tenthousandthings

Interesting, basically a hybrid 5K/4K -- 5K horizontal and 4K vertical. Extended 4K or Truncated 5K. Take your pick! 

Good to see movement, finally, in the desktop display space. Started last year with the Dell 6K competitor and the Samsung 5K copycat. After years of 4K being mostly good enough.

Your tease about "8K monitors" expected at CES has me interested...

Apple must feel strongly about other aspects of the case if they are willing to take this step.

I thought the Masimo CEO made it pretty clear they want it both ways. They want Apple to settle the whole complaint, not just the specific patent infringements the ITC has ruled on. That’s a non-starter if Apple knows they are on solid ground with regard to Masimo’s other claims.

I like the attempts to maintain perspective and suggest the possibility that Apple might know what they are doing, like the recent iMac article by Peter Cohen. Concise and to the point. But it's also good to see Professor Dilger back and thinking about future products. His lectures are long and rambling, but there's usually a "there" there. I'm rarely disappointed.

I think this coming year will establish what Apple has in mind for the refresh/redesign cadence of Mac silicon, and how it relates to shipping products. I don't think this is well understood, and a lot of assumptions are floating around. Anandtech does a good job of summarizing and explaining the industry press releases and investor Q&A, but they don't try to put it into perspective with regard to Apple's product lines, nor do they really try to characterize the TSMC-Apple alliance, which is, IMHO, the defining story of the past decade of the semiconductor industry, and likely that of the next decade as well.

One approach would be to try to get a better sense of what TSMC is doing overall, in its partnership with Apple, and with its "3DFabric Alliance." Your story of the Arizona investment with Amkor Technology didn't provide that perspective, nor did anyone else's, as far as I am aware (i.e., not very far). Amkor is a member of the 3DFabric Alliance, listed under OSAT (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test), which includes "advanced packaging." It probably wasn't a coincidence that Apple let cameras into one of its own testing facilities the same week they announced that investment.

That brings me to another possibly big story for 2024 -- the M3 Ultra. Another thing mentioned in the most recent 3DFabric Alliance press release is a tenfold increase in substrate performance. TSMC has at least two packaging technologies that use substrate, CoWoS (basically chiplets) and InFO_oS (what Apple uses for UltraFusion). I don't know if the breakthrough in substrate programming applies to the latter, but if it does, it could be a big deal.

https://pr.tsmc.com/english/news/3070

https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/InFO.htm

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17626/tsmc-forms-3dfabric-alliance-to-accelerate-development-of-25d-3d-chiplet-products

Graphics architecture in the M3 family is a major step forward. Some things won’t be seen unless you’ve got A17/M3 or better. It will be front and center with the Studio and Pro — if there is a wait until later in 2024, we can hope that new and/or improved Studio and Pro displays could be part of that.

The Glasgow union is a part of the GMB — “officially known just as GMB, the trade union has been formed by multiple mergers over decades. Prior to adopting the name GMB, it was known as the General, Municipal, Boilermakers' and Allied Trade Union (GMBATU).”