tenthousandthings

I realize the forums are a tiny aspect of Apple Insider, and it's a giant pain in the ass to moderate them, but this article/editorial contains two factual errors that have already been addressed repeatedly in the comments on earlier articles that made the same mistake—if the author had read those comments, he could have made a stronger argument here.

First and foremost, the A16 is 4nm. Apple stated that outright. It is the N4 process. The linked The Information article AI covered on December 23 may have some elements of truth in it. After all, chipmaking is hard, or everyone would be doing it. Especially high-end graphics. The quote from Ian Cutress therein says all that needs to be said. But it's Apple Insider who makes the leap there to say that the A16 stayed on 5nm and didn't go to 4nm because of these challenges. That is just wrong, wrong, wrong. The A16 did go to 4nm (N4). Apple touted this in its presentation. I find this insistence otherwise, in multiple articles by two different members of the AI staff (Wesley twice and now Malcolm), to be just inexplicable.

The second error is more of a detail, but it's an important one if you're going to be editorializing about Apple and chipmaking. TSMC's so-called "4nm" is the third generation of its 5nm (N5) FinFET platform. It's not a "die shrink," to reference Malcolm's 2019 article where he laid out some of the factors driving Apple's A-series chip production. It uses the same design library. N4 is a second "Tock" not a "Tick," to use the same terms Malcolm used in 2019. That's why Apple could easily revert to the A15 graphics designs for A16 (while staying with N4 for A16, instead of N5P used for the A15), as rumored/leaked in the aforementioned The Information article.

TSMC provides a definitive English-language source of information about how these “process technologies” relate to one another: https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/logic

This will replace the 13" Touch Bar MBP, and fill the same spot in the marketing/pricing lineup.

And let’s not forget the 2019 Mac Pro was announced just a year before the Apple Silicon announcement. The launch was less than six months before. It makes perfect sense that it would have been designed for Apple Silicon from the start. 

I've been waiting for a thread to post this in, I guess it can go here. The tl;dr version is there has been one other unusual, long time interval in the past history of Apple Silicon, between the A10 and the A10X, and that is the only case where Apple switched process nodes in between. This fact could indicate that the reason for the similarly long interval between the M2 and the M2Pro/Max (at least) is because of a process node change.

mpantone said:

rob53 said:

Not sure NVMe single blades will max out that projected speed and I can guarantee you that TB5 hardware will not be inexpensive. Article talks about 8K displays and only a bit about faster SSDs (for gaming? what about for real work like video production), which also will cost more. Higher bandwidth also ends up meaning people will want larger storage because, conceivably, faster speeds will allow more data to be pushed and stored. There is a usable limit to these speeds, which always has to do with money. You got it, you can buy it. Most consumers will never see the speed of TB5, same as now because most consumers only use USB3.x speeds instead of TB3/4 speeds because of the extra cost in making the interface hardware.

I agree, I don't see how Joe Consumer will be able to saturate TB5 bandwidth.

A pro certain probably could, writing multiple streams of 8K video (or other data) to a disk array with multiple NVMe drives. TB5 is intended more for that professional audience; Thunderbolt compatible hardware is already expensive.

In any case, TB5 is still in the proposal stage. Once it's approved in its final form, there would be more activity to develop compliant hardware.

Up until now, Thunderbolt has essentially been an externalization of the PCIe bus as far as I can tell. As PCIe bus bandwidth increases, Thunderbolt follows.

The other major integrated elements are support for display protocols (DisplayPort) and charging. Apple needs TB5 to support a future ProMotion 8K XDR display in a single cable, and they (and the rest of the industry) are getting that.

Apple’s original involvement was developing DisplayPort support and adapting Light Peak to support both optical cable and copper cable. To answer July’s question above, I don’t think Apple’s role is any different from the rest of the industry at this point. Here’s an early AI article about it:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/24/intel_details_thunderbolt_as_exclusive_to_apple_until_2012