the same system board. Moreover, Apple should do this as an expansion card for existing Intel Mac Pros so that Intel Mac Pros can run M1-apps natively.

Why stop at Intel Macs? heck if they could put M1 on a PCI expansion card, Let all Windows PC's run Mac/iOS software and the world is your oyster!

The only way this would work is if Apple charged the same price for the card as they did for the whole machine.

There is no way Apple is going to burn its own house down like this, and then have to support every single PC in existence.

fastasleep said:

22july2013 said:

melgross said:

...an updated Mac Pro. I didn’t buy one last year, because I wanted the new PCIe 4 bus, which is now becoming common enough for Apple to move to. 

In an Apple Silicon Mac a PCIe bus may not do everything that we might want. For example, a PCIe video card may not work since MacOS Big Sur may not support any video cards even including Metal-based AMD video cards.

I agree that Apple will probably support PCIe v4 in an Apple Silicon Mac with expansion ports, but if it's not for video cards, maybe Apple should just re-think the whole purpose of the expansion card idea entirely. Could Thunderbolt be enough? How about Thunderbolt 4 which is due any day now from Intel (and probably from Apple too, since Apple now supports Thunderbolt without any Intel chips)? What type of cards do people want to install in a Mac that can't be done through a Thunderbolt port in some other way? Thunderbolt 4 is 26% faster than even a 16-lane PCIe v4 connector, and it's almost as fast as 16-lane PCEe v5 which won't be out for a couple of years. Why would anyone want a slow connection like a 16-lane PCIe v4 when Thunderbolt 4 is so much faster? I'll answer that - because you don't have to buy a Thunderbolt cable. So to save $50 people want to settle for a lower bus speed?

This is food for thought; I'm not sure Apple will do what I'm suggesting. I expect the usual claims from people here questioning my sanity. 

Maybe not your sanity, but I think you messed up your units here.

Thunderbolt 4: PCIe data at 32 Gb/s (GigaBITS)
PCIe v4 x 16: 32 GB/s (GigaBYTES) = 256 GigaBITS

"The PCIe 4.0 specification will also bring the OCuLink-2 connector, an alternative to Thunderbolt 3, that provides 8GB/s of bandwidth via four PCIe 4.0 lanes" — That's 64 Gb/s.

Someone correct me if I screwed up here, but PCIe v4 x16 is quite a bit faster than Thunderbolt 4.

JinTech said:

22july2013 said:

JinTech said:

Apple_Bar said:

Apple said new intel macs later this year. So likely they will update the Macbook Pro 16 with 10th-gen intel processor like they did with iMac 27 2020.

Where did Apple specifically say they were releasing new Macs with Intel?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/06/22/intel-says-it-support-apple-across-two-year-transition-period-to-apple-silicon <--
"In fact, we have some new Intel based Macs in the pipeline that we're really excited about," [Tim Cook] continued.

It's unclear whether Tim Cook was talking about multiple Mac models or a single model, but it sounds more like multiple models. My guess is that the iMac Pro and Mac Pro are the Intel models that Cook was talking about, although it's also possible that they will be offered simultaneously with M-chip alternatives. It's also possible that there could be hybrid machines, for example, an existing or future Intel Mac Pro could have an Mx-chip "Mac-on-a-PCI-card." (The Mx-chip on this might be a variation without a video core because the Mac Pro has its own video. This sounds too complicated to me, but it remains a possibility.)

Oh I guess I missed that. Thank you for the quote and the link. I am guess it would be the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro since they still need to figure out how to maximize the memory for those machines.

Another honest question, is Apple able to solder multiple M1 chips on one logic board and somehow allow each of them to contribute to the amount of the power per chip? So like a Duo M1 for example could in theory have 16 processor cores and up to 32 GBs of memory, etc?