bootcamp Want Windows 10 on your new M1 Mac? Ask Microsoft, Not Apple

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

12 hours ago, leadeater said:

So many people did this back around 2010 and earlier, MacBook Pros were leagues ahead of pretty well every other laptop and also had very strong looks appeal so were very compelling option for many.

To add on to that, build quality was second to none compared to the squeaky plastics of Windows laptops at the time that barely fit together properly. Horrible keyboard flex was common and the trackpads on MacBooks just felt much nicer and tracking was miles ahead. But for me the most important quality of life improvement was that it was the only way to get a nice looking high resolution display in a laptop. Even the late 2012 MacBook Pro Retina came with a 2560x1600 IPS display as standard. Such resolutions are still unheard of in Windows land. We're still dealing with awful TN 1366x768 displays, and 1080P is still considered a luxury, not a standard feature... in 2020. What a joke.

 

Then you had Apple using SSDs and eventually NVMe ones as standard early on. While Windows laptops are still coming shipped with HHDs unless you really go up the product stack. Even if they were SSDs, many instances of it just being a DRAMless SATA one. Ew. 

 

The list really goes on...

[Video Beagle]

23 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

a new more powerful hardware revision of AS Macs will be released three times a year (M1, M1X, M1T, then M2, M2X, M2T, then M3, M3X, M3T, etc.

Is this speculation?  I havent' seen this anywere.

[Video Beagle]

I'm wondering if the quote in the OP is a tease of a Microsoft VM program (or something like that)...an actual program by them to run windows inside MacOs....Apple isn't one for just random comments without there being something behind it.

[captain_to_fire]

30 minutes ago, Video Beagle said:

Is this speculation?  I havent' seen this anywere.

Rumor has it that next year’s Apple Silicon Macs (16” MBP and iMac) will use TSMC’s 5 nm+ process (tock cycle)

 

[saltycaramel]

19 minutes ago, Video Beagle said:

Is this speculation?  I havent' seen this anywere.

M1X (for 14” and 16” MBP) - with 8 performance cores (+ 4 efficiency cores)

and

M1T (for the all new 24” iMac) - with 12 performance cores (+ 4 efficiency cores)

 

have been rumored (the naming is speculation, the “X” is based on previous apple naming schemes on iPads, and “T” for the desktop CPU has been rumored by Chinese media)

 

As for the M2/M3/etc. no reason to think they wouldn’t go “iphone style” with yearly updates now that they don’t need to wait for intel, but yes that is speculation at this point and maybe apple will update Macs every 2 years instead of 1. (the iPad Pro next spring will receive the first significant CPU upgrade in 2.5years, so there’s a precedent)

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

As for the M2/M3/etc. no reason to think they wouldn’t go “iphone style” with yearly updates now that they don’t need to wait for intel, but yes that is speculation at this point and maybe apple will update Macs every 2 years instead of 1. (the iPad Pro next spring will receive the first significant CPU upgrade in 2.5years, so there’s a precedent)

Really depends on the need to utilize a node shrink or not, or node revision. Those are getting slower and slower so could heavily depend on what Apple wants to achieve with any given SoC release.

 

Also bigger SoC/die designs are very expensive to develop, but it's also not like Intel was historically slower either or Apple any faster. Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake were all a year apart from each other. Sure 10nm transition got delayed but over 4 years it's not like Intel's 14nm process did not improve, it got more and more efficient in power and density and is still competitive today while not actually being market leading anymore.

 

I'm not sure Apple wants too many different SoC's so I'd bet on just two, current M1 and then a bigger one what ever that is with alternating year development cycles. Maybe, or the smaller one every year and the bigger one every second year. I guess it mostly depends on how quickly Apple gets return on investment for each SoC development cycle.

[saltycaramel]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

 

Also bigger SoC/die designs are very expensive to develop, but it's also not like Intel was historically slower either or Apple any faster. Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake were all a year apart from each other. Sure 10nm transition got delayed but over 4 years it's not like Intel's 14nm process did not improve, it got more and more efficient in power and density and is still competitive today while not actually being market leading anymore.

 

I'm not sure Apple wants too many different SoC's so I'd bet on just two, current M1 and then a bigger one what ever that is with alternating year development cycles. Maybe, or the smaller one every year and the bigger one every second year. I guess it mostly depends on how quickly Apple gets return on investment for each SoC development cycle.

 

Every September for the last 10 years Apple has delivered a new generation of SoCs with significant YoY improvements in the CPU department and unheard of YoY improvements in the integrated GPU department (that’s gonna be exciting to see in the M2/M3/etc.), plus the bonus features like the ever more powerful Neural Engine. Same can’t be necessarily said for Intel, however one squares it, that’s why they are where they are, and that’s a fair characterization to say that the Mac update schedule was slowed down by Intel woes. 

 

As for how many variants we’ll see within a given generation, I think Apple is already keeping the number to a minimum by moving to “tiers” of Macs with “1 CPU, multiple thermal envelopes” as we’ve seen.

 

1) M1 tier (4p+4e CPU, 10-25W TDP, 8-core iGPU)

- Macbook Air 

- entry level Macbook Pro 2-port

- entry level Mac Mini (silver chassis)

 

2) M1X tier (8p+4e CPU, 25-45W TDP, maybe 12-core iGPU?)

- 14” Macbook Pro 4-port

- 16” Macbook Pro 

- beefier Mac Mini (dark chassis, 10G NIC available) [no rumors yet but the fact the dark Intel one is still on sale is a red flag, we still haven’t seen the model that supersedes that]

 

3) M1T tier (12p+4e CPU, 65W-95W TDP, discrete GPU by Apple codenamed “Lifuka”)

- iMac 24” 5K

- iMac 32” 6K (?) [no rumors yet but one would think they would make an iMac to match size and resolution of their 32” 6K XDR monitor]

 

4) Mac Pro tier (this is where I can’t wrap my head around what they’re gonna do and we have almost zero rumors, except one rumor about a smaller “half the size” tower desktop being in development)

 

That’s 4 SoCs to cover the whole line-up. (previously: like two dozens Intel CPU SKUs)

3 of them and their core count have been rumored for ages now (Bloomberg, etc.).

They can’t go lower than 3. 

By the time they manage to figure out how to beat the 28-core Xeons currently in Tier 4, we’ll probably be in the M2 generation already. (they said the transition will take “about two years” starting from June 2020, so the Mac Pro may skip the M1 generation altogether and be revealed in late 2021 or early 2022 with a M2 variant on the 5NP tsmc enhanced 5nm node)

[leadeater]

38 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

and that’s a fair characterization to say that the Mac update schedule was slowed down by Intel woes. 

It is but only to a certain point, like 2 years max really. Minor delays are just a thing and companies can and do account for that. It really only became a problem when 10nm was no longer a minor delay. Not just for Apple either.

 

38 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

Every September for the last 10 years Apple has delivered a new generation of SoCs with significant YoY improvements in the CPU department and unheard of YoY improvements in the integrated GPU department (that’s gonna be exciting to see in the M2/M3/etc.), plus the bonus features like the ever more powerful Neural Engine.

Well that's not exactly difficult either when you're starting from such a low performance standpoint. Apple (and ARM) has had to introduce at lot of technologies in to the ARM architecture over that time, much which already existed over on x86. It's not to dissimilar to how difficult it is to get more power out of a born and bread pure race engine than a mass production regular engine, as you get closer and closer to the pinnacle of performance improvements get harder.

 

Also you may be interested in the transistor count difference of the M1 compared to other CPUs. Zen 3/Ryzen 5000 for example has 2.09B transistors in the IOD and 4.15B transistors in each CCD, Apple M1 has 16B which is A LOT (high performance GPU a lot). Not sure about Intel transistor counts of anything modern as they stopped giving that information but it's not close to 16B either. Apple and TSMC have been able to deliver a very complex chip at very reasonable manufacturing cost. Imagine hoe much bigger the die would be on TSMC 7nm, damn that would be big.

 

38 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

As for how many variants we’ll see within a given generation, I think Apple is already keeping the number to a minimum by moving to “tiers” of Macs with “1 CPU, multiple thermal envelopes” as we’ve seen.

I was more thinking about number of different dies Apple would make, wasn't really clear with that. I would think Apple would design a bigger one then use binning and core disabling to create any lower part they want to if they do. I'm sure as they get bigger in die size defects are going to come more in to play and it may be cheaper to utilize a single die design than two (well 3 including M1).

[leadeater]

43 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

4) Mac Pro tier (this is where I can’t wrap my head around what they’re gonna do and we have almost zero rumors, except one rumor about a smaller “half the size” tower desktop being in development)

 

That’s 4 SoCs to cover the whole line-up. (previously: like two dozens Intel CPU SKUs)

3 of them and their core count have been rumored for ages now (Bloomberg, etc.).

They can’t go lower than 3. 

By the time they manage to figure out how to beat the 28-core Xeons currently in Tier 4, we’ll probably be in the M2 generation already. (they said the transition will take “about two years” starting from June 2020, so the Mac Pro may skip the M1 generation altogether and be revealed in late 2021 or early 2022 with a M2 variant on the 5NP tsmc enhanced 5nm node)

Mac Pro is a though one, simply for the such wide range of configurations it can come in right now. It's pretty obvious Apple will leave this one to last and I wouldn't actually be surprised if they sunset the Mac Pro again for a while. If it's not needed anymore then why put the development effort in to it. Apple could well deem such a large computer as no longer necessary, they sort of already did with the trash can.

 

The other thing is by the time Apple get around to addressing the Mac Pro Intel will be on mature 10nm server CPUs and quite possibly 7nm and AMD will have Zen 4 EPYC out quite likely and the next generation on the way. For such a low volume product compared to their other offerings it may well end up being a case of Apple sticking with Intel or going with AMD here simply to not have to develop an SoC for this. If they do make dGPUs they can still pair them with these and get the software stack integration benefit.

[captain_to_fire]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Apple could well deem such a large computer as no longer necessary, they sort of already did with the trash can.

Inb4 Apple makes a "Mac mini pro" which can be as tall as three to four Mac minis stacked together, or worse they might bring back the trashcan from the dead and it will have dual socket Apple Silicon Pro chips.

 

 

They probably can't fit ECC memory modules inside so they'll probably stick with LPDDR4X

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

If the M1 transistor count is correct, then this thing is basically a 2080 TI (in terms of transistors). Kudos to TSMC.

Don't suppose you know of any source that has measured the physical dimensions of the M1? I can't find anything. I would be very interested to compare that to the TU102.

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Inb4 Apple makes a "Mac mini pro" which can be as tall as three to four Mac minis stacked together, or worse they might bring back the trashcan from the dead and it will have dual socket Apple Silicon Pro chips.

Hmm Mac Mini Pro, with stacking interface to create single large compute resource pool. Damn that would be awesome. Never going to happen but one can dream haha.

[saltycaramel]

In April 2017 Apple gathered a couple of tech journalists at their HQ and basically swore they will never make a Mac Pro without internal PCIE expansion again and that the 2013 trash bin design was a mistake.

2 years later the new MacPro was unveiled.

 

I find it hard to believe they would already revert back to a non modular design.

 

And at the same time, no way they will release a new one on Intel/AMD x86. They will just keep selling the current Intel Cascade Lake one for a while. Maybe the new “half sized” AS Mac Pro will be sold side by side to it for a while. And eventually the full sized AS Mac Pro will be released.

 

The last new x86 Mac ever is the Comet Lake iMac released in August 2020. No more x86 Macs will be released, that’s how an Apple transition work and that’s how you show devs they need to move on or else.

[bruhsfx2]

10 hours ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Too bad neither Parallels nor VMWare Fusion works on M1 Macs even with Rosetta 2

Also, the best performance is always seen when an OS runs on bare metal instead of being virtualized

Rosetta 2 is not virtualisation.

 

KhaosT (an avid HomeKit dev) has succeeded to run arm64 Ubuntu VM on M1 Mac using Apple's virtualisation framework. 

 

Checkout his SimpleVM project at https://github.com/KhaosT/SimpleVM

 

Also he managed to patch QEMU so that it runs natively (arm64) to emulate x86_64. 

 

 

[saltycaramel]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Mac Pro is a though one, simply for the such wide range of configurations it can come in right now.

I rethought about this sentence and I had an idea.

Given the wide range of configurations, spanning from 8 to 28 cores, and from 32GB to 1.5TB RAM, it could make sense to split the MacPro tier in 2 subtiers. 

 

4a) “Mac Pro Mini” (the rumored half-sized tower)

- meant to supersede the current 8-12core MP

- RAM offered only 64GB or 128GB (fixed, on package, no DIMM slots)

- half the number pcie slots

- no rack mount version

- the first of the two to be released, with the Intel bigger brother staying in the line up (just like the beefier Intel Mini is still in the line up)

 

4b) full sized Mac Pro (same chassis as today, it would be a waste to design that chassis for a single 2019 model)

- meant to supersede the current 14-28core MP

- expandable RAM up to 1.5TB or more

- rack mount version available (like the current one)

- when this is released (in November 2022 at the latest), they will stop selling the Intel Cascade Lake MP

 

pure speculation but this helped me make sense of the “half sized MP” rumor

[captain_to_fire]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Don't suppose you know of any source that has measured the physical dimensions of the M1? I can't find anything. I would be very interested to compare that to the TU102.

 

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Hmm Mac Mini Pro, with stacking interface to create single large compute resource pool. Damn that would be awesome. Never going to happen but one can dream haha.

Wouldn't that be a bad idea of stacking Mac mini modules as that could just increase power consumption? Instead of relying on a single PSU, each stackable module needs to have their own PSU

[leadeater]

11 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Wouldn't that be a bad idea of stacking Mac mini modules as that could just increase power consumption? Instead of relying on a single PSU, each stackable module needs to have their own PSU

Yes that is what I mean, Mac Mini Pro that are independent but if you link them via TB (or w/e) they can then act as a single system. It's not going to happen but it would be cool.

 

P.S. Pictures aren't what I want, I want actual dimensions of the SoC die so I can compare to TU102 which is of similar transistor count.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, saltycaramel said:

And at the same time, no way they will release a new one on Intel/AMD x86.

And why not? You do know it's expensive to design SoCs and manufacture them and the volume of sales on Mac Pros makes return on investment very long. It's not a matter of strategy, not in regards to ARM, it's simple economics. Apple isn't going to have a product that returns a negative profit.

 

It's either use existing commodity options or do with multiple SoC's and I'm not sure if Apple will go that path or not. To utilize multiple you then have to have on die interconnects which would only ever be used on the Mac Pro so any other device using the same SoC this would go to waste. If it's only a tiny part of the die not really a problem, issue is high speed I/O isn't exactly that small.

 

Basically you can't strategy your way out of an issue like this.

 

1 hour ago, saltycaramel said:

I find it hard to believe they would already revert back to a non modular design.

The trash can was modular, it just wasn't user serviceable or upgradable. It was still a mistake largely but that also had to do with them neglecting the product and not updating it, compounding the issue. Apple didn't like it so they essentially killed it and did nothing until they felt it was necessary to revisit a Mac Pro product. As much as people like the idea of the Mac Pro, myself included, the customer base is very small.

 

Until we see a bigger SoC from Apple there isn't a lot to talk about on the Mac Pro front, I'd be more willing to bet on it being discontinued again than anything else. And any Mac Pro that might exist won't use the current chassis as it'll be needlessly large for something that is likely only ever to have a single PCIe card and a likely maximum of 3. People say and think they need a bunch of PCIe slots and expandability but really they don't and never use it, I like many PCIe slots as much as the next person but the most I have ever used is 4 and onboard 10Gb NIC would remove one making it 3, however I no longer use the RAID card in my workstation anymore so that would bring it to 2 (2 GPUs).

 

With how good applications already utilize the GPU in the M1 it makes the need for that Apple accelerator card in to highly questionable territory. Mac Pro will get a complete rethink.

[captain_to_fire]

34 minutes ago, leadeater said:

S. Pictures aren't what I want, I want actual dimensions of the SoC die so I can compare to TU102 which is of similar transistor count.

Judging at the second photo, it looks like 2/3 of a gen 1 Threadripper imo. I could be wrong. 

Edited November 22, 2020 by like_ooh_ahh

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Judging at the second photo, it looks like 2/3 of a gen 1 Threadripper imo. I could be wrong. 

@gabrielcarvferPicture puts it at a lot smaller than that I think. Looks like large thumb print size based on that photo.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Couldn't find anything. Even people who took it apart didn't bother to measure, which is quite suspicious.

Don't know why I didn't check wikichip sooner, it has it listed as 119mm²

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/apple/mx/m1

 

TU102 is 754mm2 18.6B (12nm, forgot about that lol)

GA104 is 392.5mm² 17.4B (7nm)

[captain_to_fire]

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Don't know why I didn't check wikichip sooner, it has it listed as 119mm²

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/apple/mx/m1

 

TU012 is 754mm² (12nm, forgot about that lol)

I’m now starting to think the AS chips for the next year’s iMac will be 1.5 cm in length and width given that it’s a tock process for 2021

[ne0tic]

8 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Don't know why I didn't check wikichip sooner, it has it listed as 119mm²

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/apple/mx/m1

Yeah, was just going to write that I remember Anandtech measuring it to 120mm^2 in one article so this seems correct. 

[Sauron]

On 11/21/2020 at 9:18 AM, saltycaramel said:

But would their PC OEM partners be happy about this?

Well... why not? Most people don't buy a mac to primarily use windows and either way I don't see why this specific instance would be a problem when competing x86 products would not...

[AndreiArgeanu]

Microsoft doesn't have to support Arm cpu's just because apple decided to use an arm cpu instead of x86. Unless arm starts becoming popular in laptops from OEM's like HP, Dell and so on, Microsoft doesn't have the obligation to support Arm. They can but they don't have to. Personally I wouldn't mind Arm support on Windows, perhaps that will encourage manufacturers to release their own Arm laptops. But again they don't have to.