Apple execs on M2 chips, winning gamers and when to buy a Mac

News Summary

  • Now that system has expanded to envelop the Mac branch as well.“I think it felt very natural for us to sit down side by side with our industrial design partners and our system team partners inside Apple because they’re familiar faces to us,” Millet says.
  • Millet says that Apple knows that the top few percent of power-hungry users that want the edge on capability are savvy enough to know the rough release timeline of the “new Macs” and will wait for it.“That 20% is going to make a big difference to some folks.
  • That, says Millet, wasn’t a byproduct — it was the intent from the beginning.“We wanted to have the ability to build a scale of solutions that deliver the absolute maximum performance for machines that had no fan; for machines that had active cooling systems like our pro class machines.
  • So I actually think you hit on something interesting there in kind of this difference between a feedback loop and a different kind of process.”Apple M2 Max features 67 billion transistors, 400GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, and up to 96GB of fast, low-latency unified memory.
  • There will be different expectations over time — let’s make sure we have our toolbox complete.“And so we did very directed work to make sure that the GPU toolbox was there — working super closely with our Metal partners.
  • It was important, Millet says, to make sure people didn’t see the M1 as a “one and done.”As far as the “when Macs” question goes, Millet and Borchers are both in the “when possible, ship” camp.
Apples M series chips were incredibly well telegraphed when they arrived in late 2021. Apple had been designing its own silicon since the A4 appeared in the iPhone 4 just over a decade earlier. The [+19437 chars]