zimmie

DT36MT said:

amar99 said:

How will he survive on such a low salary? What a guy.

Will you do it if you were in his place just because someone or some group of people say you should?

If I were in such a position, I would have my salary lowered without somebody else pushing for it because I can't imagine ever needing more than about $100M in assets. That level of wealth is self-sustaining for even an unreasonably extravagant lifestyle. It's enough for separate his and hers Ferraris for every day of the month with plenty left over to still get about two million dollars of income per year on bank interest. What would you ever spend it on?

The biggest con of the link bracelet for me is it's incredibly heavy compared to the rest of the watch. The weight isn't uncomfortable or anything, but it seriously reduces the sensation from the Taptic Engine. If Apple made a lighter titanium version, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

blastdoor said:

zimmie said:

anonconformist said:

blastdoor said:

DAalseth said:

longfang said:

DAalseth said:

I have a feeling that Apple will introduce an M-Series Mac Pro, but keep the Intel version around.

Apple historically doesn’t really do the hang on to the past thing. 

Also consider that getting rid of Intel would vastly simplify software development efforts. 

True, but there’s Mac Pro users that need massive amounts of RAM. Amounts that Apple Silicon just doesn’t support.

That said, I’m not a computer engineer so it may be a crazy idea;
Would it be feasible to use two tiers of RAM? The high speed RAM built into the chip, and then a TB or more of comparatively slow conventional RAM in sticks on the MB like it has now? It would have to keep track of what needed to be kept in the extra high speed on chip space, and what could be parked on the sticks. It would be like virtual RAM does now but not to the SSD.
Not sure how feasible this is but it was a crazy idea that just crossed my mind. 

I think that’s highly feasible and the only question is whether it’s necessary. Another alternative is very fast pcie5 SSD swap (virtual memory). Apparently a pcie 5 SSD could hit up to 14GB/sec in bandwidth (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/pcie-5-0-ssds-promising-up-to-14gb-s-of-bandwidth-will-be-ready-in-2024/). That’s similar to dual channel ddr2 sdram. 

That’s interesting throughput, but SSD (unless using Optane) has a rather finite number of write cycles, so that’s bonkers for a solution. I’ve purposely provisioned all my machines with enough RAM keeping that in proper perspective and context, because I don’t replace machines super often. Swap files in a normal usage scenario are one thing, but treating SSD with finite write cycles as RAM is a whole other story.

Flash write durability hasn’t been a serious limit on SSD lifespan in close to two decades. Controller firmware bugs take out multiple orders of magnitude more drives than the flash wearing out does.

This is literally talking about using some high-performance SSDs as dedicated swap devices. No more, no less.

The headache would be random access, just like with swap. NVMe SSDs can get DDR2 levels of data throughput, but much worse latency for random operations. If you mix reads and writes, performance gets ridiculously bad. Give a 70/30 R/W workload to a flash-based SSD and its performance drops to around 15% of high-queue-depth peak read or peak write.

The only time I recall being in a situation where I needed more than 256GB of RAM, I doubt that a lot of small random writes to swap were needed. Instead, it really was a case of swapping big chunks, and I could see the SSD read/write statistics in glances go through the roof (Linux threadripper system). 

To need more than 1TB of RAM is way outside my experience. For folks who have such experience— does your work involve a lot of random reads and writes to that 1TB or do you think you’re really swapping in and out multi-GB chunks?

I mostly need lots of RAM for running lots of virtual machines. When you have a parent scheduler swapping stuff out, and multiple guest schedulers working with what they think is RAM and swapping stuff out on their own, you can wind up with extremely unpredictable memory access latencies in software in the guests.

InspiredCode said:

The consensus opinion seems to be that Apple will add AMD GPU support to Apple Silicon since they need some sort of GPU expansion. I'm having some trouble believing that though. If anything, at this point a shift back to nVidia would make more sense because those cards are more preferred by scientific and high-end rendering users...

Not happening. Nvidia won't give anybody else sufficient documentation and access to write drivers for their GPUs, and Apple won't give anybody else the ability to write kernel code for their platforms. This is what caused the split in the first place. Apple wants control of all of the code which can cause a kernel panic, because the users who see one will always blame them. Remember that presentation where they said something like 90% of all Safari crashes were caused by "plugins" and everybody knew they meant "Flash"? This is that, but for kernel code.

MacPro said:

I can't see what Apple could do?  If they improved the sensitivity wouldn't that just make measurements better for light skins too, thus maintaining the differential?  It's physics not bias. 

Not necessarily. All pulse oximeters use a measurement correction curve to convert from the amount of reflected light to an oxygenation percentage. That curve needs to change based on skin tone and possibly other characteristics we don’t even know about today (since only recently did a million people start carrying an oximeter around with them everywhere). Correcting the curve for darker skin would make readings for lighter skin less accurate, so it would need to be adjustable.

Wow. I didn't expect to get the SSD upgrade procedure for a Mac Studio before the ARM Mac Pro debuted, but there it is, and I was right with my predicted steps. Open it up, pull the carts, install the new carts, then use Apple Configurator on a separate Mac to reset the Studio's SSD controller.

I can't seem to see pricing for the flash carts without a valid Mac Studio serial number, but I expect it's slightly higher than the BTO pricing.