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

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. 

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.

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.

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 

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.