mdriftmeyer

elijahg said:

I suspect the desktops will have a different CPU (M2? D1?) than the laptops. Presumably some iteration eventually will end up in the Mac Pro, with PCIe support, and with it PCIe GPUs. Either that or Apple will just abandon the iMac Pro and Mac Pro, I wouldn't be hugely surprised.

They abandon their pro lines they might as well stop selling Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X, because the entire creating markets will abandon them.

blastdoor said:

ph382 said:

rob53 said:

Why stop at 32 cores. 

I don't see even 32 happening for anything but the Mac Pro. I saw forum comments recently that games don't and can't use more than six cores. How much RAM (and heat) would you need to feed 32 cores?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15044/the-amd-ryzen-threadripper-3960x-and-3970x-review-24-and-32-cores-on-7nm

The 32 core Threadripper 3970x has a TDP of 280 watts on a 7nm process. It has four DDR4 3200 RAM channels.

Based on comparisons of the M1 to mobile Ryzen, I would expect an ASi 32 core SOC to have a TDP much lower than 280 watts. 

I bet a 32 core ASi SOC on a 5nm process could fit within the thermal envelope of an iMac Pro. 

It has 8 not 4 DDR 4 3200 ECC RAM Channels and those are limited by the OEMs. Zen supports 2TB of DDR4 RAM since Zen 2. And Threadripper is limited to 32 Cores presently because they haven't moved to the Zen 4 5nm process with RDNA 3.0/CDNA 2.0 based solutions that are on a unified memory plane.

Those 32 cores would be a 16/16 Big/Little and then combine their GPU and other co-processors and you have a much larger SoC or very small cores.

TR 3 arrives this January along with EPYC 3 Milan with 64/128 Cores. The next releases as Lisa Su has stated and their software ROCm has shown will be integrating Xilinx co-processors into the Zen 4/RDNA 3.0/CDNA 2.0 based solutions and beyond. 

Both AMD and Xilinx have Architecture licenses to ARM and have been designing and producing ARM processors for years. Xilinx itself has an arsenal of solutions in ARM.

32 Cores would only be in the Mac Pro. 8/8 cores in the iMac and 12/12 in the iMac Pro is pushing it.

In 2022 Jim Keller's CPU designs from Intel hit the market. The upcoming Zen architecture designs will be announced in January 2021 at the CES Virtual conference. AMD has already announced by 2025 its conservative Product sales of Hardware will be over $22 Billion. That's up from this year's just over $8 Billion.

Apple has zero interest in supporting anything beyond their Matrix of hardware options and people believing they want to be all solutions to all people don't understand and never have understood the mission statement of Apple.

A lot of the R&D in M1 is going into their IoT future products and Automobile products.

landcruiser said:

eGPU’s will go the way of the “arithmetic co-processor” eventually as technology improves. 

You tell yourself that.

If you’re going to compare the highest end New MacBook Pro with 32 core GPU and 10 Core  M1Max and 16 core Neural Engine, then compare it to the Mac Pro with Duo W6900X with Afterburner at 28 cores and 384GB DDR4 memory, at least.

Show people why Apple demonstrated a fully loaded Mac Pro w/ 1.5TB DDR4, 28 Core Xeon and peak Duo GPGPU Logic Pro on stage, or at the very least cite what a fully loaded latest offerings Mac Pro performance can do and how far the new MacBook Pro had to go to even be in the ballpark.

Studios by the Mac Pro for music production and post production never mind 3D Modeling and Engineering because that expansion will be viable for the next 7 years and pay for itself tenfold.

fred1 said:

SpamSandwich said:

Ive was the one who tended to get the credit, but Jobs was the one making all the decisions on design. Jony would follow directions to an excruciating degree, which is what Steve loved about him. If he wants to waste his time on Airbnb trash, good riddance. 

Sure, and Steve designed the glass stair (nope, the architect I.M. Pei)
and the New York Apple flagship store (nope, that was the architectural firm of Bohlin, Cywinski, and Jackson)
oh, and the new HQ (wrong again, that was the architect Lord Norman Foster).

Sure, Steve had input, but to give him all the credit for designing these is just false.  The same with saying that Jobs designed all the Apple products.  

Those projects were reflections of Steve's obsession with what he wanted for them. Form and Function. These people didn't come up with a design from scratch and Steve said, ``Almost got it.'' Sorry, but the man was obsessive compulsive about design. He would scour design books and take from here and there and then with his own ideas discuss and insist the designers and engineers find a solution that could make whatever in his head work in the end. They all made each other better. You'd be surprised what a fire someone driven can light under another person's ass, no matter how talented they are.

sflocal said:

Anything coming out of the Western (or Eastern) district of Texas should be immediately suspected as fraudulent.  It's a patent-troll's paradise and the judge that got caught "shopping" his services to patent-trolls should be removed.

Right, because VLSI wasn't one of the pioneering Silicon Valley firms who along with Acorn and Apple created ARM and so much more. Sorry, but Intel should have bought that IP long ago.

avon b7 said:

22july2013 said:

fastasleep said:

titantiger said:

fastasleep said:

titantiger said:

mike1 said:

titantiger said:

Put another way, the base Mac Mini is $699.  Pair it with a nice $300 LG 4k display (24") and an Apple keyboard and Mouse and you're only at about $1150.  Same M1 chip, same 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD.  But more ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and even the ability to swap out the screen as a bonus if you wanted to later.  Add a webcam for $100 and you're still $50 under this crippled iMac's price point.

You clearly aren't the customer for this, so please spend your money elsewhere.

But I am the customer for it.  I've owned three iMacs since 2002.  I'm not asking for something unreasonable, or even something that is in line with what Apple has offered in the past.  The entry level consumer iMac at $1299 has never involved these kinds of petty compromises.  It makes no sense in light of the specs for the Mac Mini for instance.

There's no need to get pissy about valid criticism.  These are artificial feature removals that are a step backward from what the entry level, non-education iMac has offered in the past.

Did you consider the fact that it’s an entirely new industrial design and larger screen and doesn’t use a 4200rpm hard drive or any number of other features that would make it more difficult to reach the same price point of the previous low end model with all the features of the higher specced models? It’s not uncommon for newer improved models to come out at higher prices to recoup development and component expenses and later drop as those things improve. It’s not a new thing. 

I did consider it.  The 2020 iMac 21.5 had 8GB of RAM, 256 SSD (not a spinning hard drive) and only a slightly smaller screen for $1099.  The new design is nice but not $200 nicer when you remove that many ports and can't even be bothered to include an ethernet jack on a desktop computer.  

Most people have zero use for an Ethernet jack.

When I set up my iMac in 2017 it was quicker to initially set it up with wireless to my router, and I've never bothered to use my Ethernet jack even though it's probably faster. Wireless is perfectly good even if I want to watch a movie on Apple TV+. I can't be bothered to connect my Ethernet cable to the jack behind my desk.

Wifi is only as good as the version you have and the antenna configuration residing in the devices.

Then you have to factor in walls/floors and other signal barriers and cross your fingers that interference isn't a problem. Then you have bandwidth issues to contend with.

Due to accumulation more than anything else, I have three networks running at home and over fifty devices hopping on and off the network.

It's a bit of a mess, truth be told but it works mostly reliably, and largely due to the fact that ethernet cables and an 8 port gigabit switch get my incoming fibre service into the routers and from there, into the air via WiFi.

My mesh system also makes use of PLC for the backhaul.

I also have old equipment that has ethernet but no WiFi.

Some people will get by with a purely wireless setup but there are solid reasons to actually use ethernet over WiFi when both are available. Especially when Wi-Fi starts playing up and things become more akin to voodoo.

If your ethernet ports are in good shape and your cables are good, ethernet can be rock solid.

And writing this I'm remembering networking over firewire back in the day. Wow! I'm much older than I thought. 

Ethernet is always better than wifi and like you said with the level of switch management you must have and QoS Wifi is a joke.

So glad I bought the i7 Mac Mini 2018 and added 64GB RAM on it. Extend it with and eGPU and I'm just fine for several more years so they [my old colleagues at Apple] that real workflows need more than these first steps. I'll wait until the third major SoC generation before bothering.

zimmie said:

loopless said:

HPC runs on Intel. Software vendors are slow to move in this field as it isn’t a simple recompile to run on Apple silicon. Apple would need to show a massive performance advantage…

Not so much. Fugaku, the top HPC cluster in the world, is ARM. Summit and Sierra, the number 2 and 3 clusters are POWER9. Sunway TaihuLight is a custom, decidedly-non-x86 architecture. 5 through 10 are all amd64 plus some specialized hardware (mostly Nvidia A100 cards). The fifth place system isn't even particularly close to fourth place, let alone to first. In Rmax TFLOPS:

1. Fugaku - 442,010
2. Summit - 148,600
3. Sierra - 94,640
4. TaihuLight - 93,014
5. Perlmutter - 64,590 - This is the top system with amd64 processors involved

On a percentage basis, Perlmutter is almost as far behind TaihuLight as Sierra is behind Summit, and Fugaku's lead is just as stark as it was when it was introduced in 2020.

Fugaku won't be in the top spot for very much longer.

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