anonconformist
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Apple suggests it won't sell Apple silicon to other companies
By going to Apple Silicon (and really, all their other smaller devices already are using low-power versions) it’s trivial to have the only significant differences in capability for devices being speed and user interface: the guts are almost identical to those machines, with only minor device driver differences and hardware differences for things like touchscreens. When you can count on all the device SOCs having the same AI hardware support, crypto support, whatever it is, it allows a far more unified OS/device capability and makes it even easier to lure developers to develop for Apple devices in general: to a fairly large degree (but not completely) with SwiftUI and the hardware commonalities it means developers can reach far more potential customers for a given amount of learning the platform.ne1 said:“...unleashed another round of innovation.”This is a VERY interesting sentence— he seems to imply that there are exciting cross platform macOS / iOS products or software on the horizon.I’m trying to figure out what future product/capability he’s implicating.SwiftUI can’t do everything the older MacOS and UIKit SDKs can as of yet, but it’s getting there, and for a lot of things, it’s easier to do in SwiftUI than the other older SDKs. How SwiftUI works is a huge abstraction of the user interface that reduces the number of moving parts you need to understand to create a viable application, combined with Combine that’s integrated deeply in it.
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How Apple A-series chips stack up against Intel Macs
I’ll address one point: you’re clearly not a developer, or at least not one with enough experience. If you make a faster CPU it doesn’t change a thing about what you can do regarding multitasking, regardless of single core or multicore performance, and adding more cores does nothing to change the nature of how you solve problems effectively by adding more threads in a process or more things in the system as a whole. In fact, adding more cores and more multitasking/threads slows down throughput for a process and often a system, when those related tasks aren’t embarrassingly parallel that don’t have memory conflicts. Look up Amdahl’s Law, and what’s important to understand is even the best system is constrained by main memory latency and speed, with the CPU waiting for data from main memory about 30-40% of the time, despite all the huge cache hierarchy: it’s made far worse if you quickly swap unique code in and out of the CPU for as many threads as possible, as quickly as possible.chasm said:What Metriacanthosaurus said. While some new benchmarks on the 12Z chip running native apps suggests that even that chip has an impressive amount of barely-tapped potential, the real point here is that Apple has not yet released any member of the "family of SoCs" that are specifically designed for the Mac. Nor has it yet released any device that has all of its systems optimized for the (presumably redesigned) future Macs.
Recent stories here and elsewhere are kind of focused on the chips themselves because that's where the (tiny amount of available) information is right now, but there's really four keys to future Macs: first, the specially-designed Mac-centric SoC; second, the optimized motherboard and other mechanical components (we've been enjoying some of this part for years now, which is why we're so far ahead of PC makers on things like TB3/USB-C/USB4); third, software compiled specifically to take advantage of this custom hardware (in particular, I foresee much greater expansion on multi-tasking for all but the most basic software); and four, new chassis designs again fully in harmony with the chip, graphics, thermals, and support systems.
Intel has been great for Apple, and often very accommodating to Apple's specific desires (especially given the size of the Mac market, which is still small). But Apple Silicon (please note: not silicone!) is made not only with an awareness of hardware requirements but also the specific ways Mac users work with software, neither of which Intel can really design for. Because of the potential this opens up, I think Apple will continue to work on bringing more components in-house (like wireless/5G) and forming partnerships with third-parties where they can get custom-designed parts for its particular and in some cases unique needs.
Kudos to Mike P for the rundown, though this is really only the beginning of a tale mostly yet to be revealed. Specs and comparisons are fun, but at the end of the day the truly remarkable thing about all this is that Apple has been planning a brilliant revival of the Mac -- by far their least-popular "computer" product, let's not forget -- to keep it relevant and even exciting in the current age of mobile and wearable domination. I cannot wait to see what Apple Silicon running new Apple hardware can do, how much room for innovation they've opened up, and specifically (though I'm not the target for it) what high-end Apple Macs are going to be able to do. I'm with Jean-Louis Gassée in thinking that some major surprises are still ahead of us, including some that will benefit the entire industry, directly or indirectly.
There are no applications and domains that exist that don’t already work well on a high-end MacPro and not-quite-as-fast on an i9, but adding more cores doesn’t automatically enable the developer to accomplish anything, and it isn’t any different in how it is designed by the developer.
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TSMC 3nm 'risk production' in 2021 paves the way to 2022 mass production
There are theoretical limits, and those can more readily be computed.bageljoey said:
I always recall writing a paper for a chemistry class about computer chips (back in the late 80s). The books all stated as a fact that the laws of physics limited processors to 100nm but that 200nm was probably the practical limit.rob53 said:There has to be a limit on how small you can go before the size of the components won't work anymore. Once this limit is reached, how will processor fabrication change to improve speed and reduced power usage?
I believed that even when they got to 100nm and I take everything as magic since then...
i no longer believe there is a limit!
We are certainly approaching silicon limits.
Even with other than silicon being used, theoretical limits say we can get this small, but how quickly and at what defect rate can that be done?
There is also the design time to most effectively use all the (theoretically available) transistors, as it's not quite as simple as copy/paste another CPU core with identical connecting logic in between.
Finally, there is the cost of developing and building new manufacturing tech and facilities: the smaller the process node, the more expensive it gets, by quite a bit.
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Should you wait for Apple Silicon to upgrade to a new Mac?
If you were honest, Apple hasn’t failed at CPUs before, their suppliers have.johnbear said:History will repeat, Apple failed at CPUs before.Grab one with intel while you can before the Mac becomes an iOS device.
Who designed and manufactured all the Motorola 68k and following generations? Motorola: Apple had no control of design/manufacture of them.
Who designed and manufactured the PPC processors? A combination of Motorola and IBM. Apple didn’t design or manufacture them.
Who designs and manufactures every Intel processor? Intel: pay attention, there’s a clear pattern here!
Since the Apple A4, who designed the CPUs (part of the SOC) in every non-Mac device since that time? Apple! What’s their performance been? Perpetually increasing in both power efficiency and CPU throughput. Apple has been able to improve them in every single generation at a schedule of their choosing, and they’re currently being manufactured on a process better than Intel’s and Intel is at least a couple process nodes away from being a match on that alone.
Now, will Apple eventually hit a limit? Will Intel/AMD hit a limit? There are data points from either side that says it could go either way and performance improvements stall. There’s nothing at all to say the most efficient ISA, given identical process nodes, are either of those at all: I’d wager there’s an architecture/ISA not yet on the market that can be pushed to more processing power at less power usage. If a clear winner for optimization becomes apparent, Apple at least has a lot less inertia in changing over to a completely new ISA because Apple (for better and worse, as Apple is a consumer electronics company) doesn’t come close to having the concern for backwards-compatibility that constrains Windows from faster change, but makes it well-suited to be the OS with the majority of the market, where Enterprise is a huge money-maker factor.
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Should you wait for Apple Silicon to upgrade to a new Mac?
Weirdly unmentioned is the use-case of Apple developers: if you remain developing for Intel-based Macs, you’ll certainly want to retain one for that for testing purposes. If you’re currently a Mac developer, unless your current machine is about to die or it can’t run Big Sur, odds are there’s more value in keeping the old machine than in buying a new Intel-based Mac.
If you’re currently any type of Apple developer (not just MacOS) there is a benefit to buying a new Apple Silicon Mac because then it will run the various apps for every Apple machine (except Intel-based Macs) natively, and you’ll get a more accurate result for how the application runs on the other Apple devices for any weird CPU-related quirks specific to each CPU, at least, keeping in context that an Apple Silicon Mac is almost certainly going to execute your apps faster than the other Apple devices will, and have more RAM available, and also the number of CPU cores available for the apps on the Mac will likely be greater.
All that being said, when push comes to shove, it’s either brave and/or stupid to not test applications you develop on actual hardware and OS it’s targeted for, so you still will be expected to have other than the development Mac to test on. Besides that, unless Apple adds a touchscreen to Apple Silicon Macs, there’s no way you can really manually verify the total user experience without a real target device.
so short-term, it doesn’t matter that much as a developer for other than Apple Silicon MacOS development if you buy a new Intel-based or Apple Silicon Mac, because you still need to test on targeted hardware before release, unless you really like to live dangerously.
