ecarlseen

Can everyone quit slagging the guy for not having sufficient backup? Should he have had it? Definitely. But there's absolutely, positively zero excuse for vendors like Adobe (and Microsoft last month with the Windows 10 update) playing so absurdly fast and loose with customer data. These software vendors are forcing their customers into far more expensive subscription pricing models in a vain attempt to maintain revenue growth and correspondingly high stock prices for just a little bit longer, which is sketchy enough, but they're also getting much worse at quality control in the process, which is flat-out evil. Adobe has been one of the worst custodians of IT quality and security in the history of computing with their egregiously and shamelessly poor stewardship of the Flash plugin. Microsoft infamously fired most of their QA personnel a few years ago in order to foist that work onto their "insider" fan base, which has made their extremely poor reputation in that are decline even further. Yes, users do stupid things, but in cases like this we need to focus hard on the deeply evil neglect that certain software vendors have had for our data as well.

blastdoor said:

ecarlseen said:

I'm happy that Apple is still addressing the pro market, but it's unfortunate they missed so badly using Intel Xeon CPUs instead of AMD Epyc CPUs for this generation. The additional cores and PCIe bandwidth would be massively useful, especially if they could shave some serious money off the price at the same time.

Yeah, Rome is looking pretty good, and maybe that would have been better. 

But, I can think of three reasons why the path they chose might be ok:

1. AVX 512 --- the AltiVec of our day. Xeon has it, Epyc doesn't. 
2. AMD is historically an unreliable supplier on the CPU side of things
3. Intel has already announced that Cascade Lake Xeon Ws will be much cheaper than their Skylake predecessors. That could mitigate the Epyc price advantage. 

"Pretty good" is a bit of an understatement. Epyc Rome thrashes Xeon Cascade Lake more badly than Apple's A-series CPUs beat Qualcomm's Snapdragon. It's all just flat-out annihilation with the exception of single-threaded loads on low core-count CPUs, where Intel maintains a very slight edge. On the top end, Epyc's multi-core performance is about 260% of Skylake at less than half the price. I don't expect this to change until 2022 unless Intel gets incredibly lucky. Their 10nm performance is still utter crap - stuff coming off the line right now is slower than 14nm unless they bump the TDP, and who wants to use more power for the same speed? Intel is still excellent at core and uncore design, but they can't manufacture at a competitive level so it doesn't matter. Ultimately, this is a leadership issue. AMD has a fairly brilliant engineer (Lisa Su) running things, and Intel has been trying to cost-cut itself to death (turns out that dumping engineering resources while bringing up 10nm cost them several orders of magnitude more that it "saved"). Anyway, if early-silicon Ice Lake vs. early-silicon Milan is anything to go by, it only gets worse in the near term. Much, much worse.

AVX512 is a distinct advantage in single-threaded loads (and how many of those are there for AVX512?), but I don't think it overcomes the massive overall performance differential (assuming one doesn't dump those loads to a GPU anyway). 

With regards to reliability - AMD had their shot back in that Athlon64 / Opteron days and promptly fumbled the opportunity because they couldn't match Intel in IPC or performance-per-watt. Both of these issues have been overcome with Rome. AMD's Naples was a solid performer for the money (I bought a few of their servers to play with), Rome is awesome, and Milan is looking great. In the meantime, Intel has basically screwed things up fairly consistently for the past seven years (14nm was a mess and 10nm is  still deeply problematic unless magic happens). Furthermore, AMD gambled heavily on their "chiplet" solution for scaling core count in a single package and it payed off perfectly. Intel doesn't have anything to compete with that in the near term, and even if they started their own project in the last year or two then they're still likely looking at a 2022 shipment timeframe (in line with when they expect 7nm to start volume production, assuming all goes well).

Intel will have to cut Cascade Lake prices to stay in the game, but it doesn't matter because except in a very few edge cases the performance will not be close. The 56-core Cascade Lake part is a joke - it requires water cooling, offers only one DIMM per channel, and nobody other than Intel is even bothering to make motherboards for it. AMD's 64-core Rome beats it soundly with air cooling, a full load of memory, massively more PCIe bandwidth, and for far less money. Even if Intel matches the price, they can't do anything about the performance (or lack thereof). 

The only reason I can see for Apple to stay with Xeon for their Mac Pros is if macOS so heavily optimized for Intel's architecture that adjusting for AMD's Zen2 / Zen3 cores is too problematic to be worth the effort. AMD still isn't terribly competitive in the mobile / laptop space, which is where Apple sells most of their Intel-based machines (although there are some interesting APU possibilities there).

Ultimately, I don't care whether Intel or AMD supplies the CPUs - I just need some serious performance bumps. We've been treading water in the industry for over half a decade now, and it's getting very stale. 

Terrible analogies here. 

Apple's software quality has been noticeably on the decline for many years now. They're well still ahead of their main competition (Google and Microsoft), but this may or may not last. It seems to have gotten worse around the time that they started doing public betas - I'm wondering if in-house testing was scaled down in conjunction with that.

I'm happy that Apple is still addressing the pro market, but it's unfortunate they missed so badly using Intel Xeon CPUs instead of AMD Epyc CPUs for this generation. The additional cores and PCIe bandwidth would be massively useful, especially if they could shave some serious money off the price at the same time.

I've thought for some time now that the day that Apple purchased Beats and seriously delved into the content industry will go down as the day Apple lost its soul. The iPhone Music app fine for using Apple Music streaming, but it seems to want to fight you over managing and using your own music. At that point, it's not longer an iPhone - it's an Apple Phone. The "i" is ... maybe not gone, but it's being shown the door. The trend isn't just limited to the Music app. The iPhone (and Apple Watch) seem to want to decide what I want to do at any given moment, and they do a very poor job of it. Sadly, as the hardware begins to mature and no longer sustains aggressive update cycles (as happens in any industry), expect this to get much, much worse. Hopefully Apple finds their way back at some point, or at least stops trying to ram this down our throats Microsoft-style.

Notsofast said:

It's long past time for Apple to offer home security cameras for Doorbells, etc.  I know Apple doesn't want to scare aware companies by introducing competing products, but home security is just too important to leave it in the hands of Amazon, Google and the rest of the field, especially as their offerings are not only excluding HomeKit, but they are buggy, poor overall quality, and about as ugly as you can get in terms of design.  

Ah, the irony of making a video describing how to manage Google's problematic privacy options... and hosting it on YouTube.

Available... unless your cellular services is through a business account and it's impossible to complete their carrier validation process (which it should let me skip because I'm just buying the phones outright). I guess Apple doesn't want our business.

Interesting. Roland recently snapped up Beats competitor V-MODA (who arguably has a much better product). I guess no hard feelings...