Marvin

blastdoor said:

Scrolling through the entries so far it seems that the Neural Engine works great for the quantized version of the benchmark and so-so for half precision. But it seems Apple hardware in general is kind of lame for the single precision version (with the best hardware being the GPU in the M3 Max). 

Happy to be corrected, but I take this to mean that Apple hardware is good for on-device inference but crappy for model training. 

I wonder how much of the issue is CoreML needing more optimization versus Apple needing beefier GPUs... 

The performance looks pretty good, M3 Max is just under half of a 4090:

https://browser.geekbench.com/ai/v1/6589
https://browser.geekbench.com/ai/v1/8699

and the M3 Max can support 128GB of memory, Ultra (M4) will likely support 256GB. M3 Max is roughly equivalent to a 4070 laptop GPU.

M2 Max to Ultra doesn't seem to scale well for the test:

https://browser.geekbench.com/ai/v1/10284
https://browser.geekbench.com/ai/v1/3502

but M4 Ultra might just use a bigger GPU that will scale better.

hodar said:

Disney killed the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Disney killed the Star Wars Universe
Disney killed Pixar
Disney killed their animation studios
Disney dug up, and killed their movie classics.

I would have never imagined a company, with such a strong family friendly business model, go to such lengths to kill everything it touches. They are unrecognizable from what they were just 10 years ago.

Original content creation is going to get more difficult as time goes on. Cinema has only been around for 100 years or so and most of the movies have been produced since 2000:

https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/production-countries/#tab=territory
https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/production-countries/#tab=year
https://www.the-numbers.com/United-States/movies#tab=year

There aren't infinite original stories, characters and environments. Inevitably they will retread old ground.

The MCU ran out of interesting stories to tell. There may be more mileage from some characters but they covered a lot with over 34 movies.

It's worse with anthropomorphic characters, that formula runs out more quickly:

https://screenrant.com/every-pixar-movie-what-if-had-feelings-formula/

Superheroes similarly have limited combinations of powers so it's difficult to invent a new hero with an origin story.

Star Wars was based around a single story and a few main family characters, more content is just doing service to this core story and filling in the blanks.

Some games have shown promise for original content. Baldur's Gate 3 did a great job with original characters and storylines, Netflix may be looking at producing this:

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/baldurs-gate-netflix-talks.html

Given the low quality of movies over the past couple of years across the industry, it's not just a problem that affects Disney. They've had good financial returns from sequels and reboots and they have to follow the money to please the shareholders. It seems inevitable the industry will run out of interesting original ideas eventually.

brianjo said:

PLEASE! No external power supply required.  It suck on the iMac, and would suck way more on the mini.  The old mini had a stupid external brick, and they made it awesome with the current design.  The size is great because you can put a pair of them in a single rack space easily.  Make it smaller so you can put 3 might be interesting, but too small and you can't have enough ports to be useful.  A smaller computer that needs dongles and adaptors is NOT an improvement!

Now, if they offered a DC power supply jack alongside an internal power supply, THAT would be appealing.  Probably not likely though.

There is a lot of empty space inside the current model. In the following video around 3:15, with the fan removed, half the mini is empty:



This mini size was basically unchanged for 14 years, 1.4" x 7.7" x 7.7":

https://support.apple.com/en-us/112588

This was designed to support DVD drives and 2.5" hard drives. They could make it smaller like the Apple TV or just thinner like the laptops. They could probably get it close to the Macbook Pro thickness but half the current height should be doable:

MacPro said:

I ask the Windows experts here: Does the move to Windows ARM allow MS to create a new locked-down OS like Apple has and once and for all fix many of the issues with their legacy problems on Intel?

The ARM hardware doesn't change much, Microsoft can make a more locked down OS anytime they want but it would break some things. Windows is a big gaming platform and some of the biggest games use kernel-level anti-cheat software like Call of Duty. Any software that runs at the same level a user can access can be modified/hacked by the user.

It would be best if Microsoft eventually switched to a Unix system, this would fix a lot of problems right away and would attract more developers. If they can't secure a system at a higher level, they should build secure components into the OS and make APIs that 3rd parties can use.

Every major OS should be deployed read-only so that they remain bootable. System overrides can go into a writeable area and if the system crashes, it can disable the overrides.

Companies are letting far too much critical infrastructure depend on consumer-level systems. Delta says Crowdstrike cost them $0.5b, total costs are estimated to be over $5b. Critical systems that run airlines, hospitals, banks, ATMs etc should be bulletproof.

jcc said:

Some of the fastest home internet speed is only 1 gb. Why would we need this? Just plain 6 is plenty fast thank you…

It improves local transfers. Backup to NAS or from one device to another (e.g AirDrop) over wifi can be as fast as a wired drive.

Apple could sell a plug with built-in storage that can backup multiple devices quickly and optionally background sync with iCloud. Then people who only use iOS devices can backup/restore from the plug.