General impressions about Apple Silicon

[richmlow]

Hi all,


I've been thinking a bit about Apple Silicon Macs and their general impact into the future. Nothing too analytical....just casual rumination.

It's clear that with the step from Intel CPUs to Apple Silicon (starting with M1), a significant increase in computing performance and power usage efficiency were obtained. Very cool!

However with the SoC design, RAM limitations and built-in SSD were necessary restrictions. Then with the M2 family (and now, M3 family), we get improvements via performance cores, improved manufacturing, more GPU cores, etc. That is also very cool. However, it seems like these continued improvements will only really affect people who work with video software (designed specifically for Apple Silicon).

I suppose my question is "What does the future of Apple Silicon hold for those who don't need all those cores, etc?" Will the Mx Apple Silicon continue to evolve so that eventually only a very small group of people (video producers) really have need of Apple Silicon?


richmlow

 

[sevoneone]

I think if you want, need or prefer to use a Mac going forward you are going to have need of Apple Silicon… lol. Apple is not looking back and support for Intel based Macs already has a death clock running somewhere in Apple HQ.

There are two key things that make Apple Silicon a big deal: Power Efficiency and Apple’s magic when they can fully control the hardware and software. That is what makes the iPhone the overall best smartphone in the industry, and, as Apple silicon matures, more and more features of the Mac are going to be tied to specific features of the SoC.

Video was and is a big deal for Apple Silicon because a very sizable percentage of video professionals use and prefer Macs and Apple’s last round of Intel based Macs were really falling behind the capabilities of PCs, mostly because Apple and Nvidia don’t get along and Nvidia was leading the charge on Machine Learning and GPU computing that has been a big leap forward in video and CGI in the past decade. Apple’s GPU and Neural Engine narrowed that gap while using much less power.

While hyped a lot, video is not the only thing that benefits though. The rendering engine that is at the heart of Final Cut and Motion also powers presentations in Keynote which is amazing for a consumer app. The same image processing pipeline from the iPhone chips enhances the webcam in FaceTime and Zoom meetings. If you are just a browser and email warrior, you’re going to get close to Apple’s advertised 22-hours of battery life which no other laptop out there even comes close to.

 

[richmlow]

I think if you want, need or prefer to use a Mac going forward you are going to have need of Apple Silicon… lol. Apple is not looking back and support for Intel based Macs already has a death clock running somewhere in Apple HQ.

There are two key things that make Apple Silicon a big deal: Power Efficiency and Apple’s magic when they can fully control the hardware and software. That is what makes the iPhone the overall best smartphone in the industry, and, as Apple silicon matures, more and more features of the Mac are going to be tied to specific features of the SoC.

Video was and is a big deal for Apple Silicon because a very sizable percentage of video professionals use and prefer Macs and Apple’s last round of Intel based Macs were really falling behind the capabilities of PCs, mostly because Apple and Nvidia don’t get along and Nvidia was leading the charge on Machine Learning and GPU computing that has been a big leap forward in video and CGI in the past decade. Apple’s GPU and Neural Engine narrowed that gap while using much less power.

While hyped a lot, video is not the only thing that benefits though. The rendering engine that is at the heart of Final Cut and Motion also powers presentations in Keynote which is amazing for a consumer app. The same image processing pipeline from the iPhone chips enhances the webcam in FaceTime and Zoom meetings. If you are just a browser and email warrior, you’re going to get close to Apple’s advertised 22-hours of battery life which no other laptop out there even comes close to.

Yes, indeed you are correct. I suppose that Apple Silicon is great, from a hardware standpoint.

However, it seems like third-party software (with the exception of video software) has not really caught up with the hardware to make effective use of Apple Silicon. For example, I use custom-designed Mathematica programs to help in my research. However, I can only use 10 CPU cores (for parallel processing) due to licensing restrictions. Furthermore, no use of GPU cores are utilized by Mathematica (as far as I can tell). Of course, the extremely limited RAM restrictions on SoC Apple Silicon further complicates matters.

I guess I'm rambling a bit....

richmlow

 

[anshuvorty]

Yes, indeed you are correct. I suppose that Apple Silicon is great, from a hardware standpoint.

However, it seems like third-party software (with the exception of video software) has not really caught up with the hardware to make effective use of Apple Silicon. For example, I use custom-designed Mathematica programs to help in my research. However, I can only use 10 CPU cores (for parallel processing) due to licensing restrictions. Furthermore, no use of GPU cores are utilized by Mathematica (as far as I can tell). Of course, the extremely limited RAM restrictions on SoC Apple Silicon further complicates matters.

I guess I'm rambling a bit....

richmlow

That's odd, IMHO, GPU cores should be used for parallel processing workloads because GPU cores are designed to support parallel processing. Isn't that the reason why GPU cores are so much in demand for processing LLM's on Nvidia GPUs?