jdiamond

godofbiscuitssf said:

Apple is also part of the RISC V consortium. As soon as Apple announced Macs as having “Apple Silicon” and not “ARM-based CPUs” I knew it’d be a possibility that they’d always remain open to other ISAs.  If RISC V continues on its current trajectory— and continues to attract all the talent — it may happen by 2035–40. 

I completely agree.  Apple's not going to get caught again being tied to an ISA.  The agreement with ARM is likely just to guarantee terms on Apple using ARM for the next 20 years - Apple could drop at any time like they did with Imagine and GPUs.

The biggest apparent technical issue seems to be the failure of the quad-die Apple Silicon chip.  Perhaps they could make up for this with a dual socket system?  In principle, GPU support is a driver issue, not a HW issue.  It'd also be great if they found a way to do a two tiered memory system, so you could add terabytes of DRAM to the embedded system.  It sounds difficult, but Apple already pulled something similar off with the old two tiered SSD/HDD systems.  You'd let the 192GB of on-die RAM page out to the 8 TB of DIMMs.

I think the main reason to design and support the Mac Pro, even if it loses money overall, is the halo effect.  People who love to use the MacOS, but need to do a larger scale project, particularly with GPUs, suddenly find they are forced to leave the Mac eco system. Just knowing that it is possible to still use MacOS at the higher end provides a layer of comfort in Mac based businesses thinking of expanding in the future.  It also might help with other products on Apple's road map, if it gains them experience in pushing Apple Silicon and GPUs to higher performance levels.

Guys, no one is implying Apple will make a physical car.  It's like AppleTV - initially, everyone hoped for an amazing Apple TV that was transparent and thin.  But it ended up just being a little box you hook up to a normal TV.  There's no reason to think this wouldn't be similar in concept to car play.  Apple would just be helping car companies that need to play catch up on things like self driving features, etc.  And they could go to town integrating the infotainment/entertainment systems with their own stuff.

Apple made almost $90 billion last quarter alone!

FWIW, I found the best performance using Azul's Java 17 ARM64 JDK with ManyMC.  It's truly amazing - peak is about 100x faster in everything - imagine selecting a Minecraft world and being able to start playing in less than 4 seconds! . Minecraft and Java really seems to have the single greatest speedup going native of all applications.  For me, #2 was Blender, which was about 12x faster.