Apple’s Upcoming ARM Computers could be interesting

Sorry I Mean @Apple Silicon Computers

When I was watching the WWDC Keynote and they Finally revealed they were going to move over to their own CPUs and GPUs for their computers I was over the moon. As Intel has been struggling to move to smaller chipsets unlike their chief competition AMD I’m not surprised that Apple has ditched them and mored to their own silicone. Apple does not want to be held back by anyone and their non-computer devices are outpacing Samsung, Microsoft and other when it comes to hardware.

The next thought that struck me was How is this going to change the industry. Whether you like it or not Apple lead the way when it comes to computers mobiles and tablets. We saw it with USB-C, Thunderbolt 3 (or USB 4 as it will be called in the future) & 3.5mm headphone jacks getting removed from mobiles.

Like it or not, in the Long term, I feel that ARM CPUs are going to power the majority of devices including your desktop gaming computer. We are coming to the limit of what we can do with X86_64 CPUs you can just chuck more cores at them and hope for the best. ARM has a huge advantage in our increasingly mobile world, it provides more computer power per watt than x86_64 hand down. It’s also cheaper to make an ARM CPU and you don’t have to worry about multi-threading either, though I’m sure some smart bugger will figure out how to do it in the future.

The thing that most excites me though is the hardware we are going to get from Apple Later this year, though I seriously doubt that I’ll be able (or allowed) to buy any. The Developer Transition Kit Apple is letting it developer, temporarily, get it hands-on has the same A12Z chip that is in the latest iPad Pro. This same chip has more power in it than the i5 & i7 CPUs that Apple has in a wide selection of its laptops, including the 2017 13 inch MacBook Pro that I’m writing this blog post on.

I really hope that Apple keeps the Mac mini form factor they have for the Developer Transition Kit and put in one of their new desktop-grade Apple Silicone Chips comparable to Intel’s i9 9900K with at least 32GB of RAM and a GPU that has similar specs to an AMD Radeon VII. I might be asking for a lot, I honestly don’t know, but imagine having that power in something the size of a mac mini that isn’t thermal throttled to high heaven. Having looked at the benchmark score for the A12Z and the Radeon VIIs Graphics performance on geekbench the Radeon score is around 90,000 ahead of the GPU on the A12Z chip so I could be waiting a while, though honestly don’t think it will be that long now apple will have complete control of all the hardware they produce, especially as they are looking to launch the ARM Mac Pro in just 2 years.

While I don’t think my dream of a stupid powerful Mac mini is going to happen soon. I could really do with one that will handle my Plex server, Home Assistant and a web server all in one box. So I’d still need a half-decent CPU & Graphics card to handle the transcoding in realtime of 2 video streams as well as run docker with a least Home assistant and webserver containers with room for at least 2 more without the whole thing grinding to a halt (I’ve had to give up on my Home Assistant plans at the moment as my current Mac Mini just can’t cope with its i3 processor & 4GB of Ram.

I think I’d like something that has 16GBs RAM, 512GB SSD storage, 18 ARM cores (12 High-Performance cores and 6 low-Performance Cores for background work) and 16 graphics core may well do the job. I should point out that I have no idea how the CPU & GPU cores work and whether these numbers are complete gibberish or not. I’m just thinking of what I’d like to see compare to the current performance of the A12Z chip.

Are you looking forward to the new ARM-based hardware comping out over the next few years? What products would you like to see? Do you think I’ll get either of my Mac mini’s any time soon? Let me know in the comments below.