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Apple’s transition from Intel to its custom A-series chips was given a little sneak preview at this year’s WWDC 2020 keynote, laying the foundation of future Macs to use the tech giant’s own hardware.
Apple’s transition from Intel to its custom A-series chips was given a little sneak preview at this year’s WWDC 2020 keynote, laying the foundation of future Macs to use the tech giant’s own hardware. From the look of things, it looks like Apple is planning to go all-in, possibly going as far as developing its custom GPUs, according to the latest tweet.
Lack of Third-Party GPU Support Will Eventually Mean Lack of eGPU on Portable Macs
An image shared by Twitter user Longhorn highlights the fact that future ARM-based Macs will use an ‘Apple GPU’ which only gives rise to the speculation that the company will end up using a custom solution here too. For three generations now, starting with the A11 Bionic, Apple utilized its custom GPU microarchitecture over Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR solutions, and the same approach could be followed here.
It’s possible that those low scores obtained by the A12Z Bionic were due to Apple’s translation layer Rosetta 2, as another benchmark report revealed that the chipset’s performance cores were only being utilized, not the efficiency cores. Fortunately, the A12Z Bionic isn’t going to be found in a future consumer-based Mac; it’s only present in the Mac mini and meant for developers to test out their apps.
The future will be very interesting. macOS arm64 according to Apple removes support for AMD GPUs too, Apple GPUs all the way. pic.twitter.com/2hF8RwsO4C
— Longhorn (@never_released) July 6, 2020
The first ARM-based Mac for customers is set to arrive later this year, with reports claiming that it will be a custom 12-core SoC, where there will be eight performance cores paired with four efficiency ones. This unnamed 12-core custom A-series silicon might sport an even more capable GPU than the one found in the upcoming iPhone 12’s A14 Bionic.
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