At its annual developer conference, WWDC, Apple announced that it will be making the switch from Intel chipsets to its own, in house Apple Silicon for its line up of Mac devices. Moreover, the company announced that it will launch the first Mac powered by Apple Silicon by the end of 2020, which means we should expect something in the next two months.
That first Mac is expected to be a 13-inch MacBook Pro, if a report from Ming-Chi Kuo is anything to go by. However, a new report has now shed light on the first iMac to be powered by Apple Silicon as well. The report, which comes from The China Times, states that Apple will use the A14T chip in its iMac. The A14T will be a desktop class processor, and will be in the iMac only.
The report goes on to mention that Apple is also working on its own GPU, currently codenamed ‘Lifuka’, that will also be found inside the same iMac that Apple is planning on releasing in the first half of 2021.
The report also shows off other chips that Apple is working on for the Mac. Apparently, the mobile version of Apple Silicon for this year will be called the A14X and will be found inside the MacBook Pro, and a new iPad Pro as well.
All of these chips, including the new GPU, are reportedly being manufactured by TSMC using its 5nm process. That’s no surprising considering the A14 inside the iPhone 12 and the new iPad Air is a 5nm chip.
It remains to be seen how Apple handles the transition from x86 to ARM in its laptops. Windows OEMs have been slowly trying to do just that, but the performance hits are usually massive. Whether Apple can pull off something similar to its transition to Intel from PowerPC back in the day, or the transition to PowerPC from 68k even further back, is the million dollar question right now.
