Question Apple A15 announced

Page 9 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
15,125
5,671
136
Seems like the CPU or GPU is not much faster than A14. Might be due to wanting lower power draw for better battery life.

The NPU did get a bump, 15.8 vs 11.8 tops.

Edit: The Pro does get an increase to 5 GPU cores from 4. Might be useful because of the 120 Hz VRR they added.
 
Last edited:

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
23,805
1,381
126
Apple just announced an event for the 18th of this month so I think that should put to rest whether or not we're getting an announcement this year. While they haven't specifically said what's going to be discussed it's pretty obvious what to expect.
Yeah, we already know from very specific and legit tech leaks most of the specs of the coming MacBook Pros. What we don't know is the configurations and the exact pricing, and the availability.

Definitely new MacBook's and 27 inch imacs. Would like to see an updated Mini with the m1x also.
I think new iMacs are quite unlikely next week. They won't be 27" either. Perhaps 30"? I also have my doubts about the Mac mini. I believe this is primarily a MacBook Pro event.

I'd love to be proven wrong though, since I'm in the market for a Mac mini to pair with my 30" Apple Cinema HD Display. Mind you, I could consider a 30" iMac as well. ;) That said, I'm in no rush, since I have a functional 8-core Mac Pro, as well as a 27" iMac. Fan noise on this Mac Pro is sometimes pretty irritating though, since I have third party server RAM installed (without the ginormous heatsinks that came with Apple OEM RAM). It runs at a constant 75C, with the fans adjusting to compensate. With Apple OEM RAM, it would run at 50C-55C IIRC, with the fan at minimum speed.
 

eek2121

Diamond Member
Aug 2, 2005
3,100
4,398
136
I find it hilarious that people are still seriously claiming that Apple's decision to switch to ARM was a bad idea. Especially based on some strange belief system that claims with no evidence beyond some sort of gut feeling or wishful thinking that they will be unable to scale their hardware to larger machines.

I guess that belief system holds that Apple decided to switch to ARM because they could save a few bucks, without doing any internal development and proof of concept to know how it compared to x86 performance both natively and under emulation - and THEN announced they'd be converting the entire line without knowing whether they'd be able to produce anything that covers their high end.

Apple further made it clear they'd be using their own GPU and not third party GPUs, and that was all on a wing and a prayer too without any internal development and testing. I'm sure when they said that they had NO idea if they could scale their GPU up to workstation GPU levels of performance - after all, they are severely limited by having only 12 digits of cash on hand so clearly they couldn't afford to find out ahead of time!

This reminds me of the skepticism from some when rumors of Apple switching Macs to ARM were discussed on and off for years. People who had a clue saw how quickly they were increasing performance of their ARM SoCs and could see if that continued they'd be able to match x86 performance levels. People without a clue came up with all sorts of spurious reasons why such an attempt would fail, everything from claims that ARM is somehow only suitable for "phone workloads" (whatever those are) to claims that developers would be unwilling to port and Apple would be stuck running x86 emulation forever.

I see the spurious reasons are still coming hot and fast for a few holdouts, now including the even more ridiculous claim that because AMD makes systems that beat M1 on multicore that Apple can't ever meet or exceed it. Complete with made up ideas that "Apple would have switched to AMD but they had a secret contract clause with Intel that prevented it". Plus throw in a few ready made excuses in case Apple does beat AMD by talking about how Apple is ahead on process and only has to design for Metal and not DirectX, so when it happens claims can be made that "technically Apple isn't faster, it is only because of the process and cheating by using Metal".

I would have thought living in such a contrived fantasy world could only happen in the realm of partisan politics. But maybe Apple v Linux/Microsoft, AMD v Intel or x86 v ARM is "partisan politics" for some.
You clearly don’t know or understand Apple. I owned a Mac 512k (and owned numerous models between then and now), that is how far back I go with Apple. For modern Apple, the priorities are as follows:

  1. Profit margins
  2. Platform Control (enabling SaaS, which further lead to #1)
  3. User experience
  4. Performance
Just a quick comment in the interest of clarity:

- Apple CPUs do have turbo boost and thermal limits, but their frequency and power consumption range is much lower compared to x86 chips
- Apple Firestorm core peaks at around 5W, Zen3 and Tiger Lake at around 20W - for comparable peak performance
- AMD 15W TDP is not the maximum power consumption, it’s basically an arbitrary number that the system should eventually stabilize at. AMDs low power CPUs perform that well because they are actually running at 30-50 watts for minutes before throttling down to 15W. It becomes very obvious when comparing their 15W CPUs and their 35W CPUs - they score virtually the same in multicore benchmarks. This does make 15W AMD CPUs a good bang for buck when you are after throughtput, just don’t make the mistake believing they run at 15W…

All your numbers are incorrect. I could post some real numbers (I have access to multiple systems), but instead I will point you to AnandTech: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2633

EDIT: That is comparing to Zen 2 because AT has not reviewed Zen 3 parts as of yet. The power consumption for Zen 3 is similar, with increased performance.

Also see this for Mac Mini testing: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested
 
Last edited: