DPReview on 5 Big Improvements probably coming to Apple’s next MacBook Pro

DL Cade has a great article on possible new features of the next Apple Silicon MacBook Pro. It is very good read, but a couple of things on graphics really stood out for me.

According to several different leaks, the M1X SOC will be available in 16- and 32-core variants that could offer performance on par NVIDIA’s GTX 1650 and RTX 3070, respectively, while sipping less than half of the wattage. If these rumors turn out to be true, the M1X will offer the most powerful iGPU experience on the market, offering more than enough power for most GPU-accelerated photo and video editing tasks.

However, even if the M1X meets these expectations, we would also love for Apple to bring back support for eGPUs. For now, only Intel-based MacBooks support eGPUs, but according to French publication Mac4ever, M1 Macs can detect eGPUs when they’re connected, just don’t have the necessary drivers to put them to use. This could simply be a holdover for Intel-based Mac users on Big Sur, or it could be an indication that eGPU support is coming for more “professional-grade” users of Apple Silicon Macs. We sincerely hope it’s the latter.

Both of these are exciting. The current M1 scared me without it’s external GPU support and while that might or might not be coming, the possible performance of the GPU cores is fairly impressive, especially if they really make one with a lot more graphics cores. I still hate the ram being shared, and soldered since it will be so expensive, but if you can get at least 128 GB you will likely be pretty damn powerful. All speculation now though.

9to5Mac reports that the next MacBook Pro will dump the touchbar

Chance Miller at 9to5Mac is has the report of a rumor that Apple is getting rid of the touch bar. Honestly I think this is great news. It was a stupid idea. I want keys that are always in the same spot.

Now we will see if Apple every does a touch screen with a laptop. I know Apple says it isn’t good, but being able to use a pencil on it would be amazing.

Honestly I would love an iPad that is actually a Mac, like an old school Modbook. That would be my first laptop in a long time, and it would be easy since they use the same processor now, but I doubt it is coming anytime soon, but I would love to be proved wrong.

And the apple pencil is so damn good , using on a mac would be amazing, and I know I can use sidecar, but it isn’t perfect yet.

Bloomberg on new Apple Silicon for MacBook Pro, Air, Mac Mini and the MacPro

Bloomberg is reporting on rumors of the new versions of Apple Silicon. There will be a redesigned MacBook Pro, then MacBook Air, new lower end MacBook Pro and finally the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

The next M1’s will support 64 gigs if RAM with 8 high energy cores and 2 energy efficient cores and either 16 or 32 graphics cores. The M1 currently 4 high performance and 4 efficiency with 8 graphics cores.

The chips for the Apple Silicon MacPro will have 20 and 40 core with either 16 or 32 high performance cores and either 64 or 128 core graphics. 

Let’s hope the MacPro doesn’t top out at 64 gigs of combined RAM, but the rest of the specs sound impressive.

If performance scales with the cores, the performance will be impressive.

Bare Feats does speed tests on M1 MacBook Pro on DaVinci Resolve 17 and it shows the power of GPUs

 

Bare Feats has run speed comparison tests with DaVinci Resolve 17.0 beta 4 on the m1 MacBook Pro and the 2017 iMac Pro, 2 variations of the 2019 MacPro and the 2013 MacPro.

And the results are not surprising, the M1 currently gets stomped in 4K Noise Reduction by more than 2x, almost 3x for the slowest Mac (the 2017 iMac Pro Pro Vega 64).

And at least currently it seems to show the power of GPU adds to Macs, over what the M1 can do. Now surely the M1 will scale, but we will have to see just how far it goes.

OWC Rocketyard Blog on M1 Macs actually having 2 Thunderbolt busses with only 2 ports

 

The OWC RocketYard Blog has a really interesting article on how the new M1 Macs actually have 2 thunderbolt busses even though they only have 2 ports. This is unlike previous Thunderbolt macs which had 4 thunderbolt ports, but only 2 busses, with 2 ports split on each bus. The new M1 Macs have only 2 ports but 2 busses, and with the new ability to use USB4 Hubs to split thunderbolt you can have the more ports.

Appleinsider on the fact that the new M1 Macs support USB 4 instead of just Thunderbolt 3 before Intel has even released support for it’s own standard

 AppleInsider has an article on how the new M1 Macs in fact support USB 4, and not just Thunderbolt 3.  I hadn’t realized this at all, but it makes sense as it is new open standard, but amazing that it is before Intel managed to release it. They do need to add more ports though, 2 ports on the laptops when it includes charging is nuts. I have problems with only 4 thunderbolt 3 ports on my imac pro as is.

MacWorld article on how you to think of memory differently with new Apple M1 Chip

 

MacWorld has an interesting article on how you have to think of memory differently because of how it is used in the M1 chip and because it is part of the processor it is so much faster.

I still hope for external graphics card support in the MacPro, but think it is less and less likely that will happen, but maybe I will pleasantly surprised. And if not just how much memory will a pro need to run the graphics and system memory? And it won’t be expandable, you are stuck with what you buy.

Apple has released the first M1 Macs with it’s second processor transition

 

Apple has released it’s first 3 Macs with the M1 chip it is designing itself making for the 2nd processor transition in the history of the mac and the first ARM based Macs, now on the same platform as the ipad and iPhone.

Apple’s stats make it look really fast and the first benchmarks make it a very impressive machine and 3 of the fastest macs apple has every released.

Of course for now it is useless to me as Adobe software does not yet run or at least run well under Rosetta. Still the performance of Final Cut Pro sounds impressive and I love that the latest beta of DaVinci Resolve 17.1 runs on M1 Macs already. And Adobe has a beta of Photoshop out as well.

What scares me is the single thunderbolt channel and only 2 ports and the fact that it can’t run an external graphic card even with it’s thunderbolt port.

And what is even scarier for me is that the M1 shares it’s memory between the graphics card and the onboard memory. So you had better get the 16GB because you are sharing them with the video processing. If this continues you will need to really get more RAM on high end machines (which hopefully won’t top out at 16GB as the current machines do.

Still the processors do have impressive performance already so the higher end version will likely be very impressive.

And it is amazing that basically the MacBook Air is only different in a single GPU core being disabled, and the MacBook Pro and Mini having fans to cool the system down.

I look forward to what the truly pro Apple M1 Machines will look like, but I don’t look forward to the software update cost that will go along with it, and the software that will break and end up going by the wayside.

Apple has released a much more Pro version of the MacBook Pro but reatains the very non -pro Touch Bar

So Apple has finally updated the MacPro with Touchbar to be much more of a Pro Machine, with the 15inch model  being able to have an insanely expensive 4tb SSD, quite expensive 32GB of RAM and a fairly reasonable 6 Core intel Core i9 processor, and a Radeon Pro 560x with 4GB of Memory and true tone display, as well as having 4 USB 3.1 Gen 2 Thunderbolt Ports and a supposedly improved keyboard.

Horribly they keep the horrific idea of the Touch Bar. While it sounds like a great idea, the whole concept of a keyboard is so that you don’t have to look at it, and with the touchbar you are looking down from the screen to the keyboard to interact with it (if an application even uses it). Honestly keys with screens in them would be so much more useful, as would a touch screen, but apple always things they are smarter than everyone else.

Still a 6 core i9 with 32 GB of ram would be great, especially if added to the with the new black magic external video card for Resolve.

An argument against Xeon Processors, QuickSync and H.264 Compression

Mac Performance Guide has a new test showing a MacBook Pro vs a MacPro doing h.264 encoding. The MacPro has a consumer CPU which has QuickSync. Now you have to do specific encoder settings to get this result, but it clearly shows the MacPro being thoroughly beat by the MacBookPro!

It is pretty idiotic that Intel would actual have better features in their consumer chips than their much more expensive professional Xeon chips! Really for most uses the Xeon is really best because you can have more cores and you can have dual processors, but since you can get higher core i7 chips now, maybe a hackintosh with a Core i7 would be better in many circumstances!