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You can have thunderbolt controllers without an Intel processor, there’s nothing that precludes it from working.
There is one (as in, one) certified AMD motherboard and I can't Intel rushing to help Apple out with TB3 when they are ditching their CPU. No, it will be USB 4.
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> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference. Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gain…
I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.
One of the two scenarios (or perhaps a mixture of both) are more likely, and I lean towards #1:
1. Apple decreases the price of the Mac to stay aligned with gross margin targets. This likely has a significant upwards impact on revenue, because a drop in price like this opens new markets who can now afford a Mac, increasing market share, driving new customers to their services, and adding a layer of lock-in for iPhone-but-not-Mac customers.
2. Apple uses the additional budget per device for more expensive parts/technology. They are struggling to incorporate technologies like OLED/mini-LED because of the significant cost of these displays and this would help open up those opportunities.
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I'd assume that they'll still have AMD/NVidia GPUs as options if they truly plan to bring these CPUs to the Mac Pro market. There's no way that e.g. Animation studios will accept anything less than absolutely top-end performance. And upgradability too. I think Apple must know this.
Here's some mad lad adding PCIe slots to a Raspberry Pi 4: https://twitter.com/domipheus/status/1167566293861588992 It's definitely possible, just need to expost the PCIe lanes in a sensible way (this has been rare to see on ARM-based machines so far) and have PCIe device manufacturers distribute drivers for ARM macOS.
The best fit is for Macbooks I think - low power and being able to run iOS software is pretty nice.
For real heavy lifting (6k or 8k editing in Resolve, with raw video codecs, or heavy duty 3D tasks) I don't think I'll be changing from a desktop with AMD Ryzen and top end Nvidia in the next 2 years. Apple high end GPUs in particular are a question mark.
But Apple will probably get there eventually with their own chips - would not put it past them.
Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers. Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip. Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; I…
Here's an analogy to help explain the skepticism: ants have amazing efficiency - they can lift multiples of their own body weight. So why can't an ant lift my car? Well, because it's too small. So let's just take the same ant design and scale it up? Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. A creature capable of lifting my car wouldn't be much like an ant. There is no guarantee that a phone-scale CPU can just become…
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I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.
Bingo. Estimates vary wildly, but I've seen figures saying that Axx CPUs cost Apple about $50 each. Even if it's more like $100, that's still an insane amount of additional profit per unit to be extracted. They don't need to deal with single-supplier hassles and they get much more control over what cores go into their SoC. This is sort-of-OK for consumers but amazing for Apple and its shareholers.
This isn't a zero sum game. Being able to ship less expensive computers which perform better is a win for consumers and Apple shareholders at the some time.
The only loser here is Intel.
I'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…
I looked all over developer.apple.com and didn't find anything.
My burning question... Made in China or the USA?
(Taiwan’s constitution technically defines it as part of China, but it operates as a separate country for all practical purposes).
Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers. Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip. Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; I…
I think it will work out fine. Apple has an absolutely top-shelf team, designing chips. By hand (Qualifier: Not sure if they still do, but they did, while everyone else was using automation). They also have a great deal of experience in repaving the highway while traffic is running at capacity. They mentioned it in their keynote. They've done it three times. I have been there, for each of those times. I was also ther…
Not using automation isn’t “badass”, it’s a sign of a deeply screwed up engineering culture. It’s on par with forcing software developers to program exclusively in machine code.
Luckily, Apple uses the standard EDA tools pretty extensively so I don’t really think this applies to them. I also agree that Apple hardware engineers are generally extremely good.