programmer

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programmer
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  • New Macs in 2025 rumored to get at least one major design refresh

    programmerprogrammer
    I don't want a Mac mini with a different case.  Just update the processor to an M4 Pro and/or Max, update the ports on the back, and sell it to me.  The sooner the better.  Spend the design effort where it matters more, i.e. on laptops, phones, tablets, etc.

    And for the Mac peripherals, please please please give us devices which are USB-C and can be used full time in a wired mode.  I find bluetooth problematic, and just want to plug the devices in and never worry about it again.

    watto_cobra

  • Apple working out how to use Mac in parallel with iPhone or iPad to process big jobs

    programmerprogrammer
    dewme said:

    Edit: I should have said the the staggering unused capacity is more on the client side of things. Servers are typically utilized at much higher levels than clients. On the server side too much is never enough.
    I think you'd be surprised by just how low average server utilization is, on average.

    dewmewatto_cobra

  • Apple working out how to use Mac in parallel with iPhone or iPad to process big jobs

    programmerprogrammer

    chadbag said:
    Hopefully they’re working out now to divvy stuff up so that you don’t lose efficiency to data transfer.   It sounds all nice and good to split 4K/60 renders across your various devices but that’s very data intensive work and just moving all the data wirelessly to the other device could cause you to lose the benefit.   Small data sets with complicated processing would benefit more.  
    Non-training AI workloads are often like this -- a moderately sized model (a large part of which can often be generic and shared, but fine tuned by relative low volume training data), fairly small amounts of data to be analyzed, and a whole lot of compute needed on this data.  We haven't seen commonly used distributed compute before because the workloads haven't had the necessary compute:bandwidth ratio, but now this huge wave of machine learning use has changed that, so Apple is jumping on it.
    watto_cobra

  • Apple working out how to use Mac in parallel with iPhone or iPad to process big jobs

    programmerprogrammer
    A few years ago I suggested that Apple Silicon & Mac Pro could be combined by creating an M-series chip-on-a-PCIe-board which could be inserted into a Mac Pro's chassis.  The problem with doing this is that it doesn't look (to software) like a traditional CPU/GPU/memory machine.  That is precisely what this article is about though -- how to distribute heavy computations to the available hardware.  The more computation Apple manages to offload from the local machine, the more it makes sense to have additional "headless" hardware available.  This would make the Mac Pro chassis a lot more compelling than it is currently, and the same ASi-on-PCIe boards could be deployed into servers in the cloud.

    dewmewilliamlondonmattinozwatto_cobra

  • Apple Silicon vulnerability leaks encryption keys, and can't be patched easily

    programmerprogrammer
    icekoldsole said:
    I'm not a software engineer, nor have a degree in computer science. But I consider myself a fairly intelligent individual, and from what I've read about this issue, it seems as time goes on and its exploited more, it will become easier to utilize?  I just want to know if I should be worried about buying another Mac. I've had my M1 Mac Mini since March of 2021 and in the last three months I've returned to my computer in the morning to a window saying that the computer had to shut down due to an error, and there are super long text reports that I cannot make heads or tails of, but after reading this, it didn't leave me feeling very good about using it.  Its probably a lot to ask, but if someone could break down on a scale of your choosing from "It's not that big of a deal" to "Yeah, holy crap stop using it" I'd be very appreciative. These articles about security flaws are not very easy to understand, and I just don't have the time to sit and try to decipher just exactly what I need watch for and worry about. 
    No, this shouldn’t stop you from buying a Mac.  And while the bug is in hardware, it doesn’t mean there aren’t mitigations Apple can put in place to prevent it from being exploited.  Those will undoubtedly have some performance impacts on encryption algorithms, but most software won’t be affected.  And exploiting this security flaw requires software running locally, so (as always) exercise caution about what you install on your computer.  

    Also keep in mind that while this is making big news right now, there have been lots of similar security flaws found in Intel and AMD (and other) chips… all chip vendors have these issues, and a new one might be discovered in any chip or OS tomorrow.

    It sounds like your exiting machine has a bug causing frequent crashes.  It could be something corrupted in the OS, so you may want to try reinstalling the operating system or taking it to the Apple Genius Bar for them to look at.  It could be a hardware bug, but usually such things are a bit of data in flash gone bad, or something along those lines.
    watto_cobra