mcdave

nunzy said:

All that Apple cares about is maximizing profit. If they could increase profits while servicing only the 1%, they would be eager to do so

anome said:

Hmm...quad core in a 13” machine. Not that I don’t believe it, but...

I’d really like quad core in a 13” machine, more than hexacore in a 15”. Do we have data on what graphics it’s running? Because, if it’s not the Iris graphics for that chip, then it probably isn’t a 13” form factor. Unless they’ve done something truly amazing with cooling.

wizard69 said:

melgross said:

mjtomlin said:

melgross said:

i would not be happy with an A11X now, because normally the newest chip for the phone has approximately the same performance as the previous generation iPad X version. So that would have the new phones on a par with the new iPad Pro 12.9”. That’s really unacceptable. When considering the far higher resolution, it’s even worse.

You don't know the performance of the upcoming A12, it may in fact not be as powerful as an "A11X". You also don't know if Apple has decided to develop the A12 and A12X in tandem and plan on releasing new iPad Pros along side new iPhones in the Fall.

However, the latest iPad Pros were released in June of last year at WWDC, so it would not be that unreasonable to have an event in July with an A11X update to the iPad Pro.

You’re right, we don’t know. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t logic to this that we can apply, and that’s what I try to do. But if Apple adds another 30% performance per core, then an A12 will be as powerful as an A11X, with the extra core. Generally, the latest GPU for the iPhone is about as powerful as the previous GPU for the iPad, which has twice as many cores.

that’s what we/ve been seeing for several years. Will Apple change it up? Maybe. But why? The best situation is what we see now. The iPad version has more cores and slightly higher clock speed. It’s about 35% better in performance than the iPhone version for the cpu, and about 50% better for the GPU. You can’t just increase the speed by 30-40%. Power draw and heat will go up by about 50% if you do, but performance will just rise by about 25%. That’s a truly lousy trade off.

the reason why I feel uncomfortable about a July release with an older chip design is that the new phones are just around the corner. Then iPad performance will be compared to the iPhone performance, and will be seen as wanting. Whether some want to believe it or not, while the phone are compared to other phones, the iPad Pro is compared to notebooks. Performance needs to be enhanced as much as possible.

I agree with your concerns about performance but there is another performance driver beyond iPad, that is the rumored ARM baseed Macs or possibly entirely new devices.  To do this sort of jump really well i believe Apple will need a new series of processors.  Not so much to address CPU core performance but rather to be able to move data around much faster.  This means larger caches, data paths and faster I/O channels.   All the APU stule chips out there suffer from bandwidth issues and the A series are no exception.  So i can see a split happening where cell phone chips become one line and iPad and laptop chips another.  For example imagine an iPad chip with 4 to 8GB of HBM type memory in the package.  

Of course i can imagin all sorts of things.   The fact that we are doing so now just highlights how screwed up product delivery is at Apple these days.  It reminds me of the years after the Mac Plus when the couldnt update the Mac on a decent schedule.