robaba

Don’t have any inside or industry knowledge here but shipping 3nm devices in 2022 seems a little optimistic.  Even if chips end up being produced in quantity in ‘22, they’ve still got to be installed in the products themselves, and Apple always wants to have plenty on hand to get the most out of the initial buying frenzy.  Nothing kills a party faster than running the keg dry.

Good.  It’s not that I think NVidia plans to screw over Apple wrt it’s ARM Architectural license, but I just don’t like NVidia.  The problem ARM has is how to make enough from licensing designs to cover the huge and growing cost of R&D?  Thing is, they really need to move on to the whole widget in order to capitalize on their business model.  CPUs aren’t discreet parts any longer—the SoC is king.  

mattinoz said:

robaba said:

Marvin said:

Roderikus said:

OMG 2 years - how hard is it to migrate iMac & MacBook Pro internals into a slightly larger casing ?!

It depends on what they plan to do with the Mac Pro. It wouldn't make much sense to only put the exact same iMac/MBP chip options in the Mac Pro enclosure so they'd have to manufacture a new chip layout. That takes planning, design, testing, manufacturing, marketing, rollout, it's not a trivial process to make an entirely new chip.

Not too sure about that last part.  If they use the same M1X SoC designs in a high performance SiP, the on-package power/data fabric should in fact be enough to “glue” the logic units into an effective cpu.  Easier said than done, but that’s what they appear to be attempting.

but before that tackle this, they’ll want to get the M1X out the door and shook-down for any errata.  The M1X is in production now, so hopefully  the M1Z (?) will be on the bench soon.

Given they have a Successful 6 core chip already.
Why wouldn't they test the gluing together 2 chips to make a SIP with the 10-12 core variant. 

That would get Larger MacBookPro and Lager iMacs into the market and allow them to increment each year with the core September product releases. 

Depends on several things

1. whats the optimal high performance to high efficiency ratio in terms of core count?
2. How many Neural Engine cores do you need?
3. What level of gpu performance do you need?
4. What’s the cost per chip.
5. Can you make a unified chip that you can repackage into other products thereby leveraging your investment into other markets?

Marvin said:

Roderikus said:

OMG 2 years - how hard is it to migrate iMac & MacBook Pro internals into a slightly larger casing ?!

It depends on what they plan to do with the Mac Pro. It wouldn't make much sense to only put the exact same iMac/MBP chip options in the Mac Pro enclosure so they'd have to manufacture a new chip layout. That takes planning, design, testing, manufacturing, marketing, rollout, it's not a trivial process to make an entirely new chip.

Not too sure about that last part.  If they use the same M1X SoC designs in a high performance SiP, the on-package power/data fabric should in fact be enough to “glue” the logic units into an effective cpu.  Easier said than done, but that’s what they appear to be attempting.

but before that tackle this, they’ll want to get the M1X out the door and shook-down for any errata.  The M1X is in production now, so hopefully  the M1Z (?) will be on the bench soon.

mbmoore said:

Which states banned gaming computers? The same ones that mandated 100% electric cars by 2035? What morons. Power consumption only matters with laptops, tablets, and cell phones. Desktop power consumption is almost irrelevant in comparison as long as there is sufficient cooling.

::cough cough:: rollingblackouts ::cough::