That I can agree with, however your use of the word “redesign” is very hand wavy. It makes me think you want something you don’t expect. And that’s fine, but, if that’s the case, maybe use words that directly convey that. Design is an ambiguous idea, especially in this very complicated industry, so it’s helpful to use well defined terms.
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User predictions for Apple Prosumer Silicon (M1X, M2 etc.)
- Thread starter leman
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M2 will be the next generation architecture. E.g. from this year’s iPhone onwards. I am almost certain it will be an M1X in these MBPs. They needed to let the M1 devices settle into the market before updating the higher power devices.
With all the leaks coming out so far, I'm more inclined to think M2 instead of M1X. Apple has been planning this transition for many years, so the M2's design probably started 2-3 years ago. It kind of make sense to have the M2 first as the Mac is lower volume. Fabricating the lower volume M2 using a newer process and working out the kinks before the higher volume A15 makes a lot of sense.
We shall probably know in around 7-8 hours time. Heh heh.
My prediction: M2X. Plain old M2 will follow in 6 months (plus or minus) for the low end/consumer machines. This establishes a cadence where the pro machines get the new and faster cores before the consumer machines. I don't know if I necessarily expect this to happen, but it sounds sensible to me.
Latest MacRumors article throws some cold water on the possibility of new hardware announcement, though, which would be a real bummer after all this buildup.
Latest MacRumors article throws some cold water on the possibility of new hardware announcement, though, which would be a real bummer after all this buildup.
when there was a substantive process shrink. Over the long term year the E core get better (move closer to performance space their cohort P cores exited when they move up) . The proposed notion though that could get rid of two E cores because was going to be the two remaining ones twice as powerful so need less. Without a major process shrink all that would be doing is making bigger more power consuming cores. ... If it even worked. Apple does no SMT so getting two "one thread at a time" core to do twice as much parallel work will be a major issue if put a hard cap on consuming more power. And substantively more likely to spill work onto P cores.
So the prediction was more along the lines of the E core don't have to be as low powered consuming as they are and so just turn up their burn rate. If you turn them into "mid range" cores ( more the E but still less than P ) is effective how? If you are just going to consolidate work onto a fewer cores could just do "race to sleep" on a P core.
This is more along the lines of getting rid of E cores because "real powerful users don't use dainty E cores". That's silly. The E cores aren't that dainty. Over time they have gotten more capable and on future implementation iterations they will cover more ground. If open up Activity monitory and look at all of the instantiated processes on a Mac, the E cores can handle well over 75% of the stuff on that list. That frees up timeslices on the P core*s) to do more "more power" workloads . Also lots of times folks walk away from laptop to go do something else for a couple of minutes. ( Often don't need P cores for "nobody is looking" work).
( Yes there are some Samsung/Qualcomm SoCs that have one X1 (bigger) , a couple of Cortex75 (big) , and 4 or so Cortext55 (little) cores.. So have a mid range set . But the major objective there is smartphones and small die area usage (package can only be so big). In the context of MBP 16" , iMac 27" and bigger mother boards that is not a critical design issue. Compettion is more so 16 core "big" AMD x86_64 allocation of die space. )
And the Apple store didn't go down this morning, which is a bad sign too.
If they were planning ahead why didn't plan ahead to do a larger M1 die. Years ago also? If Apple chose to not allocation resources to do the work then it wouldn't be done. However, that non allocation would have been a planned choice. The issue if there was an early window for the M2 then there was an early window for M1 also. 00
The bigger issues that has problems is why M2-big would come before regular M2. If Apple needs a "bigger than A15" die to do 'pipe cleaning' of the new fab then the M2 is bigger. ( 120-130mm2 versus 80-90mm2 ). If they want can collect some M2's as -1 GPU and/or -1 P core to sell. And the M2 has a higher average selling price.
The other major problem with this "grand plan" is that the next generation A-series has to start high volume production every year in June so have them in relatively very large volume in late September. If the iPhone wasn't on a relatively rigid timeline then would be flex time to tweak the process with a pipecleaner. Other problem is that Apple needs hundreds if not thousands of A-series early for field validation testing around the world and validation testing. Cranking out numerous "risk production" A-series wafers anyway.
There is narrow window in the first couple of months of TSMC "at risk" production where there is probably a bigger impact of running through a 250-500mm2 dies though might help
To have had time to learn and adjust from the pipe cleaning exercise the bigger die production would have had to start back Jan-March time frame. There isn't much to validate that happened.
The A-series sells in at least one, if not two or more, orders of magnitude higher volume than the bigger M-series die will. The bigger the M-series die the quite likely the bigger of order of magnitude difference. The A-series product line isn't some poor, impoverished product line. For example, $50 A-series processor sells 100M units then a 15% cut of that is $750M . A $350 M-series processor sells 10M units , then a 15% cut of that is $525M. There is actually more money in the A-series pot than that particular M unit.
The order of magnitude gap in units sold is that would need a processor up in the $1,000 range to make a difference. The vast majority of the Mac line up doesn't support that kind of price just for the main SoC die.
for a company like AMD that doesn't have a "mega scale" volume product to lean on would shifting costs onto a relativey very low run , very high mark up product make sense. Sure. For Apple... not really. Apple has die volume that the AMD of 10 years ago had wet dreams about.
Even if they're announced today, the next Macs are not supposed to ship before well into summer. If preorders don't being today, there's no reason to close the store I suppose.
But they usually close the store lately to put up their coming soon adverts, at least the past few that I remember. I know last November there wasn't any immediate ordering, yet the store went down.
I suppose preorders were already possible, right? M1 Macs have hit the shelves less than 10 days after the event.
Well, there's no question about it anymore, no HW announcements at all. That was a boring keynote!
Yeah, no new hardware was a bit of a bummer. I was really sure they would at least mention something. Hoping that the new Macs won’t take until autumn to be released…
I liked the keynote. Some quite useful everyday stuff here and there.
Nothing in iPad OS requires an M1 (IMO) -
On a positive note, Shortcuts on a mac are probably more powerful than cron
I recently fired up an Intel Mac - and you know, lack of heat generation and constant fans make using an M1 while waiting for M2 pretty bearable.
I actually wanted the 14" M1(whatever) to be announced, I probably would have ordered it, but no mention at all about whatever is following the M1 was a bit of a surprise.
As for my boring comment, well, I really hate mondays.
Truth be told, I liked the ipadOS announcments.
On a positive note, Shortcuts on a mac are probably more powerful than cron
Yeah, the entire automator thing was in a dire need of an overhaul. Shortcuts looks neat and I totally see myself using it.
I don't know, some of the new siri requirements aren't that light on processing needs, at least to keep them fast. Hard to tell. The M1 on the iPad could well have just been a cost thing I guess.
I don't use shortcuts on my phone yet, maybe it's time to see what it does!
I'm referring to the much rumored redesign to the MacBook Pros. Not to anything I want or don't want, especially since I am not going to be in the market for whichever machine comes out anyway. This redesign is all that people are talking about, so that's what I'm referring to. Given that we didn't see a hardware announcement today, I'm less inclined to believe that Apple will release a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the current body design and Apple Silicon under the hood. I was thinking that they might just for the sake of getting the 16-inch MacBook Pro transitioned, but in advance of the M2 refresh that would likely see the advent of the 14-inch MacBook Pro too. But Apple never NEEDED to rush on getting the 16-inch MacBook Pro switched over, especially since it's clear that it, along with the 27" iMac, the Mac Pro, and what's left of the 2018 Mac mini will not simply be replaced with another M1, the likes of which we currently have in the other shipping M1 Macs. The only Mac model which makes minimal sense to be held out for this long is the 4-port 13" MacBook Pro, which seems to only be kept around for its two extra ports, its 4TB SSD option and its 32GB RAM option. Otherwise, I don't see why the M1 13" MacBook Pro couldn't have just replaced both models.
Swift Playgrounds app developed hooked into XCode Cloud. ( mentioned separately but those will probably be hooked together later after they get the XCode Cloud initial kinks worked out. ). iPad Pro is an iPhone/iPad add development platform now. ( hard to be a very complicated app on Playground, but at least possible now . ) There is stuff can see happening too. RealityKit Object Creation. That is likely not to stay "mac only" for long either.
It will come slowly. Part of issue that the vast majority of systems running iPad OS are not 2021 (or later) iPad Pros. As they sell more and the NPU core count on the iPad gets normalized , then perhaps more features later.
Yep... That was extremely disappointing on the iPad front. Glad I didn't buy an M1 iPad now.Nothing in iPad OS requires an M1 (IMO) -
On a positive note, Shortcuts on a mac are probably more powerful than cron
Do you work for Apple? I'm not upgrading from my 2018 iPad Pro to an M1 iPad just for Siri, a largely useless so-called assistant to be 0.1s faster. Comment of the day