By: Chester (lamchester.delete@this.gmail.com), June 22, 2020 1:45 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
> The point of the exercise is to reassure customers that "all the apps you know and love will work
> without a hitch". The point is NOT to show tech-heads how much faster one CPU is than another.
> This is not a product demonstration; the demo systems are A12Z, not the SoCs that will ship (which
> will be at the very least A14 based, but which will likely have 8 large cores, more memory channels,
> better GPU, ...) So there's little value in giving performance indications for a system that will
> be, at the very least 1.5x faster single threaded and quite possibly 3x+ multi-threaded.
Yeah, my point exactly. They're trying to reassure users that stuff will work - not give performance claims. For those we'll have to wait and see.
>
> > IMO we have to wait a couple years for Apple to release a desktop ARM chip before drawing
> > conclusions (or at least for the A12Z dev kit to get out into the wild). They said the transition
> > would last that long. And I hope they do well, because that'll light a fire under Intel and
> > AMD. The next few years should be very interesting for CPU microarchitecture.
>
> End user macs will ship end of this year (ie A14 based, IMHO). Two year transition
> probably means that A15 (next year) will be the one that scales larger (beyond
> 8+8?) cores via whatever mechanism (chiplets? separate die?)
That should be exciting. Idk if they'll do a chiplet design, but Apple's efforts to push ARM on desktop will certainly be interesting to follow.
> without a hitch". The point is NOT to show tech-heads how much faster one CPU is than another.
> This is not a product demonstration; the demo systems are A12Z, not the SoCs that will ship (which
> will be at the very least A14 based, but which will likely have 8 large cores, more memory channels,
> better GPU, ...) So there's little value in giving performance indications for a system that will
> be, at the very least 1.5x faster single threaded and quite possibly 3x+ multi-threaded.
Yeah, my point exactly. They're trying to reassure users that stuff will work - not give performance claims. For those we'll have to wait and see.
>
> > IMO we have to wait a couple years for Apple to release a desktop ARM chip before drawing
> > conclusions (or at least for the A12Z dev kit to get out into the wild). They said the transition
> > would last that long. And I hope they do well, because that'll light a fire under Intel and
> > AMD. The next few years should be very interesting for CPU microarchitecture.
>
> End user macs will ship end of this year (ie A14 based, IMHO). Two year transition
> probably means that A15 (next year) will be the one that scales larger (beyond
> 8+8?) cores via whatever mechanism (chiplets? separate die?)
That should be exciting. Idk if they'll do a chiplet design, but Apple's efforts to push ARM on desktop will certainly be interesting to follow.
