melgross

mcdave said:

melgross said:

1,000 years from now, when our personal assistant will be hovering right near us talking directly to our brain, she will be eagerly awaiting her next upgrade.

Surely you mean 50 years from now, when our personal assistant is us.

She’ll be looking for a more interesting peripheral.

We won’t see that kind of advance in 50 years. AI has turned out to be much more difficult than thought. Back in the early ‘50’s, it was believed, by scientists working on it, that human-like intelligence would be accomplished in a few years. Here we are, almost 70 years later, and we’re not much further along.

besides, hovering without noisy and fuel inefficient power sources is something we may never get. Hence, 1,000 years.

StrangeDays said:

cloudguy said:

tmay said:

cloudguy said:

A14 is only hexacore. Strange. Was certain that it was going to be octa-core. Hexacore is good enough to replace the i3 and i5 in the Mac Mini and MacBook Air, but for MacBook Pro and iMac they are going to need an octacore design at minimum.

CloudDude, the A series SOC isn't going to be used in any production Mac, so you can stop clutching your pearls.

I have read in various places that it was. Some have said that it would not be, but more places have stated that it would be than would not. Do you have a link? Thanks.

Nobody has a link to prove it, but common sense says they aren't going to use their iPad SOC in their brand new desktop offerings. Come on, now.

Yes, there are links to prove it, just as one can go and watch the June developer’s conference. Here’s a link from Apple’s site, and then the part about the new chips that I copied out of it.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-transition-to-apple-silicon/

StrangeDays said:

mike1 said:

StrangeDays said:

elijahg said:

mike1 said:

A little disappointed that the blood oxygen monitor can't be activated in earlier models as was rumored.

If they did that there'd be nothing new in the new models, it is disappointing though I agree.

It's disappointing they can't go back in time and add new hardware sensors to older models lacking those sensors? I really have to scratch my head at what disappoints people sometimes...

Well, that's obvious. However, there was talk that the sensors were already built in but that they could not offer that feature yet. That's all.

Of course, there would be no disappointment, even minimal, if it was always known that that the capability required new sensors.

There are rumors about anything and everything...but everything we know about sensors indicates new sensing abilities require new sensor hardware to do the sensing. It's only sensible. 😎

It’s been said that blood pressure can use the same sensor as heart rate, with new software. Possibly, the software is difficult.

anantksundaram said:

Did it sound like the aluminum is their top model!? I.e., no stainless steel, etc.?

No, at their site the SS and titanium models are shown. I just ordered a series 6 in black SS (again). But now the black costs the same as the silver and gold finishes. I looked for a while to see if it mentioned the previous carbon diamond finish, but couldn’t find anything about that.  It just said that the case is “durable”. I guess I’ll just have to find out when it comes.

GG1 said:

melgross said:

tht said:

melgross said:

The latest Nvidia GPUs have over 25 billion transistors, and an energy budget to support that. There is simply no way Apple can even begin to approach that. It takes Nvidia’s highest GPU boards to enable ray tracing in a useful way. Remember we’re talking not about ray trace in static imagery, but in dynamically rendered images at a rate of at least 60fps. That’s real time tracing. It’s in addition to every other graphic demand, such as real time physics, dynamic texture generation, hidden image elimination, etc. these all require very large amounts of graphics RAM additionally.

The A12Z on TSMC N7 has 10 billion transistors on a 120 mm^2 die. This is for a fanless tablet. I definitely see them hitting 20 to 30 billion transistors on TSMC N5 for the Mac SoCs. A notional A14X for an iPad Pro could be 15 billion transistors just based on the new fab alone. A Mac SoC for an iMac can easily be 2x that at around 30 billion.

Transistor budgets of over 25 billion are not that daunting for Apple Silicon. It's the power budgets that are. They just aren't going to run any of their SoCs at over 150 Watts, and I'd bet they want 100 W or lower. That will be self-limiting, so performance probably won't match these 300 W dGPUs or 200 W CPUs on average.

I expect them to be at parity or possibly more performant than dGPUs at each Watt class though. The fab advantage will give them about 30% perf/W advantage. The density advantage is going to be about 100%. They have so many transistors to play with on TSMC N5 that you wonder if they are willing use it all.

melgross said:

but none of us know what Apple’s plans really are. We can speculate, but that’s about it. And Apple has told us the basics during the June conference. In fact, they told us more than I expected. I listened very closely. I looked at their charts. We don’t see a separate GPU. At least not for the recognizable future. I suspect that we’ll se an SoC that competes with Intel very well in the beginning, likely exceeding performance at the level of Apple’s similar machines previously. I don’t expect to see overwhelming GPU performance. I would to see performance of a lower level separate GPU.

‘’anything that exceeds that would thrill me.

Yes. Apple has a chance to do something different than the packaging and designs afforded to them with components from Intel and AMD. It could be a monolithic SoC. It could be chiplets. It could be stacks of chiplets. They could use HBM or GDDR or whatever custom memory solution used commodity DRAM. It's going to be interesting to say the least. 

I just have to disagree. Apple has been pretty clear that these Macs would use less power and, according to the chart they showed, have equal performance. But they didnt say which Macs they were talking about. There is no way Apple is going to make that leap in the next year. Maybe, over time, if they are willing to make a much larger chip, and Nvidia’s chips are very large indeed, they can do it. But then, the efficiency and power draw will be seventy comoromised. And you’re forgetting, I suppose that thatb25 billion transistores is just for the GPU. Apple has to. Contend with an entire SoC. It’s not going to happen.

I really don’t care how efficient ARM instructions are, or how good Apple’s engineering is. There are physical laws that everyone has to follow, and it’s not likely that Apple is special here. Not only is Apple nor go8ng to run over 150 watts, likely they don’t want to run much over 20 watts. There’s only so much they can do.

It is these technical discussions such as yours (Melgross, Tht, and a few others) that really gets me excited in ASi. Kudos to you both. Very enjoyable reads!

I hope that people don’t take what I say the wrong way. I do believe that Apple’s SoCs are going to be great. But we do have to remember that the reason for them has been AMD and Intel’s refusal to compromise backwards comparability. There is an awful lot of “wasted” real estate on those chips devoted to ancient 16 bit software, and the newer 32 bit software. If they took the step to get rid of the 16 bit support, as they finally did with the really obsolete 8 bits a number of years ago, it would free up space and power to be used for a more modern 64 bit chip.

but Microsoft still supports Windows 32, and even older 16 bit software. Until they’re forced to organizations and government will stubbornly hold on to their old code, and not spend the money for modern software. That’s one advantage Apple has. They don’t have all of those customers to worry about, though, in recent years, they are getting further into that area, but with modern code.

people do have to understand that there’s nothing Apple is doing that anyone else can’t also do, if they want to. We’re seeing ARM chips for the server space, and the worlds biggest supercomputer is now comprised of ARM chips. So it can be done. Qualcomm is interested in contesting the space. If Apple is successful, then we will see others follow. Windows depends on a chip,that’s much better than what’s available to them now, and Microsoft knows it, which is why they’ve partnered with Qualcomm to develop one. Apple needs to look over its shoulder and not become complacent.