JustSomeGuy1
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Flaw in macOS briefly allowed attackers to install what they wanted
lkrupp said:So Microsoft and Google are researching and reporting macOS and iOS flaws. Fine and good. Does Apple itself have a security research team looking for flaws in macOS, Windows, Android, iOS?Who cares? Just be grateful that they are.This was a *bad* exploit. Actually it was several, but the one with zsh is just embarrassing! I am very very glad they found it and reported it to Apple.Now that I think of it, Apple's mitigation isn't really complete. I will have to play around with this some, but I think the short-term patch would be to create zero-length root-owned unwritable .zshenv files in every admin user's home dir. (Or really, every home dir, to be safe.)
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Apple's services segment maintains explosive growth in Q4
lkrupp said:Weren’t all of Apple’s services declared by tech blog armchair experts to be substandard and unable to compete? Apple TV+ was declared a monumental failure that could not compete with Netflix, Disney+, et al. Spotify was declared to the standard and Apple Music useless. Apple News was also labeled a failure.
Yet all of these failures drove up paid subscriptions and generated double digit revenue growth. I don’t get it. How could the tech blog experts be wrong?It's not really clear to me that services are actually doing well. Because they don't break things out, we only know totals for this category. I see two possible problems:1) App Store revenue: If this is the big growth driver, which seems totally plausible, then the other services could be doing very badly indeed. Which would be fine, except that revenue is under concerted attack by regulators worldwide.2) Apple Music can't be a very big source of profit, even if it is a big source of revenue, because of the prevalence of streaming and the known low-margin nature of that business.There are some counter-arguments, but I doubt they're very strong. What do we actually know about subs to Apple TV+? Not much. I suspect they're OK, but how much of that is Ted Lasso and how much of that is free subs due to device purchases?As for Apple News... I would bet you money it's zero percent of their revenue. Do you use it? Because I do. And it's pretty terrible. I've never been tempted to upgrade to paid.The biggest bit of weirdness, though, I only spotted today (though others may have noticed this before). When they talked about 745 million subs, it was widely reported as just that. But what they *actually* said was 745 million subs for Apple AND FOR THIRD PARTIES - that is, apps in the apps store. So again, those subs are earning less (15% after the first year) and those earnings are under threat.So it's entirely possible that they're doing well. But it's also entirely possible that the App Store is the only thing earning real money, and they're going to take a massive hit to revenue and growth as regulation kicks in. The fact that they're not making this clear should trouble you if you own stock. But again, it's hard to tell if they're hiding things- it's out of character but not impossible.
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New MacBook Pro chips deliver desktop performance with better power efficiency
anonconformist said:
Yes, it has far more transistors.waveparticle said:Is M1 Max chip physically larger than M1 Pro?
But, the chip itself doesn’t do more than be a partial determinant of the size of the package, which also includes the RAM, which are in separate chips on the same package.
In theory, both M1 Pro and M1 Max chips could be put on silicon with the same size and shape, but defects would have a larger impact on yield and drive up costs of the M1 Pro.For manufacturing, it’s likely easier and less expensive to make the exterior package with the chips be the same size and layout so only one motherboard is required, as well as simplifying cooling.Re: yield, that's ridiculous. If you wasted all that extra wafer area to make a pro the same size as a max, it would be dead area, and defects wouldn't exist there. It wouldn't cost more because of lower yield (that is, the percentage of chips that are good), it would cost more because you were making fewer chips per wafer.As for the package, it's not likely to matter for the motherboard - all that matters is the pin layout. That will be the same (RAM channels don't go off-package). Or almost the same? The Max might have more pins for power. Cooling is going to depend greatly on the specifics of the technology. Even if you made the Max and Pro the same package size, there would be hotspots in different places on the two packages. You may or may not want to cool them both the same way.
Pretty good overall analysis of the Mac game market but your numbers here are *way* off. Apple will ship >17 million macbooks this year. There are almost certainly already 15m M1 Macs out there, and that number will continue to grow rapidly. Obviously many of those macs will never be used for gaming, but a lot more than 13% could be.Marvin said:[...]Apple would either have to build that size of gaming audience (just now Mac gamers would be around 2 million and mostly involved with casual gaming like The Sims),[...]
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Johny Srouji says Apple's hardware ambitions are limited only by physics
Marvin said:
4x M1 Max would only be in the region of 300W fully maxed out with both CPU and GPU. The 2019 Mac Pro is over 900W. The 2013 cylinder Mac Pro was able to handle over 300W with a whisper quiet single fan and minimal heat. Fully maxed CPUs alone would be under 100W, fully maxed GPUs would be around 240W.hexclock said:
It’s fun to imagine a Mac Pro with 2 or 4 M1 Max chips, but I remember my G5 1.8 dual getting so hot you could fry an egg on the case, and that thing had 9 fans!JustSomeGuy1 said:docno42 said:
Better hope they never go dual socket. The compromises you have to make to have two sockets are numerous and what held back the cheese grater and trash can Mac Pro's. Heck there are performance penalties for "chiplet" packaging like AMD is using with Ryzen and Threadripper. I get why they are doing it - it's WAY more cost effective for a bunch of reasons. But if Apple can stomach the production for massive SOC - if you care about performance that's the real ticket and what I hope they stay focused on.GG1 said:On some other AI thread, a poster mentioned how expensive these M1 Pro/Max SoCs were to make, especially with the variable RAM amounts. So I'm wondering if the forthcoming MacPro may just use two or more M1 Max's on a single motherboard, similar to very high end dual Xeon boards.
Doubling up SoCs simply won't work (at least, well enough to be worth doing, and assuming you're talking about the existing SoCs). There are all sorts of "gated by physics" issues there. But a single large SoC also seems impossible (at least if they stick with their current memory architecture). Whatever they do, it's going to be a lot more interesting. I wrote a bit more about this in comments here: https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/224623/compared-new-14-inch-macbook-pro-versus-13-inch-m1-macbook-pro-versus-intel-13-inch-macbo/p2? ; - see comments 31, 32, 35, 36.mjtomlin said:I doubt they'll double up on SoC's. More than likely they'll go with much bigger SoCs variants, "M# Ultra" or "M# Extreme". They would be so far ahead in performance that they'll only need to update them half as often as the rest of the M1 family (basically the same as they did with the "X" variant in the A-series).This is a monumental engineering challenge! If it weren't, we'd already be seeing the new Mac Pros. I fully expect to see a new Pro next year, and that it will be amazing. Don't imagine for a second that these things are easy.
Not many processes will max out a 40TFLOP GPU except for raw compute tasks, this is like 1.5x an Nvidia 3090. Real-time rendering wouldn't come close most of the time.
If someone took the same workload from a pre-2019 Mac Pro onto M1 Max, just one of the 4 chips would handle it. If they took the same workload from the 2019 Pro, it would handle it with < 1/3 the power usage.
They could fit 12x M1 Max chips into a 2019 Mac Pro enclosure with > 0.5 trillion transistors. This kind of thing is being done for special use cases with shared memory across all the chips:
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-trillion-transistor-chip.html
"The chip is composed of 84 virtual chips along a single silicon wafer and 4,539 computing cores, which means there are effectively 381,276 computing cores to tackle mathematical processes in parallel. Packed with 18 GB RAM, the cores are connected with a communications fabric called Swarm that runs at 100 petabits per second."This work opens the door for major breakthroughs in scientific computing performance," Cerebras researchers wrote in a blog post. "The CS-1 is the first ever system to demonstrate sufficient performance to simulate over a million fluid cells faster than real-time. This means that when the CS-1 is used to simulate a power plant based on data about its present operating conditions, it can tell you what is going to happen in the future faster than the laws of physics produce that same result."
"We can solve this problem in an amount of time that no number of GPUs or CPUs can achieve," said Cerebras's CEO, Andrew Feldman. "This means the CS-1 for this work is the fastest machine ever built, and it's faster than any combination of clustering of other processors."
In a paper distributed at the conference Tuesday, titled "Fast Stencil-Code Computation on a Wafer-Scale Processor," Cerebras and Department of Energy researchers explained that shared memory is the critical difference between the CS-1 and Joule machines."
Your watt analysis is faulty because you're not looking at the whole picture. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the connectivity between cores across multiple chip(let)s is hugely expensive - some estimates put it at over 50% of the entire power budget of modern large core count CPUs like Xeons and EPYCs. That number includes memory controllers so you can't just double up (M1MaxPower * 4) to get a number, but it gives you a decent place to start.Also if you just did a half-assed job lashing together 4x M1Ms, you wouldn't have a 40Tflops (it's not "a tflop", it's "a tflops", singular) GPU. That situation would be like lashing 4x Nvidias or AMD Radeons together (SLI or CrossFire). You do NOT get linear speedups in that situation, most of the time - again, because of latency and bandwidth. You can be certain Apple isn't going to settle for that!Lastly, you have *entirely* missed the point of the Cerebras. Why do you think it is a *wafer* and not a bunch of chips cut from a wafer and then connected up?It's because that's how they tackle latency and bandwidth.Sure, you could get 12x M1Ms into a Mac Pro case. But you couldn't get them talking together fast enough for them to do useful work at anything close to 12x the rate of a single M1M.However, you have identified one of the tools Apple could use to solve their problem that I was talking about. They could conceivably have SoCs made of four dies that are cut from the wafer all together. They might use TSMC's CoW or similar tech. If they don't fall afoul of Cerebras' patents, anyway, which is not a small concern. Then they would still face issues with memory and heat removal, and perhaps most problematically, defect rates. All those issues seem solvable though.Anyone thinking this will yield cheaper Mac Pros should think again. :-/ The issues may be solvable, but not cheaply. -
Johny Srouji says Apple's hardware ambitions are limited only by physics
As I explained in the message you quoted, that won't work. It's not just a heat issue (though that is an extremely important one.) Really, it wouldn't be fun, it would be awful. Whatever Apple is doing, it's going to be much more interesting. *Based* on the M1 (or, more likely, M2), but not the M1 itself. Or rather, I should probably say, based on the M1/2 cores.hexclock said:
It’s fun to imagine a Mac Pro with 2 or 4 M1 Max chips, but I remember my G5 1.8 dual getting so hot you could fry an egg on the case, and that thing had 9 fans!JustSomeGuy1 said:docno42 said:
Better hope they never go dual socket. The compromises you have to make to have two sockets are numerous and what held back the cheese grater and trash can Mac Pro's. Heck there are performance penalties for "chiplet" packaging like AMD is using with Ryzen and Threadripper. I get why they are doing it - it's WAY more cost effective for a bunch of reasons. But if Apple can stomach the production for massive SOC - if you care about performance that's the real ticket and what I hope they stay focused on.GG1 said:On some other AI thread, a poster mentioned how expensive these M1 Pro/Max SoCs were to make, especially with the variable RAM amounts. So I'm wondering if the forthcoming MacPro may just use two or more M1 Max's on a single motherboard, similar to very high end dual Xeon boards.
Doubling up SoCs simply won't work (at least, well enough to be worth doing, and assuming you're talking about the existing SoCs). There are all sorts of "gated by physics" issues there. But a single large SoC also seems impossible (at least if they stick with their current memory architecture). Whatever they do, it's going to be a lot more interesting. I wrote a bit more about this in comments here: https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/224623/compared-new-14-inch-macbook-pro-versus-13-inch-m1-macbook-pro-versus-intel-13-inch-macbo/p2? ; - see comments 31, 32, 35, 36.mjtomlin said:I doubt they'll double up on SoC's. More than likely they'll go with much bigger SoCs variants, "M# Ultra" or "M# Extreme". They would be so far ahead in performance that they'll only need to update them half as often as the rest of the M1 family (basically the same as they did with the "X" variant in the A-series).This is a monumental engineering challenge! If it weren't, we'd already be seeing the new Mac Pros. I fully expect to see a new Pro next year, and that it will be amazing. Don't imagine for a second that these things are easy.
