gmgravytrain

I truly hope Apple has a new family of MacOS processors that are at least the equal of an Intel i9 chip.  If Apple has as powerful a processor and that processor requires only half the wattage to produce the same amount of power, I'll be more than satisfied.  I would probably be asking for too much if Apple Silicon is actually a lot more powerful than an Intel i9.  I heard that Apple's A14 processor has as many as 15B transistors.  That's just crazy.

I'm still rather puzzled as to what Apple is doing to do in terms of a GPU.  Will it be part of the main SoC or will Apple introduce some discrete GPU for the iMac.  I hope Apple has at least one fan inside the enclosure just to keep ambient temperature air moving near the SoC.  I'm really looking forward to owning an Apple Silicon Mac and I hope it lives up to the WWDC event hype.  I would love to see an Apple laptop with a fifteen-hour battery life under partial load while running videos and playing games or seven-hours under full load.  That would be mind-blowing.

I say the industry will claim Apple is making a big mistake and those ARM processors will never equal the power of X86 processors although there is nothing stopping Apple from scaling up its ARM processors in core count while having a 5nm node that's more power-efficient and much denser for higher transistor count.  There is already an ARM Ampere Altra processor that has 80 cores but costs over $5000.  It's a beast of a processor for high-end use. See: https://amperecomputing.com/ampere-altra-industrys-first-80-core-server-processor-unveiled/

So if anyone is going to BS about how no ARM processor can touch an X86 processor, they're lying.  I don't know about how Apple Silicon is going to handle GPU processing but I heard Apple is going to be building discrete ARM GPUs along with SoC ARM processors with integrated GPUs.  Amazon is using ARM-powered servers on AWS that are equal to their X86 counterparts and require far less cooling.  See: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/307498-amazon-launches-a-killer-arm-server-chip-with-the-graviton2

There may be some advantage to having X86 on desktops that have huge amounts of cooling and high-wattage power supplies, but Apple Silicon is going to have a huge advantage when it comes to laptops due to lower TDP and longer battery life.  There are going to be plenty of naysayers claiming Apple doesn't know anything about high-end processors or gaming GPUs and such but any company with enough money can at least try to figure it out if the incentive is there.  In Apple's case, it's all about profits and they're fed up with paying Intel for sub-par processors.  Yeah, let the naysayers believe Apple will fail because that's what the Apple naysayers always believe when Apple brings something new to the table.

Anyway, time will tell if Apple is making a huge mistake moving to Apple Silicon, but I don't think they are.  It's about time for ARM processors to shine for consumer use and possibly beyond.  I can't wait to get an Apple Silicon Mac later this year.  I think I'm done with Intel processor Macs but I'll wait and see how well Apple Silicon Macs perform.  I'll still keep my older Intel Macs so I'm not going to be backed into any corner.