programmer

timmillea said:

5nM/3nM = 1.6 recurring, suggesting a move from the 5nM process to the 3nM process would yield a 67% improvement in speed/power ratio. We are not seeing that.

 

LOL... that's not how this works.  Never has, never will.  For starters, the process number represents the linear dimension of the smallest feature that the process can create.  It does not apply to everything on the chip, plus it is a single dimension whereas chips are 2-dimensional.  In theory that means that this shrink ought to allow 2.8x as many devices in the chip (i.e. the number of transistors that is often quoted).  But chips are far more than just transistors, and indeed Apple's numbers mention "only" a 37% increase in transistor count (M2Max -> M3Max).  And the number of transistors does not linearly relate to performance either -- the reality is far more complex and nuanced.  Furthermore, performance is vastly more complex than just one number -- there are a mind blowing number of factors, and greatly depends on what software you need to run.  A benchmark gives only a vague snapshot of a computer's capability, unless what you plan to use it for is running that specific benchmark algorithm (which is virtually never the case).  Performance is a vast and complex topic, so thinking you can related it to the process number is simply naive.

As for waiting for a particular process tech, that doesn't make much sense.  The continual steady onward march of process tech ended over a decade ago, and now transitions happen with more fits and starts.  They are enormously expensive, and bring diminishing returns or additional problems.  Predicting what is going happen next year is difficult enough, further projections are worthless at this point.

Your M1-based Mac ought to do you well for years.  When it makes sense to upgrade should depend on when it stops doing what you need, or when Apple starts shipping a machine which has a new capability that you need.  This has very little to do with the process technologies being used to create it.

DoubleJac said:

in the report that claimed Apple bought all of TSMC‘s 3 nm, there’s nothing about it all being for the A17 Pro. that includes the link in the article.

The animation of the Apple and the Mac Finder face logos heavily imply hardware ray tracing coming to the Mac. Also remember, the M1 Pro was “scary fast” and the M1 Max was “scary faster” in 2021.

I was going to say the same thing about 3nm capacity.  Whether the logo says anything about anything other than Apple’s art department, we shall see.  And most of their chip announcements have been fancy pre-recorded videos anyhow, so another shouldn’t be a surprise.  

Well this fits with Apple pausing M-series chip production.

It is a common refrain that a platform vendor ought to become a "top rated game vendor" in order to turn their platform into a top games platform.  Nintendo, Sega, 3DO, Sony, Microsoft (XBox), and many more have all tried that.  It does not guarantee success, and it is a wildly expensive undertaking which distracts the platform vendor from its core competency -- being a platform vendor.  The best companies for delivering games to a platform are the game companies whose primary focus is delivery great games in order to turn a profit.  Those companies can be motivated to port to a platform by making that platform easy to port to, and by supplying money to subsidize the porting efforts.  Buying game studios to do such ports creates a very strange business situation which is hard for a public company (like Apple) to manage -- they can't drop the support for existing profitable platforms without destroying the business they bought, but if they don't then they're undermining their platform.  This is not a path I would want to see Apple take.

Apple is a very good platform company, if they chose to, they could leverage that to make their platforms much lower barrier-to-entry for developers than they currently do.  They could even enable the existing catalog on PC to run on their platforms without changes to the games.  Suddenly being able to run most of the PC game catalog on the Mac would immediately make the Mac more interesting to average gamers (you won't capture the high end gamers this way because there will always be a performance penalty for doing this), but that's where Apple could start making porting easier and subsidized (for key titles).  Apple needs to focus on removing barriers in the way of gamers and game developers.  Rather than trying to push the game market piecemeal onto their platform, get out of the way and let it move there on its own.

It seems like PCI-E gets besmirched a lot, and this isn't fair to the standard.  Firstly, it is the most widely used standard, which is a huge advantage for Apple.  The days of proprietary bus standards by Apple are decades past.  Second, PCI-E 5.0 is very fast -- 64GB/sec on 16 lanes, or 128GB/sec on 32 lanes (if doing large transfers... which can be the case if operating at the memory page level, instead of the cacheline or smaller level).  The original M1 only had approximately that much bandwidth to its in-package memory!  This is much faster than even the fastest data centre networks, which currently top out at around 12.5 GB/sec.  eGPUs work pretty well even at only 5GB/sec.  Third, multiple vendors build PCI-E bridge/switch chips, and PCI-E supports quite complex topologies so interesting "networks" can be built inside a single chassis (or even between chassis given that Thunderbolt is basically PCI-E over a cable).

If Apple did come up with its own proprietary interconnect, the only chips that would use it would be ASi and that would greatly limit its utility.  And very likely only the Mac Pro would use it because the rest of the lineup is doing quite well with a single large SoC.  While its not impossible that they could license another interconnect and use someone else's GPU (i.e. AMD), that undermines the perception of their competitiveness in the GPU space.  We've only seen their first attempt at a desktop GPU (the M2 isn't particularly different than the M1, it is mostly just an improved process and scaled up a bit), and I'm sure they're working on another significant step forward.