Among figured quoted by the firm include up to 3x better CPU and 5x better GPU performance than a last-generation Intel-based MBA, and perhaps more directly relevant, enough performance to play back multiple 4K ProRes streams without dropping a frame. Because the company has changed so little outside (there are a few things, which we’ll get to), the bulk of Apple’s focus in promoting the new MBA is based on performance and battery life – which is to say performance, power consumption, and performance-per-watt. The star of the show is of course Apple’s M1. The newest model picks up where the previous one left off, swapping out Intel’s silicon for Apple’s own M1 processor. The final Intel revision of the laptop was launched in March, where it shipped with Intel’s Ice Lake-Y processors, topping out with the quad CPU core i7-1060NG7. MAC MINI RAM UPGRADE 2020 MACThe most recently (re)introduced member of Apple’s Mac lineup, the Air is the company’s smallest and cheapest laptop. Starting things off, we have the MacBook Air. All of this, in turn, is made on a 5nm process – no double the same TSMC 5nm process that Apple used for the A14. Finally, joining this are various other functional blocks for the SoC, including a flash storage controller, a secure enclave, Apple’s neural engine (NPU), and a Thunderbolt 3 + USB 4 controller. Meanwhile the GPU design has been bulked up to 8 cores there as well, doubling A14. But in short, M1 looks a lot like a beefier A14, with four of Apple’s high-performance Firestorm cores – 2 more than on A14 – joined by four high-efficiency Icestorm cores. Our own Andrei Frumusanu has a detailed breakdown on the new M1 chips and what we expect from them based on Apple’s A14 SoC used in the recently-launched iPhone 12 family. Powering all three of these new machines will be Apple’s first Mac-focused Apple Silicon chip, the Apple M1. So although guts will be entirely different, these new products are still designed to be Macs in every appreciable way. Apple wants to make the transition to Arm Macs as seamless as possible, and this goes right on down to their design and product names. And unlike the transition to x86 that started in 2006, Apple isn’t even cleaning the slate with product naming – the Arm-based Macs all continue the MacBook/Mac Mini naming rather than being the progenitors of new families of machines. The new machines are all clearly reusing the designs of their x86-based predecessors, if not parts of the shell in some cases. Fittingly, these are also the areas where performance-per-watt is generally the most critical, as Apple is very strongly power-constrained on these platforms, and thus performance-limited as well.īefore diving into the individual Macs, it’s interesting to note just how little is changing on the outside. MAC MINI RAM UPGRADE 2020 PROMeanwhile the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are Apple’s two 13.3-inch laptops, focused on portability and performance respectively. The Mac Mini is of course the smallest and most integrated of Apple’s desktop-style computers. Three of the lower-end devices within the Mac family, Apple is starting small for their Arm transition. At the time Apple set the start of the transition at the end of this year, and right on cue, today Apple announced the first three Apple Silicon-powered Macs: the Late 2020 editions of the MacBook Air, the 13-Inch MacBook Pro, and the Mac Mini. After almost a decade and a half of relying on Intel’s x86 processors to serve at the heart of every Mac, the company is going to be shifting to relying on its own, in-house designed Arm processors to power their now un-PC computers. As previously announced by Apple this summer, the company is embarking on a major transition within its Mac product lineup.
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