jdiamond

Well, I'd say Disney Plus is the main competitor to Netflix, and Apple embraced Disney Plus and made it the premier video streaming app on VP.  That wouldn't make Netflix feel warm and fuzzy.  Honestly, the browser version of Netflix is great - the only big flaw is that so far, Netflix seems to block 4K and 4K/HDR on browsers - that would be a huge bummer for VP.  But I agree - it's not a market yet.  

Given that it's nothing but a paid permission slip, not transferred value, I'd like to just put out there that I'd be OK if Apple gave me 30 cents per iPhone.

Yes -and just as Fujitsu designed the SVE SIMD extensions for ARM, it was Apple that created the 64-bit ARM ISA (v8+), totally redesigning it in the process, as they were the first company on Earth to require 64-bit ARM CPUs.  We used to joke about how the new ISA was "ARM" in name only.  So in theory, they could license the ISA to ARM.  And of course, Apple hasn't used the ARM microarchitecture since the Newton - it's a total Apple design.  So what benefit does Apple get from the ARM name?  Just participation in a wide software ecosystem, where people have already created "ARM" versions of popular software, vs the smaller number of companies who would make things for "Apple Silicon".

tskwara said:

timmillea said:

5nM/3nM = 1.6 recurring, suggesting a move from the 5nM process to the 3nM process would yield a 67% improvement in speed/power ratio. We are not seeing that.

Not accounting for other changes and just looking at the size reduction ratio alone, I think the math would suggest that 3nM is a 40% reduction of 5nM, so maybe a 40% increase in speed?

You guys are referring to a concept called "Denard Scaling", but that hasn't actually held up since the late 1990s, and it took a nosedive in the 2000s after 28nm.  Today's denser processor nodes lead to only single digit percent increases in performance.  Some of this is because voltage scaling slowed down.  Some parts, like caches, haven't shrunk at the same rate.  The capacitance of wires and devices is going up.  I remember NVIDIA was freaking out after the 28 nm node, because following that, even the cost per transistor wasn't going down.

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.