mcdave

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mcdave
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  • Netflix blames account sharing for first subscriber loss in a decade

    mcdavemcdave
    Actually, yes, this is good news. Here’s a solution, just provide the streaming via an AppleTV channel & let Apple handle unique ID validation & payment.
    lolliverqwerty52blastdoorCesar Battistini MazieroStrangeDaystenthousandthingswatto_cobra

  • The birth, life, death, and possible resurrection of the Thunderbolt eGPU in macOS

    mcdavemcdave
    eGPUs are not the solution. Benchmarks aside, they never delivered in terms of application performance.
    Apple has a long road ahead convincing developers to fully re-architect their products so they could release their own discrete GPU options which would work better in the short term. Of course if they do this, there’s less of an incentive for devs to move to UMA.
    scstrrfFileMakerFellerdanoxwatto_cobra

  • Google's self-repair program for Pixel launches, Apple's program is nowhere to be seen

    mcdavemcdave
    muthuk_vanalingam said:
    foregoneconclusion said:
    LOL...you get one option: iFixit. What happened to all the "competition" stuff? 
    Lol. As the title of the article says, it is one more than what Apple provides (zero). And that one option provided is a pretty good one with a good reputation. Not a bad place to be in, as far as Google is concerned.
    So a monopoly then.
    watto_cobra

  • Studio Display teardown shows iMac-like dual-fan cooling, dense electronics

    mcdavemcdave
    InspiredCode said:
    I’m still curious about the supply chain rumor that Apple had a discrete GPU in the works code named Lifuka in addition to what we now know as the M1 (Tonga), M1 Pro (Jade C-Chop), and M1 Max/Ultra (Jade C-Die) cores. The other chips were real products, so this must be one last surprise. Could it be a GPU for a Pro Display XDR 2 that uses on display processing to get around Thunderbolt 4 bandwidth limits? Could it be a Mac Pro add on card for ray tracing acceleration? A companion chip for an XR headset or handheld game console? Multiple of these things?

    It is also strange that the Max has an extra disabled 16-core neural engine and the Ultra has extra 32-core neural engine. The extra neural engines are only disabled in software. They don’t seem to be used for binning. Maybe a secret feature Apple will turn on later? In theory it could be used for real-time raytracing. The matrix math is similar to ML. Maybe will be introduced in an upcoming release of Metal for immediate use?
    It would be cool if AMX & ANE was leveraged by Metal Ray Tracing so a software update gave us a real boost. Single-precision matmul for the 16-core ANE is around 2.5TFLOPS so the M1 Ultra should have around 10 to contribute.

    Unfortunately Apple haven’t even managed to engage the AMXs in Embree (Cinebench/Blender CPU) via Accelerate so baby steps.
    watto_cobra

  • How the new Mac Studio fills a crucial gap in Apple's desktop lineup

    mcdavemcdave
    blastdoor said:
    Some people have been pointing out this gap for 15 years and were endlessly flamed for it. It’s nice to see those folks vindicated. And more importantly, it’s great to see apple doing such a consistently wonderful job of advancing the Mac platform. If apple maintains this momentum I think they can gain some serious market share 
    I don’t see how slapping cheap displays on headless Macs is going to drive market share. If anything Apple should use the integrated nature of Apple Silicon to drive an even more integrated product with no room for user config errors.
    watto_cobra