ppietra

techconc said:

ppietra said:

that is just your assumption!
There is nothing that stops Apple from having a new architecture ready for both kinds of SoC - they basically did that last year, one month between launches is nothing. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have the resources to develop more than one SoC at the same time, they did it a few times with the X series SoC.
And there is no proof that they actually made a M1X, or thought about using a M1X, it could have been an M2X all along.

The weird part is launching a new Mac CPU that is already outdated by a new iPhone SoC, where some software will have better performance on an iPhone than on a brand new high end MacBook Pro.

Yeah, I agree.  The big question is what's behind the delay with getting the MacBook Pro's to market?  Is it something unrelated like availability of mini-LED screens or is it based on Apple's plans for newer cores.  The A15 is likely to be based on ARMv9.  It's very possible that Apple is waiting for these cores for their higher end machines as well.  If we would have had laptops in June or July, I would have expect an M1x (A14 core) based machine.  Given that we're now expecting something after the A15 is released, I'm thinking it's likely the higher end laptops will be something more like an M2x.  At least it should be at this point.

Marvin said:

M1 is faster than A14:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=a14

No, it's not.  If you'll notice even in the links you provide, the M1 based devices are clocked higher than the A14 mostly because of the form factor they ship in.  The M1 has the same core performance as the A14.  In a laptop or a Mac mini, you can afford to clock it higher as you have a bigger battery and better heat dissipation.  If Apple were to ship an A14 in a Mac mini for example, they could clock that higher as well.

verne arase said:

ppietra said:

Marvin said:

ppietra said:

"high-end M1 chips"
seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.

The iPhone has a lower thermal limit and they will all be manufactured on the same 5nm+ process. There were some tests posted of the A15:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/06/iphone-13-a15-chip-performance-continues-dominance-over-android-rivals

It showed around 15% gains vs A14, which is to be expected from the 5nm+ process.

M1 is faster than A14:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=a14

The equivalent M-series chip this year should be around 15% faster than M1 just like A15 vs A14.

They could call it M2/M2x, they are marketing terms. It will likely ship October/November, which is a year since the M1 Air. They can refresh the Air with a 3TFLOP M2 chip (4/4-core CPU, 8-core GPU) and have a 6TFLOP M2x with 2x the CPU and GPU (8/4-core or 10/2-core CPU, 16-core GPU).

There was a rumor about a 32-core GPU but they could just increase the clock speeds. M1 GPU is clocked at 1.28GHz, they could boost that to 1.6GHz (or higher) for an extra 25% performance boost to get a 7.5TFLOP 16-core GPU. It would need to be 32-core to come close to an Nvidia 3070 mobile but a 16-core like that would perform similar to a 3060. A 24-core GPU would be somewhere in between.

A 27"+ iMac would be better with an M2x Duo option but a 7.5TFLOP GPU would be ok on the entry model, the current entry level is a 4TFLOP 5300 and goes up to a 7.6TFLOP 5700 XT. This way they could get away with 32GB RAM per chip and have 64GB on the higher iMac duo option.

rcfa said:

Not happy about the lack of touch bar.
The Moment the revised edition was made with a separate physical ESC key, everything was fine.

The only instance where the touch bar wasn’t an asset but a drawback was during a Boot Camp Windows recovery boot, when one was supposed to press an Fn key before the touch bar drivers to enable it acting as function keys was loaded, but that was easily fixed by temporarily attaching an external USB keyboard.

If Apple does indeed do away with the touch bar entirely, and not just some entry level models, it’s a pity.

Every component adds to the cost of the laptop. When they introduced the touch bar, the prices went up around $300. They must have brought the costs down a bit since then as the 13" MBP with touchbar starts at $1299 now but the M1 Air and M1 13" MBP have the same spec except for the 8-core vs 7-core GPU, the Air is $999 and the MBP is $1299. Matching the chips, it's $1499 vs $1249 so the touch bar plus touch id has to be adding somewhere in the region of $250-300 to the retail price, which is far more cost than the functionality it offers.

I've used laptops with and without the bar for a couple of years and the bar has only made things worse. I have one without a physical escape key and sometimes the bar removes the escape button and restarting the touch bar process shows it again.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/379627/esc-button-from-touchbar-has-disappeared

In theory the shortcuts should be more efficient for some things like emoji or menu items but they just haven't been for me, the buttons are pretty small, hard to read and require looking down at the bar. Touch id is nice but I would be happy to see standard buttons for audio, exposé and brightness again, especially if it brings the prices down by $100-200. It would be great to see the 16" start at $1999 like the pre-touchbar 15" models instead of $2399 because then that extra can go into getting 32GB RAM, which is far more useful for creative work.

Single core centred tasks aren’t that affected by thermal throttling.
A 15-20% performance improvement for the A15 would make it around 9% better than the M1, while the new TSMC process states only 5% performance increase at isopower.

The M1 single core speed is faster than the A14 because it's clocked higher at 3.2 ghz.

The base M1 MacBook Pro has more than a single GPU core and touchbar advantage over the Air ... it also has a 100 NIT brighter display and an active cooling system.

The A15 will probably still be slower than the M1 since the M1 has four high performance cores, and the A15 two. Even if Apple manages to increase the core speeds by 20% again this year that still wouldn't compensate for doubling the number of high performance cores - or are we talking about single core speeds?

fastasleep said:

ppietra said:

tht said:

ppietra said:

Marvin said:

ppietra said:

"high-end M1 chips"
seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.

The iPhone has a lower thermal limit and they will all be manufactured on the same 5nm+ process. There were some tests posted of the A15:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/06/iphone-13-a15-chip-performance-continues-dominance-over-android-rivals

It showed around 15% gains vs A14, which is to be expected from the 5nm+ process.

M1 is faster than A14:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=a14

The equivalent M-series chip this year should be around 15% faster than M1 just like A15 vs A14.

They could call it M2/M2x, they are marketing terms. It will likely ship October/November, which is a year since the M1 Air. They can refresh the Air with a 3TFLOP M2 chip (4/4-core CPU, 8-core GPU) and have a 6TFLOP M2x with 2x the CPU and GPU (8/4-core or 10/2-core CPU, 16-core GPU).

There was a rumor about a 32-core GPU but they could just increase the clock speeds. M1 GPU is clocked at 1.28GHz, they could boost that to 1.6GHz (or higher) for an extra 25% performance boost to get a 7.5TFLOP 16-core GPU. It would need to be 32-core to come close to an Nvidia 3070 mobile but a 16-core like that would perform similar to a 3060. A 24-core GPU would be somewhere in between.

A 27"+ iMac would be better with an M2x Duo option but a 7.5TFLOP GPU would be ok on the entry model, the current entry level is a 4TFLOP 5300 and goes up to a 7.6TFLOP 5700 XT. This way they could get away with 32GB RAM per chip and have 64GB on the higher iMac duo option.

Single core centred tasks aren’t that affected by thermal throttling.
A 15-20% performance improvement for the A15 would make it around 9% better than the M1, while the new TSMC process states only 5% performance increase at isopower.

The rumored SoC going into the Macbook Pro 14&16 models are rumored to have 8 p-cores (performance cores), 2 e-cores and 16 GPU cores, as well as support for 32 GB of RAM, maybe 64 GB, which implies 2x the memory channels, and, probably has larger caches as well. These are not "M1" SoCs in lower end Macs and iPad Pros which have 4 p-cores, 4 e-cores and 8 GPU cores, nor are they A14 or A15 SoCs that go in iPhones and lower end iPads, which have 2 p-cores, 4 e-cores and 4 GPU cores, and lower memory performance and capacities.

They are all physically different chips that are manufactured independently of each other. They may share the same CPU and GPU core microarchitectures, or they may have different microarchitectures between them, but all of them are designed for performance commensurate for the box they are going in. The larger the chip, and especially for Apple as this is new territory for them, the longer it takes to design and get it shipping, so that's why everyone thinks the transition to Apple Silicon will take longer for the higher performance machines. Not a surprise that the M1X seems to be taking so long. I do think the pandemic has added about 6 months to their schedule as well.

So, an upcoming A15 or M2 with 1.15x single core performance over a M1X is not that meaningful when the M1X has 2x the performance cores. Same story on the GPU performance. People buy the more expensive machines because they have more performance, and the M1X will have above 80% to 100% more CPU and GPU performance than the M1 or M2 depending on how they set the clocks.

I was quite explicit that I was talking about single core centred tasks. Those are not affected by the number of cores, and if the A15 adopts the new ARM v9 instruction set, things might get weirder, compared with an M1 based SoC! 
The point of mentioning this is about public perception, in other words how this detail affects marketing, the risk of some backlash.

Affects marketing? The general public doesn't understand much less care about any of these nerdy details.

mpantone said:

ppietra said:

"high-end M1 chips"
seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.

This assumes that all Apple needs to do is to rev the CPU cores which does not seem like a wise assumption.

Apple will make improvements on the GPU side AND the Neural Engine. I would expect the M1X (or whatever Apple ends up calling it) will have massive improvements on the latter. They are introducing more machine learning algorithms in macOS Monterey and my guess is that Apple will accelerate moving certain tasks to the ML cores as the transition to Apple Silicon continues. 

These are performance improvements that aren't easily quantifiable in today's CPU benchmark suites. Looking at Apple's SoCs through the lens of common benchmarks will soon be obsolete unless those benchmark authors can capture ML performance in a way that is relevant to real world usage.

randy hill said:

ppietra said:

Marvin said:

ppietra said:

"high-end M1 chips"
seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.

The iPhone has a lower thermal limit and they will all be manufactured on the same 5nm+ process. There were some tests posted of the A15:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/06/iphone-13-a15-chip-performance-continues-dominance-over-android-rivals

It showed around 15% gains vs A14, which is to be expected from the 5nm+ process.

M1 is faster than A14:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=a14

The equivalent M-series chip this year should be around 15% faster than M1 just like A15 vs A14.

They could call it M2/M2x, they are marketing terms. It will likely ship October/November, which is a year since the M1 Air. They can refresh the Air with a 3TFLOP M2 chip (4/4-core CPU, 8-core GPU) and have a 6TFLOP M2x with 2x the CPU and GPU (8/4-core or 10/2-core CPU, 16-core GPU).

There was a rumor about a 32-core GPU but they could just increase the clock speeds. M1 GPU is clocked at 1.28GHz, they could boost that to 1.6GHz (or higher) for an extra 25% performance boost to get a 7.5TFLOP 16-core GPU. It would need to be 32-core to come close to an Nvidia 3070 mobile but a 16-core like that would perform similar to a 3060. A 24-core GPU would be somewhere in between.

A 27"+ iMac would be better with an M2x Duo option but a 7.5TFLOP GPU would be ok on the entry model, the current entry level is a 4TFLOP 5300 and goes up to a 7.6TFLOP 5700 XT. This way they could get away with 32GB RAM per chip and have 64GB on the higher iMac duo option.

rcfa said:

Not happy about the lack of touch bar.
The Moment the revised edition was made with a separate physical ESC key, everything was fine.

The only instance where the touch bar wasn’t an asset but a drawback was during a Boot Camp Windows recovery boot, when one was supposed to press an Fn key before the touch bar drivers to enable it acting as function keys was loaded, but that was easily fixed by temporarily attaching an external USB keyboard.

If Apple does indeed do away with the touch bar entirely, and not just some entry level models, it’s a pity.

Every component adds to the cost of the laptop. When they introduced the touch bar, the prices went up around $300. They must have brought the costs down a bit since then as the 13" MBP with touchbar starts at $1299 now but the M1 Air and M1 13" MBP have the same spec except for the 8-core vs 7-core GPU, the Air is $999 and the MBP is $1299. Matching the chips, it's $1499 vs $1249 so the touch bar plus touch id has to be adding somewhere in the region of $250-300 to the retail price, which is far more cost than the functionality it offers.

I've used laptops with and without the bar for a couple of years and the bar has only made things worse. I have one without a physical escape key and sometimes the bar removes the escape button and restarting the touch bar process shows it again.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/379627/esc-button-from-touchbar-has-disappeared

In theory the shortcuts should be more efficient for some things like emoji or menu items but they just haven't been for me, the buttons are pretty small, hard to read and require looking down at the bar. Touch id is nice but I would be happy to see standard buttons for audio, exposé and brightness again, especially if it brings the prices down by $100-200. It would be great to see the 16" start at $1999 like the pre-touchbar 15" models instead of $2399 because then that extra can go into getting 32GB RAM, which is far more useful for creative work.

Single core centred tasks aren’t that affected by thermal throttling.
A 15-20% performance improvement for the A15 would make it around 9% better than the M1, while the new TSMC process states only 5% performance increase at isopower.

Single core tasks are slowed just as much as multi-core tasks when thermal throttling occurs, unless you've found a loophole in the laws of physics.