That's assuming Apple wants to maintain the performance level of the 4 small cores for the same power consumption. But they may have determined that two icestorm cores were sufficient for background tasks on the Macs that will have these new CPUs.
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Rumored pro chip
- Thread starter cmaier
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Why do so many people think this, when the Intel iMac Pro was discontinued, and the 'bigger' consumer-line iMac is still for sale.
You might as well suggest that the AirPod Mini is going to be discontinued and the replacement will be a new Airport Express with audio port.
Is it so ridiculous though? I could totally see Apple reshuffling the entire line into “non-pro” and “pro”. Dropping the Intel iMac Pro to then reintroduce the ARM iMac Pro as a replacement for the 27” model a year later doesn’t sound too unreasonable. It definitely makes more sense than dropping the 27” iMac and retaining the expensive, niche Pro for the time being.
I could maybe see them merging the two lines, with a wider range of models within the line to satisfy the regular iMac buyers and the iMac Pro buyers - but if the name is going to be 'iMac Pro', discontinuing that one a short time beforehand just makes the whole thing appear like they're flip flopping and don't know what they want to make, or what people want to buy.
It seems pretty obvious that there is a market for an iMac Pro - especially professionals who need a quality big screen and more power but don't want to shell out $5000 for the XDR display and $20,000 Mac Pro.
The gap between an iMac/Mac Mini and an XDR + Mac Pro is way too large.
There are many possible reasons for why Apple would discontinue the Intel iMac Pro before re-introducing with an Apple Silicon chip. One possibility could be a Xeon/Radeon chip shortage or repurposing the manufacturing line for the new iMac/iMac Pro.
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I gravitating towards Apple going with a 2 categories by 3 performance tiers matrix where they would have the mobile and desktop categories with the Base, Pro and Workstation performance tier. I think we're pretty much done with the Base performance tier where we have the M1 Macs + the iPad Pro.
WWDC '21 will see the announcement of the start of the Pro performance tier, with staggered releases of different form factors until 1Q 2022.
Likely WWDC '22 see the the completion of the transition with the Workstation tier.
If the M1 Macs are any indication, all the different form factors of the same tier will have roughly the same computing power.
WWDC '21 will see the announcement of the start of the Pro performance tier, with staggered releases of different form factors until 1Q 2022.
Likely WWDC '22 see the the completion of the transition with the Workstation tier.
If the M1 Macs are any indication, all the different form factors of the same tier will have roughly the same computing power.
I thought we'd already heard how the later revisions of the regular iMac 5K mostly meet/exceed the display/CPU of the iMac Pro?
A 2019 Mac Pro configured as close as possible (I didn't bother checking actual performance of components, so e.g. I just picked the baseline VegaII - which is almost certainly higher performing than the Vega56 in the iMac Pro) to the specs of the highest 'default' iMac Pro is $10K. But sure, just make **** up, I guess?
You don't have to double them, but they could adjust the dynamic clock a bit. E.g. they could let the CPU cores go up to 10 or 15 watts in single-core operation but drop it back down to 5 watts in sustained multicore (just like x86 CPUs do).
It would also be weird if the Air is faster in single-core than Apple's professional computers...
You're right. That would be weird.
That would suggest that the upcoming Macbook Pro SoCs are indeed based on the A15 instead of the A14. This would basically mean that the Macbook Pros will always have faster single-thread performance over the Macbook Air/iPad Pro and even the iPhone.
Pro Macs should always get the next-gen SoC update first over the iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air, iMac.
So the recent 10-core SoC rumor (rather than 12-core M1) makes a lot of sense since this is actually based on A15.
Yes it would but M2 Air would be a 'weaker' SoC in terms of RAM, multi-core, and IO support/thunderbolt/display support.
Th graphics also would be lot higher on the Pro models.
IMO, the Air having the fastest single core is a given because it will always be the first Mac to receive a new process node.
Lower frequency and memory throughput should hold the Air back a bit I would have thought...
Also why do they need the addition of two more GPU cores for the future consumer level hardware...? GPUs not advancing as fast as the CPU cores perhaps...?
Because they want to close the gap between the entry level Macs and entry-level gaming laptops maybe? A 10-core GPU with slightly improved per-core performance would allow M2 to better compete against the likes of 3050
Well people who buy ultrabooks don't care about gaming(Just raw GPU speed). I think the M1 has some RT tech.
DLSS is used for games. Apple can indeed make the Neural engine like DLSS. Who knows maybe they do that for higher end Macs
At this point I would be surprised if upcoming Apple hardware didn't have RT. That said, RT on the 3050 series is practically unusable due to low performance.
And DLSS... you are really obsessed by it, aren't you
Still important to keep in mind Apple are selling Apple Arcade I guess. Gotta make it worth the $5 and a lot more people buy the $999 Air than $2400 MBP. Imagine the next iPad Pros...there has to be a bigger picture we can’t see for this ramp up in power/performance. There certainly aren’t any competitors to worry about.
They are both firestorm and ice storm, yes, but that just means they have the same microarchitecture - the same number and arrangement of ALUs, same number of reservation stations (probably), same buffer sizes, etc. But the physical designs are different - the size, location, quantity, and interconnection of transistors and metal that achieve that microarchitecture is different.
Many’s the time I worked on an follow-on chip where we took the same “core” and re-did the physical design to eliminate critical paths, decrease power consumption, tweak performance (increase the size of a buffer, move logic across flip-flops, etc.). Same microarchitecture, different design. Just like two vendors who produce an Arm Cortex-<> have the same microarchitecture, but conceivably very different chips.
As for ice storm, it’s a misnomer to say they are for background tasks. There are way more than 2 low-priority tasks running on any mac at any time. The more of them that have to run. On firestorms, the less time firestorms have to do high priority tasks. So the new efficiency cores must be better at running more low priority tasks at once.
the first place I’d use 3D stacking is for memory. There isn’t enough connectivity between other blocks to make it worth while, unless you cut the blocks so they are very small.
Hey you said entry-level gaming laptops, which if they come with the 3050 will have DLSS and usable HW RT (with DLSS on). I am not setting the bar, entry-level gaming laptops are.At this point I would be surprised if upcoming Apple hardware didn't have RT. That said, RT on the 3050 series is practically unusable due to low performance.
And DLSS... you are really obsessed by it, aren't you
Don't think there's much doubt that Apple dead-ended the iMac Pro after the release of the Mac Pro - if you go back to the original launch when it was still the new shiny thibg, there was more clear space between the top-end iMac and the iMac Pro. Plus, I don't think the 2020 iMac can touch the 18-core iMac Pro configuration.
There is also the whole Xeon and ECC RAM "stability" thing, making the iMac Pro more stable for sustained workloads, and the extra I/O bandwidth (I think the iMac Pro uses some sort of faster dual-channel/twin blade SSD?) which is partly attributable to using the Xeon. Intel manages to charge a hefty premium for Xeon on that basis - and, of course, that's the only way to get the higher core counts.
...haven't really kept up with GPUs, but there certainly used to be a similar price leap between regular GPUs and "workstation class" ones (which I believe sometimes came down to different drivers).
When it comes to Apple Silicon, Apple could call the 5k iMac replacement whatever they like, but the real question is whether Apple's new processor range will include something akin to the big Core i/Xeon divide that warrants two different ranges with a big price gap. So far, with the M1, they seem to be squeezing the maximum mileage out of just one basic processor design...
Yeah, 3 years of updates on one side will close the gap, which is kind of my point about the regular iMac matching it. There's always gonna be some outlier cases in one direction or another - but for most aspects I had the impression the regular iMac was configurable to be pretty close (obviously 10G eth, extra TB3 ports, the apparently precious space gray colour are not available on the regular iMac)
Which is kind of why I wouldn't be surprised if it's just back to 'iMac', with the range of tiers they normally have, or maybe some additional high end tiers/BTO options for those that need it (i.e. 10G eth is available on mini, seems weird to omit it on iMac)
But to call of that iMac Pro seems weird. Not because of any concept of "what does it meant to be pro", just from the marketing flip-flop factor. Apple very rarely does things at random - there's always the bigger picture in mind, which is why I don't see the iMac Pro name coming back - it just sounds too much like "welp we ****ed this up, you guys do like the name iMac Pro, so here's what we would have called the iMac, but we're calling it iMac Pro".
Or Apple is not as worried about power consumption on Macs that either do not use batteries (the desktops) or that either have larger batteries or the customer base has traditionally accepted lower battery life for more performance (MacBook Pro).
Even with just two efficiency cores, I expect the 2021 16" MBP will have better - and probably much better - battery life than the 2020 model. So yes, it could be that much better if it had four Icestorm efficiency cores instead of two, but those customers likely have workloads that benefit much more from having eight Firestorm performance cores than four and worse case they can plug the thing in - which anyone with an Intel MBP is used to doing when working it hard.
Thunderbolt is a big one, but there are also evidently hardware to support virtual machines and other tasks that were not something done on an iPhone or iPad.
That being said, it seems pretty clear M1 was designed with both the Mac and the iPad Pro in mind. I do not believe it was a case of it being designed for one product family (be it iPad or Mac) and then used in the other "because we had it lying around already". I do believe Apple will eventually extend iPadOS to perform tasks that currently are the sole domain of macOS and having a more capable SoC at the heart of iPads will allow this to happen.
In my case, it's recent Apple marketing.
Most Apple product families have a "Pro" version:
AirPods / AirPods Pro
iPhone / iPhone Pro
iPad / iPad Pro
MacBook (Air) / MacBook Pro
Apple has an iMac, so it makes sense from a marketing standpoint to also have an iMac Pro above it. There are also rumors of a more powerful ASi Mac mini with more expansion ports coming so that might become the "Mac mini Pro" if the current ASi Mac mini sticks around.
Based on what we are hearing, Apple has a new iMac model on the way that will have a (much) larger display than the 24" iMac, a (much) more powerful M SoC, (much) more RAM and (much) more storage. All of these are things Apple uses with other product families to differentiate between a "consumer" and "professional" model, the latter of which they apply the "Pro" suffix to.
As for them still keeping the 27" iMac around, I see that as a reflection of both continued market demand for Intel-powered Mac hardware and that the Apple Silicon replacement is not yet ready for market.
And just because the Intel iMac Pro started at $4999 does not mean the Apple Silicon model must start at the same price. Even if it has an expensive 32" 6K display modeled along the lines of the Pro Display XDR, they can play with the initial RAM and storage allotments to lower the price. They could even start it with an M1 SoC if that is what it takes to hit a $1999 initial price point to stay inline with the current Intel iMac 5K starting point.