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> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see an
by ianhowson 6y ago
> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster.
I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference.
Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gains [1]. Not one thing that they demoed requires any meaningful CPU power.
Similarly, while ARM parts are more efficient than x86 per compute cycle, it's not a dramatic change.
The big changes, I think, are more mundane:
- Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped
- Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators. They will probably put that stuff in T2 for Intel Macs. If they're already shipping T2 on every machine, with a bunch of CPU cores, why not just make those CPU cores big enough for the main workload?
Doubling CPU perf is meaningless if you can ship the right accelerators that'll do 100x energy/perf for video compression, crypto and graphics.
[1] for a regular web browsing type user; obviously if you're compiling stuff this may not apply; if that is true you're almost certainly better off just getting a Linux desktop for the heavy lifting
- an_opabinia 6y ago> Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped Whom is Apple going to sell binned A14s to? Where does everyone think margin comes from in the chip business?
- Reason077 6y agoApple will simply use different bins in different products. The A12X is arguably a "binned" A12Z, after all. Higher bins for pro lines, lower bins for consumer lines.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoApple doesn't have the lineup for that. The CPU in the Mac Pro isn't the same silicon as the CPU in the Mini. It has more cores, bigger caches, more memory channels. It's not just the same chip binned differently. In theory they could offer the Mini with eighteen different CPU options, but that's not really their style.
- huslage 6y agoThe Mac line will start to look like the iOS line very quickly. Binning will be important and you'll likely see processor generations synchronized across the entire product base.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoThe iOS line looks like the low end device using last year's chip. How does binning help with that? Are they going to stockpile all the low quality chips for two years before you start putting them in the low end devices? Wouldn't that make the performance unusually bad, because it's the older chip and the lower quality silicon?
- AgentOrange1234 6y agoWhy would they make the ios line worse? Surely they still want to prioritize phones?
- __d 6y agoI've been thinking about this. I can't see Apple realistically being able to produce multiple variants (phone, tablet, laptop, speaker, tv) of multiple elements (cpu, gpu, neural accelerator, wireless/network, etc) packaged up on an annual cadence. The silicon team is going to be very busy: they've got the A-series, S-series, T-series, H-series, W-series, and U-series chips to pump out on a regular roadmap. The A-series (CPU / GPU / Neural accelerator) is the major work. It gets an annual revision, which probably means at least two teams in parallel? The A-series X and Z variants seem to be kicked out roughly every second A-series generation, and power the iPads. The S-series seems to get a roughly annual revision, but it's a much smaller change than the main A-series. I could see the Mac chips on a 2-year cycle, perhaps alternating with the iPad, or perhaps even trailing the iPads by 6 months?
- gsnedders 6y agoOne question is whether they'll go down the chiplet route for higher end CPUs, then they can share a single die, binned differently, across more of their range, and just bundle them into different MCMs.
- jjoonathan 6y agoIf you think the bins are determined by yield rather than by fitting a supply/demand curve, I have a bridge to sell you. Of course, yield is still a physical constraint, but apple sells a wide range of products and shouldn't have any trouble finding homes for defect-ridden chips.
- npunt 6y agoChiplets and better interposers make yield/binning less of a need than before
- jychang 6y agoThe non Pro iPhones, non Pro iPads, Apple TVs, HomePods, maybe the Mac Minis if external GPUs are pushed as an alternative to integrated GPUs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- etqwzutewzu 6y agoI'm also predicting there will be no difference in battery life. If you check technical specifications on past MBP battery specification and battery life you can notice one thing: Watt/hour battery is always decreasing and battery life is always remaining constant (e.g., 10 hours of web scrolling). Gain in power consumption allows to reduce component space which allows further slimmer designs.
- 43920 6y agoI agree battery life for casual workloads will probably stay the same. However, if CPU power consumption decreases relative to other components, battery life on heavy workloads should go up.
- Reason077 6y ago> "Watt/hour battery is always decreasing" This isn't always true. The 16" MacBook Pro, for example, has a 100 Wh battery, which is the largest that Apple has ever shipped in a laptop. This is the largest battery size permitted in cabin baggage on flights.
- phonon 6y ago2015 15" Macbook Pro also had that (99.5 Wh). https://support.apple.com/kb/sp719?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/sp719?locale=en_US
- dylan604 6y agoGreat, they can make the laptops even slimmer. They're going to make them so thin they won't be able to put a USB-C port and use wireless charging. You'll soon learn that you don't actually need to plug anything into your device. Apple knows best.
- thefounder 6y ago>> You'll soon learn that you don't actually need to plug anything into your device. Apple knows best. A wireless solution is long-awaited.
- baddox 6y agoDon’t iPads get significantly better battery life than similar casual workloads on a similar form factor Intel PC (like a MacBook Air)?
- toyg 6y agoThat’s mostly because desktop systems are built with more background services and traditional multitasking in mind. iOS has a different set of principles.
- klelatti 6y agoSeems to me to be very likely that Apple's graphic's silicon is much more performant and power efficient than Intel's integrated GPUs. CPUs idle most of the time seems to point to the advantage of a big.LITTLE style design which Apple have been using for iPad's etc for a while. So maybe not 30% but not negligible either. They demoned lightroom and photoshop which are surely using meaningful CPU resources? Agreed on the accelerators and the cost savings. All together probably a compelling case for switching.
- 43920 6y ago> Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gains This doesn't really seem to match my experience; at least on a 2015 MBP, the CPU is always consuming at least 0.5-1W, even with nothing running. If I open a webpage (or leave a site with a bunch of ads open), the CPU alone can easily start consuming 6-7 watts for a single core. Apple claims 10 hours of battery life with a 70-something WH battery, which would indicate they expect total average power consumption to be around 7W; even the idle number is a decent percentage of that. (Also, has anyone been able to measure the actual power consumption of the A-series CPUs?)
- user5994461 6y agoA typical laptop display can consume around 10W all the time so the 1W from the idle CPU is negligible in comparison. If anything, you should install an adblocker. A single website filled with ads (and they're all filled with tons of ads) can spin the CPU to tens of watts forever, significantly draining the battery.
- majewsky 6y agoAnecdotal evidence: On my work notebook (Lenovo X1 Carbon, Windows 10), the fan starts spinning when Slack is on a channel with animated emoji reactions.
- falcolas 6y agoMy anecdote mirrors yours, plus an extra nod towards animated 'gif' wars.
- dijit 6y agoI'll turn your anecdote into an anecdatum and say the same; for all devices I've owned. (Linux on a Precision 5520 w/ Xeon CPU, Macbook pro 15" 2019 model, Mac Pro 2013) Turn off animated gifs and emojis in slack.
- Teknoman117 6y agoI fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.
- ianhowson 6y agoBingo. Estimates vary wildly, but I've seen figures saying that Axx CPUs cost Apple about $50 each. Even if it's more like $100, that's still an insane amount of additional profit per unit to be extracted. They don't need to deal with single-supplier hassles and they get much more control over what cores go into their SoC. This is sort-of-OK for consumers but amazing for Apple and its shareholers.
- snemvalts 6y agoApple's services already make more money than their Mac business. There aren't enough macs sold for this to have a big impact
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoEven on the hardware side, they sell more than ten times as many iPhones as Macs.
- jacurtis 6y agoYou could also argue that significant cuts to costs of already-profitable Mac computers, could lead to significantly higher sales volumes. Greater marketshare also provides more value to shareholders meaning that shareholders still win, as do consumers. More people with macs (and probably iPads/iPhones) would also increase other profit centers for Apple such as services (their highest profit center), warranties, and accessories. The profits and loyalty from these could easily far outweigh the $100-$300 of extra margin they might gain from keeping Mac prices the same. Meaning that price cuts to macs might actually be more strategically beneficial (to EVERYONE) than hoarding higher margins.
- askafriend 6y ago> amazing for Apple and its shareholers This only makes sense if you know nothing about Apple's business. You really think they're doing this to save $50 from ~5m Macs? You really think all this upheaval is for a mere $250m a year in savings? It'll cost them 10x that in pain alone to migrate to a new platform. Come on now....$250m is nothing at Apple scale. Think bigger. Even if you hate Apple, think bigger about their nefariousness (if your view is that they have bad intentions - one I don't agree with).
- andy_ppp 6y agoI actually think total battery life will go up a fair bit and compile times will be much faster, 20-30%, while giving everyone full power when not on the mains. The amount my MacBook throttles when on battery is startling and stopping that while still giving huge battery life, say 6h at 80% CPU will be a huge win. Apple wouldn’t bother unless they knew the benefits they can bring over the next 10 years will be huge. All of this is complete speculation of course but I don’t believe it will be a financial decision this one, it’ll be about creating better products.
- santoshalper 6y agoMulti-core performance is not a strong suit of Apple's ARM architecture, I suspect you're going to see a mild to moderate performance hit for things like compilation.
- npunt 6y agoThats mostly because of thermals, which are drastically different on Mac.
- nicoburns 6y agoThe rumours are that they're doubling the number of high-performance cores for the laptop chips (so 8 high performance cores and 4 low-power cores). That + better cooling ought to boost the multi-core performance quite significantly.
- gsnedders 6y agoIs their multi-core performance poor, or have they just made size/power trade-offs against increasing the number of cores? The iPad Pro SoCs are literally the only parts they've made so far with four big cores.
- pier25 6y agoAlso heat is greatly reduced with ARM, no?
- stjohnswarts 6y agoif power goes down heat will also, it's almost 1 to 1. Almost all power going into a CPU is lost as waste heat eventually.
- papito 6y agoTry browsing the web on a semi-decent laptop from, say, 2008. It's a frustrating experience. It is obnoxious how much CPU power modern websites require.
- dheera 6y agoJoin the trend! Deploy websites that mine bitcoin in the background in your viewers' web browsers.
- imtringued 6y agoHonestly, back when my PSU died I just did that. Beyond the lack of video decoding support for modern codecs it was perfectly acceptable as a backup machine.
- julienb_sea 6y agoThis seems very inaccurate to me. Most laptops do not have discrete GPUs, so tasks like rendering a youtube video do require CPU cycles. Zoom is very CPU intensive on basically any mac laptop, and people always have a ton of tabs open, which can be fairly CPU intensive. In other words, there are definitely gains to be had. My ipad pro offers a generally more smooth and satisfying experience with silent and much cooler running CPU versus my MBP, and they offer similar battery life. Scale up to MBP battery size and I suspect we will be seeing a few hours battery life gain.
- eugeniub 6y ago> Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. Hard to square this with the simple fact that my 2018 MacBook Pro 13" battery lifespan goes from 8 hours while internet surfing to 1.5 hours for iOS development with frequent recompilations.
- hn_check 6y agoTo distill your post- -the CPU will be a lot more powerful and faster, but it isn't really faster because it's like an accelerator or something. -if you actually use your computer get some vague "Linux desktop" or something (which is farcical and borders on parody, completely detached from actual reality). Because in the real world people actually doing stuff know that their CPU, and its work, is a significant contributor to power consumption, but if we just dismiss all of those people we can easily argue its irrelevance. My standards for comments on HN regarding Apple events are very low, but today's posts really punch below that standard. It's armies of ignorant malcontents pissing in the wind. All meaningless, and they're spraying themselves with piss, but it always happens. In the end this noise doesn't matter whatsoever.
- Xixi 6y agoI was looking at the benchmarks of the latest MacBook Air here [1]. In GPU performance it's not competitive with the iPad Pro, and that's quite an understatement. For me the most obvious win of this migration to "Apple Silicon" will be that entry-level MacBook/iMac will have decent GPU performance, at long last... [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/macbook-air-2020-review-the-most-boring-mac-is-among-the-best/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/macbook-air-2020-rev...
- acjohnson55 6y agoThis doesn't match my experience. Web browsing kills my battery life, and my assumption is that it's driven by JS.
- thejynxed 6y agoJS/ads and the wifi chipset seems to be the big culprit across laptops in general in this scenario. Even Netflix doesn't drain my battery as fast as hitting an ad heavy site with lots of JS and analytics and I can watch the power usage for my wifi chipset crank up accordingly. This happens across every laptop, iPad, Chromebook etc that I own.
- acjohnson55 6y agoI think it's largely just the JS. I adblock pretty aggressively.
- bobdole12345 6y agoYou know that Apple is going to be making the GPU with the same technology as the CPU right? And those accelerators don't need to be discrete, Apple can add them to their CPUs. So, it looks like your point is: Sure, Apple is going to jump a couple process nodes from where Intel is, but everything is somehow going to remain the same?
- raydev 6y ago> most energy is going into display and GPU You know Apple Silicon is going to handle this too, right?
- taneq 6y ago> Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped Does Apple actually have its own silicon fab now or are they outsourcing manufacture? If the former, those are /expensive/ and they'll still be paying it off.
- __d 6y agoNo. Recent A-series chips are fabbed by TSMC.
- bluedino 6y agoCPU’s do not mostly run idle, if my CPU usage indicator is accurate.
- imtringued 6y agoI was going to follow up with an anecdote about how my computer has used less than 15 minutes of CPU time in the last 2 hours but then again I forgot to stop a docker container that automatically ran an ffmpeg command in the background consuming 70 min of CPU time.
- JohnBooty 6y agoApple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators Thank you for mentioning this. I feel like many have missed it. I think Apple sees this sort of thing as the future, and their true competitive advantage. Most are focusing on Apple's potential edge over Intel when it comes to general compute performance/watt. Eventually Apple's likely to hit a wall there too though, like Intel. Where Apple can really pull away is by leaning into custom compute units for specialized tasks. Apple and their full vertical integration will stand alone in the world here. Rather than hoping Intel's chips are good at the things it wants to do, it can specialize the silicone hardcore for the tasks it wants MacOS to do in the future. It will potentially be a throwback to the Amiga days: a system with performance years ahead of competitors because of tight integration with custom hardware. The questions are: 1. Will anybody notice? The initial ARM Macs may be underwhelming. I'm not sure the initial Mac ARM silicon will necessarily have a lot of special custom Mac-oriented compute goodies. And even if it does, I don't know Mac software will be taking full advantage of it from Day 1. It will take a few product cycles (i.e., years) for this to really bear fruit. 2. Will developers bother to exploit these capabilities as Apple surfaces them? Aside from some flagship content-creation apps, native Mac apps are not exactly flourishing.
- AgentOrange1234 6y ago#1, who can say. #2 might be side stepped by the compatibility they with iOS apps they will gain? (making it so all those iphone/ipad developers can ship their apps to macs, too.)
- anoncow 6y agoThis could mean the following things. 1. If done correctly, non-Apple laptops may become significantly less attractive. Just like Android phones. 2. Intel may be in for a tough time, especially with AMD winning big on the console and laptop fronts recently. 3. AMD and Intel may have to compete for survival and to save the non-Apple ecosystem in general. If AMD/Intel can consistently and significantly beat Apple here, it may mean that the non-Apple ecosystem survives and even thrives. It may even mean that Apple looks at Intel/AMD as an option for Pro MacBooks in the future. However, this does seem a little less likely. 4. This could also herald the entry of Qualcomm and the likes into laptop territory. Looks like a very interesting and possibly industry changing move. This could potentially severely affect Intel/AMD and Microsoft. And all these players will have to play this new scenario very carefully.
- zanethomas 6y agoI'm predicting a future where the os is completely locked down and all software for macs be purchased from the app store. Great revenue model for Apple.
- lukeholder 6y agoTheir pro/developers (influence) are too important to apple to do that.
- Jaruzel 6y agoDon't worry, they'll be able to 'unlock' the OS for an exorbitant price via an Apple Pay purchase. :)
- imtringued 6y agoThat's basically what Microsoft did with ARM on Windows and I'm sure Apple will take advantage of this opportunity.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y agoThe first time (Windows RT), yes, and it was a complete market failure. The new Windows on Arm is not like this.
- DragoCubed 6y agoAnd it didn’t help that the Windows Store back then was a store for UWP/Metro apps. It also took a long time for Microsoft to actually tackle the issues that UWP/Metro and WinUI/XAML faced. It took so long, it doesn’t even matter anymore and even Microsoft has moved on. But there’s quite a bit of hypocrisy, with Microsoft telling others to use WinUI while not using it everywhere themselves while refusing to update the styles of other design frameworks.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoPeople have been making this claim for the last ten years, it hasn't happened yet.
- greggman3 6y agoI don't know about MBP but the iPad Pro has a faster GPU than an MBA for most of the shaders on Shadertoy.com
- Someone 6y ago“Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators“ I think that hits the nail on the head. Since I only cursory listened to both the keynote and the state of the union I may have missed it, but I heard them neither mention “CPU” nor “ARM”. The term they use is “Apple Silicon”, for the whole package. I think they are, at the core, but from what they said, these things need not even be ARM CPUs.
- deepGem 6y agoApple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators - Can you elaborate a bit more on this ? I was wondering how this would unfold and looks like things are moving in that direction https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/04/tensorflow-lite-core-ml-delegate-faster-inference-iphones-ipads.html https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/04/tensorflow-lite-core-ml-... If TF models can interoperate with CoreML - boy that'll literally be a home run for Apple cos eventually all ML frameworks will follow suit.
- nl 6y agoYou can convert TF models to CoreML and have been able to for quite a while: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/converting_trained_models_to_core_ml https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/converting_...
- ancientknight 6y ago> CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gains I don't agree. Simply disabling Turbo Boost on MBP16 nets me around 10-15% more battery life. Underclocking a CPU can even result in twice to thrice the battery life on a gaming laptop under same workload. Here's more details. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/304884-disabling-intel-turbo-boost-has-a-huge-impact-on-battery-life https://www.extremetech.com/computing/304884-disabling-intel...