tht

mjtomlin said:

retrogusto said:

I’ll be interested to see if anyone does benchmarks comparing the top two processors available in the new Mac Mini. I’m wondering if the fastest one will have any issues with throttling due to overheating in that small enclosure. 

There's a fan in the mini, shouldn't have any thermal issues. If I had to guess, and I do as I couldn't find any real numbers, the higher end M2 Pro probably doesn't draw more than 100W when fully loaded. That means all GPU and CPU cores working along with memory completely full. That enclosure with a fan should definitely be able to keep it cool enough to prevent throttling.

Apple's Tech Specs page says the mini w/M2 has 150 W of continuous power draw and the mini w/M2 Pro has 185 W of continuous power draw. So, curious. They have increased the size of the power supply to 185 W for the M2 Pro model.

4 TB ports at 15 W. 2 USBA ports at 10 W. That's 80 W, with 105 W for everything else. 40 W for the CPU cluster and 60 W for the GPU cluster, give or take. I do wonder if it can actually deliver 15 W out of every TB port and 10 W out of the USBA ports, simultaneously.

thadec said:

tht said:

Hardware wise, an M1 Pro in a Mac mini for $800 would be just fine as "gaming PC". If people want more, there's the Studio, but Apple will have to drop the price. Apple just aren't interesting in games for Macs.

Yeah, the cheapest device with the regular M1 costs $700 and the cheapest device with the M1 Pro costs $2000. And both those have only 8 GB RAM. Even the $400 Steam Deck has 16 GB of RAM. So A. no way Apple sells a device with an M1 Pro for $800 instead of twice that and B. it still wouldn't be "fine." It isn't just that you can frequently find a device with a Ryzen 5 or Intel Core i5 and an Nvidia RTX 3050 or AMD Radeon 6500 for about the $800 that you claim this M1 Pro Mac Mini would cost. It is that you can use that $800 x86 box as a base and significantly increase/improve the RAM, storage, GPU or even CPU over time as you can afford it in a way that you never can with an Apple Silicon device. Some gamers bought the Core i5 and Core i7 Mac Minis because you could do Windows on bootcamp with them and upgrade them. Not anymore. 

The base MBP14 SKU for $2000 comes with 8c CPU, 14c GPU, 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD. Also, all the other laptop parts. The cheapest M1 device is the iPad Air for $600 and comes with 8 GB RAM, 64 GB storage, and the other tablet parts. The $700 Mac mini SKU does have 8 GB RAM and 256 GB storage. Imo, the Mac mini has rather favorable profit margins for Apple, like a legit 30% profit margin. Not gross margin. Profit margin. I think that can sell it for $400 and break even, or maybe even make money.

Apple sells an Apple TV with A15 SoC, 4 GB RAM, 128 GB storage and Ethernet for $150. This sounds like it is an "at cost" to a break-even price. You double everything about it, and it is basically an M1 with 8 GB RAM, 256 GB of storage for $300. Add some profit margin and you get to $400. For an M1 Pro, you just double again as that is basically what an M1 Pro is over a M1, and that gets you to $800. Not a lot of profit, but doable. (You can think of it as would Sony or MS have hardware profit margins if they sold a PS5 or XBox series X for $800.)

Hardware isn't the problem. It's the will to nurture a games ecosystem on macOS that is the problem. They don't want to do it. I don't think they need to have leading GPU performance either. Just have good games exclusive to the platform. For that, I think the only choice is to become a games publisher and develop a set of games that would be able to sell the platform. They are spending billions on exclusive Apple TV+ shows to sell subscriptions in quite the long game. They can spend billions on exclusive games to sell both subscriptions and hardware.

I think the upgradeability of the hardware is not really material until Apple actually commits to having a gaming ecosystem. If someone wants higher end hardware, they can just get a Mac Studio in a trade-in or a sell-buy cycle. They won't get the PC builder hobbyists, but they aren't a big part of the market. It all doesn't matter as long as they don't have games and the availability of good Mac hardware isn't going to cause games to be ported or developed for it. So, in short, a Nintendo strategy, not a Playstation or Xbox strategy. They definitely have enough units imo.

No matter what, they are going to be a 4th player. That inevitably means a niche player, but it behooves them to do it as it keeps some fraction of their customers happy and will stay in the ecosystem rather buying a game console or a PC to play games. If Arcade had good exclusive games, I can see it happen, but Arcade is really just an iOS game subscription service, with existing games.

Will be interesting to see how many PCIe slots it will have and whether it will support PCIe GPUs, MPX modules, and Apple Silicon in an MPX module.

Hopefully the Extreme version comes out. Definitely want to see how they bridge it all together. Like I said in prior comments, priority 1 is to do better on getting GPU performance to scale with cores. The M2 and A16 GPU have some nice performance increases, but the big problem is how well it will scale with 20, 40, 80 cores.

Cesar Battistini Maziero said:

Normal, office work is still very sad compared to Mac!

I reeeeealy want Mac OS on the iPad hahahahahahah

What do you mean by normal office work?

freeassociate2 said:

I have a question for the more technically knowledgeable folks. I keep seeing the “designed itself into a box” idea trotted out. I’m curious why people would think that the M series chips would be subject to that kind of bind, when it’s reasonable to say the the A-series hasn’t in many iterations. It’s clear the architecture itself has room to grow — multiple billion-dollar companies have ARM-based commercial and consumer initiatives in place.

So given that Apple’s teams now have multiple generations of chip and hardware design experience to draw upon, and a culture that doesn’t rest, why should anyone think this is a screw-up, rather than the natural design process and temporary technological limitations? I’m sure we’re all well aware just how difficult it is to create and implement leaps in chip tech, and that one of the keys to success has always been in how well the software leverages those advances into significant improvements for end-users.

I don't think anyone is showing any doom and gloom for iPhones, outside of trolldom which you have to learn to ignore. Numbers will be bad for the holiday quarter due to COVID affecting manufacturing, but everyone is expecting those decreased units are mostly delayed sales. And, hardware ray tracing as a phone feature isn't a big feature, so the "doom and gloom" from the Information is the typical media sensationalism, which you have to learn to ignore.

Hardware ray tracing will be a big feature for the goggles though, and, it is a required feature for higher end Macs where 3D workflows are more common. So, Apple has to do it. Otherwise, steady incrementalism is basically all that is needed for iPhones (A-series SoCs) and low end Macs (M1, M2 SoCs). My comment was in regard to the large iMac and Mac Pro, and to some extent the M1 Max and M1 Pro. Lots of curious decisions at many different levels.

Product feature decisions:
1. The Mac mini and iMac 24 should have the M1 Pro as an option, at least 6 months ago.
2. The Mac mini and iMac 24 should have the M2 as an option, at least 3 months ago.

These are just the existing machines with multiple update paths that weren't taken. Instead, some of the Macs will be over 2 years old before updates. There's obviously a blue sky of possibilities for other form factors.

SoC design decisions:
1. The M1 Pro to M1 Max to M1 Ultra GPU has terrible scaling with cores. It presents like a memory bottleneck, and I suspect there isn't enough tile memory to hold enough GPU threads to utilize all the performance in the cores if so. Whatever it is, they should have caught this in GPU performance simulations 3 years ago and changed whatever it was to improve GPU performance in the M1 Max and M1 Ultra SoCs. They decided to live it, and maybe they are hoping they would quickly move to the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra versions, but COVID and TSMC delayed it by a year.

2. The poor GPU scaling likely killed a Mac Pro with a M1 Ultra/Extreme. If the scaling was perfect, the M1 Max would have a GB5 Metal score of 80k (Radeon 6600 XT), the M1 Ultra would be 160k (Radeon 6900XT) and an "M1 Extreme" would be 320k (GeForce 3090/4080/4090 territory). Scaling with core counts is never perfect and if they are say 80 to 90%, they'd be doing quite well. But the scaling from 16 to 32 cores was 80%, and 32 to 64 cores is 60%. That's quite poor. The M1 Extreme GPU scaling would have dropped even further, and probably less than 50%. This resulted GPU performance that is less than 2 to 3 year old Radeon GPUs. No point in shipping an M1 Extreme if so.

3. Apple's high end Mac SoC strategy is notionally a minimum cost strategy of only designing 1 SoC, the M1 Max chip, and either chopping off part of the GPU (M1 Pro) or bridging together 2 (M1 Ultra) or 4 ("M1 Extreme") for higher end versions. If they got the GPU performance to scale better with increasing core counts, it would work, but it didn't and they minimally lost a cycle on the high end.They should have known  this 3 years ago. Perhaps they thought they would figure out and kept on trying. Either way, it is definitely a mistake somewhere in the hardware designers, Metal designers, or both.

I don't know if number 3 is actually the minimum cost option. The cost of the strategy doesn't sound any cheaper or faster than a path where scaling is the primary purpose versus one discrete chip that could be chopped or glued. The M1 Pro to M1 Max upgrade option is just a GPU upgrade. Buyers don't get increased CPU performance. GPU compute workflows can make use of a lot of GPU cores, but Apple's M1 Max (Jade-die) strategy limits them in how they can get more GPU cores.

Notionally, they will eventually have to go with a chip tiling strategy (both vertical and horizontal). The Ultra is basically an early version. If there was a CPU chip tile, GPU chip tile, they could scale an SoC in multiple directions. Need a chip with lots of CPU, but no GPU, just tile a bunch of CPU chips together. Need a lot of GPU but not a lot of CPU, tile a bunch of GPU chips together. This doesn't sound anymore expensive or time consuming than the plans we think they had.

The poor GPU core scaling has to be fixed for any strategy to work. I don't think this is a problem with employee turn over or COVID. They definitely know about it. It's probably just a series of compounding events. Like, they decided to wait to fix the M1 GPU scaling in the M2 versions sometime 2020, and felt the M2 versions would arrive by late 2022. Then, COVID delayed them a year. Those two compounded to make it 2023.

The iPhone A-series stuff can just be explained by TSMC being late with 3nm and they had to fall back to 4nm and a more minimal upgrade to the SoC. Nothing odd about that.