programmer

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.

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.

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.