Future Macs will likely get yearly(ish) updates, Apple Chip Designer suggests

Apple chip designer Tim Millet hinted in a new interview that annual updates — or something like that — will likely be the norm for future Macs.

He spoke about the company’s initial goals for developing the M1 chip and how Apple is approaching work on each successive generation of Mac chips…

Millet and Marketing VP Bob Borchers sat down with him TechCrunches Matthew Panzarino. The interview begins with Millet discussing the desire to completely reset expectations of what a laptop and desktop processor could achieve.

Millet has been building chips for 30 years and has been with Apple for almost 17 years. He says Apple saw an opportunity to “really hit” with the M1.

“The opportunity that we had with M1, from my perspective, was about resetting the baseline.”

He’s diplomatic about Intel, but it’s clear the company was frustrated by the incremental gains each generation offered and the fact that they could only operate in the chipmaker’s timeframe.

He said it was the power of the iPad Pro that showed them how much was possible.

“As we started to get into the iPad Pro space, we realized, ‘you know what, there’s something.’ We never left anything on the table when building the chips for iOS devices. But we realized that these chips in these other packages could actually make a significant difference from a performance standpoint. And so at M1 we were super excited about the opportunity to make this big impact – to shift everything back to redefining what it means to have a laptop in many different ways.”

Apple takes the same approach with each successive generation of chips.

“The M2 family was now really looking to maintain that leadership position by once again pushing the boundaries of technology. We leave nothing on the table,” says Millet. “We don’t take a 20% raise and figure out how to spread it out over three years… figure out how to make incremental gains. We take everything in a year; we just hit it really hard. That doesn’t happen in the rest of the industry, nor in the past.”

While this doesn’t directly contrast Intel’s approach, the implication is clear.

Millet also notes that Apple is in the unique position of being able to work hand-in-hand with hardware and software teams to design the chips. He understands the goals of each new generation of Macs, so he can design the chips to meet those goals—whether it’s video encoding speed or the maximum performance of a fanless MacBook Air.

Borchers adds that it’s a very different approach to getting a third-party chip and providing feedback on what they expect from next-gen.

I think the big difference here is that we’re moving from a feedback loop to a co-creation where there’s no feedback loop… you [just] Sit at a table and push each other. Okay, what if we got rid of the fan?

Apple has historically updated the iPhone every year, but has been much more random about the timing of Mac updates. Miller says Apple is in control of its own chip development plan and will see that change for future Macs.

“We don’t want to leave Mac users with the question, ‘Don’t they care about us? A new phone was delivered last year. Why didn’t the Mac get the love?’ We want to get back on the technology curve and then make a living from it. We don’t want the Mac to stray too far from that.”

One criticism of Macs is that even with the very latest M2 chips, they remain unsuitable for gaming. Millet acknowledges this, saying Apple won’t become AAA gaming overnight – but it will get there.

Gamers are a serious bunch. And I don’t think we’re going to fool anyone by saying that we’re going to make Mac a great gaming platform overnight. We will consider this for a long time.

But he said part of the problem is that developers need to think about Mac architecture in a new way.

“Game developers have never seen 96 gigabytes of graphics memory now available to them on the M2 Max. I think they’re trying to grapple with it because the possibilities are unusual. They are used to working with much smaller video memory. I think this is another place where we’re going to have an interesting opportunity to inspire developers to go beyond what they’ve been able to.”

It’s worth reading the whole interview.

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Source: 9to5mac.com