programmer

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programmer
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  • 2022 iPhones, Macs could boast 3nm chips

    programmerprogrammer
    Kuyangkoh said:
    I wonder what’s next, onm chips??paper thin
    Paper is 100,000 nm thick.
    fahlmanwatto_cobra

  • Redesigned Mac Pro with up to 40 Apple Silicon cores coming in 2022

    programmerprogrammer
    Anyway... if we're not adding GPUs, then there's very limited need for PCI slots. 

    I still wish they'd allow RAM upgrades, and allowing internal SSD upgrades would also be nice. But I'm starting to feel like those things aren't critical. Thunderbolt makes a lot of external upgrades feasible (not RAM, obviously, but lots of other stuff). 
    And PCI chassis are a thing, so the relatively small fraction of users who need actual slots can get them that way without messing up Apple’s elegant designs... and chassis can be moved between machines, be left behind when you go mobile, etc.  There are lots of advantages.  

    Even RAM upgrades might be doable that way if the OS starts treating external memory more like a compressed backing store rather than the conventional address space... ie page sized accesses rather than cache lines.  And persistent memory can fit into that model too.  Such external RAM, of course, would have serious problems if connection to it were lost, but if the OS were smart it could keep only specific processes’ memory there and suspend it while disconnected.  The SoC is a new era and could well change how a lot of things work. 

    There are huge advantages to having the GPU so tightly integrated with the CPUs, and with the scale of integration possible at 5nm and below, Apple will have lots of options.  The tile-on-substrate integration schemes will allow lots of flexibility in design, as well as scaling up to rather large chips where the cost warrants it.  Exciting times ahead.
    williamlondonrobabawatto_cobraDetnator