"We don't want to boast about making the Mac a great gaming platform overnight, and we have to think long-term."
Tim Millet, vice president of chip architecture at Apple
This is the view expressed by Tim Millet, Apple's vice president of chip architecture, in an interview with TechCrunch after the release of M2 Pro and M2 Max, which is very pragmatic and sincere.
In addition, he said, "Apple has never forgotten gamers, and we have been paying attention to the game market since the beginning of core manufacturing."
In the impression, this is the first time that the senior management of the core team has been interviewed by the media, and it is also the internal thoughts of the few game markets for Mac in the M chip era and even the Intel era.
Macs have gone through Apple's ups and downs almost through several chip platform conversions, but no matter how they change, they are almost out of touch with the mainstream gaming market.
Before Steve Jobs' return, Mac focused on the enterprise market, focusing on productivity tools. After Jobs' return and drastic overhaul, the Mac was still a productivity tool and became more pure.
▲ Jobs and the original MacBook Pro with Intel chips Image from: TIME
Even in 2021, Mac turned to the more potential M chip, Apple used this to break the boundaries between macOS and iOS, and the mainstream "game" still failed to appear in the Mac platform.
As Apple continues to emphasize the "productivity" capability, we seem to feel that Apple has quietly abandoned the possibility of Mac games, but the words of Apple senior Tim Millet have given a new expectation to play triple-A masterpieces on Mac.
There is no doubt that the M chip platform has enough performance and gradually becomes a viable gaming platform at the hardware level, but the key lies in Apple's determination.
A new benchmark for performance was developed
The M chip is based on the Arm architecture, and its advantage over the x86 architecture is that the "energy efficiency ratio" is outstanding.
▲ Apple M1 chip "Tiantuan"
In the process of developing and designing the M1 chip, Tim Millet saw a "real opportunity" to reinvent performance benchmarks.
Historically, no matter what form factor the PC was, whether it was a desktop, gaming notebook, or thin and light notebook, they had consistent standards for performance.
However, their needs are different, and simple and crude "peak performance" is actually not very accurate and practical.
▲ Typical gaming notebooks, pursuing peak performance and not portable enough
Interestingly, for peak performance, Tim also complained, "When we are using third-party chips, they do not recommend or allow Apple to stack its performance orientation and design style to the extreme."
This means that Apple is expected to make some compromises when designing Macs, which may be performance release or final product form.
This is also one reason why Apple intends to re-push the original standards and rebuild the platform itself. The other is Apple's accumulation of Arm chips.
Jobs' decisions still affect Apple today
Starting with the A4 chip, Apple began to design the chip itself, and the core team worked with the software and hardware team to complete the final product. With the advent of the iPad Pro product line, Tim Millet found that the A-series chips were good at performing quite well in a small space.
"These chips are put in other housings, or other areas, and more meaningful products may emerge."
Eventually, A-series chips evolved into M-chips, and the devices they carried became Macs, providing a new measure of performance for laptops, "performance per watt."
Apple also believes that this new standard is suitable for portable laptops, and this is a feature that was focused on at the beginning of the design of the M1 chip.
The corresponding MacBook has also gained market attention, and even when it is not connected to a power source, MacBooks can still provide consistent performance for hours.
In the new standard advocated by Apple, M chips can match the mainstream products of processor manufacturers such as Intel and AMD, and GPUs are also comparable to independent graphics rendering performance such as NVIDIA and AMD.
The most important thing is that Apple is to achieve this per-watt performance release on the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and other portable computer concepts, in Apple's own words, "The M chip pressed a Reset button, setting a new standard for portability performance."
And to the M2 series of chips have an improvement of about 30%, Tim Millet said that this is the ultimate Apple can do, and there is no reservation.
And in the subsequent development process of M chips, the Apple core team does not plan to squeeze a few percentage points of improvement per generation of chips to the chip manufacturers that have cooperated before, and then implement them for several years.
Apple's approach is to make the M chip always maintain the leading position in the industry through the iteration of technology.
"We will not make a three-year plan for the 20% performance increase and calculate the corresponding increment, but will make technical changes without reservation."
This is the commitment made by Tim Millet, Apple's vice president of chips, to upgrade the performance of the M chip. If you change the easy-to-understand phrase, it is actually "refuse to squeeze toothpaste".
Mac games, come to Japan
To the M2 series chips, the change of technology has brought its performance to a new height. Even if it is not according to Apple's performance per watt standard, the performance of M chips is still within mainstream levels.
▲ Eye-opening chip splicing method
Apple increased the unified memory through heap cores, so that the peak performance of the M2 Max also came to the best in history. And for the integrated GPU has been quite optimized and improved, and even built-in chips such as external acceleration cards, free customization is an advantage of M chips.
More and more mature chip design, from the hardware point of view, Apple's Mac platform has enough strength to adapt to all fields.
Apple is very good at long-term planning in one field, in terms of the current M chip proud of the video editing performance, Apple has long begun to continue to layout in the industry, from video coding, to the configuration of the iPhone camera, and targeted software, and finally show the unique ecological competitiveness of Apple devices in the field of audio and video.
Back to the game field, Apple also has such a vision, in the first MacWorld conference after the return of Jobs, at a glance "Halo" (Halo), which is still in development, and also intends to use this game as the origin to let Mac enter the eyes of players step by step.
However, Microsoft, which has deep pockets, took the lead and directly acquired Bungie Studios, and "Halo" also became an Xbox exclusive masterpiece, creating a follow-up brilliance.
As for the Mac, it began to be "isolated" from mainstream games for a long time.
▲ Picture that looks contradictory Image courtesy of DigitalTrends
Until now, Mac in the psychology of many people, it is not related to the game at all, plus Apple officials have not revealed too much follow-up plans, Mac has properly become a cold tool, without a trace of entertainment.
After the emergence of the M chip based on the Arm architecture, the Mac game market has loosened, and Capcom's "Resident Evil", Feral Interactive's "Total War: Rome Remake" and "Total War: Warhammer 3" have been ported to the M chip Mac.
And the unification of the chip architecture has also made iOS's rich casual games also run successfully to the macOS platform, and Mac games seem to be active again.
Recently, Valve released the January Steam hardware and software survey report, relatively speaking, macOS players ate 0.13% of the original Windows platform, a little improvement.
However, Mac gaming blowouts, especially triple-A masterpieces, still surround the software and development environment. Mac's unique Metal API, as well as support for mainstream OpenGL and Vulkan, have directly dissuaded many game developers.
To this end, Tim Millet, Apple's vice president of chip architecture, said that Apple is continuing to expand Metal 3, adding more APIs in response to developers' willingness to port masterpieces.
▲ One-time adaptation, multi-device connection
Even if you take out a port, you can extend it once and for all to the iPhone and iPad, two platforms with huge active users, talking about Apple's ecological appeal.
However, in turn, Tim Millet, who comes from a technical background, also understands that in order to revitalize the game market, Apple still needs to do a lot of work, not only from the perspective of the game when designing the chip, but also constantly listening to the demands of game developers, which may become a core part of the chip design later.
The software is weak, but Tim Millet will not change the GPU architecture of the M chip for the sake of the game, or redevelop a game-specific GPU core, but firmly maintain a close proximity to the A series chip.
Image courtesy of WCCFTECH
One is that the current M chip GPU is strong enough, the second is that Apple's Metal 3 still has many APIs to be developed, and the third is that game developers have not fully adapted to the unique architecture of the M chip, such as not calling up to 96GB of unified memory.
As for the huge unified memory, Tim Millet did not forget to joke, "Game developers have become accustomed to developing game graphics for limited video memory, and when they know the advantages of unified memory, it will stimulate their greater creativity."
Between the lines of the interview, Tim Millet has been emphasizing the uniqueness of the M chip architecture, and as an SoC, the M chip will have a broader gaming future than x86. Apple is not in a hurry, but is gradually building its own "universe" step by step like other areas of expertise.
If more than a decade ago, Jobs' insight into introducing "Halo" as a Mac into the game market was the origin that Apple had missed, then in Tim Millet's view, the birth of the M chip may be a new origin for Mac to open the game market.
Three mountains between Mac and gaming
Today is different from the past, when the end game broke out and the host ran rampant, and the market was good. Now, with the sudden change, end-game and triple-A game masterpieces are actually no longer "mainstream", or to be precise, "mainstream revenue".
To put it bluntly, why does the Mac make games. In recent years, the traditional and classical product line of Mac, in Apple's business, has taken a back seat, ranking behind the iPhone and iPad, and the entire PC market is no longer a thriving scene.
After the birth of the M chip, the Mac business also bucked the trend and rose a lot, but for Apple, there is still potential to be tapped.
Accompanying Tim Millet's interview was Bob Borchers, vice president of product marketing, and I think he should know better about product strategy than Tim.
Bob Borchers, Apple's vice president of product marketing
Apple's next focus on business growth and goal is to gradually replace the old Intel Macs in the hands of old users with the continuous update of M chips.
Compared to expanding other businesses, this replacement demand will be the greatest potential for the continued growth of the Mac business.
And expanding to the field of games should be a long-term goal of Apple, and it is also a new battlefield that the Mac has never touched, and how much market can be grabbed depends on the content, that is, the game.
Windows is still the main platform for PC gamers
Although Tim Millet proudly said that the M chip has advantages and potential, there are still three mountains between the Mac and mainstream triple-A games.
One is the cliché development and porting environment, the underlying platform, the second is not support for ray tracing, and the third is the price.
While Tim Millet has repeatedly stressed that Apple will continue to develop more APIs for Metal 3 and is willing to listen to developers' needs, it is obviously too unrealistic for some developers to compile from scratch.
Image courtesy of Aresgalaxy
Previously, in order to enrich the game lineup of Mac, Apple recompiled most of the metal code of "World of Warcraft", but for subsequent 3A masterpieces, it is simply impossible to do each game by yourself.
At this stage, it's more realistic to partner with Epic to add Unreal Engine support for Mac, which may have a strong appeal to triple-A titles.
In addition, mobile chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek have begun to generally support "ray tracing" last year, striving to have better picture performance on mobile devices.
▲ Arm new GPU architecture ray tracing demo Demo (GIF has compression), pay attention to the change of light and shadow Image from: Arm
But back to the Mac, or all Apple devices, it is currently unable to support light chasing, which makes Apple's current game lineup still based on "casual games", and the Mac is still trapped in iOS games.
There is still a big gap from the real 3A game masterpiece, or the mainstream game PC and console.
Finally, the price question, Tim Millet's 96GB unified super large memory, at least 30,000 taels to buy (custom MacBook Pro 14), and for a traditional Windows PC, this money can already buy Xeon's quasi-configuration.
Even the average Mac is still too expensive for gamers.
Unless, entering the mainstream game market, not with Mac as the protagonist, but with M chips, Apple's "protracted war" seems to make sense.
Whether it is Apple's current or future devices, the new product line will be built around the A-series chips and M-series chips of the Arm architecture.
And Tim Millet emphasized that Apple will not make special GPUs for gaming, but intends to eat all over the world.
Apple's AR glasses will also most likely be driven by the M chip, and the picture is drawn by DALL-E 2
Starting from the chip, the layout software level, gradually contact game developers to make some adjustments to the underlying ecology, so that game developers can adapt to the Mac, rather than adapt to the environment with unified memory, Arm architecture, Metal 3 Apple chips.
For Apple, this universal solution can be easily transferred to any device, be it an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or AR and VR, which are widely considered the next flashpoint.
When I was writing about the relationship between the Mac and gaming, the current Mac platform wasn't worth reinvesting decades of resources and effort, just a handful of market growth.
But the M chip will not be limited to the Mac platform, but may be the computing core of many of Apple's future devices, restart and then find an origin to cut into the game field, in fact, before the hardware to enrich the content, this rhythm for Apple, is actually just right.