Realistic expectation of 1 gen 14" MBP

[burgerrecords]

So... if I am interpreting your post in between the lines (that appears to be the only place to find an on topic idea anywhere in there) - in essence your saying a realistic 1st gen Apple Silicon MBP 14” will have equivalent performance to a current Intel 27” iMac on one of the mid-range dGPU options??

yes that’s my interpretation of the charts from wwdc - and technically it appears quite feasible. Will it beat my 3900x with a 2060 super? Probably not in laptop form, but that is overkill anyway.

My only other concern is that I really hope 16 gb and 32 gb ram is somewhat reasonably priced. People have been speculating on affordability and I’m worried where they’re gonna get us is on Ram like they do with storage on iPhone. 16 in particular is such a sweet spot right now.

 

[Waragainstsleep]

Storage on iPhone is nowhere near as bad their RAM prices at the moment. £400 for an extra 16GB? Eat a **** Apple.

 

[playtech1]

I forgot one feature I feel is at least a possibility - albeit prob <50% - a touch screen.

The slightly more spaced out Big Sur layout hints at it, but also if a big feature of ARM is that you can run iPad apps, then a touch screen makes sense so the experience isn't compromised.

Also, it's cheap to add.

 

[Waragainstsleep]

Have you seen those Airbars?

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Check out AirBar by Neonode. It is a sensor bar that you attach beneath your PC screen. Then you can pinch, swipe, zoom and scroll to your hearts delight. Launching on CES in January and is available for pre-order right now. Plug-and-Touch, when you need it!

air.bar

Can't fathom why they haven't made one for iMacs.

 

[Jyby]

Science Rules!

 

[Waragainstsleep]

My turn.

- CPU faster than or matching 16” MacBook Pro high end
- GPU faster than Or matching 16” MacBook Pro mid-high end
- 12GB RAM base
- 512 SSD base
- Touch Bar remains
- 5 additional battery hours
- USB 4.0
- No PCIE in notebooks, Apple will design their own bus for storage and USB 4.0 (open source standard). PCIE support will be in MacPro chips as a bridge for PCIE expansion.

Why would notebooks need PCIE support? USB 4.0 will handle external devices. Apple will just map internal SSD storage their own way. Probably less bloated and bottle necked by PCIE

16GB will be the next standard rather than 12GB.
Apple could ditch PCI-E if they had something compelling I guess but they don't really make their own storage and currently SSD and Thunderbolt are built on it. If they had a really compelling replacement for it then sure but there doesn't seem to be much need. PCI-E 5 is already specced I think.
Apple Silicon will support PCI-E 4.0 I expect. Maybe later they'll do something different if they have a good reason.

 

[Jyby]

Science Rules!

 

[leman]

I don’t think they have a reason to use PCIE... They could make their own chipset and lane system that’s faster than PCIE. And implementing thunderbolt 3 doesn’t require PCIE.. PCIE messages get encoded and sent over thunderbolt 3 to the CPU and decoded- then the CPU is tricked to think it was a PCIE connection. So really Apple doesn’t even use PCIE much at all. Apple can just do their own thing now and probably create something more energy efficient, that has a smaller footprint on the CPU die.

Apple is definitively going to support PCIe. They just released a brand new driver programming framework for PCI devices and they have mentioned that Apple Silicon Macs will give each device its own memory mapping to prevent snooping. ”Emulating” PCI is wasteful - Apple still has support fast external storage devices and similar. It’s another question whether they are going to use PCIe much for internal communication, if at all, especially if they use an SoC. I also agree that they could forego the PCI interface for the internal storage.

But PCIe remains the primary interface for interacting with external or modular devices.

 

[Jyby]

Science Rules!

 

[Waragainstsleep]

Sticking with PCIE is really a matter of not reinventing the wheel. Reinventing wheels like that is a multi-multi-million dollar endeavour.

I hadn't considered the iPad RAM configurations. Isn't there a dual channel speed bonus for using multiples of 8 or something though?

 

[Jyby]

Science Rules!

 

[leman]

Well that’s how Thunderbolt 3 handles PCie... It gets sent over the cable as an encoded message directly to the CPU. The CPU transcodes the message internally without any PCIe interface involved.

Ah, I see. I suppose it would be the thunderbolt controller rather than the CPU, but that’s question of implementation details. Yes, I believe this is possible on the laptops, would also simplify the intervals quite a bit.

 

[Apple_Robert]

More ram and a faster graphics card with storage starting at 256GB.

 

[Waragainstsleep]

Now that they make their own Arm chips they don’t have to follow the traditional PC architecture. And I bet Apple has done a significant amount of work to reinvent a lot of their computer design now that they can literally own the design

If that were the case they could have made their own instruction set. Replacing PCI means a whole team of engineers that at best are doing other things but more likely they need to hire away the industry leaders in interconnects or system bus architecture. You only redesign something perfectly serviceable if you need to for financial or legal reasons or if you have a good idea you can improve significantly enough to be worth the cost.
PCIE 6.0 is already due next year. Apple hasn't shipped anything with PCIE 4.0 yet. Thats a lot of work.

 

[Jyby]

Science Rules!

 

[Waragainstsleep]

They literally design their own SoC now- that is far more complex then a bus controller and some wires.

But they payoffs are more than tangible and they still license and incorporate other IP into their SoC. The instruction set (and likely some aspects of reference designs) from ARM, thunderbolt from Intel, PCIE, USB and RAM are industry standards...
They designed what they needed to design in order to achieve what they wanted to achieve which is building the products they want to build. If you have a highly compelling product in mind that would benefit from Having the equivalent of PCIE 7+ while everyone else is languishing on 4.0 speeds, then please give details but you should know that Intel and AMD's top gaming CPUs (10700K and 3900X) can bottleneck a top of the line GPU on PCI 4.0. Apple would need a GPU that craps on the 2080 Super from a great height and a CPU on a par with a Xeon W or Threadripper in order to stand any chance of taking advantage of such a technology. For graphics anyway. I can't seemany people needing five figure SSD RAID in their MacBook any time soon either.

 

[jinnyman]

As said before, Apple gotta introduce highend model first in order to affirm its ability in Apple Silicon. I'm not saying it has to be Mac Pro level, but people needs to see Macbook Pro level Arm machine or otherwise, AS will look not that convincing enough yet.

 

[johngwheeler]

My turn.

- CPU faster than or matching 16” MacBook Pro high end
- GPU faster than Or matching 16” MacBook Pro mid-high end
- 12GB RAM base
- 512 SSD base
- Touch Bar remains
- 5 additional battery hours
- USB 4.0
- No PCIE in notebooks, Apple will design their own bus for storage and USB 4.0 (open source standard). PCIE support will be in MacPro chips as a bridge for PCIE expansion.

Why would notebooks need PCIE support? USB 4.0 will handle external devices. Apple will just map internal SSD storage their own way. Probably less bloated and bottle necked by PCIE

Apple are not going to release an MBP13 that is better than the current Intel MBP16 because it will kill sales of the MBP16. The only way it could happen is if they also released an Apple-Silicon MBP16 at the same time. I doubt the latter will happen because they probably need more time to design an on-chip GPU as capable as the current Navi AMD Radeons.

12GB RAM is possible to allow for c. 4GB system memory for graphics.

 

[Jyby]

Science Rules!

 

[JohnnyGo]

Here’s my take on it:

ARM Macs have one major advantage which is performance per watt. So Apple is going all in with better performance than the equivalent MBA or MBP with a longer battery life (but not by much). I expect Apple to shave a couple of ounces to keep battery life at real 10-12hrs.

One thing they will definitely use is the faster an less power hungry LPDDR5. No doubt about that. The MBA may start at 8Gb RAM but all MBPs will start at 16Gb. Desktops Macs will also start at 16Gb but may not use LPDDR5 because there is no need for power efficiency.

GPU performance will be much better in low end Macs vs Intel but in higher end Macs performance will vary greatly depending on software / optimization using Metal vs other graphics languages.

The big unknown is whether Apple will go fanless all the way with MBA and 14 MBP, keeping fans only for a higher performance 16 MBP ARM. Fanless MBAs are a given IMO.

I expect Apple to announce a 2x gain in performance or at least 2x gain in performance per watt for their first new ARM Mac, most certainly an MBA that maybe be called simply MacBook or keep the MB Air name.

 

[aeronatis]

My guess is that, with Apple Silicon, the performance gap between 14" and 16" MacBook Pro will be no more (maybe slightly due to thermal headroom), just like how it is with the 11" and 12.9" iPad Pro. The only difference would be the size of the device and the screen resolution accordingly.

I believe MacBook Air will have the regular A14 (maybe slightly of higher TDP) just like the regular iPhone and iPad line-up as it is the case with the current MacBook Air with less than 10 watt CPU. The only different from iPhone/iPad line-up would be the configurability of the amount of RAM. There is no reason the system memory being anything more than LPDDR5 (which would be fine as the current device already uses LPDDR4 shared memory).

14" and 16" MacBook Pro would have the rumoured A14X with 8P & 4E cores as well as the iPad Pros, still the difference being the amount of RAM (and TDP obviously). Given Radeon Pro 5500M and 5600M are around the performance level of GTX 1060 Max-Q and RTX 2060 Max-Q respectively, it is really hard to estimate the graphics performance level of the new devices (Maybe less in raw power but similar/better performing due to running an ARM optimised OS and apps). The type of the unified memory here is a mystery for now.

iPad Air and MacBook Air would have regular LCD display just like they do now. iPad Pro and MacBook Pro would have miniLED with ProMotion (We know iPad Pro already has 120 Hz and why not dream of the same for Macs?). All would have USB4 ports with the number of ports varying from one another.

 

[Danny82]

If we are talking about the range, I would hope there won't be complicated range like intel as some said it is a good money making strategy.. really hate it.. y series i3, i5, i7.. u series i3, i5, i7.. h series i3, i5, i7, i9.. k series i3, i5, i7, i9.. come on.....

My ideal world will be:

1) A14 2p core - iphone all size, ipad air 8" & 10"
2) a14x 4p core - ipad pro 10.5" & 12.5", 12" & 14" MBA
3) a14m 8p core - 14" & 16" MBP, mac mini, imac 24"
4) a14 (any letter) 16p core - 27" imac or 32"
5) a14 (any letter) 16p core SLI? - mac Pro

Left out efficient core as most likely 4 core for all.. also left out GPU for the anyone to fill in.. also left out cheap iPhone and ipad.. mind as well call them SE

I know mbp 16" has always been more powerful than the 14".. but i really don't like the feeling of, "I really like the smaller form factor but I also like more power.. then stuck in between".. so I have put them together

This way, they just have to focus on getting the iphone chip stronger each year and then they mention it is a scalable architecture.. not like intel.. 14 chip in one generation.. too hard to focus on improvement every year..

Just going crazy and creating my ideal product range.. not going to happen anyway..