Specifications for the iMac 2020 may have just been revealed in a Geekbench listing, detailing that Apple’s next all-in-one computer will have a reasonably powerful spec.
Spotted by our sibling site Tom’s Hardware, the leaked benchmark (for the rather uninteresting OpenCL test) details an unnamed iMac running an Intel Core i9-10910 CPU and sporting an AMD Radeon Pro 5300 graphics card. With the processor having 10 cores and 20 threads to bring to bear on tasks, it looks like it could be a solid desktop machine for creative professionals.
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The Geekbench listing shows the Core i9-10910 CPU. Tom’s Hardware speculates that this could be a customized version of the top-end processors in Intel’s Comet Lake-S family of chips, running with a base clock speed of 3.6GHz and a top clock of 4.7GHz. That means it runs at some 29% faster than the standard Core i9-10900.
Tom’s Hardware noted that the chip could be a 95W processor, which sits it between the lower-powered 65W Comet Lake-S and the gutsier 125W CPUs. Such a custom chip is likely Apple’s attempt to have a CPU that is energy-efficient when it needs to be but can crank up its power for bursts of higher performance when necessary.
It’s interesting that the iMac 2020 could have a custom Intel CPU, considering that Apple is transitioning towards making its own ARM-based chips for Mac and eventually move away from relying on Intel processors.
As for the graphics, the Radeon Pro 5300 appears to be a desktop variant of the Radeon Pro 5300M that’s designed for laptop use. Tom’s Hardware highlighted that the iMac’s Radeon Pro 5300 should, therefore, be based on the latest Navi 14 GPU and come with 1,280 stream processors.
The Geekbench listing had the graphics card clocked at 1,600Mhz, and noted it has 4GB of onboard memory. That’s not the most powerful graphics card around, but it’s worth noting that the Radeon Pro GPUs are designed for professional graphics work such as CAD tasks or video rendering rather than high-end gaming; AMD is slated to reveal its next big gaming graphics card in September.
All this means the iMac 2020, which is expected to sport a new design and be revealed at some point later on in 2020, could be a major upgrade over its predecessor. The Geekbench listing doesn’t provide any single-core and multi-core CPU test results, but we expect its 10-core modern Intel processor to deliver strong performance.
We’re looking forward to seeing what Apple can cook up with its next iMac, especially given the radical look of the Mac Pro 2019. But we’ll need to wait at least a few months before the Cupertino crew takes the covers off the iMac 2020.
