The critical question is "Faster for what?"
I'm sure the new Apple Silicone will make some operations much faster and others much slower. But really what do 99% of Mac users do? They type email and watch Youtube. A 5 minute Youtube video will still take 5 minutes to play. and that email will still take just as long to read.
If you are running 3D CAD software the ARM Mac will likely slow to a crawl because it is having to emulate an Intel CPU but if running Photoshop, Adobe has re-written its software to take advantage of the new hardware.
So 99% of users will not notice the change as they don't push their computers. For the 1% who do, I expect wildly different results. Overall it will be a win for Apple even if they do lose 0.5% of their customers.
Nah...
I don't think a lot of people posting here realise just how freaking far behind intel is, and how despite AMD being massively ahead of intel (and don't get me wrong, AMD are doing great things CPU wise), they're still quite a way back from where they could be due to maintaining compatibility with 4 decades of x86 quirks for software compatibility reasons.
ARM when originally released back in the 80s was WAY a head of anything else on the market. Like
2-4x as fast as the fastest desktop PC of the day in terms of CPU. As fate/circumstance/home computer market would have it, they ended up being marginalised in home computers and only really saw use in the education sector with the original Acorn Archimedes and RiscPC but IBM compatibility was what everyone at the time wanted. The rest of the home computer market (Acorn, Commodore, Atari, etc.) died, and the ARM based home/business computer died with it.
Fast forward 30 years and ARM is used in
everything outside of PCs and Macs and intel have hit several walls - brain drain losing their most competent people to elsewhere, massive fabrication failures (and intel fab was previously a home court advantage for intel which enabled even a relatively mediocre design to perform well due to clock speed advantage from better manufacturing). Right now intel are staring down the barrel of no 7nm process until 2022-2023 at which point TSMC will be on 3nm, and intel are also scrabbling to fix 20 years of performance vs. security hacks. They're WAY behind on fab, and WAY behind on design capability as a result. They simply can't build a competitive product on their own manufacturing tech and ship it in volume.
Right now intel are behind and their roadmap (what they are proposing even) is bad. And they haven't successfully executed on their roadmap since 2014. They've repeatedly slipped. They delayed 14nm, they delayed 10nm and they've delayed 7nm. Their core is not that different since Skylake which itself is only a slight evolution of Sandy bridge from 2011!
The ARM chips will blow intel away (already do, even if we aren't comparing apples to apples; the Apple processors handily beating intel even being limited to FAR less power consumption and thermal headroom by virtue of being inside fan-less phones and tablets), not because of magic or because or some unbelievable progress Apple has made, but purely because intel and the x86 market has stumbled so badly and stagnated for near on a decade that they have been caught up and passed. You simply can't stagnate for a decade like intel has and expect to remain at the front. Apple has had what would have previously been accepted as "expected" performance gains, generation on generation.
Ryzen is great relatively speaking but AMD stumbled for 4-5 years themselves with bulldozer. the 2010-2016 era was essentially close to ZERO progress by either AMD or intel. AMD because they bet the farm on a design that didn't pan out and nearly went broke; intel because they grew complacent with no competition in their markets. Ryzen if compared to what we should have seen in terms of progress from both AMD and intel is
where we should have been in 2014 or thereabouts, if both companies didn't have epic failures in execution in the same decade.
As to pro users - expect more from things like the afterburner card and other bespoke apple hardware for particular tasks. Look up what FPGAs are and understand that afterburner is a big powerful FPGA (Both why it is so expensive, and also why it is so powerful) - essentially hardware that can be reconfigured for optimal performance on specific tasks pretty much as quickly as loading a different app. And it then does those tasks in HARDWARE. Right now it does pro-res. But that's not the only thing it can do, if programmed.
Performance is the least of our worries with Apple Silicon and apple getting of x86 in general. As above, the A13 is outperforming intel parts in 10-20% of the power draw. And that's last year's hardware in a mobile phone form factor.
The future looks great. The new parts will enable entirely new ways of interacting with your computer. They're going to be a game changer. Think less about "is my laptop going to be any faster" and more "what will new apps be able to do with 5-10x or more performance in the next 5 years?"
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