I'm wondering, since both OSX and iOS will now use Metal to accelerate built in apps, what will go on with older devices. Some of the iDevices that are compatible with iOS8 already can't use Metal (like A5), I wonder if the same will be true with OSX 10.11 compatible macs.
And since Metal is a low level API, how does development work? Recent macs cover Intel, AMD, and Nvidia GPUs alike. Is it universal? Will the low level Metal features benefit older GPUs as well, like DX12 with the low level API as a feature most new chips get, but the new featureset as something new chips get?
I imagine that on the computer front that anything that could run DX12 will be able to do Metal since the philosophy is just about the same, which is pretty broad (Nvidia should be everything since the 400 series, AMD's GCN cards 7000 series and newer, and Haswell or newer from Intel). Phones may be a different animal, I bet that will more likely be the newest and greatest only.
I'd imagine so. That unfortunately would leave out the devices that could use the boost most though, so I wonder how much improvement is coming to older devices that can't run Metal. Like Core 2 Duo/320M era Macs for instance.
People have wondered that for a long time, and I just don't see the point. Core M delivers so much performance in 5W, and benefits from Intel being so far ahead on fab tech (yes, even with their 14nm delays...Other 14nm can hardly be called that in comparison to theirs*), and Macs would be plunged into a time of missing a lot of key pro apps, no matter how hard Apple tried to switch everyone over faster. Why be arsed? Because "Apple likes control", as everyone who wants to see it says? They tremendously influence Intel anyways.
I think the Macbook is pretty much what an ARM based Mac would look like anyways. They got there with old x86, by bother throwing all the compatibility out.
I think you assume that for Apple to offer an ARM-based Mac-like desktop or notebook that it would do this across the board. Consider a low-end Mac or Mac-like desktop or notebook that can shave hundreds off the price just by going with ARM. Apple has done an architure transition many times with great success so I don't see adding a sub-$700 Mac-like notebook to the mix that only used the Mac App Store (either as the only app installation access or as the default) to be a big engineering feat. Let's remember that most customers don't need the power of a MBP or Mac Pro to do their limited tasks, and many have move to iDevices to fill that need, so ARM for a desktop OS seems very plausible to me.
you forget apple's reasoning: don't need the power of a macbook? get an ipad. don't like it? it's either that or the highway. want a cheap laptop/tablet/phone? go beg in the windows & android corner.
Ok, but then would it not just be a Surface-like iPad with a keyboard, more than a proper Mac at that point? What would be the point of porting OSX over to ARM just for one product, otherwise? I don't see Apple going down that route. If such a product is in the works, I'd think it would just run iOS rather than follow the footsteps of the failed Windows RT.
The Core M is actually configured to 6.5W in the new Macbook, not the normal 5W. Also most of the Core M's performance comes from turbo frequencies. While turboing, the chip exceeds the TDP. It is not clear how well Apple's ARM processors might perform given similar constraints as none of them have turbo modes to handle bursty workloads.
The compatibility story is a significant concern, more so than performance. And the reason for Apple to make this change isn't control but rather price. Intel charges ~$300 for those Core M chips. Apple could knock $100-200 off the Macbook price, while still having a greater profit margin. Regardless of whether they do switch, at the very least Apple is probably using this to negotiate cheaper prices with Intel, giving them an advantage over the Windows OEMs.
There is no way Apple pays $300 for Core M chips. Asus sells core M products at $700. Apple processors are nowhere near as powerful as Core M for CPU intensive tasks, turbo ability or not.
The performance difference isn't that great between an A8X and a Core M.
And Apple won't use a tablet oriented chip in such a device anyway. Apple tends to get the performance needs correct in their chip designs, so if they need four/eight ARM cores in their "A10Mac" chip to achieve the performance they need, they will add them. And, of course, having a 5W TDP (with ~10W boost) rather than a 2W TDP will mean they can boost the top clocks of the cores too.
Again, nothing suggests Apple are doing this at the moment, but if they were to do it, they would solve most of the issues by release date.
It depends what you mean by "performance". They have the same IPC, but - the Broadwell can turbo up to 2.9GHz (for the highest speed model). - the Broadwell's nominal frequency is 1.3 GHz, the A8X's is 1.5 GHz.
I suspect what this means in reality is that for SUSTAINED code, they are about equal, with Broadwell able to zip ahead for bursts of speed (which is important for responsiveness).
The issue, however, is more what Apple is capable of doing. The question is not "what is the performance of Apple's iOS optimized chip?", it's "what is Apple capable of if they designed a higher power optimized chip?" It seems plausible that, with 14nm andFinFETs, the A9X could run at 2GHz. There's more scope for compiler improvements in LLVM for ARMv8 than for x86, and there's a steady stream of improvements coming (LTO, PGO, better register allocation, better vectorization, POLLY, etc). One third of last year's 25% A7 to A8 speedbump was compiler, and it seems reasonable to expect a similar 8% or so jump this year and next year before the compiler is maxed out. It also seems reasonable, even if all Apple do with the A9 is the same sort of minor micro-architectural tweaks as the A8, that they could get another 8% or so from there. So now we've got something that's capable of matching Broadwell at around 2.2 GHz or so --- still not hitting those turboboost numbers, but a lot closer.
Beyond that there are the obvious questions. Apple appears not to have even tried so far for serious circuit optimization stuff --- so far they've just ensured a nice core architecture. Their L2 is slow compared to Intel (and other companies with less resources than Intel), and their L3 is crazy slow compared to competitors. They have not apparently invested any effort in any sort of turbo'ing technology. There's a lot they could do with pre-fetching. etc
The point is not that they have been dumb --- every one of these choices was probably optimal for a phone/tablet SoC. But there is no reason to believe that they are unaware of the consequences of different choices, and they appear to have the skill to pull them off. Meaning that if they had an ECONOMIC/STRATEGIC reason (as opposed to just "wouldn't it be cool?") there seems to no reason to believe they couldn't fab a design at 3GHz, with some turbo'ing, and with all these micro-architectural enhancements setting at the equiv of Intel's 3.3 to 3.5 GHz or so.
My guess is the strategy is more important than the economics. They sell a little under 20 million macs a year. If they save $100 on each CPU, that's $2billion. I guess that's enough to cover costs and break even. They would make Macs less desirable to WinHeads (bad) but would be able to introduce new features on their schedule (good). No more being stuck with Intel's schedule for introducing TB3 or USB3.1 or whatever.
The big problem is at the high end, I think. Unless they're going to sell these cores to someone else, they probably can't break close to even on designing the NoC, the L3 cache features, creating the the masks, etc, all the stuff they'd need to create a Xeon equivalent. They could run split architecture (at least for a while) I guess, but that's a hassle for everyone. Of course as their data center needs grow, that provides a captive market for those Xeon equivalents that's probably a LOT larger than the Mac Pro sales...
Well, if an A10X chip costs Apple $40 to make, runs at 5W and performs great, then the savings in price over using the Intel chip, times the millions of devices they would ship, is a massive saving, even for a company of Apple's size.
Additionally, there is such a thing as emulation, and there are commercial x86 emulators for ARM - you can even get one for the Raspberry Pi. For compatibility with apps that won't get recompiled, this is a viable option (as they will tend to be older). Also, remember most apps spend most of their time in system libraries, so as long as the emulation allows the use of native libraries, performance won't drop too much.
Any current software could be recompiled to have an ARM binary in the bundle. This would be an XCode thing that Apple could enable at any time.
Apple could start with a MacBook Lite type device, before migrating the rest of the ecosystem (for example, they probably won't want to stop using Xeons in the Mac Pro).
I'm not saying that Apple will do it, or will do it this year or next year. I'm just saying that compatibility is not going to stop them doing it.
Metal has to already work on an A5 as iPad 2 was an iOS 8 supported device and so was the Iphone 4S. Both used the A5 chip.
Anyhow, Metal is a DirectX 12 play. Apple is looking to bring titles/developers from iOS over to Mac easily. With an end hope of promoting gaming on Mac. I see this as a good possibility as they have always leveraged better graphics hardware than PC OEMs. I have spent some time searching the Mac App Store for games and it is sparse. There should definitely be an uptick of games for Mac by this time next year. Apple was already supporting Intel, Nvidia, and AMD graphics on their own, so I don't see this as a stretch for them.
As for "not all devices can use it" - absolutely. Apple has done this differentiation *PLENTY* of times on the Mac. Quartz Extreme, Quartz 3D, AirDrop... I'm currently running Yosemite on the oldest Mac it can run on. I'm missing out on *PLENTY* of features. Most of them are inconsequential - speed boosting ones, not actual functional features, but AirDrop and Continuity are two that I would like to have. (If I upgrade my WiFi card, I could get them.)
Regarding performance, raw speed is fine in Yosemite, it's the transparancy that is killing animation performance. It's just stupid to have newer macbook pros not run animations smoothly.
It's also running sluggishly on older hardware. Compositing performance really sucks in Yosemite and even worse seems to depend on a number of non-obvious factors; even with reduced transparency and just the internal screen and few windows open the performance might slow down to almost a halt and even switching between two terminal windows can take 3s and will only recover after a reboot.
Yeah, Windows 7/8.1 run much better on the Core 2 Duo era Macbook in the house than Yosemite does. Nothing after Snow Leopard was ever really good on them again.
I hope El Capitan will improve this, but it seems most of the gains are tied to Metal, which older GPUs may not get.
Even with transparency off I get stuttering on a 2014 rMBP with the GT 750M forced on if I use a scaled res. Apple's 1920x1200 mode is pretty brutal on GPUs.
And don't even think about full screen flash videos on a 2013 rMBP... I can't get above like 25 fps (with regular drops below 15 fps) streaming Twitch. And the GPU spins up to full fan speed in about... 20 seconds or so.
Can I ask where you saw SMB mentioned? I'm really curious to know if there are any performance improvements as well. I've seen very bad performance when simply browsing large SMB shares in OS 10.10.3. Sometimes it can take Finder up to 20 seconds to load the file listing of a large directory.
It's not clear if this is "raw" SMB's fault or that Finder is (STILL!!!) a piece of crap. The SMB experience when browsing is awful --- plenty of things won't connect, SLOOOOOW, out-of-date data is cached and displayed, etc --- BUT it was (and still is) all just as bad with AFP. I really think Finder (or, possibly the network VFS infrastructure, but more likely Finder) is the issue.
It would Appear that apple neglects these kinds of things in favour of flashy things. It's very interesting to see how OS X performs against other Unixes and Linux in some standard benchmarks.
I'm guessing just a few key titles will. There are getting to be way too many APIs duking it out, out there. I kinda wish Apple just went in to support Vulkan fully in OSX rather than split attention with Metal. Now developers have DX12, Mantle, Metal, and Vulkan to think about. Granted Mantle may just meld into the Vulkan project eventually.
Vulkan will replace Mantle, as it's strongly influenced by it. As far as developers supporting OS X with Metal, having the major game engine support it will probably be enough for Apple, with the remaining companies using OpenGL.
Which is also why they should get around to fixing that whole being 5 years behind on OpenGl implementations thing. I hope they support Vulkan as well.
If Apple really wants to promote gaming on mousepads, I mean macbooks, they always have the option of paying devs to support Metal exclusively just like MS and Sony paid devs to have console exclusives, and keep in mind that Apple has way more cash to spend. but like other people said major engines will probably support Metal as well, how well they support Metal solely depends on sales and sponsorship from Apple
Will this graphics performance update perhaps allow the 13" RMBP from late 2013 (First version with Haswell and Iris graphics) to output 4k on display port at 60 FPS like it should be able to?
>>You can now slide tabs to the left to pin them, which will keep them persistent even after restarting Safari or your computer. There are also indicators for which tabs are playing sound, which is something other browsers have had for some time now.<<
Pinned tabs have also been in other browsers, or at least Chrome, for some time now. Maybe Apple reviewers should try other products before they write about "new" features.
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tipoo - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
I'm wondering, since both OSX and iOS will now use Metal to accelerate built in apps, what will go on with older devices. Some of the iDevices that are compatible with iOS8 already can't use Metal (like A5), I wonder if the same will be true with OSX 10.11 compatible macs.And since Metal is a low level API, how does development work? Recent macs cover Intel, AMD, and Nvidia GPUs alike. Is it universal? Will the low level Metal features benefit older GPUs as well, like DX12 with the low level API as a feature most new chips get, but the new featureset as something new chips get?
Scabies - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
I imagine that on the computer front that anything that could run DX12 will be able to do Metal since the philosophy is just about the same, which is pretty broad (Nvidia should be everything since the 400 series, AMD's GCN cards 7000 series and newer, and Haswell or newer from Intel). Phones may be a different animal, I bet that will more likely be the newest and greatest only.tipoo - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
I'd imagine so. That unfortunately would leave out the devices that could use the boost most though, so I wonder how much improvement is coming to older devices that can't run Metal. Like Core 2 Duo/320M era Macs for instance.Impulses - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
They're probably SoL.solipsism - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
I wonder if that inclusion is foreshadowing a future change to Apple's A-series chips for Mac OS X.tipoo - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
People have wondered that for a long time, and I just don't see the point. Core M delivers so much performance in 5W, and benefits from Intel being so far ahead on fab tech (yes, even with their 14nm delays...Other 14nm can hardly be called that in comparison to theirs*), and Macs would be plunged into a time of missing a lot of key pro apps, no matter how hard Apple tried to switch everyone over faster. Why be arsed? Because "Apple likes control", as everyone who wants to see it says? They tremendously influence Intel anyways.I think the Macbook is pretty much what an ARM based Mac would look like anyways. They got there with old x86, by bother throwing all the compatibility out.
* http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014...
solipsism - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
I think you assume that for Apple to offer an ARM-based Mac-like desktop or notebook that it would do this across the board. Consider a low-end Mac or Mac-like desktop or notebook that can shave hundreds off the price just by going with ARM. Apple has done an architure transition many times with great success so I don't see adding a sub-$700 Mac-like notebook to the mix that only used the Mac App Store (either as the only app installation access or as the default) to be a big engineering feat. Let's remember that most customers don't need the power of a MBP or Mac Pro to do their limited tasks, and many have move to iDevices to fill that need, so ARM for a desktop OS seems very plausible to me.bernstein - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
you forget apple's reasoning:don't need the power of a macbook? get an ipad.
don't like it? it's either that or the highway.
want a cheap laptop/tablet/phone? go beg in the windows & android corner.
tipoo - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
Ok, but then would it not just be a Surface-like iPad with a keyboard, more than a proper Mac at that point? What would be the point of porting OSX over to ARM just for one product, otherwise? I don't see Apple going down that route. If such a product is in the works, I'd think it would just run iOS rather than follow the footsteps of the failed Windows RT.mabellon - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
The Core M is actually configured to 6.5W in the new Macbook, not the normal 5W. Also most of the Core M's performance comes from turbo frequencies. While turboing, the chip exceeds the TDP. It is not clear how well Apple's ARM processors might perform given similar constraints as none of them have turbo modes to handle bursty workloads.The compatibility story is a significant concern, more so than performance. And the reason for Apple to make this change isn't control but rather price. Intel charges ~$300 for those Core M chips. Apple could knock $100-200 off the Macbook price, while still having a greater profit margin. Regardless of whether they do switch, at the very least Apple is probably using this to negotiate cheaper prices with Intel, giving them an advantage over the Windows OEMs.
mabellon - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Oops I think its supposed to be "6W not the normal 4.5W".Speedfriend - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
There is no way Apple pays $300 for Core M chips. Asus sells core M products at $700. Apple processors are nowhere near as powerful as Core M for CPU intensive tasks, turbo ability or not.psychobriggsy - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
The performance difference isn't that great between an A8X and a Core M.And Apple won't use a tablet oriented chip in such a device anyway. Apple tends to get the performance needs correct in their chip designs, so if they need four/eight ARM cores in their "A10Mac" chip to achieve the performance they need, they will add them. And, of course, having a 5W TDP (with ~10W boost) rather than a 2W TDP will mean they can boost the top clocks of the cores too.
Again, nothing suggests Apple are doing this at the moment, but if they were to do it, they would solve most of the issues by release date.
name99 - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
It depends what you mean by "performance".They have the same IPC, but
- the Broadwell can turbo up to 2.9GHz (for the highest speed model).
- the Broadwell's nominal frequency is 1.3 GHz, the A8X's is 1.5 GHz.
I suspect what this means in reality is that for SUSTAINED code, they are about equal, with Broadwell able to zip ahead for bursts of speed (which is important for responsiveness).
The issue, however, is more what Apple is capable of doing. The question is not "what is the performance of Apple's iOS optimized chip?", it's "what is Apple capable of if they designed a higher power optimized chip?"
It seems plausible that, with 14nm andFinFETs, the A9X could run at 2GHz. There's more scope for compiler improvements in LLVM for ARMv8 than for x86, and there's a steady stream of improvements coming (LTO, PGO, better register allocation, better vectorization, POLLY, etc). One third of last year's 25% A7 to A8 speedbump was compiler, and it seems reasonable to expect a similar 8% or so jump this year and next year before the compiler is maxed out.
It also seems reasonable, even if all Apple do with the A9 is the same sort of minor micro-architectural tweaks as the A8, that they could get another 8% or so from there. So now we've got something that's capable of matching Broadwell at around 2.2 GHz or so --- still not hitting those turboboost numbers, but a lot closer.
Beyond that there are the obvious questions. Apple appears not to have even tried so far for serious circuit optimization stuff --- so far they've just ensured a nice core architecture. Their L2 is slow compared to Intel (and other companies with less resources than Intel), and their L3 is crazy slow compared to competitors. They have not apparently invested any effort in any sort of turbo'ing technology. There's a lot they could do with pre-fetching. etc
The point is not that they have been dumb --- every one of these choices was probably optimal for a phone/tablet SoC. But there is no reason to believe that they are unaware of the consequences of different choices, and they appear to have the skill to pull them off. Meaning that if they had an ECONOMIC/STRATEGIC reason (as opposed to just "wouldn't it be cool?") there seems to no reason to believe they couldn't fab a design at 3GHz, with some turbo'ing, and with all these micro-architectural enhancements setting at the equiv of Intel's 3.3 to 3.5 GHz or so.
My guess is the strategy is more important than the economics. They sell a little under 20 million macs a year. If they save $100 on each CPU, that's $2billion. I guess that's enough to cover costs and break even. They would make Macs less desirable to WinHeads (bad) but would be able to introduce new features on their schedule (good). No more being stuck with Intel's schedule for introducing TB3 or USB3.1 or whatever.
The big problem is at the high end, I think. Unless they're going to sell these cores to someone else, they probably can't break close to even on designing the NoC, the L3 cache features, creating the the masks, etc, all the stuff they'd need to create a Xeon equivalent. They could run split architecture (at least for a while) I guess, but that's a hassle for everyone. Of course as their data center needs grow, that provides a captive market for those Xeon equivalents that's probably a LOT larger than the Mac Pro sales...
psychobriggsy - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
Well, if an A10X chip costs Apple $40 to make, runs at 5W and performs great, then the savings in price over using the Intel chip, times the millions of devices they would ship, is a massive saving, even for a company of Apple's size.Additionally, there is such a thing as emulation, and there are commercial x86 emulators for ARM - you can even get one for the Raspberry Pi. For compatibility with apps that won't get recompiled, this is a viable option (as they will tend to be older). Also, remember most apps spend most of their time in system libraries, so as long as the emulation allows the use of native libraries, performance won't drop too much.
Any current software could be recompiled to have an ARM binary in the bundle. This would be an XCode thing that Apple could enable at any time.
Apple could start with a MacBook Lite type device, before migrating the rest of the ecosystem (for example, they probably won't want to stop using Xeons in the Mac Pro).
I'm not saying that Apple will do it, or will do it this year or next year. I'm just saying that compatibility is not going to stop them doing it.
eanazag - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Metal has to already work on an A5 as iPad 2 was an iOS 8 supported device and so was the Iphone 4S. Both used the A5 chip.Anyhow, Metal is a DirectX 12 play. Apple is looking to bring titles/developers from iOS over to Mac easily. With an end hope of promoting gaming on Mac. I see this as a good possibility as they have always leveraged better graphics hardware than PC OEMs. I have spent some time searching the Mac App Store for games and it is sparse. There should definitely be an uptick of games for Mac by this time next year. Apple was already supporting Intel, Nvidia, and AMD graphics on their own, so I don't see this as a stretch for them.
tipoo - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
That's not right. They got iOS8, but no Metal. It requires the A7 GPU onwards.https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentat...
CharonPDX - Thursday, June 11, 2015 - link
As for "not all devices can use it" - absolutely. Apple has done this differentiation *PLENTY* of times on the Mac. Quartz Extreme, Quartz 3D, AirDrop... I'm currently running Yosemite on the oldest Mac it can run on. I'm missing out on *PLENTY* of features. Most of them are inconsequential - speed boosting ones, not actual functional features, but AirDrop and Continuity are two that I would like to have. (If I upgrade my WiFi card, I could get them.)ASEdouardD - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Regarding performance, raw speed is fine in Yosemite, it's the transparancy that is killing animation performance. It's just stupid to have newer macbook pros not run animations smoothly.Daniel Egger - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
It's also running sluggishly on older hardware. Compositing performance really sucks in Yosemite and even worse seems to depend on a number of non-obvious factors; even with reduced transparency and just the internal screen and few windows open the performance might slow down to almost a halt and even switching between two terminal windows can take 3s and will only recover after a reboot.tipoo - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Yeah, Windows 7/8.1 run much better on the Core 2 Duo era Macbook in the house than Yosemite does. Nothing after Snow Leopard was ever really good on them again.I hope El Capitan will improve this, but it seems most of the gains are tied to Metal, which older GPUs may not get.
ASEdouardD - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Well it's even worse than I thought then.Brandon Chester - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Even with transparency off I get stuttering on a 2014 rMBP with the GT 750M forced on if I use a scaled res. Apple's 1920x1200 mode is pretty brutal on GPUs.Kumouri - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
And don't even think about full screen flash videos on a 2013 rMBP... I can't get above like 25 fps (with regular drops below 15 fps) streaming Twitch. And the GPU spins up to full fan speed in about... 20 seconds or so.lorribot - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Any news on improvements to SMB performance now it is the default file sharing protocol? Or have they given up and gone back to AFP?sphigel - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Can I ask where you saw SMB mentioned? I'm really curious to know if there are any performance improvements as well. I've seen very bad performance when simply browsing large SMB shares in OS 10.10.3. Sometimes it can take Finder up to 20 seconds to load the file listing of a large directory.name99 - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
It's not clear if this is "raw" SMB's fault or that Finder is (STILL!!!) a piece of crap.The SMB experience when browsing is awful --- plenty of things won't connect, SLOOOOOW, out-of-date data is cached and displayed, etc --- BUT it was (and still is) all just as bad with AFP.
I really think Finder (or, possibly the network VFS infrastructure, but more likely Finder) is the issue.
nils_ - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
It would Appear that apple neglects these kinds of things in favour of flashy things. It's very interesting to see how OS X performs against other Unixes and Linux in some standard benchmarks.darckhart - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
sure hope they get around to fixing the ever expanding save dialog box.tipoo - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Will DiscoveryD come back in 10.11, after it was removed in 10.10.4?hfm - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Hmm.. wonder if future OS X games will use Metal.tipoo - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
I'm guessing just a few key titles will. There are getting to be way too many APIs duking it out, out there. I kinda wish Apple just went in to support Vulkan fully in OSX rather than split attention with Metal. Now developers have DX12, Mantle, Metal, and Vulkan to think about. Granted Mantle may just meld into the Vulkan project eventually.jeffkibuule - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Vulkan will replace Mantle, as it's strongly influenced by it. As far as developers supporting OS X with Metal, having the major game engine support it will probably be enough for Apple, with the remaining companies using OpenGL.tipoo - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Which is also why they should get around to fixing that whole being 5 years behind on OpenGl implementations thing. I hope they support Vulkan as well.Buk Lau - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
If Apple really wants to promote gaming on mousepads, I mean macbooks, they always have the option of paying devs to support Metal exclusively just like MS and Sony paid devs to have console exclusives, and keep in mind that Apple has way more cash to spend. but like other people said major engines will probably support Metal as well, how well they support Metal solely depends on sales and sponsorship from Applejabber - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
So when do they come out with something new and fresh?Conficio - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
All I want to know: Did they fix DNS? Does DHCP stop assigning random host names to my laptop (in default config)?tipoo - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
In 10.10.4, they killed DiscoveryD and went back to mDNSresponder, so yeah it's fixed in the latest beta.bj_murphy - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
Will this graphics performance update perhaps allow the 13" RMBP from late 2013 (First version with Haswell and Iris graphics) to output 4k on display port at 60 FPS like it should be able to?tipoo - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
A graphics API has nothing to do with a chips video output capabilities. That's down to the DAC and cable. Can't change hardware.iVision - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
Does anyone know if Apple will finally support 10-bit color with El Capitan?Spike666 - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
>>You can now slide tabs to the left to pin them, which will keep them persistent even after restarting Safari or your computer. There are also indicators for which tabs are playing sound, which is something other browsers have had for some time now.<<Pinned tabs have also been in other browsers, or at least Chrome, for some time now. Maybe Apple reviewers should try other products before they write about "new" features.
der - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
yaaa!MaBoomBoom - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
I have a MAC Pro 10.10.3. How much is El Capitan going to cost me?tipoo - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
Zero