hey everyone welcome back to today in tech i'm juliet beauchamp and i'm here with mac
world executive editor michael simon as well as computer world executive editor ken mingis
we are live on youtube as well as on linkedin so if you have any questions or comments
while we are talking and discussing please do let me know we also have a special double feature um
episode today so we'll be talking today um with ken and mike a little bit about um just some
some chip things at large intel's new cpus um the the google pixel 6 powered by its own chip
and then later in the show we're going to have mario morales the program vice president for
enabling technologies and semiconductors at idc on to t to talk about the ongoing chip shortage
so if you had any questions about either of those things please do let us know so before we start
it's it's applicable to the conversation can you have you have a new a new baby yeah yeah a new m1x
and one minute max yeah yeah yeah i i you know it was a long journey i tried to order one on the day
uh that they were announced last week and my delivery date was going to wind up being like
mid to late november so i looked up and managed to order one for pickup on tuesday when they actually
were released so ordered it about eight a.m on tuesday and had it in hand about 11 30. just now
getting that uh to know it it is a phenomenal machine i'm sure i will never put it through
the paces in a way that somebody's doing video editing or you know crunching databases and
running virtual machines things like that but it should certainly keep me going for the next three
four or five years although i know michael probably doubts that that would be the case
but uh that's the one i heard you went to the apple store and and demanded yelling in the middle
of store do you know who i am no no demanding that they give you give you your computer no no that's
that's what i heard i very quietly got online i paid too much attention to the mac for mac
rumors forums about the best way to do this and skip the line and so i jumped online first thing
this tuesday morning and it worked seriously i will say this i'm glad i did because i was just
checking before we started talking and and this may go back to the point you were making earlier
juliet about chip shortages and things uh you know these are no longer available for pickup
at least locally where i am in raleigh north carolina and uh if you order one now you'll get
it probably around the first of december something like that or the first week of december so that's
you know for uh pretty much a major product for apple that's that's a pretty good backup
yeah bill amy so so how's that m1 max treating you so far so good you know there there have been
some issues i think people have complained that uh safari doesn't really do the promotion in the way
that uh uh it should and i think everybody's assuming that's gonna require a quick uh
uh software update the notch is not an issue for me as it were what do you what do you mean about
the promotion i didn't i haven't yeah there's apparently uh if you do scrolling in safari and
i think maybe chrome as well uh it doesn't appear that the promotion is is bumping up to 120. really
uh it's it's it well again my eyes are not as as as focused on this as apparently a lot of people
there's a lot of discussion about it again if you take a take a look at the uh mac rumors forums
um now in terms of like when you move windows around desktop you know when you're when you're
pinching and zooming and stuff smooth as butter i mean you know you can tell clearly it's it's 120
but it with some scrolling in safari it stutters a little bit some people say okay yeah interesting
but again you know in terms of the notch it took me uh you know all of a day to realize i don't
care it's not bothering me it doesn't get in the way of any of my menu items at the menu bar and uh
um so i'm i'm a happy camper we got conflicting comments last week on our episode one person
was very much on your team ken no one cares about the notch but another person to your point mike
very insistent that they do not like the notch yeah i mean we're gonna get that from here until
the end of whenever um it's a polarizing feature it's been for the iphone now forever and it was
same thing with on android phones i mean it is a it's a thing and if your eyes can't not see
it it's going to be a nuisance you know that's just the way it's going to go so there it is
there it is yeah and it's big and it's noticeable and you know if you apple can say all they want
well you're getting the same amount of screen space and all that is true
but you can't convince you can convince your brain but not your eyes if you as
if you will so fair enough you have to think about it as the basically the the screen real
estate below the notch is full screen oh yeah and semantics so the menu bar above it is the extra
it's just just a change in mindset i mean i mean the iphone 10 was the same thing
it's the same situation as the iphone it's still there all right i think let's talk a little bit
about the chips at hand so talked a little bit about this m1 max ken and you're enjoying it but
i wanted to talk a little bit about um so intel just yesterday it sort of formally introduced
its 12th generation alder lake cpus and one of them in leaked benchmarks seems to outperform
the new m1 m1 max by a hair and i think last week we had even said something along the lines of you
know new intel chips are going to come out how fast are they going to be it seems like the answer
is pretty pretty pretty powerful yeah well let's let's let's explain a few things before we get
into this so alder lake what intel released right our desktop cpus they're brand new they are built
on a seven nanometer process for the first time intel's been doing 10 and promising seven forever
uh but they they finally got to seven and it's a completely different architecture so they're doing
what apple is doing what amd is doing with these cores so they have uh high efficiency cores and
and high performance cores inside these desktop processors so it's a completely different
chip and in some ways it's a direct response to these types of chips apples before the m1 the
a series chips and amd's chips which have kind of been eating intel's lunch for a while now
uh intel is still a big name they still send it to sell a ton of processors and they're still you
know among the fastest around but when you're talking about a modern chip architecture there
they they didn't have what these chips have with these types of cores so this is a change for them
alder lake is basically an m1 essentially an intel version of an m1 chip so the ones
that they released they absolutely destroy the m1 because they're desktop chips and they're they're
optimized for performance we haven't seen the m1 pro m1 max in a say an imac or certainly certainly
not a mac pro which is what these chips are are destined for those those higher end machines
so the what intel released this week isn't isn't a fair comparison now what you're talking about is
leaked benchmarks of the mobile version yeah of that chip yes the alder lake chip which
i mean yes the benchmarks that we've seen leaked do by a hair
beat the m1 max by the smallest of margins and we don't know
so they will run obviously using windows 11. windows 11 does some some optimization stuff
with um hybrid threading or whatever it's called so we we don't really know the actual comparison
uh apples to apples no pun intended performance um i'm not surprised at all that these chips will
you know meet what apple has done with it with the m1 mac i mean intel's a chip company if they don't
what are they doing totally so i'm not that that doesn't surprise me at all what's what
what is a little you know it's as a as a as a mac world editor it's a little irritating that as soon
as this happens it's like oh look apple's terrible like like listen apple basically makes chips on
the side and they're making them as good as what was once the the biggest and the best and the most
the number one chipmaker in the world and intel is playing a little bit of ketchup
here there's there's there's no there's no real denying it apple the m1 max is a it's a
ridiculously good chip and i'm sure the m2 max next year or or maybe 2023 whenever we get it
is going to take that even even further and it you can't deny that apple right now is a major
player both in the chip making business and in how the entire landscape is shifting towards
these types of chips you know we check we talked about this a couple weeks back
and this is the exactly what we were talking about is that what apple is doing with its this whole
chip design manufacturing process is spurring innovation in a way that you know intel has
not had this kind of competition i know it's got competition with other you know amd and others but
you know this is the sort of thing that is good on both sides of the of the ocean if you will because
both companies you know will look to compete on both not just speeds but like you know heat uh
battery life for mobile devices but that's the that's the other thing we don't know
right is is that you know benchmarks are in a very benchmark leaked does not mean that
a windows 11 machine running the alder lake chip is going to run either as fast as cool or as long
as as the macbook pro and you know the fact that intel's until that apple's in the conversation is
a win for apple i mean this is their first high performance chip for for a desk for a mac that's
it the m1 was not that it was very much low end even though it was in the 13-inch macbook pro
it wasn't it wasn't a high-end chip this is and the fact that intel's you know so alder
lake we're probably looking at a two to four year road map or whatever it is apple's already there
you know and apple's roadmap is going to be what it is we don't know yet because we've only had
the first generation of these so for all we know the m2 max doubles performance and intel's back to
the drawing board so you know you said alder lake is a seven nanometer chip is it the m1 pro five
five five yeah and the m2 is probably going to be a five as well but the m3 the m3 will probably be
a three like based on what we're what we're seeing okay so um i i don't like there's going to be a
lot of once these chips are actually released once benchmarks are actually come out there will be a
lot of headlines that say you know hahaha the m1 max isn't as good as everyone thinks it is but
okay i don't you know i don't think that i think that's a little bit a little bit of hyperbole
that's not necessary yeah fair enough and you know there's a thing we've say it all the time
it's it's it's it's not it's not something until apple does it and there's hot this hybrid
architecture for these chips which is again the the core split between performance and and power
amd's been doing it for a while it's it's not a new thing snapdragon qualcomm snapdragons they're
not it's not a new process but once apple started doing it then until appeared to notice that maybe
they should get into it as well i'm not gonna i don't have any inside intel information but it's
all very convenient that once apple started doing it all of a sudden now they're they're shifting
their their main chips now to this to this hybrid power efficiency uh architecture all right
so in i think that was a pretty thorough overview so i wanted to talk a little bit now um i guess
it was last week i'm getting my days confused a little bit that google announced and the pixel
6 and the pixel six that was last i was even when i was preparing for this i was like i don't
remember if it was two weeks ago or it was just last week google got a little caught up in the
apple thing it was unfortunate timing for them so um i wanted to talk a little bit about the
tensor chip because this is a big step for google's to be making its own system on a chip and
it's i know that we're kind of talking about how these things are reminiscent perhaps
of what apple has done but i'll link also i'm j.r rayfield's article about the pixel
6 and the pixel 6 pro in the description but i guess it's i guess i'm just saying this is it's
it's big how does it run i guess i'm sure jr talks about this in the article
um i i haven't tested it because i don't do that stuff anymore but um i did see a video
comparing that the iphone 13 to the um 13. yeah right that's right iphone 13 to the um
the iphone 130 pro to the pixel 6 pro and at first you know so what this thing does is it's
like a it's like a robotic arm that opens applications ways for them to load and then
and then closes them and opens up another one just to to test the the responsiveness of of the chip
at first the pixel was ahead by a bit of time you know maybe five seconds or so
which i think speaks to the the ram the pixel 6 pro has 12 gigs of ram whereas the iphone is i
think uh eight maybe six or eight i don't know six i think six okay so that's a that's a lot
that's a lot of ram so you're able to access those those things quicker but when it came to
processing something like a like a video render or something like that or i think it was it was
not a render it was an export of something the iphone blew it away i mean so apple's chips
you know like you the the the pixel will maybe seem faster at certain points
uh it cannot compete with um the speed and from when i read the efficiency of the
um of the of the a 15 processor i mean they're not even on the same level um i don't think that's
what google was necessarily going for here but it's important that that becomes a focus
because if you're paying 900 for a phone and up you want the best performance and right now it
does not appear even when you compare it to the snapdragon 88 in the in the s21 like it's not on
the same level as that stuff and yeah okay google is prioritizing the tensor stuff which is ai
and the things that that it does now bringing that to the to the chip level
okay i think more important is the is the speed and the graphic power and things like that
and i don't know if the pixel 6 pro delivers it at that at that price range
you know big big church big picture point though you've got google developing chips
you've got intel responding to apple you've got apple is basically a major
chip maker now you know there's a lot of investment energy and innovation coming
from these companies at this point and that's good you know i mean you can argue benchmarks
all the time all day long depending on exactly what you're doing and under what circumstances
but you know these you know the tensor is a good chip i'm sure the alder lake will be a good chip
and the m1 max is a good chip you know and beyond that the details at this point
i think are sort of meaningless fair enough so we have one quick um viewer question before we
transition over because we've been talking about chips and then we're going to be talking about
how companies have been getting them so we have just one question i think mike this is maybe more
of a question for you they're asking about the a15 bionic chip this is the first time that apple
has gone with sort of like the bionic labeling no uh introduce it with the 12. what makes it
different is there a difference or is that just a fantastic it's a fancy new name but it it it
re it refers to the to the neural engine that it released with the without it introduced with the
a12 so that handles all the machine learning ai stuff um that's really what it is it is it's a
yeah but but the bionic nomenclature came along when they introduced that neural engine with the
a12 so gotcha so to the viewer who asked well yeah it doesn't really mean anything okay well thank
you both so much for joining i know this was a little bit quick but i think we covered a lot and
i think you made a great a great um conclusion point there ken about um you know new chips
they're coming out they're fast it's competition ultimately i mean it'll be exciting to see and it
probably in that good i'm sure for the consumer at minimum so i mean competition is always good
yeah when when companies respond to what other companies are doing
i mean think about back in the 90s when they were doing those pentium bake-offs
literally literally bring intel machines on stage oh it's it's it's all good for us
yeah yep great well thank you both so much and we will see you i'm sure next week