Marvin

king editor the grate said:

Slow updates are most mystifying things about switch to Mapple Silicon. The company said updates were stymied by Intel's slow progress, which made it seem (to this dolt, at least) that computer guts would regularly be swapped for newer innards. Instead, the slow pace has continued.

One of the reasons Apple switched was due to poor quality:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/former-intel-engineer-explains-why-apple-switched-to-arm

Apple also makes better margins on their own chips. There's no way they could sell a 28-core Xeon at $4k like the Studio and definitely not in that form factor.

Apple Silicon also runs near silently, all while they have best-in-class 3TFLOPs+ integrated graphics and lots of unified memory.

Intel CPU performance gains were 10x in 10 years ( https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks ). That's about 1.25x per year. Apple jumped 2x CPU and probably 3x GPU in a single year when they switched, which gained them an instant 3 year lead.

They obviously can't keep doing 2x every year because TSMC doesn't change nodes every year so subsequent upgrades will be slower (likely 2x every 2-3 years) but they will use the best tech available.

If they hadn't switched, they'd be 3 years behind on a slower roadmap. Intel only got a jump start after Apple ditched them and AMD has to keep pace with Intel. The 3nm Apple Silicon will blow people away again but they have to wait for TSMC manufacturing.

blastdoor said:

DAalseth said:

I have a feeling that Apple will introduce an M-Series Mac Pro, but keep the Intel version around.

If they were to keep the Intel Mac Pro around, then I don't see the point of an Apple silicon Mac Pro that lacks upgradeable RAM. Might as well keep the Mac Pro Intel (or AMD) only and use the Mac Studio as the highest-end Apple Silicon machine. 

Apple Silicon offers better performance-per-dollar than Intel workstation CPUs. The following shows the $4k Ultra Mac Studio is roughly the same performance as the highest CPU $13k Xeon Mac Pro:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

The i9-13900K is pretty good value but a 3nm Mac Studio will match this. It's worthwhile to save $9k.

The hardware video encoders/decoders save another $2k vs getting the Afterburner card.

And they run cooler so better sustained performance and room for increasing clock speed.

Intel will have new Sapphire Rapids Xeons at some point this year, which will offer better performance, aiming to rival the AMD Threadripper CPUs but they will be priced the same as before:

https://wccftech.com/intel-sapphire-rapids-ws-xeon-cpus-w790-fishhawk-falls-platform-to-be-unveiled-in-february-launch-in-april-2023/

A 3nm Ultra Duo would beat AMD's top Threadripper chip and rival it on price.

The main reason to still offer Intel chips is software compatibility, virtual machines etc. They could maintain the old design for that model and just upgrade the Xeon and AMD GPUs and the Apple Silicon version will be much lower priced for the same performance.

blastdoor said:

DuhSesame said:

Actually, if you count how old the microarchitecture is, the M1 is a two-year-old technology.  It took another year for Apple to deliver their Pro and Max lineups.  While they’re impressive chips, they aren’t that advanced like most of us would think.

Exactly right. Apple is slacking. There's no way that little AMD should be able to beat Apple, even in somewhat cherry picked benchmarks. 

A 4nm M2 Pro class SOC should already be out in shipping Macs right now, today. Apple has the superior financial resources, the stronger position to get a favorable spot in the fab line with TSMC, the better ISA, the better core design, the better software stack. 

Blame COVID, blame China, but AMD faces all that, too. 

Stop slacking Apple! 

It would have been nice to have the M2 Pro/Max chips already but it actually demonstrates why they didn't need to ship them yet. AMD's chips are just being announced, they won't hit retail until March and Intel's new chips are even further behind. Here's the AMD presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMxU4BDIm4M&t=1503s

AMD and Intel are playing catchup to match Apple's 2021 chip in 2023.

Their chips boost clock speeds to 5.2GHz so short-run benchmarks get an advantage and they are using a more advanced chip process.

Intel and AMD are the PC industry heavyweights and every presentation they've done since Apple's chips has shown how far behind they are because they only ever competed with each other.

Their marketing material is also based around theoretical/reference designs. AMD doesn't make the OS or the shipped product so the efficiency, quietness, stability of the retail system depends on Microsoft, PC assembler and AMD components all working well together. They never have in the past, there's no reason to expect it to be different in 2023.

When Apple releases M2 or M3 Pro/Max chips this year, they will jump ahead 1-2 years again. Intel openly admitted they only plan to catchup to Apple in 2024 and surpass them in 2025:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/10/28/intel-to-outpace-moores-law-surpass-rivals-in-2025-ceo-says

Talk is cheap though, Apple actually shipped a better product, marketing talk is meaningless until Intel and AMD ship better products.

9secondkox2 said:

Dang. Why the long wait between seasons? It completely kills the momentum. 

It takes time to film the episodes. Game of Thrones was a year between seasons too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_Thrones_episodes
https://www.ladbible.com/entertainment/film-and-tv-game-of-thrones-final-season-battle-took-11-weeks-to-film-20190304

Getting all the actors on location on the same schedule, scripts read, sets built can easily take a week per episode. That's 10 weeks of shooting per season. Then huge amounts of post-production per episode, easily another 10 weeks.

TV show Supernatural crew said 2 weeks per episode turnaround:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/anv4qd/we_are_the_vfx_crew_of_the_tv_show_supernatural/

Best case they'd be able to do it in 6 months but given the location filming and size of the crew on location, I'm not surprised it's a year between seasons. It mentions 18-19 months for season one at the following site and it was suspended for 7 months for Covid so it looks like they have around a 12 month production cycle:

https://thecinemaholic.com/where-is-foundation-filmed/

They plan to do 8 seasons so it will be 2029 when the last season airs:

https://decider.com/2021/09/27/foundation-apple-tv-plus-8-season-plan-david-goyer/

foregoneconclusion said:

ravnorodom said:

I checked some and some look really cool.

That's only because the "AI" sampled human art that already looked really cool. There's no real purpose behind "AI" art other than to rip-off human artists. 

AI will eventually be used by most artists because they will take care of mundane tasks just as computers have done for other fields of work. Inanimate objects have very little artistic merit and are very tedious for artists to have to draw - trees, sky, grass, telephones, floors, tables, chairs, windows. An AI can fill those parts in seconds and it can learn the art style of the artist. Artists can't rip themselves off.

Current implementations of AI art are trying to create entire finished art from keywords. That isn't very reliable because it has too little control over the final result but using AI-powered art tools will be the way a lot of artwork is made in the near future.