I’ve been singing the praises of Apple’s SOCs on other forums, when I said Apple would ditch AMD GPUs and go their own way with their own in house designs I was descended upon by Apple fanboys saying I hadn’t got a clue what I’m talking about. Despite Apple making it vert clear in their own developer documentation.
I’ve said many times Apple’s SOCs are extremely interesting and will be not be lacking in performance. I’ve had to explain to Apple fanboys on Blender Artists that integrated GPUs does not mean slow using the example of the next gen consoles.
When someone writes ‘No vendor has anywhere close to the experience Apple does with modern chip design’ you know they’re a clueless imbecile. This is not to trash Apple but it’s simply an untrue statement. Apple license designs from ARM and their GPU tech has been acquired because they destroyed a British company to get it. Yay Apple you’re so wonderful, let’s not let the truth about this vile company get in the way of the virtuous image it likes to represent.
To say x86 is not modern as if ARM is vastly more modern is again utterly clueless, both architectures rooted from the 1980s, ARM is marginally younger by about 5 years or so.
Let’s bring some realism to the conversation and explore how Apple can scale up their designs from impressive phones and laptops to workstations. Can an SOC be made out of chiplets? It doesn’t look like it as it is a System on Chip which includes the system memory. Apple’s workstation SOCs may be very different from their portable SOCs and dispense with certain parts of the SOC. My guess is they’ll use multi-SOCs connected via some highspeed bus to scale up but that’s just a guess. I struggle to see how massively high core count SOCs can be fabricated affordably in such low volumes, the iMac Pro and Mac Pro are rounding errors in the Apple computer sales let alone the wider PC market.
Maybe Apple’s wafer costs will be spread over all 5nm products and can drive down the cost due to huge volumes at TSMC but how do they overcome yield issues as the SOCs grow in size? The only thing that makes sense is multi SOCs unless they are not going to be bound by price and the sky is the limit in pricing for the Pro Mac models, though any performance victory is a pyrrhic victory if it comes at an absurd cost to the end user.
I’m interested to see how this pans out not because I want to go back to the Mac but because I just don’t understand the economics of it.
Cook.
