tht

Apple has reports on the carbon emissions of all their products. For the carbon neutral Apple Watch Ultra 2, this is from its environmental footprint report:



So, for every Apple Watch Ultra 2, with the Alpine Loop, Apple is "removing" 12 kg of CO2 (Trail Loop is 11 kg) from the atmosphere by restoring and maintaining forests: "Located in Brazil and Paraguay, Apple’s three initial investments with Conservation International and Goldman Sachs aim to restore 150,000 acres of sustainably certified working forests and protect an additional 100,000 acres of native forests, grasslands, and wetlands. Together, these projects are forecast to remove 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year by 2025."

80% of the carbon neutral claim, versus the baseline of just using existing processes, is done simply by sourcing renewable/clean energy for the manufacturing of the product. Another 10% is nicked at by recycling and using boats instead of airplanes for transportation. The last 10% is done with carbon offsets.

The biggest inherent risk with what Apple is doing with forests, wetlands, etc, in Brazil, Paraguay, and I think they said Kenya (?) is that governments change. A new government in Brazil could simply change laws and burn down these areas. They will literally need to have rangers patrolling and possibly killing farmers who want to burn it down. So, there is an inherent level of trust in the permanency of these areas when using carbon credits, which is typically a bad idea. Also, there is no such thing as permanency with global warming. These areas have to be selected to survive the rigors of global warming. Those areas may become too hot and dry to sustain a forest, etc.

The carbon credit needs to last about 50, maybe 100, years. So, not permanent per se, just long enough. By 50 years, direct air capture will be mature, or other processes for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, so these types of carbon credit systems will fade away in favor of more deterministic methods. 

flyway said:

GPUs such as the AMD Radeon Pro 5500M use GDDR6 and the 5600M uses HBM2 in the 16" MacBook Pro.
Is DDR5 mainly for the CPU and how does it compare to GDDR6 and HBM2?

It depends on how many channels of each memory.

2 channels of DDR4: 50 GB/s
2 channels of DDR5: 100 GB/s
2 channels of GDDR6: 250 GB/s
2 channels of HBM2: 1000 GB/s

DDR5 is for system or main memory for PCs, servers and such, but it usually comes down to cost. If HBM was cheap, there would be systems using it for main memory, but it is two expensive to be used as system memory for a regular PC. It will be interesting if Apple uses it as main memory for high end Apple Silicon Macs though. I'm almost half expecting it.

There are latency differences that can sway usage of one type of RAM over the other depending on primary application as well.

cogitodexter said:

waveparticle said:

cogitodexter said:

Serious question:

What does an Intel Core i9 do that requires it to be as power inefficient in the same processing circumstances as an AS M1 Max?

Presumably there's a reason why it draws so much more current to achieve the same ends? Are there features in it that are not replicated in the M1 Max? 

I'm assuming the architecture is radically different, but what stops Intel from changing to that architecture?

Power is consumed when a transistor switch from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. Switching is controlled by clock cycles. The more switching the more power is consumed. 

Well, that is presumably a given. And possibly at a slightly lower level than I was alluding to. More specifically, is there some set of processing or overall design feature that Intel does wrong? Or does it do more 'stuff' that the M1 doesn't do? Is it required to support legacy ways of doing stuff that the M1 is free from? 

It basically all comes down to economics. There's a lot of hoo-ha about instruction set architecture (RISC vs CISC), but it's not a big deal imo. It comes down to the economics of how many transistors you can have in a chip, what power budgets the OEM is willing to design for, and whether it is profitable in the end.

First and foremost, Intel's fabrication technology - how small they can make the transistors - was effectively broken for close to 4 years. 2 CEOs and executive teams were sacked because of this. The smaller the transistors, the more transistors you can put in a chip and the less power it will take to power them. Intel was the pre-eminent manufacturer of computer chips for the better part of 40 years, with 75 to 80% marketshare for most of those years. It takes a lot of mistakes for them to lose their fab lead.

Two things enabled TSMC, Apple's chip manufacturer, to catch and lap Intel in terms of how small a transistor they could make. The smartphone market became the biggest chip market, both in terms of units and money. It's bigger than PCs and servers. This allowed TSMC to make money, a lot of it Apple fronted, and invest in making smaller and smaller transistors. The other thing was Intel fucked up, on both ends. They decided not to get into the smartphone market (they tried when it became obvious, but failed). They then made certain decisions about the design of their 10nm fab that ended up not working and hence a 4 year delay, allowing TSMC to lap them. Even Samsung caught up and lapped them a little.

More transistors mean more performance. Apple's chips have a lot more transistors than Intel's, probably by a factor of 2. If you aren't economical to have a lot of transistors, you can increase performance by having higher clock rates. High clock rates mean it will take more power to run. It's not a linear relationship. It's an exponential increase in power consumption. So, Apple's chips have transistors that are about 2x smaller than Intel's, there are more of them, and consequently can design their chips to run at relatively lower clock rates, and consuming less power.

Intel can theoretically design chips with the same number of transistors as Apple, but the chips will be 2x as large. They will not be profitable doing this. Well, it's really, they will not enjoy their traditional 60% margins if they do it this way, ie, not profitable "enough". So smallish chips with higher power consumption is their way. Apple hates high power consumption chips, and they do it the opposite way (big chips lower power consumption), and you end up with an M1 Pro having about the same performance as an Alder Lake i9-12900H, but with the M1 Pro needing 30 W and the i9 need 80 to 110 W. And Apple has a 2x to 3x more performant on-chip GPU than Intel has. They can not do this if TSMC didn't become the leader in chip manufacturing.

Intel has plans to regain the fab lead, be able to fab the smallest transistors, but we will see about that. They might, or not.

blastdoor said:

tht said:

Apple is certainly taking their time on this. It was a strategic error to discontinue a branded Apple monitor+dock. They should have shipped an Apple Thunderbolt 5K display in 2018. They really should have done it in 2016, but I digress. 

I can understand the wait for XDR miniLED versions, but a 27" 5K monitor, sourced straight from the iMac, should have been shipping 2 years ago.

Would love to hear how their product marketing and finance folks made all these decisions. Better be a book. It would be a horror book, but those are fun to read too. Maybe it was a bargaining chip with LG for monitor development?

I’d say tactical marketing error rather than strategic error, but otherwise I agree.

An apple branded monitor is a marketing tool. Marketing-wise it’s nuts to have Mac users staring at a Dell logo all day. If they’re going to do that, then might as well put “intel inside” stickers on Macs too.

Who knows what the difference between tactics and strategy are here, but Apple left billions of revenue off the table by discontinuing monitors.  A typical desktop setup in modern times, and I'm going back about 10 years here, is to have a laptop with an external monitor or two connected to it. When the 4th gen Macbook Pros came out in 2016, it should have been when this type of setup is mature, no dock dongle needed as it would have been in the monitor. Plug in the TB cable, everything is lit up, plug-n-play, and theoretically more "reliable" if it came from Apple. This is more or less how it works with my LG UF27, except that it only has 3 USBC in back. It could have Ethernet, SD card, the usual.

Apple sells about 20+ million Macs per year that could use an external monitor. With a take-up rate of 5% for a $1000 Apple monitor, 1m units per year, that's $1b per year in monitor sales alone. That's huge! Wasn't thinking about branding purposes at all.

The A16 Bionic had been rumored to be being developed on the 4nm process but was released on the 5nm process. This change seems to corroborate The Information's story, though it was only a rumor.

Apple touts that A16 Bionic is fabbed on TSMC 4nm. This sentence would make more sense if you used TSMC 3nm.

A full node change is essentially the Moore's law doubling of transistors, give or take. Chip vendors would typically have to change their designs to adapt to the new node, such as going from TSMC 5nm to 3nm. With half node changes, they can typically keep the design rules for 5nm, but enjoy something like a 10 to 20% increase in transistor count, 5 to 15% power reduction, or some combination. I suppose TSMC 4nm can be considered an enhanced TSMC 5nm, with better transistor density, but just call it TSMC 4nm.

Calling it 5nm makes it sound like there isn't improvement, and that's factually incorrect. It's a half node improvement that TSMC has done for basically a decade now.

If in 2021, Apple was expecting TSMC 3nm to be in mass production by summer of 2022, which would be in time for fall iPhone shipments, they would have designed a chip given TSMC 3nm capabilities, like hardware ray tracing features. Once TSMC and Apple saw that 3nm was going to make it on time, and they would have figured it out in 2021, they would fallback to the half node step, TSMC 4nm, and get the typical half node improvements, like 10 to 15% performance, 10 to 15% less power, some combination.

Strategically, I kind of think the Jade C die (M1 Max), Jade C chop (M1 Pro), Jade 2C (M1 Ultra), and the failed Jade 4C was a mistake. It didn't scale in the manner that buyers wanted. The M1 Max and on down appear fine. The M1 Ultra and on up? There have been issues. Apple's designed itself into a box that can't get them to ship higher end machines. That's a bigger issue than TSMC being late.

tophatnosocks said:

Masimo already won the patten case, correct?  Just Apple contesting in court the outcome...

So ya getting Apple to pay up is next, but this Kiani guy thinking that, that also entitles him to "change its interactions with smaller companies." of Apple, is really a joke. 

I get that they 'Apple' should, but that's not what his win in court was.   It really makes me laugh at this Kiani guy.  He's acting like some kind of police, and don't forget Masimo is an almost two billion dollar company. They hosed people somewhere.  

The Masimo vs Apple patent and trade secrets case ended in a mistrial, where the jury voted 6-1 in favor of Apple. Mistrial means no action from the Court I believe. Masimo is appealing. 

A variation of this article shows up virtually every time prior to an iPhone press event. It used to happen like clock work come September. New iPhone is running into this or that production problem, and could be delayed, everyone should panic. It's like a template and they just replace the names. Then, there is a tail end production rumor article sometime in January where they say Apple has cut production of iPhones by 50%, everyone should panic.

It's the nature of any complex mass production endeavor. Problems arise. People work to get them fixed. Maybe they will make it on time, maybe they will be 4 weeks late. That type of delay is of minor consequence. Missing the holiday shopping season is a big mistake, but quite doubtful to happen. It's not like Apple has not been doing this for 40+ years, and have been doing this at a worldwide supply chain, worldwide mass production scale for the past 10 years.

The timelines in the article doesn't make sense to me. I would think pilot production (small scale production) was done in July. So perhaps the reports of problems is really older than stated. The point of pilot production is to find the problems with assembly before mass production starts, fix them, and move on to mass production. So, finding problems in pilot production is like "no shit!". They work around the clock for every product to get them out the door.

knowitall said:

tht said:

knowitall said:

Very interesting, nice info.
Is Gassee former Apple?

JLG is indeed ex-Apple, in the late 80s and early 90s, but he doesnotknowitall, knowitall. He doesn’t have any real sources inside Apple nor its supply chain, and is just shooting the breeze here.

I thought so, but thanks for the confirmation.
I have seen him at an Apple session in Amsterdam.
I know its someone with software expertise, one of the best I think.

JLG has pretty storied history vis a vis Apple. He was the guy that guided the features of Apple Macs post Steve Jobs starting in 1985. The Mac II, IIci, IIfx, all that Mac hardware of that era, etc, were his babies. He left Apple to form Be, Inc and push super threaded BeOS in 90s, which was the OS Apple was going to buy before deciding on NeXTSTEP. They thought they had Apple by the huevos and was pushing for a higher buyout, but Apple bought NeXT instead.

After that, he tried to push BeOS as an alternative PC operating system. Obviously that failed as you have to have MS Office to be successful as a PC operating system, or be free like Linux or Unix is. Tried their hand at being an Internet Appliance operating system after that, obviously failed. After that, Palm bought them out and BeOS tech was going to be in the next gen PalmOS, but they could never pull legacy PalmOS apps along, and was never able to get any OEMs to license PalmOS Cobalt. I’m guessing Rubenstein didn’t like it because Palm didn’t use it for webOS. It died inside Palm, or maybe I should say lies dormant in the Chinese company that bought Palm, Access. 

tmay said:

DAalseth said:

lkrupp said:

DAalseth said:

lkrupp said:

And if the climate change radicals get their way this is the future for the U.S. Learn to live one or two days a week without power... to save the planet of course.

No. 

Thats a completely clueless comment. 

Yeah, and how is it clueless? Energy needs are growing exponentially, not shrinking. Climate radicals insist that wind and solar will fill the need. No need for hydrocarbons or nuclear. Abject nonsense. My oldest son is director of engineering at a company deep in the power industry. He was part of the team that designed and built a solar power plant in the Mojave desert that uses liquid sodium to store energy. When he tells me hydrocarbons and nuclear will be around for a very long time I believe him. Solar and wind will never be able to provide a stable base load supply of electricity. The energy density of hydrocarbons far surpasses that of solar and wind. Add to that the problem of storing the energy produced by sources that are not 24/7/365 available.  

The climate radicals won’t accept that fact. So yes, if they have their way, energy production will not be able to keep up with demand. If they get their way. Hoping for more rational minds to prevail. 

It is clueless because you obviously know nothing about the subject. Do you ever wonder WHY it’s so hard to move over to renewables? Because the industry and those of us dealing with the issue are working very hard to NOT cause precisely the problems you so blithely say we want. Heck it would be simple to just turn off the power plants and let everyone sit in the dark and cold. But we’ve been struggling for decades to prevent exactly that outcome. As far as hydrocarbons being more energy dense, well that’s true. That’s why we are working so hard to advance alternatives that won’t kill the environment, and as a result billions of people. Moving off of fossil fuels is an absolute necessity. It’s just a matter of how. It’s not something we can wait another hundred years to figure out. We’re already fifty years too late to start.

At one time whale oil was the fuel of choice. We transitioned to something better. When that happened there were howls of protest from people that said it would never work. But after a few years the transition was over and things got better. We are going through such a transition now. There are howls of protest and people insisting that it won’t work. They are simply wrong. We can’t afford to not make this change.

Hydrogen, generated via solar energy is a magic bullet for replacement of fossil fuels. It also allows decentralized power production and energy storage which improved the resilience  ot the power grid. 

Still, the easiest solution is to improve our power grid, making it more efficient and robust, so that excess energy generated in the Southwest can be cheaply distributed through the grid.

Yes, the grid needs to be updated to be like the Internet: distributed, adaptable, robust. It should be capable of rerouting power around a failed distribution point, make up for lost power from generators that trip offline, stop little power failures from cascading into big ones. It will take a 1950s style big engineering program like building the interstate highway system. There is considerable inertia against doing this in the USA as it's hard to break down the entrenched, incumbent fiefdoms of the public utility energy companies and state governments. They want to survive after all, so it is unlikely anything will be done. It will have to happen in a manner that doesn't arise from public policy.

Ultimately, a good chunk of residences, business, and places will have enough renewables+storage to become grid independent. It's going to be a vicious cycle for the power companies. It's going to get weird. Like, $100/mo charges just to be connected to the grid. The politics are going to be brutal. I'm a house battery away from being grid independent. With a bidirectional EV, it would be a no-brainer.

I think hydrogen isn't going to make it. It has lost a big use case with cars. Where it can fit in will be interesting to see. Air-to-gas will be available to make jet fuel. Methane (basically natural gas, propane) made from air-to-gas processes can be used for backup or peak electricity generation, but I don't see how that is cheaper than batteries will be. For colder places, backup gas storage used for heating could be a thing, but these places should use geothermal.

It’s amazing that Gore has been on the board since 2003! Joined the board when he was 55. It’s been a very quick 20 years and he experienced Apple’s growth rocket. 

That was a good hire imo. Having a stereotypical CEO from another company, or a person whose job is “board member”, is too staid. With Gore, he brought some different perspectives.