[Software] Apple's 'One More Thing' event: as it happened

[Agent47]

 

 

Intel pulled the wraps off its 'Intel Server GPU' today, unveiling a discrete graphics card for servers manufactured by its partner H3C. The new card consists of four separate Iris Xe Max discrete graphics chips, formerly codenamed DG1, that are also used as discrete GPUs in laptops. Instead of the typical use case for server GPUs, like machine learning workloads, the four processors work in tandem to process Android cloud gaming and media transcode and encode workloads for real-time video streaming.

Intel says it has now delivered on its GPU roadmap for 2020, and that it recently powered-on the Xe HPG discrete gaming graphics card, meaning it appears to be on track for a 2021 release. Additionally, Intel says it has released the design of its Xe HPC GPU, Ponte Vecchio, for development and is awaiting the first power-on testing.

Intel's new server GPU replaces the company's Visual Compute Accelerator (VCA) that used three Xeon E3 processors and their onboard Iris integrated graphical processors (IGP) for similar tasks. 
The first Intel Server GPU comes as the XG310 from H3C. The PCIe 3.0 x16 add-in card (AIC) has a full-height, 3/4 length form factor and uses an 8-pin connector for auxiliary power. Intel recommends four cards per server as the optimal configuration. As with Intel's Iris Xe Max GPUs, each GPU LPDDR4X memory that interfaces with the chip over a 128-bit connection that feeds 96 execution units, but Intel has boosted capacity from 4GB to 8GB. The chip itself is fabbed on Intel's 10nm SuperFin process. Naturally, the card support Intel's Deep Link feature that allows the GPUs to process workloads simultaneously. 
Intel also announced the Gold release (1.0) of its OneAPI Toolkits would arrive in December. OneAPI is a cross-architecture programming model designed to simplify programming across GPU, CPU, FPGA, and AI accelerators, and it works with both Intel hardware and chips from other vendors. The end goal is to make code easily portable between scalar (CPU), vector (GPU), matrix (accelerators), and spatial (FPGA) processors. 

OneAPI provides unified libraries that will allow for applications to move seamlessly between Intel's different types of compute and supports AVX-512 and DL Boost. The OneAPI toolkits will be available for free in the Intel DevCloud, but the company also offers commercial versions that provide support from Intel's technical consulting engineers. Additionally, Intel's Parallel Studio XE and System Studio tools will immediately transition to OneAPI. 

Intel will hold a OneAPI Developer Summit in November and share further details during the SuperComputing 2020 conference. 
10:41: Starts at $1,299. Improved studio mics and webcam. The 'ultimate expression of what the M1 can do'. Guess that rules out it coming to the 16-inch MacBook Pro for the moment, then.

10:39: "World's fastest compact pro notebook". And has 'simply amazing' battery life of 20 hours for video playback. Longest battery life ever in a Mac. Apple is usually quite good with its battery life promises, so this is exciting.

10:38: Powerful performance, sleek design and 2.8 times faster performance. Three times faster than a Windows laptop in its class, according to Apple. Apple is being very vague about its comparisons, to be honest. Doesn't mean much.

10:37: And now.. it's the MacBook Pro 13-inch! It gets an M1 upgrade as well. 
10:25: It's the MacBook Air. 'Will completely redefine what a thin and light MacBook can do.' The world's best selling 13-inch laptop, apparently.

10:24: So, Big Sur looks like it'll run pretty well on the new M1 hardware! And now we're on to the first Mac with M1! What can it be?!

10:21: New Macs do something no mac can do before - run iPhone and iPad apps directly on your Mac - thanks to M1 chip. This was something many of us were looking forward to. Now we're getting a video of some app devs talking about what this means for them and their apps. Took some devs a day, apparently, to transfer their apps to Apple Silicon.

10:20: One app can run on all your Macs - basically there will be two versions of the app, one for Intel Macs, one for M1-based Macs. Thanks to Rosetta 2. Seamlessly runs apps built for Intel chips on M1. And apps actually run better on M1?!?! Witchcraft if true.