I have a late 2011 15" Macbook Pro that went through 2 of the AMD 6770M GPU recall(freezing, distorted screen, auto restart). It's been running strong but since the last MacOS it can run is High Sierra, I ended up getting last month a mint 2015 15" MBP with AMD 370MX GPU...all the ports I need...TB 2, USB 3.0, HDMI, SD Card slot, audio jack....and this is now my portable FCPX/Davinci Resolve editing powerhouse...stoked that it is compatible with Big Sur. Will be holding onto this until it no longer is supported on a future MacOS...by then the ARM MBP's will be around its 2nd/3rd generation. I was always tempted to upgrade to a Thunderbolt 3 MBP...glad I held off.
Apple dumps Intel and shows Final Cut Pro on new Mac with Apple CPU !
- Thread starter joe1946
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Ah, awesome! I don’t exactly remember what all went down, but i kind of wish i pursued it a bit more. Well, glad to hear it! I enjoy that model. Ended up swapping some gear for a 2012 or 2013 13” of the same general body. Classic design. The newer ones are nice, but i like the overall size and design of the 2011 unibody. Slightly user upgradable, etc. feels more like a professional tool.
Samuel H
Major Contributor
Here's a comparison of Amazon's ARM-based cloud-computing server (graviton 2) against some even more expensive AMD (zen1) and Intel (cascade lake) servers. That ARM machine is almost as good in single-thread performance and scales better to multithreaded performance. A more modern Threadripper 3990x desktop would probably beat it at much lower price, but that thing I said before that "ARM has worse total performance" is going to depend on exactly what configuration you use, what you compare against, and what you measure. I still have doubts about the move, but at least there's a chance it may improve performance and not just boost their margins. Interesting...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd
Thomas Smet
Veteran
the transition from PowerPC to Intel opened up a lot of options by allowing bootcamp. It was a fairly positive move with few negatives except for a few older tools that refused to update.
The transition from Intel to Arm (refuse to call it Apple silicon) so far doesn't offer any awesome new abilities like bootcamp did.
Bootcamp opened up a whole new world because suddenly PC users could buy a Mac and if they had to still run Windows. Right now Arm seems to just offer less heat/noise and better performance in a smaller space. It adds the ability to use iPhone and iPad apps on the Mac but Catalyst already allowed iPad apps. Plus most iOS apps are not massive performance hogs and the big ones like popular games likely already had a MacOS version anyway.
I just don't see a lot of demand to run a iPhone app on a desktop. There are the typical ones like Facebook but those already have options on the desktop. I can't think of very many apps that have a phone only version. This is more to plug up the fact that the Mac App Store sucks and maybe desktop users will now bother to buy a few apps.
The Arm direction is going to have to provide one hell of a performance boost to get people excited or else its just a in the background transition and just something buyers will be stuck with. I don't see a ton of non Mac users suddenly rushing out to buy Apple because of this change.
This may be huge for Apple due to the effort and how many business partnerships they can reduce but from a market perspective it doesn't really mean very much at all. Its just the guts that make the computer do the same things they do now. 99% of Apple users won't give two $%^&$ what's inside.
The transition from Intel to Arm (refuse to call it Apple silicon) so far doesn't offer any awesome new abilities like bootcamp did.
Bootcamp opened up a whole new world because suddenly PC users could buy a Mac and if they had to still run Windows. Right now Arm seems to just offer less heat/noise and better performance in a smaller space. It adds the ability to use iPhone and iPad apps on the Mac but Catalyst already allowed iPad apps. Plus most iOS apps are not massive performance hogs and the big ones like popular games likely already had a MacOS version anyway.
I just don't see a lot of demand to run a iPhone app on a desktop. There are the typical ones like Facebook but those already have options on the desktop. I can't think of very many apps that have a phone only version. This is more to plug up the fact that the Mac App Store sucks and maybe desktop users will now bother to buy a few apps.
The Arm direction is going to have to provide one hell of a performance boost to get people excited or else its just a in the background transition and just something buyers will be stuck with. I don't see a ton of non Mac users suddenly rushing out to buy Apple because of this change.
This may be huge for Apple due to the effort and how many business partnerships they can reduce but from a market perspective it doesn't really mean very much at all. Its just the guts that make the computer do the same things they do now. 99% of Apple users won't give two $%^&$ what's inside.
joe1946
Veteran
Apple should stick that A12Z processor into the 2013 Mac Pro with Thunderbolt 3 and 10Gb Ethernet ports etc. for a low cost desktop to run Final Cut Pro on a large 6K monitor like in the WWDC 2020 demo.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/...veloper-transition-kit-silicon-chip-wwdc-2020
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Taiwan Semiconductor is going to build a major plant in Arizona to manufacture 5 nM chips for Apple. This is moving way beyond Macs.
https://www.cnet.com/news/report-apple-chip-manufacturer-to-build-factory-in-arizona/
https://www.cnet.com/news/report-apple-chip-manufacturer-to-build-factory-in-arizona/
Thomas Smet
Veteran
Just checked out the Arm development system that can be purchased from Apple for testing apps for developers. No TB3 ports. Only USB3.
That reminded me of one important factor. Intel invented Thunderbolt. Are we potentially seeing the end of TB3 with Apple here? Even if 3rd party GPUs can work with an Arm system if TB3 is no more then so is eGPU.
I read it is now possible for AMD to support TB3 so maybe TB3 will come eventually or at launch. Intel did say they will still be providing a lot of other components to Apple. Maybe part of that is licensing TB3 to Apple.
That reminded me of one important factor. Intel invented Thunderbolt. Are we potentially seeing the end of TB3 with Apple here? Even if 3rd party GPUs can work with an Arm system if TB3 is no more then so is eGPU.
I read it is now possible for AMD to support TB3 so maybe TB3 will come eventually or at launch. Intel did say they will still be providing a lot of other components to Apple. Maybe part of that is licensing TB3 to Apple.
In May 2017, Intel announced that Thunderbolt 3 would become a royalty-free standard to OEMs and chip manufacturers in 2018, as part of an effort to boost the adoption of the protocol. The Thunderbolt 3 specification was later released to the USB-IF in March 2019, making it royalty-free, to be used to form USB4. Intel says it will retain control over certification of all Thunderbolt 3 devices, though it will not be mandatory.
That being said, I am unable to connect a Glyph Thunderbolt 3 SSD drive to our iPad Pro. It indicates that it is T3 device and "unsupported."
That being said, I am unable to connect a Glyph Thunderbolt 3 SSD drive to our iPad Pro. It indicates that it is T3 device and "unsupported."
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Thunderbolt hasn't been implemented on any iPad or iPhone so far, and the dev kit is running an iPad chip, so it makes sense that it doesn't work yet, since it'd require a chip level redesign. Maybe they'll just go with USB4, on their first one?
there is a pretty in depth thread on Macrumors Mac Pro forum. here is what i thought a really informative response from one of their members...
this is a cut and paste from "Cuu":
I'm a big enthusiast, build my own water cooled computers and servers which I have done so for over 15 years. I know a great deal about computer hardware right down to manufacturing including chip fabrication and design.
I'm also a software engineer and I write server based software that runs on x86 and ARM based architectures, in the past I worked on FPGA hardware where we prototyped chip functions before committing to designing and fabricating ASIC's. I say all this to provide some context to what I'm about to say next.
Based on all the relevant data we have about Apples ARM chips they are core-for-core already better than Intel on generalised computing tasks. And that in itself is absoloutely insane because the chips Apple is producing are in phones with extremely small power and thermal budgets.
We're talking execution parity with processors that consume 30 to 50x more watts and release 100x more heat. This is literally unheard of in the industry and to put this in perspective for Intel to even get close (and still be 10x worse) they would have to bin their processors to within an inch of their life.
If you're not familiar with that term it's where they test the chips they produce and put them in different categories based on their performance such as how high they clock, if any parts of the chip are defective, how much power the chip consumes at the clock speeds it's capable of, how much heat it produces while under load etc
Apple has managed to reach parity not with their top 0.01% of produced chips like Intel does with some of their super high-end XEON's and ultra low-power U skus. They've been able to do it with from what we can decipher 86-92% of their entire chip yields.
They sell 100 Million iPhones with their latest SoC every year and they all perform the same which is to say absoloutely steller, top of the line performance, two years ahead of their closest mobile counterpart (Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Exynos etc).
So with all that out of the way what does all this mean for the Mac Pro? - When you're wanting to build a large chip one with a wide memory bus, lots of cores, lots of on-board cache you need to start with a strong foundation and in todays chip fabrication that means more than anything performance-per-watt.
If you have a die that consumes 2.5 Watts per core and you scale that to 64 Cores which is the kind of chip appropriate for a next generation Mac Pro suddenly you have 160 Watts for raw core compute. And that's before you factor in the power consumption for core-to-core communication (uncore) which with that many cores could be 20-30 watts then the I/O such as memory and PCIe and any other "uncore" usage.
Things can quickly spiral into the 250-350 Watt range. But here is Apple with an architecture that is already sub 1 Watt for the cores. Suddenly they can produce a 64 Core chip where all the cores can be 60 Watts leaving ample room for uncore power.
This is what's exciting. Instead of coming at the processor design challange from the top (performance) they've come at it from the bottom (low power). This lends itself perfectly to making a large chip with lots of cores a chip that is appropriate for a Mac Pro class computer.
Now on top of this as I mentioned Apple has put these high performance chips in phones that have very small thermal envelopes and yet we've seen Apple able to reach very high clock speeds on these processors even when under sustained loads. This is noteworthy because this is without proper heatsinks. Apple at most has an IHS on their chips now (Integrated Heat Spreader) which is thinner than the thickness of a coin.
When they design a chip using the principle architecture of their mobile SoC's into laptops and desktops where they can attach heatsinks that have 45 Watts (MacBook Pro) to 300 Watts (Mac Pro) of heat dissipation they can run them a lot faster.
Based on AMD's usage of TSMC's 7nm process node we know that the high performance node offered by TSMC (which does differ slightly from the low-power 7nm node utilised by Apple) that the sweet spot for the transistor switching speed is around 4GHz.
This is the point where heat output, power consumption and clock speed come together for the best trade offs on each to deliver a high performance chip which doesn't guzzle energy essentially. So right now in a phone Apple is pushing 2.3GHz and already streamrolling Intels 3.6GHz-4.2GHz mobile chips core-for-core. Now imagine what Apple can do delivering their own archicture at these same clock speeds.
I need to remind you, we can only do projections because we can't overclock an iPhone SoC to see what might be.
Now I do want to temper expectations a little. There are things Apple has to overcome to deliver for a Mac Pro type computer.
Firstly I cannot overstate how difficult it is to keep so many cores fed. The interconnects between CPU cores in a single die can really hamper performance especially in the kinds of high end workflows professionals will be performing where core-to-core communication is highly utilised due to multithreading.
Secondly if Apple decides to make chips that are one huge die (like Intel) that will decrease yield rates due to increases in defects. It will also increase costs as more of the wafers produced for them will go to waste. So this is a two-fold problem, clock speeds and core counts may become restricted with this strategy.
They could potentially go with a multi-die setup similar to AMD's Zen1 or Zen2 where by you make smaller dies that are all identical and combine them together on a single module to create the CPU. If Apple were to do this it would allow for higher yields, higher clock speeds (especially on the high core count part appropriate for a Mac Pro) and lower their costs.
Thirdly scaling up an entire chip for a desktop takes time. There is a lot of engineering they can't just skip over, there is stuff they haven't done even for the iPhone and iPad. For example their current SoC has PCIe lanes and they use NVMe storage on the iPhone and iPad. That's great when you only need 4 lanes but the Mac Pro for example needs 72. This means Apple has to decide do we put 72 or more PCIe lanes into our SoC or do we put say 32 and use PCIe switching chips? - There's trade offs. Also do they move to PCIe 4.0 or even 5.0 (2021 5.0 will be making the rounds in shipping systems from their rivals).
Forth and perhaps the most important. While Apple is dominating in Mobile and their performance eclipses Intel currently (when normalising core count and frequency) there is another chip manufacturer on an unbelivable climb to the top and that is AMD.
What happens if AMD is faster than Apple and they made everyone do all this work switching? What if Apple can only produce a 32 Core part for their first Mac Pro refresh when AMD already today is selling a 64 Core chip? What if Apple can only deliver 72 PCIe lanes or the lanes they do produce are only PCIe 3.0 when AMD today is delivering 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes.
That is to me the biggest gambit they're taking here. In 2021 when these new ARM macs are supposedly coming out AMD will be delivering Zen4 based EPYC processors that feature 128 or more PCIe 5.0 lanes and 64 Cores+ (the rumour being 72 Cores but if they move to 5nm by then it may be as much as 128 Cores, all over 3GHz and under 250 Watts power consumption).
Anyway, interesting times. Personally if Apple can deliver something that is better then I say they should go for it. I don't think the downsides of software compatability headaches should hold back chip progress.
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this is a cut and paste from "Cuu":
I'm a big enthusiast, build my own water cooled computers and servers which I have done so for over 15 years. I know a great deal about computer hardware right down to manufacturing including chip fabrication and design.
I'm also a software engineer and I write server based software that runs on x86 and ARM based architectures, in the past I worked on FPGA hardware where we prototyped chip functions before committing to designing and fabricating ASIC's. I say all this to provide some context to what I'm about to say next.
Based on all the relevant data we have about Apples ARM chips they are core-for-core already better than Intel on generalised computing tasks. And that in itself is absoloutely insane because the chips Apple is producing are in phones with extremely small power and thermal budgets.
We're talking execution parity with processors that consume 30 to 50x more watts and release 100x more heat. This is literally unheard of in the industry and to put this in perspective for Intel to even get close (and still be 10x worse) they would have to bin their processors to within an inch of their life.
If you're not familiar with that term it's where they test the chips they produce and put them in different categories based on their performance such as how high they clock, if any parts of the chip are defective, how much power the chip consumes at the clock speeds it's capable of, how much heat it produces while under load etc
Apple has managed to reach parity not with their top 0.01% of produced chips like Intel does with some of their super high-end XEON's and ultra low-power U skus. They've been able to do it with from what we can decipher 86-92% of their entire chip yields.
They sell 100 Million iPhones with their latest SoC every year and they all perform the same which is to say absoloutely steller, top of the line performance, two years ahead of their closest mobile counterpart (Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Exynos etc).
So with all that out of the way what does all this mean for the Mac Pro? - When you're wanting to build a large chip one with a wide memory bus, lots of cores, lots of on-board cache you need to start with a strong foundation and in todays chip fabrication that means more than anything performance-per-watt.
If you have a die that consumes 2.5 Watts per core and you scale that to 64 Cores which is the kind of chip appropriate for a next generation Mac Pro suddenly you have 160 Watts for raw core compute. And that's before you factor in the power consumption for core-to-core communication (uncore) which with that many cores could be 20-30 watts then the I/O such as memory and PCIe and any other "uncore" usage.
Things can quickly spiral into the 250-350 Watt range. But here is Apple with an architecture that is already sub 1 Watt for the cores. Suddenly they can produce a 64 Core chip where all the cores can be 60 Watts leaving ample room for uncore power.
This is what's exciting. Instead of coming at the processor design challange from the top (performance) they've come at it from the bottom (low power). This lends itself perfectly to making a large chip with lots of cores a chip that is appropriate for a Mac Pro class computer.
Now on top of this as I mentioned Apple has put these high performance chips in phones that have very small thermal envelopes and yet we've seen Apple able to reach very high clock speeds on these processors even when under sustained loads. This is noteworthy because this is without proper heatsinks. Apple at most has an IHS on their chips now (Integrated Heat Spreader) which is thinner than the thickness of a coin.
When they design a chip using the principle architecture of their mobile SoC's into laptops and desktops where they can attach heatsinks that have 45 Watts (MacBook Pro) to 300 Watts (Mac Pro) of heat dissipation they can run them a lot faster.
Based on AMD's usage of TSMC's 7nm process node we know that the high performance node offered by TSMC (which does differ slightly from the low-power 7nm node utilised by Apple) that the sweet spot for the transistor switching speed is around 4GHz.
This is the point where heat output, power consumption and clock speed come together for the best trade offs on each to deliver a high performance chip which doesn't guzzle energy essentially. So right now in a phone Apple is pushing 2.3GHz and already streamrolling Intels 3.6GHz-4.2GHz mobile chips core-for-core. Now imagine what Apple can do delivering their own archicture at these same clock speeds.
I need to remind you, we can only do projections because we can't overclock an iPhone SoC to see what might be.
Now I do want to temper expectations a little. There are things Apple has to overcome to deliver for a Mac Pro type computer.
Firstly I cannot overstate how difficult it is to keep so many cores fed. The interconnects between CPU cores in a single die can really hamper performance especially in the kinds of high end workflows professionals will be performing where core-to-core communication is highly utilised due to multithreading.
Secondly if Apple decides to make chips that are one huge die (like Intel) that will decrease yield rates due to increases in defects. It will also increase costs as more of the wafers produced for them will go to waste. So this is a two-fold problem, clock speeds and core counts may become restricted with this strategy.
They could potentially go with a multi-die setup similar to AMD's Zen1 or Zen2 where by you make smaller dies that are all identical and combine them together on a single module to create the CPU. If Apple were to do this it would allow for higher yields, higher clock speeds (especially on the high core count part appropriate for a Mac Pro) and lower their costs.
Thirdly scaling up an entire chip for a desktop takes time. There is a lot of engineering they can't just skip over, there is stuff they haven't done even for the iPhone and iPad. For example their current SoC has PCIe lanes and they use NVMe storage on the iPhone and iPad. That's great when you only need 4 lanes but the Mac Pro for example needs 72. This means Apple has to decide do we put 72 or more PCIe lanes into our SoC or do we put say 32 and use PCIe switching chips? - There's trade offs. Also do they move to PCIe 4.0 or even 5.0 (2021 5.0 will be making the rounds in shipping systems from their rivals).
Forth and perhaps the most important. While Apple is dominating in Mobile and their performance eclipses Intel currently (when normalising core count and frequency) there is another chip manufacturer on an unbelivable climb to the top and that is AMD.
What happens if AMD is faster than Apple and they made everyone do all this work switching? What if Apple can only produce a 32 Core part for their first Mac Pro refresh when AMD already today is selling a 64 Core chip? What if Apple can only deliver 72 PCIe lanes or the lanes they do produce are only PCIe 3.0 when AMD today is delivering 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes.
That is to me the biggest gambit they're taking here. In 2021 when these new ARM macs are supposedly coming out AMD will be delivering Zen4 based EPYC processors that feature 128 or more PCIe 5.0 lanes and 64 Cores+ (the rumour being 72 Cores but if they move to 5nm by then it may be as much as 128 Cores, all over 3GHz and under 250 Watts power consumption).
Anyway, interesting times. Personally if Apple can deliver something that is better then I say they should go for it. I don't think the downsides of software compatability headaches should hold back chip progress.
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Last edited:
NorBro
Major Contributor
ha...that knowledge is just radiating. Have to get him or her to post over here.
Mind sharing the thread?
ahalpert
Major Contributor
I like reading stuff like this because it makes me feel dumb. I mean, it wasn't that hard to understand, but it was a lot of stuff I'll have to take his word for.
Even if he's right about the possibility that AMD could build a faster high-end machine, I wonder if what he says about lower power consumption means that Apple could build smoking mid-level and laptop computers with their chips...?
Even if he's right about the possibility that AMD could build a faster high-end machine, I wonder if what he says about lower power consumption means that Apple could build smoking mid-level and laptop computers with their chips...?