I think your expectations for what emulation is capable of are set a bit high. The fact that it is able to emulate a game that's a few years old at decent frame rate is more than acceptable. You didn't see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason.
I mean, if I had things my way they wouldn't be switching to ARM at all and emulation wouldn't be necessary, so I don't think it's wrong to be skeptical.
> You didn't see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason.
Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs.
> I'm going to assume that a dedicated GPU was being used for Tomb Raider—they would have said something otherwise.
They said exactly what SoC they were using, and it's not known to have spare PCIe lanes lying unused in existing products. Apple pretty much just demoed an x86 game running on an overclocked iPad Pro.
They only said the demos were running off Apple silicon, not that they were running off a Mac Mini DTK machine.
They probably have other systems more akin to Mac Pros that they use internally.
It's not like Apple can't change what connectors are available on the back of the mac Mini. The form factor may not have changed, but the ports available have in the past releases.
Don't be surprised if there is no Thunderbolt 3 at all, but just USB-C.
It may be that by the time these things are ready for an actual release they can be USB4, which is USB-C + Thunderbolt technology, but no longer Intel exclusive.
> Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs.
Were you under the impression this $500 developers kit shipping with an iPad Pro CPU/ GPU is a high end computer? While it's a decent chip, it's essentially the same CPU as the prior generation iPad Pro with 1 additional core.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a PS4/XB1 game, not a PS360 game.
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Edit 2: Please disregard my first edit, below—I was right the first time, then I got the games mixed up.
Edit 1: Oh wait, I forgot, SotTR actually did have an Xbox 360 port! It was one of the last big titles to have one. I think what they showed on screen looked better than the 360 version though, although it's admittedly hard to tell on a stream.
Is the target to match the performance of ten year old hardware? Then sure, that's matched. But it's not impressive. AMD FX CPUs have better performance than that, by a mile.
Yeah, but this is their existing CPU/GPU designed to fit into the constraints of the iPad form factor. They'll likely have something much more powerful for consumer hardware.
The iPad CPU/GPU is already thermal limited. An unlimited A12Z is right at the TDP of a laptop chip, at ~25-30W (5W per big core per anandtech, 4 cores, plus GPU and I/O, it's actually quite a generous estimate.
An unlocked A12Z is likely all you can get away with in a laptop, and inferior to SOTA x86 low power CPUs.
