The argument is over for best laptop processor. I want to see if Apple is as eager to beat the competition in the Workstation/HPC space as they were in the mobile/laptop.
I think they are, Srouji looks like he's got a knife in his teeth and can't wait to claim fastest personal computer ever period. But we'll have to see, it's a tiny, tiny market to justify the effort.
The only really tough thing would be supporting things desktop users want like external video cards, but people may be willing to forego that if the CPU smokes everything else and if the built-in GPU is at least fast enough for serious work.
But I think they’ll have the Mac Pro continue to be RAM, GPU and PCI upgradable.
How they are doing that is the most interesting secret in the industry.
How they're gonna solve that is the big question.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
As far as HSA/unified memory architecture, PCIe 4.0 has enough bandwidth to comfortably access main memory for applications that support it (and vice versa with GPU memory), although I imagine most high-performance GPU workloads will do better primarily operating on dedicated GPU memory (especially given that a single M1 core can already saturate the memory controller on its own).
This has also not been a problem for any other unified memory system (which typically also do not include memory on-package), and I can't see any reason why it would matter.
They should revisit all choices they made earlier. Users might want more generic ML hardware, so that they can develop the algorithms that can get burned into specific hardware on some future consumer-level hardware, a GPU that can ray trace better, more memory than you can fit on a SoC, etc.
That last issue is particularly problematic. They might have to give up the idea of having (only) unified memory.
If so, the entire design could change. In some cases, that could mean task-specific hardware isn’t (much) faster anymore than doing it in the CPU, in which case discarding it to make room for extra cores, cache, etc. might be the better choice.
Im sure Apple could produce something in the HPC space. The question is whether it makes financial and/or strategic sense to compete there.
Just a side note. It's unlikely that Apple will eliminate their "slow" cores from their desktops. Mac Pros spend big chunks of their time doing mundane things which their efficiency cores do just fine. By using their efficiency cores, they can bring down total power requirements and their desktops can essentially run continually as opposed to entering a dedicated sleep more.
I suspect the Mac Pro will sip power and run cool as a cucumber most of the time when it's not getting hammered for high end tasks.
Doesn't HPC use PPC or something?
I could see them delivering on Desktop, not sure about HPC though. There's only one Fortran compiler for M1!