discountopinion
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Apple considers bringing iPhone camera sensor designs in-house
Personally i feel that Apple is stretched as-is on the silicon side. Baseband modem design in the works, a plethora of SoCs and co-processors to maintain.
Sony is best in class and will be very hard to beat and the question is - aside from unit price, what is currently a pain point with Sony’s sensors?
I just do not see any limitations at this stage and seems like the ISP component inside the SoC combined with the Neural Engine may be better areas of deep innovation and investment due to so much more being done in computational photography.
Photo sensor is not a piece of silicon that can be integrated into the AS chip as is physically separate. Baseband modem seems like a more logical SoC integration piece which they are already working on.
Vision Pro may throw up a range of pain points worthy of investment though.
Personally i am hoping they are doubling down on GPU, ISP and Neural Engine advancements instead. More direct to satellite tech in the iPhone would also be fantastic.
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M3 Ultra could have up to 80 graphics cores
tht said:
The last rumor on this was they pushed it out to 2027, 2028 type timeframe. The multi-core scaling is already poor going from Max to Ultra configs. It'll be even worse for an Extreme version. They have a lot of work to do to get it those GPU cores to scale.discountopinion said:32 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores and a blazing fast neural engine. If i had the money i would buy it. A computer like this makes me loose all rational thinking, ability to use consonants in speech, mutter 1.21 gigawatts and pine for the fjords.
My workload use cases do not demand as much horsepower, but i can imagine that it must be an amazing time to work with heavy lifting workloads. Apple Studio with M?Ultra is very reasonably priced, seems cheap to me actually. I remember back in the day when people used to pony up a small fortune to get a Sparc station 5 on their desk.
Life as a computer enthusiast has never been this good and Apple leads the way.
Does anyone feel there is any merit to the rumours of a further interconnect between 2 M?Ultras into something even more extreme?
Would there even be an idea to package up many M3 Ultras into compute nodes like Nvidia is doing with their chips? The power draw from the M3 Ultra is nothing compared to their chips. Maybe this is something for Apple’s iCloud.
Doubtful that Apple enters any server hardware market. They basically stick to products and service for consumers. They barely even try to serve the education market as at it. Network servers? Requires even more commitment than the gaming market.
Ah, I didn’t say for Apple to join the server market and I had a lot of implicit things embedded in the statement.
What I meant is the following:
hyperscalers are investing a lot into gpus from Nvidia and many of them also build their own server silicon (aws graviton, google tpu etc)
Apple has serious silicon chops and a massive efficiency lead in compute and maybe also gpu. Note power draw of Nvidia as an example.
Data Center energy use is a huge deal for density of compute and costs for run and cooling.
Apple is a hyper scaler in their own right so it may follow that they build their own server stack using their efficient M series which may also amortise costs and may be cheaper than buying Nvidia et al.
your comments on scaling is a clear signal that this may not work well and further Nvidia DGX etc has a lot of advanced interconnects etc.
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M3 Ultra could have up to 80 graphics cores
32 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores and a blazing fast neural engine. If i had the money i would buy it. A computer like this makes me loose all rational thinking, ability to use consonants in speech, mutter 1.21 gigawatts and pine for the fjords.
My workload use cases do not demand as much horsepower, but i can imagine that it must be an amazing time to work with heavy lifting workloads. Apple Studio with M?Ultra is very reasonably priced, seems cheap to me actually. I remember back in the day when people used to pony up a small fortune to get a Sparc station 5 on their desk.
Life as a computer enthusiast has never been this good and Apple leads the way.
Does anyone feel there is any merit to the rumours of a further interconnect between 2 M?Ultras into something even more extreme?
Would there even be an idea to package up many M3 Ultras into compute nodes like Nvidia is doing with their chips? The power draw from the M3 Ultra is nothing compared to their chips. Maybe this is something for Apple’s iCloud.
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Apple aims to reinvent the battery with high-performance cathode technology
tht said:Seems crazy?
Is it really a strategic technology for computers? For cars, most certainly at this point in the EV adoption curve, but computers? Isn't a battery like the 3rd or 4th, or higher, most expensive part of mobile computer?
Display, SoC, cellular modem, then the battery?
Does not seem crazy to me at all for Apple to actively pursue this field with great interest and investment.
Why? Future Products and current small devices portfolio.
Vision Pro needs a separate battery via cable at the moment. This is clearly not what they want. Higher capacity, lower weight and fast charging seem core to the pain point at the moment to remove the need to tether a power pack. Remove it and lower the overall weight of the device is critical after the early adopter stage.
AirPods. Can't do a long haul flight on one charge. Would be greatly improved with longer battery life. Longer battery life will also unlock further assisted hearing and med tech use cases. Mission critical to get this done in the medium term to unlock further growth.
Apple Watch - can always use more battery life and may unlock new use cases for on device compute boosts in particular the neural engine for more advanced onboard Siri.
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Apple suffers fourth consecutive quarter of declining sales, beat Wall Street anyway
This is actually a very good quarter. I am impressed.
The small decline in revenue was predominantly from iPad and Macs for which we are comparing Q 2022 that benefitted from M2 Mac launches and Q 2023 which did not. We saw new Macs just recently being announced. iPad refresh also has not happened yet in 2023. Best is yet to come.
Highest margin segments iPhone and Services grew. Home/Wearables was almost flat. This is a strong showing by Apple.
All of this to the backdrop of a killer macro economic climate and FX head winds. I mean the world is deep fried bananas.
The more I look at the numbers, the more confident I feel that Apple is riding the economic tectonic plates like a pro surfer. And this while investing heavily into new major product categories like Vision Pro.
Edited - The more I run the numbers in chatGPT data analysis the more I love this Q. Gross margin of services is up YoY (up ~0.5% points). Services represent ~25% of total sales but is ~40% of total gross margin. (2022 numbers were 21.3% and 35.5%). Installed base keeps growing and gooses the services volume. Good times.
