With apple's spring conference coming to an end, many Apple users should be satisfied, after all, this year's spring conference is directly full in hardware, a new generation of iPad Air, a new Mac Studio, a new Studio Display and a slightly regrettable iPhone SE (third generation), in addition to the new iPhone 13 series of color matching.
At today's March 9 conference, only Studio Display may be a real new product in Apple's product line, but according to Xiao Lei's colleagues, Studio Display is lG's 5K display audio enhanced version for Apple. In addition to adding space audio and other Apple-specific functions, but also strengthened the display comes with the audio module, but in the main display parameters of the two are basically no difference, interesting is that Apple also for studio Display equipped with an A13 chip.
Therefore, although there are many new products, the new hardware at the spring conference as a whole has a feature - retaining the original configuration upgrade chip, of which the appearance of the iPad Air 5 and the iPad Air 4 are almost no different, and the main upgrade point is on the M1 new products and storage.
Although Mac Studio is a new product, it basically continues the design idea of Mac mini, but it has been significantly improved in hardware configuration and interface, and a huge cooling system is embedded to ensure the normal operation of high-performance hardware, of course, Mac Studio also brings us a new version of the M1 chip - M1 Ultra, a complete "monster".
M1 Ultra debuts, targeting high-performance professionals?
Before the conference, there was news that the M2 chip may be released in the spring conference, but from the follow-up exposure data, the M2 chip is most likely to be born in the autumn conference with the iPhone 14 series, and will be equipped with the next generation of MacBook Air. So the question is, Apple is said to launch a new desktop product at the spring conference, and what chip will be used in this product? Is it still the M1 Max?
Now that we have the answer, the two versions of Mac Studio are equipped with M1 Max and M1 Ultra, of which M1 Ultra is stitched together with two M1 Max, bringing double the transistor area while doubling the memory bandwidth, this design is not just a simple way to put two M1 Max together.
In the M1 Ultra, we see Apple's hidden die-to-die connector, that is, the inter-chip interconnect module, through which Apple can directly stack the M1 chip and make it a new "big" chip, the key is that after the fusion of this module, it will not have much impact on the performance of the respective chips, that is, it has the effect of 1+1≈2.
This may seem normal in everyone's eyes, but from a chip point of view, it is not easy to do this, even arm, which is known for its easy heap core, it is not easy to fuse two high-performance chipsets together without losing performance.
However, in recent years, more die chips have gradually emerged, Apple can come up with M1 Ultra is also reasonable, according to the news that Apple even prepared a 4die fusion "Big Mac", will be installed in the future high-performance Mac devices.
It is worth noting that Apple is gradually laying out its M1 chip into more high-performance professional-grade product lines, and the birth of M1 Ultra means that Apple can easily achieve different chip designs by increasing or subtracting core area and fusing chipsets to meet the needs of different product lines for chip performance and power consumption.
From Apple's measures, we can basically guess that the future ordinary Mac devices will most likely not see the x86 architecture chip, the only exception may be only the Mac Pro, but the next generation of Mac Pro will most likely carry the strongest M series chips, may be M2 Max, may also be M2 Ultra.
As for whether the xeon chip configuration of x86 architecture will be retained, although there is not much news exposure at present, Xiao Lei believes that the possibility of retention is unlikely, and with today's M1 Ultra performance to calculate, M2 Ultra should not be weaker than the Xeon series processor at least in multi-core performance, which is enough to meet the user's demand for high performance. The only question is whether Apple is really determined to extend the M-series of chips into the Mac Pro before the Arm software ecosystem is fully perfected.
After all, unlike other Mac devices, Mac Pro takes into account the user's performance and professional software requirements when designing the product, not only leaving room for users to expand but also using Intel's most versatile Xeon series processor, and the current Arm ecology still lacks enough professional software support, and whether it can meet the software running needs of professional users after switching to M series chips will be the main problem.
Today, what hinders Apple from launching M-series chips in the full line of Mac series products may only be the software ecology.
Apple's Arm chip camp has become a scale
In the just-concluded conference, the protagonist of the chip is undoubtedly M1 and A15, the former is not only equipped with the iPad Air at a price of 4,000 yuan, but also appears in the Mac Studio that costs more than 10,000 yuan, while the A15 is the desired debut on the iPhone SE (the third generation), as Apple's most advanced iPhone chip, A15's performance in performance and power consumption is also remarkable.
Moreover, we have also noticed that Apple is expanding its high-performance chips to more devices, even the Studio Display used as a display, Apple has specially equipped it with an A13 processor, which is very simple to work with, responsible for processing functions such as spatial audio, character centering and Siri.
However, the most surprising thing is the iPad Air, Apple equipped it with an M1 chip and 8G storage, resulting in the iPad Air 5 at least in terms of performance has been almost the same as the iPad Pro on sale. The two are not much different even in the front design, the biggest difference is only the screen and the image system, users who are not sensitive to these two parameters can even directly ignore the iPad Pro, and the price difference between the two is more than 2,000 yuan.
On the other hand, Xiao Lei was also surprised by the low cost of Apple's chip, allowing Apple to unscrupulously apply high-performance chips to low-end devices, although from the price point of view, the 4399 yuan iPad Air is not cheap, and even the price has been comparable to high-end Android tablets.
But in terms of software ecology and productivity, the performance of the iPad is far beyond the Android tablet, and it is even more powerful after using the M1 chip, and the iPad Air as the cheapest M1 chip device at present, considering the cost of hardware such as the screen, the cost of the M1 chip may be lower than we previously guessed.
The lower chip cost means that Apple can apply the M1 chip to more areas, and it is only used on the iPad Air, so will the next generation be configured on the iPad mini and iPad series? Little Ray thinks it can be expected.
However, limiting the popularity of M1 chips is not only the cost, but also the heat dissipation and chip volume, even if the M1 chip energy consumption ratio is very good, but compared to the traditional A series processor is still much higher, and the chip volume is also greater than the A series chips, how to maintain the existing performance power ratio under the premise of achieving the same performance experience on the volume of the iPad mini will be a great test of Apple's chip design capabilities.
Of course, as long as the power optimization problem of the M series chip can be solved, in the future, we may be able to see the M series chip on the iPhone and even the folding iPhone. However, Xiao Lei believes that the main battlefield of the M series chips is still the PC side, especially the mobile PC side, and the future M series should still be based on creating a chip with excellent performance and power consumption ratio, which will make the MacBook series products have an extremely strong competitiveness in the mobile office market.
With the development of the M series of chips, Xiao Lei even feels that Apple may launch personal server-level products in the future, pulling the chip volume to the extreme for the needs of enterprise users, creating a product with strong performance and much smaller than ordinary servers in terms of volume, allowing users to more easily arrange the working environment, and also providing choices for users with higher performance needs.
At least for now, relying on the strong performance and power consumption ratio of M series and A series chips and Apple's unique interconnection ecology, Apple is already invincible in the field of mobile ecology, and they can surpass only themselves.