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Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#262I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers. Either raw power or at least power efficiency and projected battery life improvements. Seeing as this is a major reason for the transition (according to them), it feels very weird. They're shipping a 'Development Transition Kit' Mac mini with an A12Z this week, so it's not like the numbers are going to stay private for a long time. Even if there's an NDA, someone's…
It wasn't just lack of performance numbers, there were no actual products announced. They would have had to tip their hand on a lot of info that is not helpful to customers or their ability to keep selling Intel stuff. One big question though will be how this devkit benchmarks against the current maxed Intel mac mini. I'm curious if GPU performance beats the current BlackMagic eGPU. (rx 580)
I think the lack of hardware and lack of benchmarks are related. Apple doesn't know yet what the thermal throttle will be on an A12Z MacBook until they start testing the cooling system.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't just lack of performance numbers, there were no actual products announced. They would have had to tip their hand on a lot of info that is not helpful to customers or their ability to keep selling Intel stuff. One big question though will be how this devkit benchmarks against the current maxed Intel mac mini. I'm curious if GPU performance beats the current BlackMagic eGPU. (rx 580)
Not divulging their hand may be a thing. But they could at least have said something (rehashed) about the A12Z: "it performs better than the CPUs currently shipping in the Mac mini by X% in Y benchmark". I'm not intrisically excited for a new Apple product, but if they could have told me, we can deliver 50% extra battery life in your new MacBook at comparable performance, that would build up some hype and maybe minds…
> But they could at least have said something (rehashed) about the A12Z: "it performs better than the CPUs currently shipping in the Mac mini by X% in Y benchmark".
It's a kit to allow developers to prepare for transitioning their applications to ARM, for future retail MacOS/ARM devices. It's not a new Mac Mini, and it doesn't make sense to compare the retail machines to this dev kit (which is probably running a yet-to-be-fully-optimised OS)
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#264Is this the end of Linux as the host OS on Mac hardware? It's been really difficult for many years anyway, so for essentially hasn't been practical for a long time. I know there are plenty of working ARM builds of Linux so if the new Mac chips are ARM compliant then the ARM linux builds should work. I would think Apple has their own proprietary extensions or something tho, otherwise why make their own? Just very high…
> so if the new Mac chips are ARM compliant then the ARM linux builds should work That's not how it works. ARM is just the processor architecture. While Linux may very well support the processor, it's unlikely to support the rest of the hardware well, if at all.
yeah, but driver support has been a challenge for years on mac hardware (as I implied poorly) but there are ways to run if you tolerate some absurdities as a result of poor hardware support (like the fans running 100% all the time, battery draining from 100% to 0% in 60 mins, no wifi, etc). There are also workaround for some things like Broadcom where you can pull the firmware out of the windows driver. So you don't necessarily need the Linux kernel to work perfectly with all the hardware.
But my question/point was, is there likely to a total show stopper now that you can't just tolerate?
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#265I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers. Either raw power or at least power efficiency and projected battery life improvements. Seeing as this is a major reason for the transition (according to them), it feels very weird. They're shipping a 'Development Transition Kit' Mac mini with an A12Z this week, so it's not like the numbers are going to stay private for a long time. Even if there's an NDA, someone's…
The major reason for the transition is higher margins, plain and simple. For customers, both average users and developers it will be a pain with little to be gained.
No doubt profit margins are a big factor in their thinking.
However, performance/watt matters too.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
IDK, "look how good our CPU support is by running a several year old GPU limited game" fell a bit flat for me.
Not even running it very well. All the graphics settings were turned down, the framerate looked choppy and it was only running in 1080p.
But does it run better than on the current intel mac mini with integrated graphics? All it needs to do is beat intel in comparable circumstances.
It doesn't really matter what the graphics performance is, on high end macs they'll still ship a dedicated GPU from AMD. What matters is that the game is GPU-limited instead of CPU-limited.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#267I wonder if Big Sur on Apple Silicon is still Unix based, i.e. with all the Unix underpinnings and terminal access?
Yes, it will be. Even the iPhone/iPad are Unix at their core, although terminal access isn't supported.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#268MacMini with an A12 chip. Available now as a part of a developer kit. Will be fun to see what that can do.
I wonder if they could release something to turn iPad Pros into development kits. Would be readily available for a lot of devs.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think for this reason they are not going to discontinue intel based macs as x86 is the default for many high performance software.
They claimed they would "complete this transition" in 2 years.
They also stated they'll be supporting Intel Macs for a long time, and have new, unreleased, Intel-based machines in the pipeline.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
The A12Z is already faster than every tablet and phone in existence. Depending on the benchmark, it smokes about 80% of off the shelf PC hardware. They really don't need to do that much.
I believe Apple can make processors for laptop and normal desktop in A-series way but I'm curious how they make for Mac Pro. Adopting architecture like chiplet?
I have to assume they'll just put a bunch of processors in there, go massively parallel.