It's not powerful/faster that sells chips, it's power and speed relative to envelope. Maybe the iMac pro continues to ship with Xeons, the iMac with Core i5 and i7 depending on configuration.

But compare the Intel Core m3 to the Apple A11, and a completely different story will emerge. The A11 is already comparable to relatively recent Macbooks in terms of performance.

The point is, if we're going to bring up what an 'easy' time Apple has had transitioning from one architecture to another, it's worth remembering each transition came with a big performance jump. This made the new platform desirable and emulation bearable. If they are considering a transition again, 'bearable emulation' is not as much of a given.

While single core performance may not be higher, I could see Apple adding more cores than their current Intel offerings have, and still fall within an acceptable power envelope (thermal, battery life, etc).

My memory is that the PPC -> x86 jump was due to PPC supply issues and the fact that the PowerPC 970 / G5 was too power hungry for laptops. I could be wrong, but I administered labs of mixed x86 / PPC Macs during the transition and the performance jump seemed just like the normal difference between successive generations.

Keep in mind that while you don’t see much 68k outside embedded these days, you still see POWER in supercomputer rankings, and it also appeared in game consoles.

They were a lot faster, especially the laptops. And that was really the consumer proposition in both cases - you put up with our switch in exchange for a faster, better, stronger computer.

If Apple ends up doing it, the proposition would almost certainly be different and it seems very unlikely it would involve things like running your x86_64 macOS apps on your brand new Mac except three times slower. Thinking about this in terms of previous changes (or in terms of PPC history details) just seems obviously wrongheaded to me.

People assume that everyone who uses a Mac is running Photoshop or developing advanced AI but they're not. There are a lot of professionals using Apple products but they avoid the low end like the plague. Apple is a lifestyle brand these days and much of the user base has no demand for anything beyond the core Apple Apps.

The Macbook Core i3 is barely enough to run Safari or iTunes and Apple could probably replace the CPU without many of those users ever noticing.

I'd expect a huge performance jump when the new ARM-based Macs come out, both in Single-core (they can ramp up the clocks and increase cache and execution units) and Multi-core (they can add more cores to fit new power budgets as well).

The current A11 chips for iPhones are within 10% of Intel's top mobile chips on Geekbench, and within about 30% on their top desktop CPUs.

It's entirely possible for chip architectures to see 2x-3x speeds when moving from mobile power budgets to desktop power budgets.

An Intel Pentium 4410Y Kaby Lake running at 4.5-6 Watts gets about 1800 single-core on Geekbench, while an Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake running at 115 Watts gets 5600 single-core on Geekbench.

> The current A11 chips for iPhones are within 10% of Intel's top mobile chips on Geekbench

No, they aren't. iPhone X's multithreaded geekbench score is 10k. The 15" macbook pro is 15k. That's a lot more than 10%. It's only close if you look at the lower end Intel chips, the dual core ones (which is what Apple ships in the 13" macbook pro).

Those are multi-core numbers, not the single-core numbers.

What do you think is the most important for 250million desktop users? Because the vast majority of them are sitting idle waiting for interaction tasks, like on your system now.

Even browsers are doing a better job of loading multiple cores now and desktop machines often have more processes running in the background.

> Because the vast majority of them are sitting idle waiting for interaction tasks, like on your system now.

My dual Xeon E5-2690 v4 regularly loads all its cores and benefits greatly from them, but keep making assumptions by all means.

But if all you want is a chromebook competitor then sure, A11-class works fine. I'm going to guess that the people using Mac Pros tend to care a bit more about just running Chrome/Safari, though. Maybe Apple is just going to completely give up on their historically strong content creation market.

Geekbench is not representative of application performance, sadly.

The Intel chip is definitely along the biggest line items on a Mac. Apple can cut that cost by 70-80%.

Maybe the first few hardware revisions it won't be as performant. Its probably going to be an Armbook that will have the form factor of the Air or the Macbook but with A12 chips. The current A11s are in striking distance for performance.

The current A-series SoC’s were also designed around the power and thermal requirements of a mobile phone. In a laptop or desktop they would have a lot more wiggle room.

They could also run more than one per machine

> This wouldn't be the case this time.

I don't think we can make that assumption here. I would be very surprised if the ARM chips they put in desktops are identical to the ones they put in phones.

For one, the power budget is going to be a lot larger (even for a notebook), and power is roughly equivalent to speed.

Apple's ARM chips compare favorably to the crap that is in most laptops. Those Intel Core i3 6100U or Core i5 6200U chips? The midrange and low end will be greatly served from ARM chips.

They will not compete at the high end against the Core i7s with 6 cores running at 3.8GHz (12 with HT) though.

> Geekbench 4 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 4000 (which is the score of an Intel Core i7-6600U)

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

> iMac (27-inch Retina Mid 2017) | Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.2 GHz (4 cores) | 5683

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks

> iPhone 8 | Apple A11 Bionic @ 2.4 GHz | 4217

4217 for Apple A11 @ 2.4Ghz vs 5683 for Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.2GHz

Of course, microbenchmarks don't mean much. But the margins are thin enough for users to notice already. Add in more power, more cores, more Ghz, better optimized instruction set, more vertically integrated system, and who knows.

geekbench scores look impressive because they are very very short bursts to prevent power/thermal throttling on iphones, iphones are able to scale up/down preformance wise very quickly, x86 CPUs less so, so what is really being tested is how fast can a cpu jump from idle to full speed.

Geekbench is not at all a reliable benchmark that tells you anything about real preformance.

Its a total farce to suggest that a CPU with a power budget that is 10x to 20x larger, on a modern process, with modern archtecture is somehow just as fast or slower.

Intel is dragging 40 years of legacy along. I’m not so sure a new processor can’t be faster and less wasteful of battery power.

Indeed, we have every indication that Apple can already do both of these things. Go look at Geekbench 4 single-core scores for the current iPhone and iPad vs. the current MacBook Pro. Apple is already beating Intel on speed in a design that uses MUCH less power.

I guess that Apple would have the resources and knowledge to create an extended ARM architecture that could match x64 in the same power envelope, if they really really wanted.

The market segment isn't that large though so it seems tough to get it done within the laptop budget. Still, it could benefit the other devices and streamline the hardware development, so maybe they think it's worthwhile.

But what -- and work with me here -- if the processor is slimmer. With rounded corners.