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What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

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Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#71

Post by yywwbbn »

girvo wrote: post #52
ksec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Which is the question I have been asking since 2015 . From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap. >but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip…

Silly idea: could they put a M-series processor connected to a Xeon as a coprocessor to get the “benefits” of both wrt. adding their NPU stuff? Would that even make any sense?

Would that be very useful if you can have a discrete GPU?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#72

Post by runeks »

What excites me about apple Silicon is this: performance that is roughly on par with competing x86 CPUs combined with ~5x lower power usage.

My M1 MacBook Pro can run full throttle on all 8 "performance" CPU cores for an hour without the fans ever spinning up.

This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU, which is simply not possible with x86 (unless you severely compromise on the definition of "portable").

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#73

Post by yywwbbn »

IshKebab wrote: post #47
akamaka wrote: post #5

How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Most of the M-series chips are shared across multiple products, but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now. I don’t see Apple doing it simply as a vanity project, so there will have to be some inn…

Presumably it isn't that low volume. Just low volume compared to their other products. They can probably heavily base a more powerful chip on their existing designs but with more cores & cache, so design should be relatively cheap. Manufacturing the masks etc. is probably around $10m which is probably fine given how expensive Mac Pros are (and it would simplify their software if they can ditch Intel entirely).

I think IO would be a bigger issue than scaling performance.

Somebody buying a mac pro would probably expect support for discrete and expandable ram.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#74

Post by SpacePortKnight »

What I like about Apple is that they have such a clear product lineup that it allows for speculation like this article.

On the other hand Microsoft's surface lineup makes no sense and is super confusing. That's true for Samsung as well. Even if these companies had the engineering capacity to make chips like M1; I doubt they would attract even a fraction of the media attention enjoyed by Apple.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#75

Post by blkhp19 »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #24
BooneJS wrote: post #8

Xeons have many, many PCIe lanes. Apple Silicon only needs enough HSIO for SSD and Thunderbolt ports, and they’ve released all of the non-internally-expandable machines already. They needed a chip that added 48+ PCIe lanes to the package so they could satisfy the relatively few Mac Pro customers. And without external DRAM, they’ll never be able to provide as much memory as a low-end Intel chip in the Mac mini at the…

There’s some very interesting speculation on the ArsTechnica forums about how expandable RAM on a Mac Pro might look. It’s not my speculation but it’s definitely not all said and done from what I’ve read.

Any links?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#76

Post by sylens »

Apple’s high end desktop strategy has been confusing to me for several years now. They made a big deal out of the iMac Pro, even though that seemed like an obvious quick fix for power users since the new Mac Pro wasn’t ready at the time. However, I never understood why Pros would want to pay more for an an all-in-one they couldn’t self service or upgrade when they probably already had monitors they preferred using.

Then they finally released the 2019 Mac Pro at a cost that I thought was prohibitive to all but the highest end professionals. I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production.

When they unveiled the Studio, I thought that they were replacing the Pro line with that product…but then they confirmed the Pro is still coming. I really do not know what differentiation there will be between the Studio and the new Pro. I’m curious to see what they do with expansion and dedicated GPUs, but considering they don’t play ball with Nvidia anymore it’s probably still going to be a niche product

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#77

Post by alkonaut »

What is the biggest hurdle for the M2 Mac Pro? Is it connectivity that isn't suppported by the chip? E.g. when they want external DRAM and GPU, the M2 SoCs simply don't have that capability so a whole new SoC would be required, with features that would only be used in the Pro, making it a questionable investment?

Or is there a more technical hurdle, e.g. that supporting external Dram and third party GPU would require more fundamental changes than merely building a new SoC?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#78

Post by cyber_kinetist »

runeks wrote: post #72

What excites me about apple Silicon is this: performance that is roughly on par with competing x86 CPUs combined with ~5x lower power usage. My M1 MacBook Pro can run full throttle on all 8 "performance" CPU cores for an hour without the fans ever spinning up. This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU, which is simply not possible with x86 (unless you severely compromise on the definitio…

> This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU

I'm not too sure about that. The current 20-core CPU from Apple is inside the Mac Studio, and it has quite a monster of an air cooler. It's obviously going to be much harder to put that (or something more powerful) inside a laptop, even with all the chip improvements...

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#79

Post by zozbot234 »

runeks wrote: post #72

What excites me about apple Silicon is this: performance that is roughly on par with competing x86 CPUs combined with ~5x lower power usage. My M1 MacBook Pro can run full throttle on all 8 "performance" CPU cores for an hour without the fans ever spinning up. This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU, which is simply not possible with x86 (unless you severely compromise on the definitio…

This is not comparing like for like, as we have yet to see how x86 does on those device fabbing nodes. And other ARM vendors are not really in the same space, but within the mobile form factor they're hitting comparable performance numbers.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#80

Post by GeekyBear »

What's needed to complete the Apple Silicon transition is TSMC's recent start to 3nm volume production.

Originally, TSMC projected 3nm risk production to start at the tail end of 2021, so Apple would have had chips for multiple product lines that were designed to be fabbed at 3nm in 2022.

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