Author | Sun Guangxin
Edited by | Zhang Yi
"There is no delay at all, it's like a switch that turns on the light instantly."
"There wasn't even time to stir the coffee, the file opened in the blink of an eye."
"Scene rendering is up to 4 times faster, and with this level of performance acceleration, I can play a little more advanced."
......
At the 2022 Apple Spring Conference, several creative workers in the VCR "angrily praised" Apple's product use is too silky, and this experience is all due to Apple's latest upgrade chip - M1 Ultra.
Although the "M2 chip using the 4-nanometer process" was not unveiled, Apple did not disappoint the officials.
The M1 Ultra is the next generation of the M1 Max and the fourth generation of the M1 family. Apple calls it the "last chip" of the M1 series. In order to highlight the explosion of the M1 Ultra, Apple has deeply integrated the latest high-end product, the Mac Studio, with the M1 Ultra.
The Mac Studio for creatives uses two products from the M1 Max and M1 Ultra chips, while the M1 Ultra edition is a premium version. Also released at the same time as Mac Studio is the Studio Display display.
"Directly press more than 200,000 Mac Pros on the ground and rub them, it is estimated that the friends who bought Mac Pro have cried and fainted." Some netizens praised the golden pair of Mac Studio and Studio Display from the perspective of application.
Insiders look at the doorway, and laymen look at the bustle.
"There are fewer people who can touch this area, and the general population will watch it lively." After all, the lowest price of this set of equipment is more than 40,000 yuan. In the level of electronic product consumption of the general public, the higher prices are really "not grounded".
It's hard to keep up with the fast-paced Macs of "squeezing toothpaste"-like development progress, so Apple has launched the Apple Silicon plan - so that all Mac computers equipped with Intel processors use self-developed chips.
In 2020, M1 was released with a stunning four-seater, according to Apple's official data, the performance of M1 at the same power is 2 times that of Intel's latest computer chip, but the power consumption is only 1/3 of Intel's. Now, with the M1 Ultra out and tied to high-end professional products that require high performance, Apple has made another big name for itself on its self-developed chips.
On the one hand, Apple pursues a high-end market position in the pursuit of high performance, on the other hand, Apple's mature mass-produced chips are accelerating the "sinking" replacement.
For example, the iPhone SE series, which is a stepping stone to the low-end market, has been updated, and the new model is equipped with the same A15 bionic chip as the iPhone 13 series. The new iPad Air is equipped with an M1 chip and is priced at $599, while the price of the National Bank of China is from 4399 yuan. Although Apple launched the M1 in November 2020, it is the first time that an iPad product at this price point has been used. Even the Mac Studio, which costs as much as $3999, is much more "pro-people" than the previously released Mac Pro.
However, the M1 Ultra does not seem to meet the market's expectations for the progress of Apple's self-developed chips, and people's expectations for the M2 series are still very enthusiastic. Meanwhile, 2022 is the deadline for Cook to cash out the use of self-developed chips for all Mac products.
Between offense and defense, Apple's path to self-developed chips is undergoing subtle changes.
Apple chip replaces the penultimate piece of the puzzle
As the biggest highlight of this conference, some people jokingly said that the M1 Ultra sounds more like two M1 Max chips together.
The M1 Ultra interconnects two M1 Max chips using the new UltraFusion package architecture for higher performance and lower power consumption. It has 114 billion transistors, seven times the size of M1, with 800GB/s memory channel and 128GB of unified memory. It has 20 core CPUs and 16 high-performance processing cores, 64 core GPUs, which is 8 times faster than M1, and the media processor engine performance is 2 times faster than M1 Max. With high performance, the M1 Ultra consumes 90% less power than today's 16-core PCs.
Superimposing two chips together to become a new chip is not the first of Apple, Huawei already has a patent for chip overlay technology.
In fact, chip superposition is not a simple "1+1" problem, the first two main problems are volume and energy consumption. It can be seen that the volume of each generation of M1 series chips will be larger than the previous generation, and the increase in volume will lead to another problem, that is, the increase in energy consumption.
One of the reasons why Apple chose its own chip was that the energy consumption of Intel chips based on the X86 architecture was prominent.
According to the run-score test results of Geekbench 5, the Intel i9-12900K is nearly 1.5 times faster than the M1 Pro and M1 Max in terms of multi-core performance, but in terms of power consumption, the i9-12900K is significantly inferior to the M1 Proh and M1 Max. Apple has a hard time accepting Intel's heat dissipation problems caused by energy consumption.
For the heat dissipation problem, Apple has always tended to solve it by increasing the energy consumption ratio.
For the release of the M1 Ultra, Apple said that in terms of CPU equivalent power, the M1 Ultra is 90% higher than the best performance of the Intel i9-12900K. At comparable performance, power consumption can be reduced by 100 watts. In terms of GPU, the M1 Ultra and NVIDIA RTX 3090 compared to the results show that the former can run at a rate of more than 3090 while reducing power consumption by 200 watts. It is no wonder that some netizens said that the M1 Ultra is far behind Intel, and the future M2 crushing is even more suspenseful.
This allows Apple to reduce the overall volume of the product while maintaining product performance. According to the press conference information, the M1 Ultra debuted this time is mainly used in its new Mac product Mac Studio, because the desktop chip can not directly abandon the heat dissipation structure like the mobile phone chip, but despite the addition of the dual centrifugal fan, the overall bottom side of the Mac Stidio is only 7.7 inches long and only 3.7 inches high.
When the first M1 chip came out, the two main flaws that were attacked were insufficient memory and only support for 1 4K display, so many professional practitioners still tended to use Intel's products, and the release of Mac Studio also made up for these two defects, and on the basis of Mac Pro, it also expanded a wider high-end market share.
However, in chip technology, Apple's M1 Ultra is not a qualitative leap, and the process it uses is still 5 nanometers instead of 4 nanometers, and people's expectations for M2 chips have not diminished. But Tianfeng Securities analyst Guo Mingji has said that the M2 chip will not be launched in 2022.
There is not much time left for Apple's self-developed chip replacement
Apple failed to achieve mass production of M2 chips, so it first launched Mac Studio and Studio Display at the spring conference, what is Apple in a hurry?
First of all, according to Apple's latest financial report, although the iPhone 13 has allowed Apple to achieve good sales results, Mac products are Apple's fastest-growing products in the last fiscal quarter.
Q1 of fiscal 2022 (the fourth quarter of 2021), Apple's iPhone business revenue of $71.63 billion, although still the highest proportion of business, but only increased by 9.2% year-on-year, iPad revenue also declined due to supply chain issues; Mac business revenue was $10.85 billion, accounting for 8.8%, but an increase of 25.1% year-on-year, is the largest increase in products.
The supply problems of iPhone and iPad are mainly in the chip shortage, but the M series of chips is affected less than the A series, Apple would rather launch a "stitch monster" to vigorously promote its new chips and Mac Studio, may also hope to take advantage of the current momentum of Mac products to further increase sales.
Second, Cook is also close to making good on his promises. At the WWDC developer conference in June 2020, Cook said that he would use Apple's own chips for all Of Apple's Mac products within two years, and all apple Macs used at that time were Intel chips.
Whether this "flag" can stand up lies in whether it can release the Mac Pro equipped with Apple chips at this year's WWDC developer conference.
Synthesizing the relevant information, M2 will use TSMC's 4-nanometer process, and TSMC is also the only company that has been rumored to be oem for Apple's M2 chip, but TSMC's 4-nanometer process is also unsatisfactory.
Although it is reported that Apple has contracted the first batch of 4-nanometer production capacity of TSMC, but at present, it is Clear that the TSMC 4-nanometer process has been used and has been put into production is MediaTek's Tianji 9000, qualcomm also transferred the 4-nanometer order from Samsung to TSMC due to product yield problems, and the news about when Apple M2 will be mass-produced is still a market rumor.
In addition, Apple's self-developed chips are also to open up the iPhone, iPad, Mac software system.
Although the X86 architecture used by Intel has good performance, because Apple's other two major products use ARM architecture software, the two architectures are different in terms of running mode and efficiency, and some iOS native software is not so smooth after porting to the Mac. If all ARM architecture chips are adopted, Apple will accelerate the realization of ecological unification.
However, to rely on the ARM architecture to create Apple's own chip ecology is a long-term thing, such as many mainstream chips do not have X86 solutions, how to enable a large number of developers to migrate software to the ARM architecture is still a problem.
The mac launched this time is not only suitable for the film and television cultural and creative industry, but also suitable for program development. According to Apple's official website, the delivery date of the Mac Studio was delayed shortly after the conference. If it is not a marketing strategy or insufficient inventory, but there are really so many people who want to buy Mac Studio, there will be a large number of software based on Apple chips to be developed in the future, which is obviously easier than convincing third-party developers to migrate software to the ARM architecture, and it is easier to build their own chip ecology.
In general, the self-developed chip is replaced, leaving little time for Apple.