[mbessey]

You are thinking much too conservatively, in terms of performance. I think 50% faster wouldn't even be worth the effort of making the transition.

If we start from the position that the A12Z is, roughly speaking, on par with Intel's most-powerful mobile processors (per CPU core), then work from there:

The first ARM Macs will not be using that processor. Apple have said publicly that the processor cores in Macs will have features that aren't supported by the DTK's processors. That means they're at least equivalent to the A13, but more-likely a generation newer than that, so A14 (or whatever) equivalent. That's probably a 50% boost in and of itself.

The rumor mill says the Mac chips will have 12 cores, instead of 8. Presumably those are 4 more "performance" cores, so that's another 50% boost.

And if they double the TDP, which should be feasible with forced-air cooling, that's another 50%.

So, that's a 237% performance improvement, under some fairly realistic estimates.

Maybe the first portable Macs with the new chips will "only" be twice as fast as the current MacBookPro line, but they might very well be much faster than that.

[throwaway888abc]

And amazing graphics! Compare the latest ipad performance with integrated intel (sick).

Not planning to jump back on mac from linux, especially the first generation, but excited by the move.

[throw51319]

Faster at all things, or faster only at certain things that have already been optimized for the iphones?

[mbessey]

I'm not sure I'm really understanding the question, but "faster at most things" is what I'm getting at. Any time you compare two different processor families, there are going to be some benchmarks that look better on one, and some that look better on others.

For Mac applications (which are obviously what Apple cares about in this context), the new processors will be faster than the previous processors.

For tasks which can be accelerated by Apple's custom silicon (video encoding/decoding, object classification), the ARM Macs will be much faster than the Intel Macs.

[saltcod]

Great answer, and very interesting stuff. Thank you!