SkylightActive

Extremism imagery like the use of the old airport terminal which hasn't been used for 15 years, or places that you'd have to really dig in to find such conditions is very far from truth. Not to say that there aren't, but it's becoming harder to find now. Im in Thailand at the moment and understand why people aren't ok with it. Bangkok has come a long way since the Vietnam war era. The imagery depicted in the ad is how it felt like. The old view of South East Asia during that era. Unfortunately modern day Bangkok (if you've visited it) you'd know that it's not like that at all. You can see it for your self on Youtube vloggers. Finding the supposed 5star hotel that looks darn old in the ad nowadays is hard. Most 3-4 stars hotel looks like 5 star hotels in western countries already. The massive roads and toll ways. The cab thing, even I haven't seen it in years (the whole vibe of third world Taxis). When I travel it's either the Metro/Skytrain or Uber (Grab) now. Even the busses are now converting to EV. Overall I think the people who call Thailand home (westerners or Thais) felt that what was depicted was very far from truth. Which is why they reacted as such. 

Take a basic example. An office with staffs sorting mail for delivery. With limited amount of people, you can only do so much at a given time. So instead of just simply throwing more people to increase the speed (which would drive cost up and is what Intel does), you eliminate unnecessary jobs and streamline the process so that they can achieve more. Then if that’s not enough, you add a few more people so it can overall improve the speed of sorting mail. This is efficiency. You can do more if you’re efficient. 

We have to move away from judging all this as a direct comparison with other vendors who just quote Gigahertz. Big gigahertz numbers is useless unless they can be fully exploited. Apple doesn’t need to build the highest gigahertz cpu on the planet if they can already achieve better real world usage. It’s better than having high clock counts just so that you can say you have the highest count. A shift to “what are people really using it for? They need faster coders for video editing right? How about digital stabilization tool for post editing that needs to be faster, ok! We’ll throw in ML acceleration so that our devs can use that to accelerate that process”. I think this is the right way to go moving forward. Custom solutions for specific tasks. So that those tasks is faster without sacrificing on low power consumption and HEAT. Less heat means they can sustain the higher speed for a longer time. The iPhone and iPad had always had less RAM and clock speed compared to their competitors. They don’t even put that into their slides. Yet, they always outperform their competition in real world usage. Like Apple vs. Samsung and Qualcomm for mobile devices, this will be Apple vs. Intel. We just have to learn how to decipher comparisons in a different way. 

System on a chip is a very innovative shift for microprocessors. However, from the lack of info so far on the M1 regarding RAM resource management between GPU and CPU is a concern of mine. How does the operating system prioritize which is more essential? what happens when the RAM is full? Will they use SSD’s as virtual memory? Will apps need to be written or rewritten in such a way that targets both CPU and GPU at the same time to get the most benefit from the efficiency and speed of the Silicon? Where some apps prior to this may be 85% on CPU and 15% on GPU. 

These are some of the questions I wished I had more info. I’m not too worried about the future GPU. Having said that, GPU performance is very important to me. Probably due to how the software that I use requires it to be. Not yet optimized. Not factoring unified memory approach so therefore needing beefier GPU than they really need to. The other point that weren’t mentioned is Ray tracing. I think Apple needs to address this in their upper tier SoC. This particular Graphics technology goes well beyond just gaming. If Apple wants to remain relevant in this arena, they need to address this. 

Apple isn’t showing the SoC for the 16” MacBook Pro in this event because they are giving them selves time to release. Probably wanting to wait and see Ampere and RDNA2 too but most likely not wanting to release all at once. It is 2020 after all. But to say that they don’t have anything to fight those beefier GPU would be unjustified for Apple. Somethings cookin in their labs. We just haven’t had the luxury of seeing it apart of Sruji. Ampere and RDNA2 will be the sort of benchmark performance they need to match or exceed.  If the Air can gain drastic performance upgrade, I can’t wait to see the silicon that will go into the new 16” MacBook Pro 2021. 

I agree with Apple in this. Allowing alternate stores, means going outside Apple's app approval vetting control. Forcibly by Congress. I highly disagree with this because Congress is trying to make Apple like Android or Windows. I chose to be with Apple because I trust that they can protect me and my family of cybersecurity threats from malicious Apps/plugins. I control every credit card purchases used for all my nephew's devices. I authorized them with Apple. Closed gate method have worked well for users since Appstore's inception. Letting this gate open will lead to security issues that Apple can no longer guarantee. This change (if it happens) will get reflected in the user terms of agreement. Like voiding the warranty etc. Apple provides warranty on hardware and software. Their complete control allows them to do that. Without that control, one cannot guarantee. To me that's not something I opted for. 

I understand that there's a choice issue here. Many would want iOS to be an open system. Having alternate store would not compromise existing Apple's payment system. You can opt to not use it. That argument is true. What I fear though, is that Congress would go beyond that and force Apple to allow side loading etc. What happens if there is a security breach on the alternate store front or 3rd party app that is not vetted? That malicious activities can exploit the loophole in the operating system forced on by Congress for the sake of having it OPEN. Whereas before, Apple controls and would be the one to quickly identify and release the patch as soon as possible. In this scenario, who would be responsible? Do I trust that 3rd party store would be as responsible and quick as Apple? I don't think so. But I trust Apple. I think that's the fundamental here. Trust. One that doesn't come easy, it takes time and years to earn this from its users.

Apple is no perfect company. But I do believe that this particular issue has security consequences that comes with being open. How much can this be open but do not compromise security is something Senators will have to be careful with. It can really backfire. 

Apple would be better off setting up a studio and do it the right way, if they want to be serious about gaming. Doing things half the effort shows, and that’s what’s letting them down. I have a dedicated tower to play windows games. I just wished Apple was serious about games enough. 

“Ok guys, we have an important decision to make. Our laptops are burning. We can’t control the heat. Our design roadmap is no longer applicable with current CPU. The damn thing heats up too much. We are getting so much heat from our customers. Our engineers can’t keep up with finding thermal solutions to mitigate without doing the whole chassis revamp. It’s screwing up our product launch plans. We’ve complained to them [Intel] and are not getting any resolve. What can we do?”

ans: “we can use our own chip!” Saids Johnny Srouji

” yeah. But is our chip good enough to replace Intel? This decision can not be a decision based on anger. If we are gonna move, we have to know that what ever we have has to be better. Otherwise what’s the point? “

Ans: yes. Our solution is good. My team and I have been working on monolithic prototypes of the chip. And it’s good. I mean really good. We can fit it inside the chassis with minimal thermal. It runs like a beast and the graphics is so great.

”but if we move to ARM, how about x86 GPU? Our customers are gonna be expecting the performance that AMD will bring. Can we even do that?”

ans: yes. Our prototype chip is a scaled A13 chip. We know what Nvidia and AMD are doing with their upcoming offerings. What we can do is increase our compute units but keep it at low power consumption. The result is a low heat but powerful chip that matches a Dedicated GpU solution. Our team uses the dedicated GpU from AMd and Nvidia as benchmark for development criteria’s. To convince our customers to move to ARM with us is a major move. So the bare minimum of performance must be set higher than what will be available when and if the chip launches. 

“So. Can we do it? And are we going to do it?”

ans: [everyone] yes. Let’s do it. 

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this is speculative. But it’s the sort of discussion that we do at my company. We often have supplier reviews. Check their quality and delivery performance. We discuss long term strategic plans like this as well. Weight out the pros and cons. Then make the decision and announce. We are not a big company like Apple, but I expect their senior discussion meeting to be quite similar. Their decisions have many ramifications. To their users, suppliers and developers. Their decision to move must have enough reasoning to justify the risks taken. Remember, the said chip, is guarded behind the mothership’s walls. Basing anything on just the Dev Kit A12z  as benchmark isn’t a good idea. Strategically speaking, they know they need to release an ARM chip to the public so they can write their code on. The A12z is already good and is publicly known. “We’ll use that for developers so they have a test platform. We can’t release the new chip just yet. It’s gotta be kept secret for the time being”. I think Apple knows regardless of their “no benchmark” policy of the dev machines, someone will still do it. Words gonna get out how well or bad the chip is gonna do on MacOS Big Sur. So giving devs / public a glimpse of “hey! A12z is a great chip right? It can do anything you ask of it.” 

Decoy tactics. Cause Intel / AMD / Nvidia / Qualcomm are laser focused on what Apple will do next. Why would Apple handedly let the cat out of the bag before prime time? If I’m gonna launch my own chips, why would I let the competition know? I’m gonna trick them into thinking that our chips are weak. Then, launch a surprise. Shake up the market. Take the crown for my self. 

What Craig said, pretty much answered most of the worries. It supports what I just described. You guys should watch it.