Apple chipper A12Z

I see Apple is about to change chips again. They seem to be quite good at it, although there are a few application casualties along the wayside.

I transitioned from the PowerPC to Intel back in the day and the machines hardly missed a beat. I still have, in a plastic crate, a PowerPC 17 inch MacBook Pro (matt screen) which occasionally runs old legacy device updates (Guitar EPROMs and TV hand controllers mainly). It just works.

I did the compatibility check and realised the processor shifts generate the biggest Mac purchase cycles for Apple. Unlike PCs, Macs don't degrade to slow imbeciles full of registry errors after about 20 months.

When the last Mac Pro was released, they included a diagram of the chip architecture with it, which I thought was unusual for Apple, but I guess they were positioning for the A12Z ARM processor. As far as I can see, it is a variant of the iPhone X processor, which is, itself intriguing. Nowadays everyone is building SoC (Systems on a Chip) which cuts down the distances that electrons have to travel. A nanosecond is about 30 cm/1 foot.

The big difference between the A12X in an iPhone and the one to be used in an iMac seems to be the transistor count, which goes from 6.9 billion to 10 billion. Current Intel are at about 2.8billion in the i7 Kaby Lake processor. Apple also switched on all of the Graphics Processing Units, which were partly disabled on the phone - I guess it relates to battery life or diminishing returns? They are also using the same idea of two sets of processor cores, with Vortex running at 2.4GHz for the big work and Tempest for the high-efficiency tasks and this time they have put 4 of each core onto the chip, so it is a sort of jumbo-sized iPhone X processor in the new Mac.

It is also interesting to look at the new diagramming as an illustration of master-class marketing. Show the things you want to - don't give them anything to count which could backfire - so no mention of the multiple processors in the new diagram.

I followed my own instincts when I originally started using Apple years ago ('it just works' era) and stayed fairly close to their product sets for most tasks. The stuff in the box did most of the average domestic chores. I slid away over the years and now have substantial Adobe and some Microsoft product set in use. It is curious though, that the Millenial-influenced design drift is from the mobile world onto the big screen, with systems like Catalyst to enable porting of iPad/iPhone apps to the Mac.

I hope it won't be a reminder of what happened when Apple changed Final Cut by adding the word 'Pro' and removing about half of the features, including for a time the ability to support plug-ins.

The average reporter dialled into the Apple jamboree will be saying what they've been told to say about how the Arm chips will inherit abilities built into Apple's A-Series chips for iPhones and iPads. We just don't want that to become a mantra or a box-in. 'Make it a feature not a bug,' as the ancient IBM Marketing manual reads.

The hidden challenge will come with the likes of Photoshop, InDesign and other dual-platformed software(ie Mac/PC). Writing for the clean lines of Big-Sur Safari and the needs of someone editing bleed-lines on a preprint image might create a few challenges. I suppose the Siri command "Macintosh make it so," might be the ultimate answer. I guess we will be hearing more of Clang compilers and Rosetta emulation again, probably on these little 'at cost' boxes.

So now I'm looking at two hardware cycles again. First to be able to run anything at all on Big-Sur and then to be able to transition to ARM processors.

Maybe I should buy some buy Apple shares as a fundraiser? And when will California run out of landmarks to use as codenames?