This has been on my mind for a while. How does Apple follow up its success of the M1 or does it have too? I think their main bread and butter for Macs is the laptop sector, and this falls right into Apple's strengths with its ARM processors. The issue is they could be viewed as falling behind if they roll out an M2 pro/max/ultra that can't compete with the latest offerings from intel and AMD.
Performance wise we're seeing significant gains from Intel and AMD. I could spend hours and hours going through each benchmark, but Cinebench r23 is one that is generally accepted. The Intel 13th gen numbers fall into the unverified category - so take them with a grain of salt. Also these numbers are not written stone. I can run Cinebench 10 times and get slightly different results, so keep that in mind.
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The ONLY *interesting* benchmarks in this space are single-threaded benchmarks. Cinebench multicore and similar only tell us that Intel and AMD have made a *business choice* to place some large number of cores on what they call HEDT chips; they tell us nothing interesting about technology. Maybe you're angry that Apple doesn't also offer a chip with 32P cores and no GPU (or whatever), but that's not an technology complaint, it's a business complaint.
Even then Cinebench is uninteresting insofar as it is a (component of) a large program whose programmers have unclear incentives. Does Maxon *sell* enough copies of Cinema 4D (as opposed to benchmark downloads) to care much about Apple Silicon-specific optimizations (as opposed to eg AVX512 optimizations)? We know, for example, that Cinebench is at R23, while Cinema 4D is already at Release 26; this strongly suggests that EVEN IF Cinema Bench is being rapidly optimized for Apple Silicon, that won't necessarily translate to improvements in Cinebench until Cinebench itself is updated. And why should that be a priority for Maxon?
As for the basic point, there's a *massive* space of options for making Apple's particular cores faster. I don't believe there is any sort of "slowdown", either because of supposedly leaving engineers, or because of supposedly slowed down TSMC, or because of supposedly no more good ideas left.
Rather, look at the situation the way Apple does, as a company that cares nothing about creating premature hype (unlike Intel) or constant churn. What good does it do them or their customers to waste scarce engineering resources on new chips at the high end that are just *slightly* better?
From the outside it's clear that Apple already have multiple somewhat independent groups that work together very well, but on separate schedules. So, for example, the GPU or NPU or ISP may take a big jump, then "stagnate" for two or even three years as what was delivered gets minor improvements, perhaps a few tweaks and bug fixes, but the serious work goes into the next version. You also see this pattern in the patent record.
So why be surprised at the same thing in the cores? Both the A15 and A16 cores are big leaps forward in energy efficiency, along with small improvements in other aspects. Good, necessary work, but not overly interesting for the desktop (meaning there's no strong incentive to go to the expense of moving them to the desktop). Meanwhile, I imagine, a separate team is working on the next cores for the desktop. This team will doubtless roll in the good energy saving ideas adopted by the A15 and A16, but is not simply refining the A16.
I suspect, going further (because Apple is extremely efficient this way) that some aspects of what we will see in the new desktop chips (for example a variety of page sizes, some substantial changes to virtual machines, and even a new cache protocol) were test-run in these phone chips precisely because if problems are discovered on the phone, it's no big deal – it's not like anyone using a phone is engaged in fancy virtual machine tricks or requires a sophisticated cache protocol!
In other words, all this weeping and wailing is simply the impatience of three-year olds.
A new desktop SoC is coming. It will be spectacular along all dimensions. BUT
even if it is ready within Apple (unclear) it's surely designed targeting N3 (because duh! why target the old node when we all know 2023 and 2024 are N3 years?) so there's the requirement of flowing through N3 before it can be shipped to users. TSMC tells us N3 is in volume now. But there's a long path from a wafer going into the factory to that wafer coming out, and then having to flow through PCB and then system manufacturing...
If Gurman is correct that there will be no October event, I think that also tells us that there will be no new desktops in October. When the new desktops do ship (and who knows when that will be in terms of what Apple is trying to achieve. Is it important to hit Christmas? Are there advantages in delaying till January?) I expect their WILL be a big event, simply because I expect the (single-threaded) performance boost to be massive, and for Apple to want to make a big deal about it.