Great marketing. I wonder the sales difference if they were also selling Macs with current generation AMD Ryzen chips manufactured on a modern TSMC node.
It boggles my mind that Apple hasn't switched to AMD Ryzen yet. Lower cost for them, more cores/higher overall performance for their customers. What's not to like?
But no, they'd rather try and sell people $20,000 Xeon Mac Pros with half the cores of an AMD Threadripper and like 4x the price.
It would be interesting if Apple used these chips in upcoming Mac desktops.
I'm guessing that adopting these lower priced chips without lowering prices would have a negligible impact on sales for Apple if the performance is as good as AMD claims.
It seems like apple is TSMC priority customer so I suspect they will always be a node ahead of AMD.
Doesn't matter if Apple does mobile and low power stuff exclusively, but if they can scale this design into a higher TDP/core count it's going to get interesting.
> The Mac Pro numbers certainly wouldn't pay for such a CPU development.
Again, though, what exactly does "development" mean here? Apple is already fabless. TSMC makes 32-core chips for AMD, so that scale is not new to them.
My only concern here is that the Mac line still only represents 10% of Apples revenue, and they might not give these desktop processors the attention that a supplier like intel or amd would to their own processors. I hope I'm wrong but I feel like Apple has been making serious missteps in the mac line for the past 10 years because its no longer their core product.
Any chance Apple will ever consider AMD chips for the MacBook Pro or any of their computers. I have to wonder how much of the $4k+ I just spent on my MacBook Pro went to pay for the Intel 8-core CPU...
No it's not. I like MacOS and use their laptops, but Apple proprietary approach does not work for me when it comes to desktop. Their development lifecycle must be very long if they missed advancements in the CPU space. Ryzen to the masses.
I wonder if Apple knows something about what Intel has in store, or if they just doin't care because the performance of their ARM-type chips will be so vastly better they can emulate x86 and still be faster than what Intel has.
That being said, the Mac Pro with a 64-core Ryzen chip and 4TB of memory would have been absolutely nuts.
I agree that the shipping dates would have been tight, but given Apple's relationship with AMD (like getting certain Navi cards in the MacBook Pro months before they shipped anywhere else) I think they could have pulled it off. The Mac Pro is also a relatively low volume device, so AMD could have done an early run just for Apple like they have done with other HPC customers. Both Apple and AMD have enough clout with TSMC that they most certainly could have made it happen. Apple could have been well aware that AMD had a winner in the works, years before launch.
I feel like Apple could have easily prototyped the Mac Pro on older TR designs and evolved the design as AMD got deeper into sampling the current gen.
I think what eliminated the risk of switching to AMD for them was the ability to test their thermal design on already shipping parts from Intel. The chipsets haven't changed at all so they've been working on a stable platform since day 0. Or maybe they got an offer they couldn't refuse from Intel.
CPU compatibility with macOS is also a total non-issue, considering how well the AMDOSX community is doing.
Given that Apple is tightly coupled with Intel for now, I would assume that they did not expect AMD to deliver great new CPUs and did not create the Mac Pro to compete with them in mind IMO.
I would be surprised if they’re not evaluating this. The only difference I can see is that it complicates the number of SKUs they’d need to provide to their customers. It’s a little easier for Apple in this regard because they’re also building the final machines, whereas Intel/AMD are making chips that are going in a wider range of devices.
That would be a very AMD thing to do. Apple is likely to pump endless amounts of cash into TSMC to make huge monolithic chips so that there's no cross-core latency issues and that they can still say they have a single "chip" in marketing materials.
The first is that they could justify continuing to do this to their shareholders based solely on the cost savings from not paying margins to Intel, even if the performance is only the same and not better.
You know Apple’s market capitalization is a little over $2 trillion dollars, right? And Apple's gross margins have been in the 30-35% range for many years. This isn't a shareholder issue. They are by far the most profitable computer/gadget manufacturer around.
So it was reasonable for them to expect to beat Intel's 14nm++++++ with TSMC's 5nm, but what happens now that AMD is no longer dead and is using TSMC too?
No matter what AMD does in the short term, they're not going to beat the performance per watt of the M1, let alone the graphics, the Neural Engine and the rest of components of Apple's SoC. It's not just 14nm vs. 5nm; it's also ARM’s architecture vs. x86-64.
Apple has scaled A series production for more than a decade and nobody has caught them yet in iPhone/iPad performance. There were 64-bit iPhones for at least a year before Qualcomm and other ARM licensees could catch up.
There's no evidence or reason to believe it'll be any different with the M series in laptops and desktops.
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