Tech Crunch interviews Tim Millet (VP Platform Architecture & Hardware Technologies) and Bob Borchers (VP Worldwide Product Marketing) about Macs

theorist9

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A lot of the interview is marketing fluff, but it's interesting fluff.

These are all verbatim excerpts from the article:

MAC RELEASE SCHEDULE
As far as the “when Macs” question goes, Millet and Borchers are both in the “when possible, ship” camp. Coming out of a period pre-M1, when many in the Mac ecosystem felt that it was being underinvested in, it’s clear that Apple wants to send a message that this is not the case and they never want that to become a meme again.

“As a silicon person, I know that technology moves fast and I don’t want to wait around. I certainly want to push hard, as you can imagine,” says Millet. “We want to get the technology into the hands of our system team as soon as possible, in the hands of our customer as soon as possible. We don’t want to leave them wondering…do they not care about us? A new phone shipped last year. Why didn’t the Mac get the love?”

“We want to reset to the technology curve and then we want to live on it. We don’t want the Mac to stray too far away from it.”

GAMING
Millet says that Apple’s work on cracking the gaming market started with the early days of the Apple silicon transition.

“The story starts many years ago, when we were imagining this transition. Gamers are a serious bunch. And I don’t think we’re going to fool anybody by saying that overnight we’re going to make Mac a great gaming platform. We’re going to take a long view on this.”

“My team spends a lot of time thinking about how to make sure that we’re staying on that API curve to make sure that we’re giving Metal what it needs to be a modern gaming API. We know this will take some time. But we’re not at all confused about the opportunity; we see it. And we’re going to make sure we show up.”

He also acknowledges that it will take time to build an installed base of strong GPUs in order for it to be enticing to the AAA space.

He acknowledges that Apple needs to do work to bring game developers along the road to adoption, but he says the company is happy that they’ve shipped the core ingredients in very performant systems. He says that the team has been and will continue to look at a variety of chip configurations and components through that gaming lens as well. Anyone who games on the Mac should find room for encouragement in the way Millet says that the team is focusing here, though time will tell.

Millet also is unconvinced that the game dev universe has adapted to the unique architecture of the M-series chips quite yet, especially the unified memory pool.

“Game developers have never seen 96 gigabytes of graphics memory available to them now, on the M2 Max. I think they’re trying to get their heads around it, because the possibilities are unusual. They’re used to working in much smaller footprints of video memory. So I think that’s another place where we’re going to have an interesting opportunity to inspire developers to go beyond what they’ve been able to do before.”

[My editorial comment on the last paragraph: You're talking about establishing a large installed base of gaming-capable machines, which makes sense. But the percentage of users that will have 96 GB RAM anyways for non-gaming reasons is going to be quite small; and, at what Apple charges for RAM, the percentage of gamers that will buy 96 GB RAM for gaming will likewise be tiny. So it seems unlikely game developers will optimize games to take advantage of so much RAM. A more reasonable statement would have been to mention that having, say, 32 GB available for CPU+GPU is going to become increasingly common on AS.]
 
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Colstan

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Thanks for drawing attention to this interview, @theorist9, I appreciate it. Since Tim Millet is a "chip guy", in his own words, that makes his feedback more authentic. Also, while most marketing folks are going to stick to the company line, Bob Borchers seems to be more down to earth than the typical marketing suit. A few things that stuck out to me from the interview:

The opportunity we had with M1 the way I looked at it, it was about resetting the baseline.
I think that, while this is obvious, it's also easy to forget how much performance the base M1 brought to the table. We're so used to Intel's garbage iGPUs that it's difficult to think of integrated graphics as anything other than pathetic.

We wanted to…move performance per watt to the point where we delivered real usable performance in these in a wide range of machines.
The question still remains in regards to how far Apple is willing to push clocks and wattage to target performance desktops. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be our first glimpse. Even though most of us will never purchase one, that mentality will impact the entire line of performance Macs.

For decades, Apple had been running up against third-party stewardship over chipset speeds, power requirements and features — with the result of increasingly less mobile computers that ran hot, loud and short.
As we all know, Apple got sick of dealing with the failures of the PC component companies. We don't need to recycle those old arguments, but Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have been unreliable partners for various reasons. Now, it's entirely up to Apple whether they sink or swim on their own merits.

We don’t leave things on the table,” says Millet. “We don’t take a 20% bump and figure out how to spread it over three years…figure out how to eke out incremental gains. We take it all in one year; we just hit it really hard. That’s not what happens in the rest of the industry or historically.”
Subtle reference to Intel being stuck on 14nm for ages and getting, at best, minor gains.

Borchers chimes in to note that Apple is building products, not parts.
Which is why the PC crowd will never understand Apple. PC enthusiasts can easily become obsessed with teraflops, gigahertz, cores, memory latency, etc. Many in that crowd are spec obsessed, while not thinking in terms that actually have an impact on the user, rather than winning by 3.7% in a random chess benchmark.

Apple engineers the SoC, built to their own specifications, designs the software, with the goal of combining those efforts into an actual product. That's a perspective that only Apple has in the personal computer space. When a motherboard manufacturer releases a new product, they brag about how they keep temperatures down on the VRMs, not an entire computer, because they aren't providing a complete solution. That matters to the enthusiast crowd, with their anime-themed cases, but that's a niche part of the market.

(With the opposing dynamic, when a PC company releases a complete system, it's cobbled together with the cheapest commodity parts available.)

There's an argument to be made that DIY enthusiasts and the Mac are entirely separate markets, and that Apple can never win over the enthusiast crowd, but I don't believe that. That's because I'm one of those people who used to qualify as a PC enthusiast, who was spec obsessed and custom built my own Windows boxen. Not just a casual tinkerer either, but a hardcore one that used to look down on Mac users from my high tower of superiority.

“As somebody who’s been building silicon for 30-plus years, the luxury of knowing what the target is, and working side by side with the product designers, the hardware system team, the software people to understand exactly what you’re aiming at, makes all the difference in our ability to really target and make sure we’re adding things that matter, not adding anything that doesn’t,”
Exactly. I'm not a silicon engineer, but I understand his line of thinking. When I purchase a Mac, I know exactly what I'm going to get.

What I want is simple: a small, quiet, fast computer, which requires no maintenance, and runs an operating system that doesn't actively hate me.

Both Millet and Borchers are diplomatic about the Intel partnership (which is till present, for now, in Apple’s Mac Pro machines).
It's smart to avoid burning bridges, just in case you work with that company again. It's well known that there is some sort of beef between Nvidia and Apple, but neither has commented publicly. An ex-Intel engineer said that Apple was the number one filer of bugs for Skylake, and we know the score with Intel.

For other partners, it was more of a formality. Shortly after the transition began, when asked about Apple, Lisa Su simply stated "Apple continues to work with us as their graphics partner". Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Concerning Windows on Apple Silicon, Craig Federighi said in regards to native Windows on M1 Macs: "that's really up to Microsoft".

With Nvidia and Intel, it comes down to animosity, negligence, or incompetence. For AMD and Microsoft, it's simply a matter of not being important enough to be needed anymore. I'm not sure which is worse.

(I'm assuming that Microsoft had far less collaboration with Apple than the others, but my point is that Apple is leaving the PC companies in the rearview mirror.)

“These are people that we’ve been working with for iPad and iPhone. And it really felt very, very natural.
From the outside, it's easy to forget that the engineers, developers, and designers inside of Apple regularly collaborate on a number of projects. I recall @Cmaier mentioning how AMD had to work with Microsoft on AMD64 (x86-64) but that collaboration was paltry compared to the cooperation within Apple's engineering groups.

Now, concerning the gaming focused part of the article...

Borchers says that Apple is feeling like the Apple silicon gaming story is getting more solid release by release.
It sounds like Apple's first goal is to simply get as many gaming capable Macs in the hands of users as possible. As long as they are haunted by the ghosts of Intel's iGPUs past, the Mac's gaming capabilities will be limited.

Because what we have now, with our portfolio of M-series Macs, is a set of incredibly performant machines and a growing audience of people who have these incredibly performant systems that can all be addressed with a single code base that is developing over time.
I think Apple understands the value of having a common hardware platform to match software development tools that are tuned specifically for that hardware.

This is yet another reason that I don't foresee Apple implementing third-party drivers for eGPUs and PCIe graphics cards. Apple have been repeatedly hammering on the benefits of unified memory and a simplified hardware platform to target. Some skeptics aren't happy about the Mac's lack of native support for Vulkan, or Apple's refusal to work with Valve on some form of Proton compatibility, but those are never going to match first-party tools. Metal is far from what cross-platform utopian advocates want, and will never be acceptable to the Linux as a religion crowd, but there's no denying that Metal is a first-class citizen with Apple's software efforts.

With Capcom bringing Resident Evil across, and other titles starting to come along, I think the AAA community is starting to wake up and understand the opportunity
What I've always found curious is the mantra from the PC crowd that "Apple doesn't care about gaming", when all evidence points to the contrary. They have an uphill battle, they don't deny that, but they are putting in the work. Most recently, Apple is working with Capcom to improve Metal, but they have a history of doing this. Apple worked with 4A to make Metro Exodus perform better with Rosetta 2. They've regularly taken feedback from Mac porting house Feral Interactive. Apple made changes to Rosetta 2 based upon input from CodeWeavers to allow CrossOver to work with 32-bit Windows programs, which is a product that is mainly used to play PC games. They've also worked with Larian to support Apple Silicon in Baldur's Gate 3, and even helped Larian release DOS:2 which included Touch Bar support, of all things.

“The story starts many years ago, when we were imagining this transition. Gamers are a serious bunch. And I don’t think we’re going to fool anybody by saying that overnight we’re going to make Mac a great gaming platform. We’re going to take a long view on this.”
Which is the realistic view that Apple needs to take. Apple has done pushes into gaming in fits and starts. At WWDC 2007, Electronic Arts announced a number of popular titles for the Mac, but nothing ever came of them, afterward. However, those games were running under a crude compatibility layer, which tanked performance. This time, Apple is providing their own, optimized tools.

It sounds like Apple also understands that this is going to take time, and that a handful of gaming announcements at WWDC aren't enough. This jives with @Cmaier's assertion that Apple has a strong interest in gaming, and is willing to keep working at it, engaging with developers. In the past, that wasn't the case.

“We weren’t going to design GPUs for that space that were unnecessarily complicated, that had features that were not relevant to iOS,” he notes. “But as we looked at the Mac, we realized that this is a different beast. There will be different expectations over time — let’s make sure we have our toolbox complete.
Which is a strike against the hardcore PC crowd that attests that Apple Silicon is nothing more than a scaled up version of an iToy.

So that when Capcom approached us, it wasn’t going to be this awkward port for them. It was going to be a very natural ‘Ah, you do support these modern APIs that gamers are needing. This is interesting.’”
I had been wondering how much work Apple was going to put into differentiating the iOS tools compared to those specifically for the Mac. It looks like Apple understands that the hardware and software need to be adapted to the platform, which bodes well for Mac gaming, at least in terms of hopefully attracting game developers.

We know this will take some time. But we’re not at all confused about the opportunity; we see it. And we’re going to make sure we show up.”
I think motivation and commitment have been the biggest impediments within Apple in regards to Mac gaming. Increasing market share and more capable hardware will certainly help.

“Game developers have never seen 96 gigabytes of graphics memory available to them now, on the M2 Max. I think they’re trying to get their heads around it, because the possibilities are unusual. They’re used to working in much smaller footprints of video memory. So I think that’s another place where we’re going to have an interesting opportunity to inspire developers to go beyond what they’ve been able to do before.”
On the surface, this sounds like an odd assessment, on Millet's part. While I think he could have worded it much better, I think this is simply an analogy about how Apple Silicon's unified memory may provide benefits that developers aren't used to having. It wasn't the best comparison, but this is an interview targeted at the average consumer, not a developer crowd. Apple has been making specific appeals to developers, such as architecture videos during WWDC, and I'm sure even more detailed approaches in private.

Apple has made a lot of fanfare about unified memory and that they want developers to use that model, over the old-timey third-party graphics cards used inside of PCs. Again, this is another reason why I don't see eGPU or PCIe graphics driver support. They like their architecture. While the flashy headline at the beginning of the transition was that Apple is replacing x86 PC CPUs with Apple Silicon, they have made it clear that they're also doing so with GPUs, along with any other components that they can integrate, such as the SSD controller.

Regardless, I think Apple focusing on Metal and their own architecture is the right decision. Just as a personal example, I got a good price on "Dying Light Definitive Edition" for my Mac. It's a horror survival game. What is notable is that it only supports AMD graphics cards. (Apple Silicon support is hit or miss.) It's an older title released in 2015, but demonstrates why I don't foresee Apple willingly going through that bifurcation with GPUs ever again. It's a headache for developers, users, and Apple itself. The simplified hardware matrix of Apple Silicon is a boon, and closer to consoles, rather than the myriad of combinations on PC. This won't make the hardcore PC spec crowd happy, but many of those people won't be purchasing an Apple Silicon Mac, regardless.

As far as the “when Macs” question goes, Millet and Borchers are both in the “when possible, ship” camp.
This is good to hear, since the M2 appears to have been delayed, probably as a result of global events, which we are all aware of.

We don’t want to leave them wondering…do they not care about us? A new phone shipped last year. Why didn’t the Mac get the love?”
This was a huge problem, not just recently with Cook, but during the Jobs era, as well. Apple Silicon really seems to have driven Apple to improve the timeliness of Mac upgrades, global events permitting.

“We feel like the Mac mini form factor is such a great way to unleash creativity and, frankly, goodness in the world that we wanted to be able to put it in as many people’s hands as possible.
Considering the number of times that they mentioned the Mac mini and the price drop, I definitely get the impression that Apple is pushing to gain market share with the little computer. It's not a powerhouse, and MacRumors forum members hate it because they think it requires the selection of a number of optional upgrades. For the average user who does the most common tasks, it's a compelling product. For people like me, who need more grunt, the M2 Pro Mac mini is more interesting.

Borchers says that the opportunity for Apple lies in the fact that the vast majority of Mac customers are on Intel machines.
That's an assumption from Tech Crunch, and wasn't stated by either Apple executive. I don't know what percentage of Mac hardware is still on Intel, but among gamers, if the Steam survey is to be believed, Apple Silicon surpassed Intel back in November.

MacGamerShare.jpg


Anyway, I appreciate you posting the article, @theorist9! It was interesting, even if they didn't get into a lot of specifics. The simple fact that Apple is going to continue to pursue gaming for the Mac is encouraging, for those of us who prefer to not deal with a dedicated PC or console. The difference between now and previous attempts in the gaming sphere is that Apple appears to be heavily engaged in the process, by offering compelling hardware, continued improvements in the Metal API, and engaging with developers. As well as doing interviews like these, so that the average user understands that Apple wants to compete in this market with the Mac.
 

Jimmyjames

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As usual, don't bother reading the usual place, or unfortunately Arstechnica. One well known dev for Feral is on the gaming thread there and, as the rest of posters are, they are completely convinced that this interview amounts to nothing and the only way forward is getting Vulcan on the platform. Disappointing from a Mac game dev, but not unexpected.
 
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