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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2021-05-21, 16:32

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
Chucker, your logic makes sense, but the naming structure/debut of Apple's A-series chipsets refutes it.

The iPhone consistently debuted with the Ax processor.
That's not entirely true — the A4 debuted in the iPad, and the A5 in the iPad 2.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
A few months later (sometimes much later) an iPad would pop in with an AxX processor (specifically with more cores). The two were never side-by side, and sometimes there was an iPhone with, say, an A11, while the iPad Pro was running an A10X. So, it is not uncommon for the "slower" device to have a later-generation processor.
Yeah. I think that's really just a function of Apple not seeing any point in annual releases for the iPad Pro (yet), and therefore also not for AxX chips. Maybe that changes now with the M-series iPads Pro.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
So, it makes sense to see an M1X with, say, 16 cores and 32 GPU cores (or something) drop into the MB Pro, while a slightly later MB Air update (new design?) gets the 8- or 12-core M2 with 8 or 12 GPU cores.
It does, but the part I forgot to add to my post was: we're already late into the M1/A14 cycle. If the MBPs come out in July (and I'm guessing more like August), it'll be 9 months old, so three quarters.

By that point, next-gen cores will be in production ramp-up no matter what.

It could go either way, but the longer we wait, the less likely an M1X seems to me.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
The M1X is still going to be the faster of the two chips by virtue of its higher core-count. Then, in a few months the M2X would drop into a Pro update, and on and on. The setup makes sense to me.
Yeah, I get that. But I think we're getting close to past the point where "let's do a high-end design based on the Firestorm/Icestorm cores" makes sense, assuming "summer" really means "late summer".

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
And, yes, I still believe there will be an M2X Pro chip designation for the Mac Pro tower, and that chip will be behind all of them and seemingly make no sense next to the M3, except that the Pro chip will have ~20 and 40 CPU cores, and ~64 and 128 GPU cores.
Right.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
I guess what I'm saying is that the Mx AS chips are going to get their performance numbers from core-counts more-so than letter designations, i.e. generational debut. The Pro stuff will always "seem" to be behind because of the letter designation, but will be far ahead based on core-count.

The previous iPad Pro is proof of that. The iPad Air (4th-gen) had the A14 Bionic while the iPad Pro (4th-gen) had the A12Z Bionic. The A12Z had more cores and the Pro was faster because of that. Thus, the letter designation should be somewhat ignored when it comes to core-performance, and only the core-count should be considered. Obviously, there are other generational touch-ups to the Neural Engine, the Secure Enclave, etc. to take into consideration, but these have thus far not been enough to overcome much higher CPU and GPU core-counts.
I'm not sure Apple was particularly happy with the "the iPad Pro has an A12 core from late 2018 to early 2021" situation. They did that and it was fine, because the iPad Pro was already plenty fast anyway, but I think they made an exception because they knew the M series was coming. (Plus, the A12Z served as test bed for what later became the DTK.)

I wouldn't extrapolate too much from "the iPad Pro is on a weird ~18-month cycle and they don't shy away from using last year's core" to "they're OK with doing this on high-end Macs".
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