What does A14 mean for the first Apple Silicon Macs?

[Jorbanead]

Summary: do not automatically assume that A14 in the new iPad Air will be the same chip in the AS Mac.

They clearly said they are making a family of SOC’s for the Mac, and stressed that the A12z in the dev kit was not indicative of what’s going into macs. Of course some of this may be reading between the lines, but it never sounded like they were ever just going to slap an A14 chip in the Mac and call it good.

What I’m mostly interested in is the performance gains. We’re pretty confident at this point that the SoC’s will be based off of the same 5nm process and use the same cpu and gpu design as the A14 (just scaled up to various tiers).

For purely marketing reasons, I also don’t see them putting in an A14 chip into any Mac just because that’s considered a “mobile” chip used for iPads and iPhones and marketing will want to differentiate the Mac and it’s feature sets.

 

[Kostask]

The A14 CPU, ML/AI cores, and GPU will form the basis for the Mac SoC. Anything developed for the A14 has already been debugged, tested, verified, etc. The Mac SoC will use multiples of these CPU and GPU modules (I am making the assumption that the GPU will be identical to the A14 GPU), but the quantities will go up. Apple will dispense with things like the controllers for the Face ID camera, the touch sensor, motion sensor, etc. They will then add on modules for USB and TB, possilbly storage controllers, larger amounts of RAM, keyboard controller, etc. They may also get rid of whatever silicon is used for controlling the cell phone chip set. There will be some cores that are identical, there will be others that are more advanced (as in the GPU and ML/AI cores, if they decide to go that way) and there will entirely new modules (that will need to go through design verification and test). So, the Mac SoC will not be an A14 (as in iPad/iPhone) derivative, but will use some of the modules originally developed for the A14. This allows Apple to call the Mac SoC "custom". It also allows for the very efficient leveraging of the design, test, and verification resources, with the iPhone essentially being used to pay for the CPU, ML/AI and GPU cores (if the GPU and ML/AI cores are the same between the A14 and the Mac SoC).

 

[Homy]

pretty sure you mean 50 and 300 respectively

You're right. I meant 1.5 and 4 times faster which means 50% and 300%. Thanks!

 

[johngwheeler]

Here is my unscientific speculation based on the presentation of A14:

A12 6.9 billion transistors, 6 CPU cores, 4 GPU cores, Geekbench 5 single core 1112, multi-core 2866, Metal 4641

A12X 10 billion transistors, 8 CPU cores, 7 GPU cores

A12Z 10 billion transistors, 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, Geekbench 5 single core 1118, multi-core 4631, Metal 10337

A13 8.5 billion transistors, 6 CPU cores, 4 GPU cores

A14 11.8 billion transistors, 6 CPU cores, 4 GPU cores, 40% faster CPU than A12, 30% faster GPU than A12, Geekbench 5 single core 1557, multi-core 4012, Metal 6033

A14Z 17.1 billion transistors, 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 40% faster CPU than A12Z, 30% faster GPU than A12Z, Geekbench 5 single core 1565, multi-core 6483, Metal 13438

A14Z Mac SoC 25.8 billion transistors, 12 CPU cores, 32 GPU cores, 50% faster multi-core than A14Z, 300% faster GPU than A14Z, Geekbench 5 single core 1565, multi-core 9725, Metal 53752

That would put A14Z Mac on par with 10-core i9 in iMac 2020 and the GPU between RX 580 and RX Vega 56.

Your A14Z Mac SoC would be fantastic, but I'm not expecting it for a first release. I expect the real-world specs to be much closer to your A14Z estimate - but would be delighted to be proved wrong!