Apple Silicon Macs will ‘easily outperform’ Intel – report

Three chips together: M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max

A new report from The Information digs deep into Apple’s silicon development plans, confirming some of what we already thought and adding a little meat to the bone. Apple will “easily outperform Intel’s future processors,” the report says.

The chip that fell to Earth

Apple Silicon has changed the world of chip development. In its latest M1 Pro and M1 Max chips the company now dominates speed benchmarks and mean that its MacBook Pro devices compete with the highest-end gaming PCs but provide much more functional versatility at lower energy requirements. You could argue these Macs represent a huge step forward for the company.

And it’s about to take a few steps more.

We’ve heard on the grapevine that TSMC may be slightly delayed in moving to 3nm process technology. The company surprised us all a couple of years ago when we learned it hoped to make it there by 2022, but it now seems unlikely to hit that target until 2023. Which is still ahead of the rest of the industry and will not put a dent in Apple’s processor development plans.

Under pressure

Apple isn’t so worried. It is already ahead. That’s why it now plans new processor based on an improved 5nm production process next year. These chips may not deliver the quantum leap in performance we’ve seen with the M1 chips, but will still offer credible improvements, likely with an on-chip focus on specific tasks.

(I imagine we’ll see machine vision intelligence improve, for example, as Apple makes use of the Neural engine to support what the processors do).

The Information also tells us Apple intends introducing Macs with dual chips. This tallies nicely with our expectations around Mac Pro. These chips will offer double the performance. Also next year we can expect an iMac Pro and a dual-core M1 Max-series Mac Pro to appear, the company says. You can anticipate the MacBook Air will benefit from one of the new 2022 chips.

Oh! You pretty things

Moving forward to 2023 and we can anticipate yet another boost to Mac (and iPhone/iPad) performance, as 3nm chip production begins. These processors could feature up to 40CPU cores per chip and may be available in quadruple-processor configurations.

[Also read: 6 reasons your business should deploy Apple Silicon Macs]

Three versions of the third-gen chip are in development under the names Ibiza, Lobos and Palma, the report claims. Might these transpire to be M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max? We’ll find out soon enough.

Senior hardware technology VP Johny Srouji seems to have a magic touch

Starman, waiting in the sky

Apple will “easily outperform Intel’s future processors for consumer PCs,” the report also states.

This is a complete reset of the PC industry. In this new story we have Macs as the world’s most advanced, most computationally performant mass market PC. And this is something that hasn’t happened for a while.

It’s terribly exciting!

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