The Future of Apple's Integrated Graphics: Speculation and Analysis

We're talking about the integrated graphics that would be found in the likes of a base model Mac Mini, where things start to get a little bit hazy is when we talk about the M1X that's the chip that we're expecting to see within the next month or so on the new MacBook Pros. What we don't really know about these chips is whether or not they're going to be using the newer A15 cores, or even whether they would need to. So, as we discussed earlier, the A15 runs at 3.23 gigahertz that happens to also be what the M1 CPU runs at, so it's possible that the A15 core is really just an M1 core which is a higher clocked A14 core.

I don't know if that makes sense to you, but basically, it's possible that the A15 is more like an M1 than it is like an A14 that's been boosted a little bit. So, we don't know what Apple's plan is for the M1X. Let's compare it to some precedent that has a little bit more of a concrete number and that is the A14 to the M1. The A14 was a four-core GPU, while the M1 is an 8-core GPU. The A14 chip score in Geekbench 5 Metal is 21,698, which means even though the GPU cores only doubled, the score increased by 141 percent. That's a really impressive scaling and is likely also due to clock speed and power draw changes when moving up to a higher system power package.

So, if we apply that to the M1 and assuming an even implementation of those gains, let's say the M1X is 131 faster than the M1. That would mean the M1X would be about 51,122 compared to 21,698 for the M1. That's really close to the Radeon Pro 580x, which is not a super powerful GPU, but we're talking about integrated graphics here that's pretty crazy. And that's just when we're talking about the 16-core GPU and assuming Apple does increase the system power a little bit as they did going from an iPhone to an M1.

So, if we think about it logically, just extrapolating the exact same way right, going from four to eight cores doesn't really apply. When we're only basing this off of the low-end jump from four to eight cores, but if you think about it just logically, the M1 has an 8-core GPU and it's a pretty powerful one. So, you'd be quadrupling the number of cores now, obviously not perfectly quadrupling the performance maybe 3.75 times because Apple scales their stuff pretty well.

So, that would yield a Geekbench score of about 81,000 which is really crazy, that would be trading blows with like the 5700 XT in a 2020 iMac. Now, it's worth pointing out that we're talking about Geekbench 5 Metal compute, which isn't really indicative of real-world performance but those are the kinds of scores that we would be talking about here.

What I think is most interesting is the 10-core M2 if Apple can apply those 55 gains like they did from A14 to A15 with the increased GPU cores to the Mac then that would make the entry-level chips really, really solid not just in terms of CPU but also in terms of graphics. So, I'm really looking forward to seeing what Apple does next on the baseline.

As for timing for that, we don't really have an estimate so from what I've seen the next-gen like the M2 chips should be coming out hopefully on the earlier side of next year, but at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple makes us wait all the way another year until like October.

As far as the M1X goes, well we don't have to wait that long. It should be just around the corner.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enguys i couldn't help myself i whipped out my calculator app on my iphone and i've been doing some calculations you guys know i love to do this whenever we get some numbers about upcoming apple chips i can't help myself i sit down and i start running some math trying to figure out what the next apple chip is going to be and now that we have some actual geekbench 5 benchmark numbers for both the cpu and the gpu of the a15 well i did it again i've been calculating some stuff trying to figure out what all of this means for upcoming max so today we're going to discuss my findings and i think they're pretty interesting okay so before we get started i have to put the disclaimer that this video is speculative obviously it's kind of weird i keep saying that i'm making speculations and people like this is just speculation it's like yeah that's the point that's kind of the entire purpose of the video but basically what we're going to be doing today is comparing what we now know about the a15 with what we knew last year with a 14 in the m1 chip to try to make some extrapolations make some comparisons and figure out what the a15 chip means for upcoming max but before we do any of that i figured it was worth revisiting what i talked about in my last video so since i filmed that a number of interesting little tidbits have come out so the biggest one is that there are actually three variants of the a15 chip apple only talked about two they talked about the four core gpu and the iphone 13 and the five core gpu and the 13 pro and that was already a really interesting thing they've never really done that offering two different variants of the a15 but there's also a secret third variant that they didn't tell anyone about and that's in the ipad mini it uses a slightly down clocked version of the a15 which i suspect is for battery life reasons considering that you're running a full fat ipad but it's a much smaller device with therefore a smaller battery and so it's not as powerful as the a15 that you would find in the iphone 13 and the iphone 13 pro now granted this difference is pretty minor how minor exactly you might ask well fortunately we can figure that out so as of the time that i'm filming this video right now there are 16 entries for iphone 13s they're listed as iphone 14 comma 2 and they have a motherboard number of d63 ap in case you want to go and find them on your own once more are added but basically there's been a sort of a question of like well how much faster is the a15 compared to the a14 well guess what folks we now have a sample size of 16 results so i just averaged all of them i put them in a spreadsheet i found the average and compared it to the a14 so across the 16 geekbench 5 benchmark entries for iphone 13 as of filming the a15 has an average score of 4609 the a14 on the other hand has an average score of 4112 according to cpu monkey that means that when we take into account a little bit of margin of error on both the a15 and the a14 the a15 chip would be about 9 to 15 faster than an a14 so we'll call it 12 now these gains are pretty minor right 12 on average isn't something that you're going to notice you're not going to be picking up your iphone 13 and going this is like 12 better than than what i had previously on my iphone 12. like no you're not going to notice that but it is worth comparing to previous iphone chips to see if the gains this year are greater or smaller well last year the a14 versus the a13 it was about 17 to 20 percent faster before that the a13 compared to the a12 was pretty substantial 27 faster and before that the a12 versus the a11 was eight to ten percent faster now interestingly these geekbench five entries show that the a15 is clocked at 3.23 gigahertz which is up from 2.99 gigahertz on the a14 so i suspect that much or all of these 8 to 15 gains are from the increased clock speed so the story with the a15 is minor refinement subtle gains nothing really that crazy but what does interest me pretty significantly is the gpu because this year the iphone 13 pro is a whopping 55 percent more powerful than last year's 12 pro according to the geekbench metal compute scores that is a really noticeable difference now a lot of that can be traced down to the fact that that particular gpu has 25 more gpu cores than the regular iphone 13 and last year's iphone 12 but it is worth noting that the regular iphone 13 with the four core gpu is still about 15 faster than last year's iphone 12 pro these are some pretty good gpu gains i touched on this in my video yesterday which i would definitely recommend checking out because what it means is if apple is starting to apply some of these gpu gains to the mac chips things could get really interesting and that's where i want to spend a good bit of time in today's video so let's recap the a15 with the four core gpu is 15 faster than the iphone 12 with a four core gpu the iphone 13 pro with a 5 core gpu is 55 faster than the iphone 12 with the four core gpu those are some pretty incredible gains and basically what this tells us is that if you go from the a14 generation with four cores and you increase the cores by 25 and then move to the newer a15 core that yields 55 more performance now this is really interesting because if you'll recall rumors about the upcoming m2 chip have included the possibility that apple could be moving from an 8 core gpu to a 10 core gpu now wouldn't you know it that's a 25 increase in cores so if apple does use these newer a15 cores which are probably clocked a little bit higher then we could assume that compared to the m1 chip it should be about 55 faster with this new 10 core gpu so let's apply that to what we currently know the m1 gpu scores around 21 698 in geekbench 5 metal compute test so if we were to bump that up 55 it would score 33 631 which puts it pretty close to the radeon pro 575 that used to ship in imax a couple of years ago now granted yeah that's an older gpu it's not exactly a high-end gpu but we're talking about the integrated graphics that would be found in the likes of a base model mac mini now where things start to get a little bit hazy is when we talk about the m1x that's the chip that we're expecting to see within the next month or so on the new macbook pros and what we don't really know about these chips is whether or not they're going to be using the newer a15 cores or even whether they would need to so as we talked about earlier the a15 runs at 3.23 gigahertz that happens to also be what the m1 cpu runs at so it's possible that the a15 core is really just an m1 core which is a higher clocked a14 core i don't know if that makes sense to you but basically it's possible that the a15 is more like an m1 than it is like an a14 that's been boosted a little bit so we don't know what apple's plan is for the m1x so let's compare it to some precedent that has a little bit more of a concrete number and that is the a14 to the m1 the a14 was a four core gpu the m1 is an 8 core gpu the a14 chip score is in geekbench 5 metal whereas the m1 scores 21 698 which means even though the gpu cores only doubled the score increased by 141 percent that's a really impressive scaling and is likely also due to clock speed and power draw changes when moving up to a higher system power package so if we apply that to the m1 and even implement a 10 scaling penalty because you can't really just multiply things linearly and infinitely let's say that the m1x is 131 faster than the m1 that would mean the m1x would be about 50 122 compared to 21 698 for the m1 that's really close to the radeon pro 580x which mind you is not a super powerful gpu but we're talking about integrated graphics here that's pretty crazy and that's just when we're talking about the 16 core gpu and assuming that apple does increase the system power a little bit as they did going from an iphone to an m1 so that that in itself is pretty ludicrous but if we're talking about the 32 core gpu things would be even more insane now i don't think it would be fair to extrapolate the exact same way right going from the 16 core hypothetical score to a 32 core hypothetical score that's a bit of a stretch when we're really only basing this off of the low end jump from four to eight cores but if you think about it just logically the m1 has an eight core gpu and it's a pretty powerful one so you'd be quadrupling the number of cores now obviously you're not going to perfectly quadruple the performance maybe 3.75 times because apple scales their stuff pretty well so that would yield a geekbench score of about 81 000 which is really crazy that would be trading blows with like the 5700 xt in a 2020 imac now it is worth pointing out that we're talking about geekbench 5 metal compute that's not really indicative of real world performance but those are the kinds of scores that we would be talking about here and yeah a 32 core apple gpu would absolutely be trading blows with higher end and fairly recent dedicated gpus in a laptop that is really crazy but honestly what i think is most interesting is the 10 core m2 if apple can apply those 55 gains like they did from a14 to a15 with the increased gpu cores to the mac then that would make the entry-level chips really really solid not just in terms of cpu but also in terms of graphics so i'm really really looking forward to seeing what apple does next on the baseline now as far as timing for that we don't really have an estimate so from what i've seen the next gen like the m2 chips should be coming out hopefully on the earlier side of next year but at the same time i wouldn't be surprised if apple makes us wait all the way another year until like october but as for the m1x well we don't have to wait that long it should be just around the corner so i'm curious to know what you guys think of this obviously as i mentioned this is a hypothetical exercise but if you really think about it talking about 3.7 times the performance for four times the number of gpu cores things are going to get pretty crazy and i can't wait to get my hands on it and if you can't wait either make sure to get subscribed and leave a like down below because oh boy things are getting really interesting i'll see you guys in the next one youguys i couldn't help myself i whipped out my calculator app on my iphone and i've been doing some calculations you guys know i love to do this whenever we get some numbers about upcoming apple chips i can't help myself i sit down and i start running some math trying to figure out what the next apple chip is going to be and now that we have some actual geekbench 5 benchmark numbers for both the cpu and the gpu of the a15 well i did it again i've been calculating some stuff trying to figure out what all of this means for upcoming max so today we're going to discuss my findings and i think they're pretty interesting okay so before we get started i have to put the disclaimer that this video is speculative obviously it's kind of weird i keep saying that i'm making speculations and people like this is just speculation it's like yeah that's the point that's kind of the entire purpose of the video but basically what we're going to be doing today is comparing what we now know about the a15 with what we knew last year with a 14 in the m1 chip to try to make some extrapolations make some comparisons and figure out what the a15 chip means for upcoming max but before we do any of that i figured it was worth revisiting what i talked about in my last video so since i filmed that a number of interesting little tidbits have come out so the biggest one is that there are actually three variants of the a15 chip apple only talked about two they talked about the four core gpu and the iphone 13 and the five core gpu and the 13 pro and that was already a really interesting thing they've never really done that offering two different variants of the a15 but there's also a secret third variant that they didn't tell anyone about and that's in the ipad mini it uses a slightly down clocked version of the a15 which i suspect is for battery life reasons considering that you're running a full fat ipad but it's a much smaller device with therefore a smaller battery and so it's not as powerful as the a15 that you would find in the iphone 13 and the iphone 13 pro now granted this difference is pretty minor how minor exactly you might ask well fortunately we can figure that out so as of the time that i'm filming this video right now there are 16 entries for iphone 13s they're listed as iphone 14 comma 2 and they have a motherboard number of d63 ap in case you want to go and find them on your own once more are added but basically there's been a sort of a question of like well how much faster is the a15 compared to the a14 well guess what folks we now have a sample size of 16 results so i just averaged all of them i put them in a spreadsheet i found the average and compared it to the a14 so across the 16 geekbench 5 benchmark entries for iphone 13 as of filming the a15 has an average score of 4609 the a14 on the other hand has an average score of 4112 according to cpu monkey that means that when we take into account a little bit of margin of error on both the a15 and the a14 the a15 chip would be about 9 to 15 faster than an a14 so we'll call it 12 now these gains are pretty minor right 12 on average isn't something that you're going to notice you're not going to be picking up your iphone 13 and going this is like 12 better than than what i had previously on my iphone 12. like no you're not going to notice that but it is worth comparing to previous iphone chips to see if the gains this year are greater or smaller well last year the a14 versus the a13 it was about 17 to 20 percent faster before that the a13 compared to the a12 was pretty substantial 27 faster and before that the a12 versus the a11 was eight to ten percent faster now interestingly these geekbench five entries show that the a15 is clocked at 3.23 gigahertz which is up from 2.99 gigahertz on the a14 so i suspect that much or all of these 8 to 15 gains are from the increased clock speed so the story with the a15 is minor refinement subtle gains nothing really that crazy but what does interest me pretty significantly is the gpu because this year the iphone 13 pro is a whopping 55 percent more powerful than last year's 12 pro according to the geekbench metal compute scores that is a really noticeable difference now a lot of that can be traced down to the fact that that particular gpu has 25 more gpu cores than the regular iphone 13 and last year's iphone 12 but it is worth noting that the regular iphone 13 with the four core gpu is still about 15 faster than last year's iphone 12 pro these are some pretty good gpu gains i touched on this in my video yesterday which i would definitely recommend checking out because what it means is if apple is starting to apply some of these gpu gains to the mac chips things could get really interesting and that's where i want to spend a good bit of time in today's video so let's recap the a15 with the four core gpu is 15 faster than the iphone 12 with a four core gpu the iphone 13 pro with a 5 core gpu is 55 faster than the iphone 12 with the four core gpu those are some pretty incredible gains and basically what this tells us is that if you go from the a14 generation with four cores and you increase the cores by 25 and then move to the newer a15 core that yields 55 more performance now this is really interesting because if you'll recall rumors about the upcoming m2 chip have included the possibility that apple could be moving from an 8 core gpu to a 10 core gpu now wouldn't you know it that's a 25 increase in cores so if apple does use these newer a15 cores which are probably clocked a little bit higher then we could assume that compared to the m1 chip it should be about 55 faster with this new 10 core gpu so let's apply that to what we currently know the m1 gpu scores around 21 698 in geekbench 5 metal compute test so if we were to bump that up 55 it would score 33 631 which puts it pretty close to the radeon pro 575 that used to ship in imax a couple of years ago now granted yeah that's an older gpu it's not exactly a high-end gpu but we're talking about the integrated graphics that would be found in the likes of a base model mac mini now where things start to get a little bit hazy is when we talk about the m1x that's the chip that we're expecting to see within the next month or so on the new macbook pros and what we don't really know about these chips is whether or not they're going to be using the newer a15 cores or even whether they would need to so as we talked about earlier the a15 runs at 3.23 gigahertz that happens to also be what the m1 cpu runs at so it's possible that the a15 core is really just an m1 core which is a higher clocked a14 core i don't know if that makes sense to you but basically it's possible that the a15 is more like an m1 than it is like an a14 that's been boosted a little bit so we don't know what apple's plan is for the m1x so let's compare it to some precedent that has a little bit more of a concrete number and that is the a14 to the m1 the a14 was a four core gpu the m1 is an 8 core gpu the a14 chip score is in geekbench 5 metal whereas the m1 scores 21 698 which means even though the gpu cores only doubled the score increased by 141 percent that's a really impressive scaling and is likely also due to clock speed and power draw changes when moving up to a higher system power package so if we apply that to the m1 and even implement a 10 scaling penalty because you can't really just multiply things linearly and infinitely let's say that the m1x is 131 faster than the m1 that would mean the m1x would be about 50 122 compared to 21 698 for the m1 that's really close to the radeon pro 580x which mind you is not a super powerful gpu but we're talking about integrated graphics here that's pretty crazy and that's just when we're talking about the 16 core gpu and assuming that apple does increase the system power a little bit as they did going from an iphone to an m1 so that that in itself is pretty ludicrous but if we're talking about the 32 core gpu things would be even more insane now i don't think it would be fair to extrapolate the exact same way right going from the 16 core hypothetical score to a 32 core hypothetical score that's a bit of a stretch when we're really only basing this off of the low end jump from four to eight cores but if you think about it just logically the m1 has an eight core gpu and it's a pretty powerful one so you'd be quadrupling the number of cores now obviously you're not going to perfectly quadruple the performance maybe 3.75 times because apple scales their stuff pretty well so that would yield a geekbench score of about 81 000 which is really crazy that would be trading blows with like the 5700 xt in a 2020 imac now it is worth pointing out that we're talking about geekbench 5 metal compute that's not really indicative of real world performance but those are the kinds of scores that we would be talking about here and yeah a 32 core apple gpu would absolutely be trading blows with higher end and fairly recent dedicated gpus in a laptop that is really crazy but honestly what i think is most interesting is the 10 core m2 if apple can apply those 55 gains like they did from a14 to a15 with the increased gpu cores to the mac then that would make the entry-level chips really really solid not just in terms of cpu but also in terms of graphics so i'm really really looking forward to seeing what apple does next on the baseline now as far as timing for that we don't really have an estimate so from what i've seen the next gen like the m2 chips should be coming out hopefully on the earlier side of next year but at the same time i wouldn't be surprised if apple makes us wait all the way another year until like october but as for the m1x well we don't have to wait that long it should be just around the corner so i'm curious to know what you guys think of this obviously as i mentioned this is a hypothetical exercise but if you really think about it talking about 3.7 times the performance for four times the number of gpu cores things are going to get pretty crazy and i can't wait to get my hands on it and if you can't wait either make sure to get subscribed and leave a like down below because oh boy things are getting really interesting i'll see you guys in the next one you\n"