It suprises me that this is news. It's a brand new chip out for a couple of month, deliberately positioned at the moment with 4 full fat cores and 4 low level cores. You wouldn't change the process every year, the R&D needed wouldn't be covered with a cycle that rapid, the only logical step is to scale up by increasing the core count, and perhaps decent overclocking of the cores, with appropiate cooling solutions, i.e. larger laptop form factors and true desktop form factors.

I have the mac mini M1 and I must say its brilliant. I've been able to do everything I could have ever done on windows and more. So far, everything just seems to be working, and well. For WFH it's brilliant. Looking at the teardowns, it's mostly empty space, so even on this relatively tiny form factor its going to be quite easy to ramp up the power in future builds.

A full desktop experience will undoubtedly blow the competition out of the water, provided the cooling solutions are decent, and developers really get on board.

Never underestimate Apples ability to slow walk innovation over years that they could do in months...    I don't look for an M2 this year when they can release and M1x thats consistent with how they do their other chips and lets them spread 'innovation' out longer.   

The 16" pro needs more horsepower AND more GPU power...  I don't see apple pairing with nvidia/ati at this point when they can keep the GPU on their silicon.    They also need more emph in their new iPad Pros so the Air isn't nipping at its heals so much.

I see an A14x thats more or less a stripped down M1 with the 'pc specific bits' removed.      and I see an M1x with more CPU and GPU cores... they don't have time to change lithography. 

The 16" macbook pro will use an M1x but still lack touch...  so developers will 'almost' have a perfect iPad development system...  but not quite... that way they can add touch in another year or so and resell all those customers.   

|

A few months ago there was a rumour that Apple were developing a gaming laptop. This week we learn they have designed a keyboard with custom key captions using fibre optics. I bet they are going to launch a killer combo gaming /video editing workstation MacBook Pro. Gamers can configure the keys and video editors can assign editing features to specific keys with a temporary custom caption. like the awful TouchBar but tactile.

A few months so there was a rumour that Apple were developing a gaming laptop. This week we learn that have designed a keyboard with custom key captions using fibre optics. I bet they are going to launch a killer combo gaming /video editing workstation MacBook. Gamers can configure the keys and video editors can assign editing features to specific keys with a temporary custom caption. like the awful TouchBar but tactile.

Intel is so fooked. PussycatPond is not nearly as power efficient or fast.

16"  Macbook pro battery life with this chip will last twice longer than the Skylake++++++ anyway.

"Impact" is relative, there's almost no doubt that it would still be far more efficient than a TGL alternative.