Apple Silicon transition may hit its two-year target with 2022 Mac Pro

Apple's plans to complete its two-year Apple Silicon transition will still be on time, a report claims, with 2022 Mac launches expected to include an updated MacBook Air and a new Mac Pro.

On launching Apple Silicon, Apple advised it was on a tight two-year schedule to transition away from Intel processors to chips of its own designs. Given the first M1 Macs landed in November 2020, Apple has until November 2022 to stay on target.

In Sunday's "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman believes Apple will "barely hit its two-year timeline" for Apple Silicon. While the time may be fairly tight, it also appears that Apple is preparing to complete some of the trickier and higher-performance launches towards the end of the period.

According to Gurman, "M1X" Macs are on the way in the "coming months," possibly coinciding with Apple's typical fall announcements. The rumored updated Mac mini will apparently arrive "soon after that."

Into 2022, the full transition will take place "by the end of next year," and will include a MacBook Air with MagSafe support. Other rumors have put forward an updated MacBook Air, including different enclosure color options, and even the use of mini LED screen technology.

However, the main launch towards the end could be a new Mac Pro.

Expected to be smaller in size, roughly half that of the current Mac Pro, the Apple Silicon version is anticipated to use chips with higher core counts, possibly including 20-core and 40-core variants.

Gurman believes rumors about a final Intel Mac Pro are true, with one more apparently planned for launch. Rumors from July point to a Xeon W-3300 family CPU being used in an update, in parallel to Apple Silicon.

37 Comments

montrosemacs 17 Years · 118 comments

About 3 years ago

Bloody hell… Hope this doesn’t mean we won’t see deliveries of M1x (M2?) MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs until 2022. Really counting on 2021 Q3 or worst case Q4 deliveries.

mcdave 19 Years · 1927 comments

The longer they’re leaving it, the more the competition has stepped up. The buying public can’t see beyond marketing specs so genuine advantages are already mitigated. Single-core performance has been matched by Intel 11th gen i7/i9 so it’ll be interesting to see how much Apple has left in the tank.

mark fearing 16 Years · 441 comments

mcdave said:

The longer they’re leaving it, the more the competition has stepped up. The buying public can’t see beyond marketing specs so genuine advantages are already mitigated. Single-core performance has been matched by Intel 11th gen i7/i9 so it’ll be interesting to see how much Apple has left in the tank.

If that were true Apple would have lost long ago. There's always better specs. The point isn't to 'beat' intel. Intel speed per watt is not getting smarter or better. And in several states you can't sell the game machines all tricked out as they consume so much power. It really doesn't matter how long it takes.

KTR 4 Years · 280 comments

mark fearing said:

mcdave said:

The longer they’re leaving it, the more the competition has stepped up. The buying public can’t see beyond marketing specs so genuine advantages are already mitigated. Single-core performance has been matched by Intel 11th gen i7/i9 so it’ll be interesting to see how much Apple has left in the tank.

If that were true Apple would have lost long ago. There's always better specs. The point isn't to 'beat' intel. Intel speed per watt is not getting smarter or better. And in several states you can't sell the game machines all tricked out as they consume so much power. It really doesn't matter how long it takes.

And plus. Apple will always have the competitive edge. The have a better hardware software integration

mpantone 18 Years · 2254 comments

mcdave said:

The longer they’re leaving it, the more the competition has stepped up. The buying public can’t see beyond marketing specs so genuine advantages are already mitigated. Single-core performance has been matched by Intel 11th gen i7/i9 so it’ll be interesting to see how much Apple has left in the tank.

This is not how Apple is approaching their ASi architecture.

During the WWDC 2020 keynote, Johny Srouji explained that Apple Silicon's focus was performance-per-watt. Not benchmarks. He pounded this concept again and again during his segment.

Because of Intel's ineptitude in advancing their process technology, they had to throw efficiency out the window to keep up with AMD. So Rocket Lake (10 nm Ice Lake architecture backported to the 14 nm node) generates massive amounts of heat and tops out at 8 cores. Hell, Intel even had to come up with a new platform which will probably be abandoned after one generation.

Intel can beat Apple on single-core performance but at a massive power load. However that's not the sole usage case. Apple's big.LITTLE implementation on M-series SoCs is superior to the competition and for the PC market, there is no competition yet from Intel nor AMD.

Apple has improved price-per-watt to the point that ASi can beat Intel handily. That's why they shipped ASi last fall. They have been working on this for years and have been advancing faster than Intel.

This is same thing that happened with their M-series SoCs. Apple's performance-per-watt on mobile silicon has advanced faster than their competitors.

As mentioned by KTR, the hardware-software integration is better. This includes that managing big.LITTLE both on PC silicon and mobile silicon, the latter has provided Apple many years of experience. My guess is that Apple has been running macOS on A-series SoCs as well as prototype M-series SoCs on Macs for YEARS in their labs.

And Apple is really just getting started with machine learning on Macs. I expect Apple to pull ahead over the next couple of years when considering multiple tasks and usage cases as more tasks get handled by the Neural Engine instead of having the CPU cores do it. You wouldn't see this superiority in a standard artificial benchmark. Those benchmarks don't include machine learning because AMD and Intel currently don't have any machine learning silicon in their CPUs.

Apple does not design their CPUs and GPUs so they can be King of Cinebench or King of Furmark.