32-Core Apple Silicon Macs in 2021?
Bloomberg is reporting rumors of Macs with up to 32 Cores already in 2021
We are just recuperating from the shock of the M1 Macs which have been released. Now, respectable Bloomberg Technology are reporting on rumors that we will potentially see new Macs already in 2021 which are significantly more powerful than the M1 based Macs we have seen thus far.
In case you have forgotten, the M1 based Macs are already outperforming all their existing high end Intel laptops, and that is with only 4 high performance cores. The other 4 are low performance.
A core is basically a separate little microprocessor, which can run any code independent of other cores. Thus as long the programs and the operating system is able to utilize extra cores to the full, doubling the number of cores often means getting close to twice the performance. It will always be somewhat lower as you increase contention for shared resources.
So what we are talking about here is Macs potentially released within just one year (end of 2021) are going to have 8 times as many cores the current M1, which is already a speed monster.
But that is not the end of it. Oh no, it gets better. Many people have remarked about the M1 that it was not actually the CPU cores that impressed them the most but the GPU cores. What is a GPU core you ask? These are typically the brains of graphics cards. You will find many of these inside Nvidia graphics card where they are used to draw advance 3D graphics.
Usually GPUs integrated with CPUs have been really weak (looking at you Intel), but Apple released M1 with surprisingly strong graphics capabilities. The M1 has 7 or 8 GPU cores depending on what choice you make. Yet according to Bloomberg they are planning to give the most powerful Macs up to 128 GPU cores. That is a whopping 16 times more cores than the current M1.
Thus within a year we will really have to rethink them mindset that fully integrated computers in a system on a chip are weak things for cell phones and tablets.
For the first time since the PowerPC days, Apple may again be able to enjoy some time with the highest performing desktop computers.
