Wow.
Apple’s fanless MacBook Air may not be able to sustain the load of my Core i9 8-Core iMac sitting on my desk but it outperforms it in benchmarks which is truly an amazing feet. Apple’s shipped an “UltraBook” form factor laptop with all day battery life, no fan and a chip that outperforms everything in Intel’s consumer catalogue.
Wow.
Apple has done something that no x86 chip maker can do which is to only bake in the instruction sets needed to run a modern operating system and put the memory, GPU and everything else on a single wafer/die or whatever they call it making everything lightning fast without having to run through a myriad of translation busses.
Wow.
Apple is doing all of this with a TDP that I think is around 10 watts on peak power but remember, while the Core Chips from Intel previously powering the MacBook were a TDP of 4.5 watts, this chip is double that but has CPU, GPU, Memory and more all baked in and the high and low power cores allow the average TDP to be significantly lower in regular every day load such as load a javascript page like Gmail, you get full speed. Once loaded, things slow down to the lower cores that barely break a sweat.
Wow.
These chips are not the professional chips. Those will eventually come (I assume before WWDC 2021) to the iMac and 16” MacBook Pro likely with a higher clock speed, 64GB of RAM and 16 cores. I’ll be able to buy a MacBook Pro that outperforms the benchmarks of the most expensive MacPro
Wow.
The one mystery to me right now is the GPU. Can Apple create a GPU that rivals the Vega 48 in my iMac? The slowest part of my Mac workflow is processing 30 megapixel RAW images in Lightroom, applying filters in Photoshop, Transcoding & Exporting 4K, 60FPS HEVC video in Final Cut Pro and believe it or not, working with 100 megabyte Excel Spreadsheets (made faster now that Microsoft supports Multi-core processing).
If Apple can release an M2 (X2?) MacBook Pro next year with a GPU that rivals the Vega chips we have today and a 12 hour battery life along with mini-LED, I’d be so happy. If they release an iMac with the same specs, I’ll buy that as well so long as its a redesign. I’m ready for a new iMac without a bezel. Apple’s professional chip bundles so much in it that certainly Apple can float a 27” LED panel on a pro stand with everything baked in.
Time to start saving and while I’m waiting for the professional machines, my girlfriend has already purchased a 13” M1 MacBook Pro to replace her mid-2014 13” MacBook Pro with a Core i7 Haswell chip which she uses every day still. She’ll be going from 700 single-core and 1600 multi-core to 1687 and 7433 respectively. She’ll have a laptop that out benchmarks my iMac Core i9.
Wow.
Can’t wait to play around with it.