Everything indicates that Apple is planning to bet everything on hardware development and, after swapping Intel processors for ARM64, it is possibly now heading towards the development of its own GPUs.
An image taken from a video (4'40") from Apple's developer site titled "Bring your Metal app to Apple Silicon Macs" highlights the fact that future ARM-based Macs will use "Apple GPUs", which only makes us imagine that for Macs with the new architecture, third-party GPUs will not be used.
For three generations, starting with the A11 Bionic, Apple has leveraged its custom GPU microarchitecture over Imagination Technologies' PowerVR solutions, and now the same approach can be followed.
The first example of the capacity of Apple GPUs can be represented in a previous benchmark test, where the A8Z Bionic's 12-core GPU beat the Ryzen 5 4500U and Core i7-1065G7 iGPUs, but the numbers were not impressive, in an OpenCL test.
It is possible that the low scores achieved by the A12Z Bionic are due to the Apple Rosetta 2 translation layer, as another benchmark report revealed that the chipset's performance cores were only being utilized, not the efficiency cores.
Fortunately, the A12Z Bionic won't be found on a future Mac; it is only present on the Mac mini and is intended for developers to test their applications.
Anyway, the first Mac based on the new ARM architecture should only arrive later this year for users, with reports claiming that it will have a custom 12-core SoC, where there will be eight performance cores paired with four efficiency cores.
This as-yet-unnamed 12-core A-series custom SoC (System on Chip) could bring an even more capable GPU than the one found in the iPhone 14's upcoming A12 Bionic.
Of course, we won't find out more details about Apple's plans until the next few months, but the prospect of seeing Apple's own GPUs at work makes us anxious for the overall performance result of the ARM64 Macs that will hit the market.
