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For typical desktop workloads you are not going to have much advantage over 8-cores. More cores are very useful for servers, but Apple's primary concern is to d

For typical desktop workloads you are not going to have much advantage over 8-cores. More cores are very useful for servers, but Apple's primary concern is to demonstrate good performance under desktop workloads. The 4 high performance cores and 4 low performance cores of the M1 should give more than enough performance for regular desktop tasks, writing emails, browsing, desktop publishing etc. But as a desktop user you have special use cases where you really need performance. A lot of people who use Macs use them for video editing or image editing. These are demanding tasks and it makes sense that Apple has made special hardware to deal with these tasks. A MacBook Air with M1 e.g. can now encode video at less than half the time of the most expensive high end iMac ($4000). That means that specialized hardware really pays for itself. General purpose cores are no different than ASICs most to the time, as neither one will be needed for most common workloads. In a regular day to day usage you are never going to need say 32 cores working constantly. As a software developer I can see a benefit for more cores to do compilations, but most people are not developers and anyway Apple is planning 32-core M chips. Anyway for the kind of work I do now my 2013 model Mac Pro is still more than fast enough. But I do do video and audio work at times. Here those special coprocessors would really benefit me as well.

shmerl 6y ago
My workloads include running VMs and compiling something like Linux kernel so I do benefit from more cores. But I don't want to run a server for such tasks. Desktop CPUs like modern Ryzens work pretty well for it. Also, single core performance benefits gaming, especially when you run things in Wine where there is more overhead. Hardware accelerated video encoding is already handled by discreet GPUs, so the benefit of putting that also in a CPU/APU is moot in the desktop use case. What so far is missing are cards that support AV1 encoding in hardware. I doubt Apple will be much of help here too.
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  By integrating everything rather than having a discrete GPU, you get performance benefits. With discrete GPU you can have beefer GPUs because you are given a bigger thermal budget. However you also loose performance from having to move data between CPU and GPU over a slow bus.
  - shmerl 6y ago
    I doubt integrated GPUs will ever reach the performance of discreet GPUs, as you said - thermal budget is the limiting factor. PCIe speeds are increasing, so that's not a big issue. If anything, I expect some of these co-processors to become new PCIe connected cards. I.e. in addition to GPU you'll have some other *PU with its own cooling.

shmerl 6y ago

My workloads include running VMs and compiling something like Linux kernel so I do benefit from more cores. But I don't want to run a server for such tasks. Desktop CPUs like modern Ryzens work pretty well for it. Also, single core performance benefits gaming, especially when you run things in Wine where there is more overhead. Hardware accelerated video encoding is already handled by discreet GPUs, so the benefit of putting that also in a CPU/APU is moot in the desktop use case. What so far is missing are cards that support AV1 encoding in hardware. I doubt Apple will be much of help here too.

socialdemocrat 6y ago
By integrating everything rather than having a discrete GPU, you get performance benefits. With discrete GPU you can have beefer GPUs because you are given a bigger thermal budget. However you also loose performance from having to move data between CPU and GPU over a slow bus.
- shmerl 6y ago
  I doubt integrated GPUs will ever reach the performance of discreet GPUs, as you said - thermal budget is the limiting factor. PCIe speeds are increasing, so that's not a big issue. If anything, I expect some of these co-processors to become new PCIe connected cards. I.e. in addition to GPU you'll have some other *PU with its own cooling.