Marvin

AppleInsider said:

The method itself requires a small amount of video of the subject, typically in motion within a scene and showing as many surfaces as possible for the system to work from. The technique can use very short clips in some cases, sometimes monocular video with as few as 50 to 100 frames, equating to two to four seconds of 24fps video.

The system has been trained to "disentangle the static scene and a fully-animatable human avatar within 30 minutes," Apple claims.

In the end, the time from training video to a "state-of-the-art rendering quality" animation of the human model and the scene, outputted with a render speed of 60fps at a HD resolution, is about half an hour. This is claimed to be about 100 times faster than other methods, including NeuMan and Vid2Avatar.

The research paper lists its authors as Muhammed Kocabas, Rick Chang, James Gabriel, Oncel Tuzel, and Anurag Ranjan, and was produced in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.

Apple has been working on the idea of creating digital avatars for quite some time, with the concept of a high-detailed version appearing in the Apple Vision Pro. To enable FaceTime conversations, as well as an external view of the user's eyes, the headset creates a digital "Persona," which is used in various ways to represent the user. 

This will help a lot in making 3D avatars quickly at high quality. They can do lighting control so the avatar will blend better with the virtual environment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V85241UJmg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6Lz-qjs_mA

These don't have the uncanny valley feeling that CGI avatars do. Animating them (especially faces) can still be difficult but Meta's ones look good with animation.

michelb76 said:

He updated the article with the nvidia optimized version of whisper, and no surprise, the 4090 blows aways the macs. Still a nice trajectory that apple is on, but also still a long way to go. 

The optimized version says it uses parallel processing, default batch size is 24:

https://github.com/Vaibhavs10/insanely-fast-whisper

The other test is sequential. It also says that optimal one runs on Mac.

It's not a fair comparison to put parallel software against sequential to show a 10x gain. That's like running After Effects sequentially on one machine and doing batch image processing on another. Of course it's going to be faster in parallel.

AMD and Nvidia have been squabbling about this recently:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-is-2x-faster-than-amd-m1300x

That one mentions using FP8 calculations vs FP16. They say the result precision isn't compromised but still not a fair comparison.

If these benchmarks are going to be fair, there needs to be a standard for what is comparable. Compare same batch sizes, same compute units otherwise we're not talking about the capability of the hardware.

It's still valid to mention faster results regardless of the route used because in the end the result is what matters but all these manufacturers are working on the same base principles and software. It's about transistor count, clock speed, memory bandwidth etc. Nvidia 4090 is around 4x the raw hardware of M3 Max and M3 Max is on a more advanced node. The 4090 should be expected to be around 3-4x faster in most tests. M3 Max equivalent is the desktop 3070/laptop 4070, not the desktop 4090.

NYC362 said:

Turning the Mac Studio Display into a 27" iMac can't take all that much work.

The display is the same at the 27" iMac that went away a couple years ago.  It already has speakers, power supply, camera (with center stage), fans, and USB-C/Thunderbolt ports.   All it needs is the logic board from a MacBook Pro. a headphone jack, add a couple more Thunderbolt ports, and, poof!, it's an iMac. 

3-step program to your dream setup:

1. Buy a Macbook Pro
2. Buy a display
3. Plug them in

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1668323-REG/apple_mbp_16_sg_25_16_2_macbook_pro_with.html
M1 Max 64GB/2TB
$2699

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1757494-REG/lg_oled42c3pua_c3_42_4k_hdr.html
LG C3 42" OLED
$896

Total $3595

iOS_Guy80 said:

What happens after 1-nm? 0-nm?

There's a limit due to the size of the atoms. Silicon is around 0.5nm:

https://www.princeton.edu/~maelabs/mae324/glos324/silicon.htm

Current chips are 3nm (2023-2025), next is 2nm (2026-2028), then there's probably two updates left: 1.4nm (2029-2031), 1nm (2032-2034).

Enough for another decade of improvements. If they manage 20% improvement each year, that will result in 6x performance improvement over 3nm. M3 Max is around 16TFLOPs so close to 100TFLOPs in a laptop eventually and entry Macbook Airs will be faster than M3 Max.

People are already settling into lower-end hardware because it does everything they need so people will just buy computers and use then until they need a new one. The manufacturing will become like appliances.

helgansven said:

Hi All, my first post!

I have two older (2016), 15" Macbook Pro devices with Monterey as the OS.

Is it possible to make an image of device#1 and run that image from a USB or external drive on device#2?

I've tried a couple tutorials online but no love (likely me not understanding instructions).  After imaging 500GB stick from device#1 and attempting to boot from it on device#2, I can select the USB device from the startup options screen but the OS on the USB will not boot.

Basically, it goes:

1. Format USB as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) + GUID Partition.

2. Create Monterey bootable USB installer (sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Monterey.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/500GBDrive)

3. Clone internal drive to USB (using Carbon Copy with changes only being cloned).

4. Attempt boot from USB on device#2.

For some more detail, when I boot device#2, I hold the option key till I see the boot device selection screen.  The USB is seen by the device and is shown as a separate icon on screen.  After selecting the 500GBDrive, the device will only show a black screen with a circled "X" and an address for what I'm assuming is Apple's official "how to boot" page.

I'm know I'm doing something wrong, but can't seem to see it.  Am I trying to do something that's not possible (or frowned upon)?

This seems mostly right but Apple locked the bootable systems down more with recent Mac systems.

Carbon Copy Cloner has some guides for how to make a bootable drive:

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/help-my-clone-wont-boot
https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/cloning-macos-system-volumes-apple-software-restore

"If I continue to make regular backups to the destination, will it remain bootable?

You should not expect the destination to remain bootable after running additional backup tasks to the destination (i.e. via manual or scheduled backups). The Legacy Bootable Copy Assistant is intended only for creating ad hoc, bootable copies of the system that you intend to use immediately."

Carbon Copy Cloner recommends making a dedicated external bootable volume without backups in the same place. Try to get a bootable system volume first without doing any data backups. Then try multiple partitions on the same drive or a separate drive for data (latter will be more reliable).

Another thing you could try is booting an older system before Big Sur and then upgrading the system while booted into it.