You know, hardcore PC gamers have always exaggerated their importance and numbers, and their numbers
are declining as proved by the dominance of mobile gaming when it comes to gaming revenue dollars.
Gamers are aging, and the willingness to invest the time in AAA games gets stripped away by the other responsibilities of life.
Outside of a few
must have titles, I've been out of gaming for a while now until recently when my daughter is more grown up and I've retired so I have time to game again. Still, I've recently had a sewage fill-up event whose mitigation has been spread out over a year due to COVID concerns, and a knucklehead hit me in an intersection by taking the turn too fast and I'm in the process of getting that damage repaired, both incidents costing about $13K each to mediate and a bunch of time.
AAA games require a fair investment of hardware dollars and time, and AAA developers are currently investing in the Wintel platform because of ... well
population. There are simply more Wintel users at this juncture than another other platform, and of that vast number of units a certain percentage sport discrete GPUs and CPUs fast enough to do realtime gaming.
Of that number, Mac computers have traditionally been underpowered because the principal target for Mac hardware has been productivity, and discrete GPUs have been limited to one GPU manufacturer due to nVidea screwing up so royally with GPUs melting on laptop class motherboards in the first decade of the current millennium.
Intel CPU designs have been stagnating and haven't delivered their promised (by roadmap) efficiency gains and delivered TDPs which have led to Apple reputational damage due to computers designed for energy budgets which year after year Intel failed to deliver on - resulting in thermal deceleration and ultimately the transition to Apple Silicon SoCs whose future course Apple
could actually rely on.
So here are are today - with Apple delivering machines with accelerated graphic and computational pipelines which have genuine price/performance/efficiency advantages so that not only are Mac users upgrading to them but Wintel users (not deeply embedded in legacy Windows subsystems) are switching to them - but it's only been less than a year so their population isn't enormous.
But ... even with just the first phase complete of Apple's lowest level offerings - their performance envelope bats waaayy outside that of their Wintel counterparts. The CPUs are highly advanced and
fast - high performance eight wide CPU cores with 690 instruction execution queues, massive reorder buffers, and enough arithmetic units so that Firestorm can execute up to eight instructions
simultaneously. That makes for blazingly fast single core execution speeds which traditional CPU makers like Intel and AMD can only match by pouring on energy to boost their clocks (which produces exponential increases in heat) and then turning around and requiring heroic cooling solutions (which adds still more to their energy budget) to keep those chips from burning up. How many discussions of high performance Wintel computers end up with question,
"... but how good is the cooling ... ?"
With those few units able beat M1, most do it by beating down the M1's mere four Firestorm cores by adding a ton of cores which works for easily multithreaded tasks like transcoding or an enormous number of discrete tasks like file sharing but in consumer computers mostly ends up with a lot of idle cores. IOW, for consumer computers it's mostly a specs-on-paper game.
So ... with M1x we end up with eight high performance Firestorm cores and two high efficiency Icestorm cores and 16 or 32 GPU cores (up from M1's 7 or 8). That M1 could achieve so much with 7 or 8 means that M1x's 16 or 32 will result in pretty much staggering graphics performance, provided that it's all done under the umbrella of unified memory and high speed interconnects, since 'M' series SoCs no longer require the main memory to GPU memory copying which resulted in such bottlenecks under the Wintel model, with graphics intermediate pipelines rendering into discrete tile memory.
So M1x should be a pretty significant improvement even if Apple doesn't play with the clocks ... which they could do. After all, Apple did nudge up the A14's clocks up to 3.2 ghz for the M1, and these new models should have lots more battery and thermal headroom. That's what's nice about evolving from a super thrifty SoC like the A14 which runs in a pocketable glass sandwich with a smallish battery and only passive cooling.
So, as the Apple Silicon population increases, so too does the population of Macs with fairly capable computational and graphics subsystems. M1x MacBooks are rumored to have mini-LED displays capable of true HDR (
at least 1000 NIT HDR transient brightness) and also possibly greater than 60 hz frame rates.
Can't wait to get my 16" M1x MacBook Pro, and I think that one of the first things I'm going to try is to run
Mass Effect Legendary Edition at full screen resolution under
Parallels 17 and
ARM Windows.
