“We don’t want to boast that the Mac can become a great gaming platform overnight. We have to think about it in the long run.” Tim Millet, Apple’s vice president of chip architecture, said in an interview with TechCrunch after the announcement of M2 Pro and M2 Max. Very sincere.
He also said that “Apple has never forgotten the players. We have been paying attention to the game market since the beginning of self-developed chips.” This is probably the first time a chip team executive has been interviewed by the media. idea. The Mac has almost run through Apple’s ups and downs in life, and has gone through several chip platform conversions, but no matter how it changes, it is almost out of the game market.
Before the return of Steve Jobs, the Mac focused on the enterprise market, focusing on productivity tools. After Jobs returned to make drastic reforms, the Mac was still a productivity tool, and it was more pure. Even if the Mac switches to the more potential M chip in 2021, and Apple breaks the boundary between macOS and iOS, mainstream “games” still haven’t appeared on the Mac.
Apple’s constant emphasis on “productivity” seems to be able to see the possibility of Apple quietly abandoning the Mac to play games, but the words of the executive Tim Millet gave users the expectation of using the Mac to play 3A masterpieces. There is no doubt that the M chip has sufficient performance, and the hardware level has the feasibility of gradually becoming a game platform, but the key lies in Apple.
Set new benchmarks for performance
The M chip is based on the Arm architecture. Compared with the x86 architecture, the advantage is that the “energy efficiency ratio” is outstanding. During the development and design of the M1 chip, Tim Millet saw a “real opportunity” to reshape performance benchmarks. In the past, regardless of the form of the PC, desktops, gaming laptops, or thin and light laptops, the performance has a consistent standard, but the requirements are different, and the simple and crude “peak performance” is not accurate and practical.
Interestingly, Tim complained that “when we use third-party chips, the other party does not recommend or allow Apple to maximize performance orientation and design style.” It means that he hopes that Apple will compromise when designing Mac, which may be performance release, or it may be the last Product form. This is why Apple intends to overthrow the original standard and rebuild the platform. The other is the accumulation of Apple Arm chips.
Starting from the A4 chip, Apple designed the chip itself, and the chip team cooperated with the software and hardware team to complete the final product; the iPad Pro product line appeared, and Tim Millet found that the A-series chip was good at performing in a small space.
“These chips may be placed in other casings or other fields, and more meaningful products may emerge.” Finally, the A-series chips evolved into M chips, and the device used became a Mac, and provided a new performance measurement standard for notebooks, that is, “performance per watt “. Apple believes that the new standard is very suitable for thin and light notebooks, and it is a feature that has been focused on from the beginning of the M1 chip design.
The MacBook is also gaining attention in the market. Even without an external power supply, the MacBook provides consistent performance and lasts for hours. The new standard advocated by Apple, the M chip is comparable to mainstream products such as Intel and AMD, and the GPU is also comparable to independent graphics rendering performance such as NVIDIA and AMD.
The most important thing is that Apple releases the performance per watt of MacBook Pro and MacBook Air notebooks. In Apple’s own words, “press the Reset button on the M chip to reset the new standard of portable performance.” The M2 series chips have increased by about 30%. , Tim Millet said that this is the ultimate that Apple can do, and it has no reservations. In addition to the subsequent development of the M chip, the Apple chip team does not intend to be like a cooperative chip manufacturer. Each generation of chips only squeezes a few percentage points of improvement, and then implements it for several years. Apple does this in order to keep the M chip in the leading position through repeated calculations through technology.
“We will not make a 20% performance increase into a three-year plan, and calculate the corresponding increment, but will update the technology without reservation.” Tim Millet promised to upgrade the performance of the M chip. To put it bluntly, “refuse to squeeze toothpaste.”
Mac gaming is here to stay
When it comes to M2 series chips, technological updates bring performance to new heights. Even without Apple’s performance-per-watt standard, the performance of the M chip is still at the mainstream level.
▲ The eye-opening chip splicing method.
Apple uses stacked cores and increased unified memory to make the peak performance of M2 Max reach the best in history, and has greatly improved the optimization of the integrated GPU. It even has a built-in chip like an external accelerator card. Free customization is the advantage of the M chip. . The more mature the chip design, the Apple Mac platform has enough strength to adapt to all fields in terms of hardware alone.
Apple is very good at discussing a certain field from a long-term perspective. Taking the video editing performance that the M chip is proud of, Apple has started planning very early, from video encoding to iPhone lens specifications, and starting with software, and finally demonstrates the unique audio and video field of Apple devices. Competitiveness.
Going back to the field of games, Apple also has an idea. At the first MacWorld conference after Jobs returned, he caught a glimpse of “The Last Battle” that is still under development. He intends to use this game as the starting point to let the Mac enter the eyes of players step by step. However, the rich and powerful Microsoft took the first step and directly acquired Bungie Studios. “The Last Battle” has also become an exclusive masterpiece for Xbox, creating subsequent brilliance. Mac began to be “isolated” from mainstream games. Until now, Mac has nothing to do with games in many people’s minds. In addition, Apple has not revealed its plan. Mac has become a cold tool without any entertainment.
▲ It looks very inconsistent. (Source:Digital Trends)
After the emergence of the M chip based on the Arm architecture, the Mac game market loosened. Capcom’s “Evil Castle”, Feral Interactive’s “Army of the Enemy: Rome Remake” and “Total War: Warhammer 3” have been transplanted to the M Wafer Mac. The unified chip architecture has also successfully moved iOS’s rich casual games to macOS, and Mac games seem to be active again.
Recently, Valve released the January Steam hardware and software survey report, macOS players ate 0.13% of the Windows platform share, a little increase. The blowout of Mac games, especially the 3A masterpieces, the problem still revolves around the software and development environment. The unique Metal API of Mac and the lack of support for mainstream OpenGL and Vulkan directly discouraged many game developers. Tim Millet said that Apple is expanding Metal 3, adding more APIs to respond to developers’ willingness to transplant masterpieces, and even offering conditions such as transplanting once and for all, extending to the two major platforms of iPhone and iPad, increasing the attractiveness of Apple’s ecology.
But on the other hand, Tim Millet, who has a technical background, also understands that in order to activate the game market, Apple still needs to do a lot of work. Not only must it start from the perspective of games when designing chips, but also need to constantly listen to the demands of developers, which may become the key to chip design. core.
The software side is weak, but Tim Millet will not change the GPU architecture of the M chip for the game, or redevelop the game-specific GPU core, but will firmly keep a distance from the A-series chips. One is that the current M-chip GPU is strong enough, the other is that Apple Metal 3 still has many APIs to be developed, and the third is that game developers have not fully adapted to the M-chip architecture, for example, they are not very good at using up to 96GB of unified memory. As for the huge unified memory, Tim Millet did not forget to tease: “Game developers are used to developing corresponding game screens for limited video memory. When they know the advantages of unified memory, they will stimulate higher creativity.”
It can be seen between the lines that Tim Millet has always emphasized the uniqueness of the M chip architecture, and as a SoC, the M chip will have a broader prospect than x86. Apple is not in a hurry to succeed, but like other areas where it is good at, it builds its own “universe” step by step.
If it is said that Jobs’s vision to introduce “The Last Battle” into the game market for the Mac was the origin that Apple missed more than a decade ago, then in Tim Millet’s view, the birth of the M chip may be a new origin for the Mac to open the game market again.
The Three Mountains Between the Mac and Gaming
Today is different from the era when consoles are rampant, and the market is booming. Today, 3A-level game masterpieces are no longer “mainstream”, but “mainstream revenue” to be precise. Why is the Mac gaming? In recent years, Mac, the traditional and classic product line, has retreated to the third line of Apple’s business, ranking behind the iPhone and iPad. The entire PC market is no longer thriving. After the birth of the M chip, the Mac business bucked the trend and rose a lot. There is potential to be tapped.
Interviewed with Tim Millet was Bob Borchers, vice president of product marketing (pictured above), who revealed a clearer product strategy than Tim. Apple’s business growth focus and goal is to continue to update the M chip regularly and gradually replace the old Intel of old users. version for Mac. Compared with the expansion of other businesses, the demand for replacement is the greatest potential for the growth of the Mac business. There is no one. Expanding into the game field is Apple’s long-term goal, and it is also a battlefield that the Mac has never touched. How much market it can steal depends on the content. It’s the game.
Even though Tim Millet is proud to say that the M chip has advantages and potential, there are still three big mountains between Mac and mainstream 3A games. One is the commonplace development and transplantation environment, the underlying platform, the other is that it does not support ray tracing, and the third is the price. Although Tim Millet has repeatedly emphasized that Apple will continue to develop more APIs for Metal 3 and is willing to listen to the needs of developers, it is obviously too unrealistic for developers to develop from scratch.
In order to enrich the lineup of Mac games, Apple rewrote most of the metal codes of “World of Warcraft”, but it is simply an impossible task for each 3A masterpiece. A more realistic approach is to cooperate with Epic to increase support for Unreal Engine for Mac, which may be more powerful in attracting 3A masterpieces.
Mobile chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek generally supported ray tracing last year, striving for better screen performance of mobile devices.
▲ Arm’s new GPU architecture ray tracing Demo (the animation is compressed), pay attention to the changes in light and shadow. (Source: Arm)
But back to the Mac or all Apple devices, they still can’t support ray tracing, so Apple’s game lineup is still dominated by “casual games”, and the Mac is still trapped in iOS games, which is far away from the real 3A masterpieces, or mainstream gaming PCs, consoles There is still a big gap.
Finally, the price issue. The 96GB unified large memory that Tim Millet said will cost at least 133,900 yuan to buy (custom MacBook Pro 14). If you change it to a Windows PC, you can buy a very high-end specification with this money, but an ordinary Mac Still too expensive for players. Unless it enters the mainstream gaming market, where the Mac is not the protagonist, but the M chip is the mainstay, Apple’s “protracted war” seems to make sense. Regardless of Apple’s current or future devices, the new product line is built around Arm-based A-series chips and M-series chips, and Tim Millet emphasized that Apple will not build special GPUs for games, but intends to eat the world with one move.
Starting from the chip, laying out the software, and gradually contacting game developers to adjust the underlying ecology, so that developers can adapt to the Mac, rather than the Apple chip environment with unified memory, Arm architecture, and Metal 3. Apple can easily transfer the universal solution to any device, be it the iPhone, iPad, Mac or AR/VR, which is widely regarded as the next breakthrough point.
At present, the Mac platform is not worth investing decades of resources and efforts in exchange for not much market growth, but the M chip is not limited to the Mac platform, and may be the computing core of many Apple devices. Restart and find the origin to enter the game field , In fact, it is rich in content before the hardware. This rhythm is just right for Apple.
(This article is reprinted with the authorization of Ai Faner; source of the first picture: Unsplash)