danox

anantksundaram said:

I recall that, for so many years, so many here just laughed off Apple’s long term India strategy as blather and fantasy. 

Guess what…  

danvm said:

programmer said:

danvm said:

And I have work with some of those workstations, and the performance is not as pathetic as you mention.  Some of them have advantages over Apple Silicon, specially when comparing the GPU. 

You say "workstations" whereas what you quoted said "laptops".  Big difference.  Apple Silicon's performance really shines in power-constrained situations.  If you can run plugged into the wall and with big heat sinks, then the Intel/AMD CPUs and the nVidia/AMD GPUs can burn copious power to deliver serious performance.  They're still inefficient in terms of compute per watt, but you don't notice as watts are cheap in such a situation.

It would be interesting to see a large scale data centre built from ARM-based machines and compared to ones build from Intel/AMD-based machines, and compare the operating costs.  Some of the big cloud vendors offer lower cost ARM-based hosts just for this reason -- they greatly reduce energy and cooling costs in the data centre.  Not Apple's focus though, so we aren't likely to see Apple Silicon based data centres (except perhaps for Apple's own, but they are typically very secretive about that).

There is a group of laptops that are considered workstations (Dell Precision, HP Z mobile workstation, Lenovo ThinkPad P-series). The quality of componentes, warranty / service and specs are different from a notebook that you buy in a consumer retailer.  Also, they are certified for ISV's like Autodesk, Bentley Software, Siemens and others. That's the reason I used the term workstation and not laptops. 

I also know the benefits of Apple Intelligence and ARM in general, especially with power efficiency.  But there are cases where some specialized applications use CUDA / Optix, and you are required to use Nvidia adapters.  In datacenters is very difference, and even more with AI.  There are even rumors of Apple dealing with Nvidia for their datacenters.

Unlikely report claims Apple is buying 250 Nvidia servers for AI

Large cloud providers also have their own AI processors (Amazon Trainium2, Azure Maia and Google Axion).  Maybe these processors have advantages over ARM and Apple Silicon for AI tasks.  My point is that ARM and Apple Silicon is not the magic CPU that will solve all problems.  It has many advantages over Intel and AMD in some tasks.  But Intel, AMD and Nvidia have some advantages over ARM / Apple too. 

At the end, It's good to have competition working for us.  

jfabula1 said:

With all the $ that Apple have and a very successful M series, still a fabless relying on tsmc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dhuxRF2c_w&pp=0gcJCYQJAYcqIYzv 

The comment section is flooded with comments. The reviewer just gave a fair review of the M2 Ultra Mac Studio, mentioning its performance and wattage compared to a 4090 graphics card at 13:02 and 13:09.

https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=OPTIX&compute_type=CUDA&compute_type=HIP&compute_type=METAL&compute_type=ONEAPI&group_by=device_name&blender_version=4.3.0 

What’s noteworthy in this table is that Apple jumped 40 positions from 52nd the M2 Ultra to the M3 Ultras12th spot on the list of devices that run Blender. 

The M5 Ultra, which has been rumored to be Apple’s next move instead of releasing an Ultra M4 would be a two-generation jump, which raises questions about how many positions they’ll jump to when they release something that’s two generations down the road. (Apple may jump to the top of the chart).

The M5 processor is rumored to be even more efficient in terms of wattage/energy capabilities than its predecessors and that’s in addition to its increased performance.

mike_galloway said:

coolfactor said:

Wesley_Hilliard said:

Ok, had to delete some incredibly off topic and rule breaking threads that are just useless screaming matches. Let's chill out.

And as a reminder: It isn't illegal to be a monopoly. It is illegal (or at least heavily regulated globally) if a monopoly uses its power of a specific market to manipulate that market or others. The EU has a right to govern how it sees fit, even if some of its policy seems unfairly targeted towards Apple. It is up to Apple to work through the litigation and arrive at a happy medium. These things take time, and the world leaders having pissing matches won't help either.

Patience. This fine was a pittance for the affected companies. We'll see where it goes from here.

Avoid insulting each other, politically charged comments, or leaving the topic entirely to make some kind of random point. There's no need for that.

There also needs to be some safeguards where political regions can't just "change the rules" or implement new rules, and then claim companies are breaking those very same rules. It can take years, even decades, for a large company to build up their sales ecosystem, and then governments come along and just make new rules? One interpretation is that it's a convenient money-grab. Where does this fine money end up in the end? There should be some regulation over that, too.

Unfortunately voters (us) are continually demanding from politicians that "something must be done" about whatever grieves us at the moment and that we are "unfairly disadvantaged" so we sort of get what we deserve (continual knee jerk responses and badly thought out changes) and not what we need.