mdriftmeyer

mrmacgeek said:

WTF???????

Oracle becomes a trusted partner and Oracle gets inroads into areas of Asia that it sees necessary to expand its Enterprise Services Hardware/Software solutions.

NeXT had distributed computing Frameworks since it’s NeXTStation debuted with NeXTStep 2.0. This isn’t new just updated, and no this doesn’t get easier with an ARM only ecosystem. We were fully Distributed from an agnostic set of frameworks with NS3.1. Nothing has stopped Apple being a ubiquitous distributed ecosystem since the merger of NeXT Inc with Apple Inc. We changed direction to consumer to save Apple. 

Thunderbolt royalties are $0. Intel charging for the controller chip in Thunderbolt is the expensive part. All it takes is third parties to release their on controller chip and the price will drop dramatically. That's how USB became ubiquitous. If you have a slew of NVMe drives in that chassis you'll want TB 4 over USB 4 for DMA over PCIe.

blastdoor said:

foregoneconclusion said:

Rayz2016 said:

An in-house GPU eh?

This is where the bun fight starts. 

I would imagine that the MacBook would continue to use the SoC style GPU just like the iPad. It will be interesting to see what Apple does for higher end hardware like the MBP or iMac line. Will it still be integrated, or will they do a discrete version of the GPU?

That’s the big question in my mind, too. 

The AMD Navi GPU, fabbed on 7nm, has a die size of about 250mm. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-5700-xt.c3662

That’s a lot bigger than any GPU Apple has integrated into a SOC before, but the SOC for the PS5 is even larger https://www.pushsquare.com/guides/ps5-vs-xbox-series-x-full-tech-specs-comparison

Individual Mac models don’t have the economies of scale to justify taping out huge fully integrated custom SOCs. So I doubt apple does something like the PS5 SOC. 

But we also have this:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16031/tsmcs-version-of-emib-lsi-3dfabric

Which is basically the next generation in chiplet glue.

i bet that’s the direction Apple goes. A single Mac cpu chiplet and a single GPU chiplet, but glued together in multiple combinations for different Mac models.

no discrete GPU 

These designs are in collaboration, not just TSMC. AMD Zen 4 in 2021 is required to have their patented equivalent and announced for both their CPU/APU and GPUs.



AMD has lots of patents on this going back many years and give a clue to how important these technologies will become to the entire industry, at large.

Source ref from USPTO via Anandtech Forums: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/speculation-zen-4-epyc-4-genoa-ryzen-5000.2571425/post-40121255

The secondary comment hints that anything Apple is doing for Silicon AMD has been developing for several years, including FPGAs [Afterburner is a clustered FPGA unit]

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/speculation-zen-4-epyc-4-genoa-ryzen-5000.2571425/post-40146010

Rayz2016 said:

mdriftmeyer said:

GeorgeBMac said:

seanismorris said:

I wonder what Epic is thinking...
I get they are frustrated with the 30% “Apple Tax” but their actions make no sense.

I'm thinking that for them, they can only win.   They can't lose:

Their game is to break down the walls of the walled garden.  

-- If they succeed then they win

-- if they don't succeed then they go back to obeying the rules -- and have lost very little (but gained a bunch of free publicity!)

It's only a matter of time before Apple releases a mature Gaming Engine/Environment to leverage the hoard of new Metal based APIs that will be optimized for Afterburner and the DSP/FPGA assets being built into their forthcoming motherboards for Macbook/Macbook Pro/Mac Mini, MacBook Air, never mind the iMac and a future iMac Pro and the eventual Mac Pro line.

You're really quite stuck on this 'keep skin-scalding PC tech in the Mac' thing aren't you? :-)

Apple is chasing high performance, low-heat, low-power.

I'm not sure  that 1 out 3 is going to do it for them.

Your lack of understanding how Apple is going to design their new Motherboards and subsystems is severely obvious. Apple will achieve today's performance at 20-30% less power consumption in three years or less. Not because the CPU design, but because the offloading of the vast majority of the asset production with their built-in FPGA subsystems. If you understand the actual power of the new Mac Pro--Afterburner you'd realize how much of an impact its offspring will have moving forward.