There seems be a misunderstanding making its way around the web...

octa-core neural engine for machine intelligence functions that can run a trillion operations per second

That's from the Wired article and I've read it elsewhere... This is false. The Neural Engine in the A12 performs 5 trillion ops. The NE in the A13 has a 20% performance increase over that; 6 trillion.

The "trillion operations per second" figure being regurgitated over and over is the performance of the CPU with its new ML accelerators.


Update: The Wired articles was updated...

octa-core neural engine for machine intelligence functions that can run over five trillion operations per second

This guy!!! 

Zuckerberg: Apple's ad-tracking block will impair COVID-19 my economic recovery

There. Fixed!

Technically speaking, they are not actually using Face ID, they're using the True Depth camera system with ARKit to capture depth and facial landmark location data. Face ID is the iPhone's security authorization API, which also uses the True Depth camera for facial recognition.

tylersdad said:

This still makes no sense at all. There is no reason why Apple can't support their native SDK (Metal) and OpenGL. Microsoft has been doing this for decades with DirectX.

The majority of game developers won't bother with creating Metal versions of their rendering engines. There won't be enough customers to justify it.

Two things...

First, Apple hasn't updated OpenGL for a while now. Probably when they starting pushing Metal. So the OpenGL implementation included with iOS and macOS are fairly old, I think it's at 2.1, while the latest is 4.6. So there really is only a limited amount of "cross platform" compatibility for developers.

Second, the entire industry is moving away from OpenGL. There is now a Khronos project, Vulkan, that is meant to replace OpenGL and OpenGL ES. And there is a version that "runs" on top of Apple's Metal called MoltenVk, so if developers must have cross platform compatibility, then they can move to it, instead of Metal.

christopher126 said:

I like it..Apple has a flair for things like this.

Apple's manufacturing plant in Fremont, CA used to a giant rainbow Apple logo on the roof - only visible from an airplane flying over.

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

This is not about choice. It is about control. Facebook wants to control the ads you see. Apple wants to control the apps you use.

Yeah, not so much. Apple doesn't want to control what apps people use, they want to control what developers can and can't do on their platform. And there are several reasons for that...

1. Device security
2. User privacy
3. Platform advancement/stability
4. User experience

As a user, I am free to download Apple's Developer tools and write ANY app I want and run it on my devices and I am free to distribute that code to anyone else I want and they can compile it and run it on their own devices. All Apple "controls" is my ability to upload that app and distribute it via the App Store.

crowley said:

If Rosetta is generating a translation of x86 apps on install, does that mean the storage for those apps is going to balloon (until they get recompiled, obvs)?

Barely... binary code is usually a fraction of the actual size of an app. Most space is taken up by resources (images, videos, etc.), not code.

chadbag said:

sflocal said:

This is human stupidity at its finest.  The selfish, moronic, conspiracy-loving anti-vaxxers are putting people's live at risk.  They are just too stupid and ignorant to accept it.  I'm all for personal choice and keeping the government out of my body, but what's it going to take to get these people to understand that COVID is here to stay until they get vaccinated?! 

One can only hope that Darwin will take care of things, but even then... that's years down the road.

The vaccine does not stop you from spreading or getting covid.  It does lessen the effects if you get it.  So I fail to see how someone  who has concerns about the covid vaccines and is not vaccinated is any more at fault for the spread.  

Repeat:  The vaccine does not prevent the spread of covid.  It does lessen symptoms once you get it.  

 (Yes I am vaccinated). 

The chances of spreading the virus and getting sick don't just "lessen", they drop dramatically. If the virus cannot propagate in your body, the less chance there is of you passing it along to someone else before your own immune system can catch and neutralize it. Sure there is a slight chance you could potentially pass it along, but it's rather slim - nothing is 100% effective.

1. Rosetta is not emulation, it’s translation. It translates x64 code to ARMv8 code and hooks that translated code into native APIs. It cannot be used to emulate an x86 system.

2. At no point did Apple say they would disallow any kind of emulation.

3. It won’t be too long before someone develops an actual x86 hardware emulator. (See qemu.org) It is obviously something that will eventually be needed by many users.

entropys said:

The RAM is separate to the SOC? Interesting.

Yes and no. The actual logic is separate from the RAM, but they are both in the same SoC package. All the photos we have seen clearly showed this. I’m not sure why the article thinks “RAM is soldered to the motherboard”. The SSD sure is, but no, the RAM is part of the M1.