Slimmer Macbook Pro 16" ...with a Mechanical Keyboard!
Here's another wild idea. Could the increased transistor density and decreased redundancy of silicon make room for... a mechanical keyboard? I think it could! The key parts of this machine are made on TSMC's N5P process, and it would release 2H 2021.
The slimmest mechanical switch I know of that uses an actual spring design (no scissor!) is the
Kailh Choc Mini. It's about .8mm altogether. Here's a shot of them from anandtech:
So including backlighting and our bottom case, the keyboard part of the machine would be
1cm thick. And that's fine as long as there is nothing under it. Including the screen (which is mini led and touch because why not), our machine will be about
1.3cm thick.
The goal will be to stick all of our silicon
around the keyboard, in a ﹇ bracket shape. To do this we'll make a little room by shrinking our touchpad and pushing down our keyboard
just a tad. We need 5cm between the top of the number keys and the top of the base (we can still put silicon under the touchbar, which is suddenly a blessing).
Right now, the silicon in the MBP 16 looks like this (courtesy iFixit):
But a lot of that can be made smaller or eliminated. For instance, we don't need both the orange (RAM) and green (GDDR) boxes if we're using two stacks of unified HBM2E, which would be smaller than the green box. We don't need the blue box (Apple coprocessor) if everything it does is integrated into the APU. And the yellow box (AMD GPU) and red box (Intel CPU) can both be much smaller.
We're going to unify all five of these parts on one 1.5cm (H) x 3cm (W) silicon interposer, which goes above the keyboard and under the touchbar. On top of the interposer is, from left to right:
APU Die (A14Z)
8x Perf Cores ~3.2GHz
4x Efficiency Cores ~2GHz
12x GPU Cores
Memory Die
2x HBM2E Stacks = 32GB
GPU Die (Bionic 14-28)
28x GPU cores
Power and Performance: The Perf Cores are clocked
20% faster than the A13, relying both on the improvements of the N5P process and some additional power (about 2W / core). They're based on the A14 design, but have a little more cache and clock. The GPU Cores are clocked
15% faster than the A13, relying entirely on N5P's process improvements (about 1W / core). They cores use the A14 Bionic design with no changes except the clock boost from N5 -> N5P.
The total TDP of this thing, including 10W for the two stacks of HBM and 2W for the efficiency cores, is around
56W. Accordingly, it is flanked by two small (20mm diameter) fans, which
I think will cool it. It's fortunately positioned, being able to vent up out of the base or down under the roomy mechanical keys.
The base configuration uses a 24-core GPU and just one stack of HBM. It's the same part, but salvages some of the semidefective GPU dies. Battery life should be incredible - there's still plenty of room for battery under the lower half of the system, and we're only using about 2/3 the power of a current gen MBP. I
think performance will be much better too - I'm confident about the CPU, but it's harder to guess how a 28-core Apple GPU die would compare to a Radeon Pro 5600M. Still starts at $2400... but the extra GPU cores and HBM2E are $700 a piece, the touchscreen is $400, and the SSD price gouging is insane
