tht

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.

The A16 Bionic had been rumored to be being developed on the 4nm process but was released on the 5nm process. This change seems to corroborate The Information's story, though it was only a rumor.

Apple touts that A16 Bionic is fabbed on TSMC 4nm. This sentence would make more sense if you used TSMC 3nm.

A full node change is essentially the Moore's law doubling of transistors, give or take. Chip vendors would typically have to change their designs to adapt to the new node, such as going from TSMC 5nm to 3nm. With half node changes, they can typically keep the design rules for 5nm, but enjoy something like a 10 to 20% increase in transistor count, 5 to 15% power reduction, or some combination. I suppose TSMC 4nm can be considered an enhanced TSMC 5nm, with better transistor density, but just call it TSMC 4nm.

Calling it 5nm makes it sound like there isn't improvement, and that's factually incorrect. It's a half node improvement that TSMC has done for basically a decade now.

If in 2021, Apple was expecting TSMC 3nm to be in mass production by summer of 2022, which would be in time for fall iPhone shipments, they would have designed a chip given TSMC 3nm capabilities, like hardware ray tracing features. Once TSMC and Apple saw that 3nm was going to make it on time, and they would have figured it out in 2021, they would fallback to the half node step, TSMC 4nm, and get the typical half node improvements, like 10 to 15% performance, 10 to 15% less power, some combination.

Strategically, I kind of think the Jade C die (M1 Max), Jade C chop (M1 Pro), Jade 2C (M1 Ultra), and the failed Jade 4C was a mistake. It didn't scale in the manner that buyers wanted. The M1 Max and on down appear fine. The M1 Ultra and on up? There have been issues. Apple's designed itself into a box that can't get them to ship higher end machines. That's a bigger issue than TSMC being late.

jeromec said:

I am a bit confused.
It seems to me that external display support has been here forever for iPads.

I believe the new thing is external display support with Stage Manager, which is a big deal, and could be called "full" external display support.

The prior external display feature was mirroring. Whatever was on your iPad display was mirrored on the external display. Specific apps could be designed to use the external display to extend the display area. Eg, a video editor could display video on the external display while showing its UI on the iPad. 

danox said:

tht said:

mikethemartian said:

tomowa said:

Just asking, as I am not a Tesla car user. 

Does Tesla sell subscriptions for "enhanced features".  

Does Tesla allow 3rd party software/firmware access to its car's operating systems? Or does Tesla control the whole environment?
Is there any irony in Musks position, regarding Apple here?

I’m not sure but I think they charge a one time fee to unlock features but I don’t think it is an ongoing subscription.

These are the current aftermarket software unlocks Tesla is offering for my Model 3.

One time items consisting of:
$2000 Acceleration Boost
$6000 Enhanced Autopilot
$15000 Full Self Driving

Subscriptions consisting of:
$199/mo Full Self Driving
$9.99/mo Premium Connectivity

Tesla's on-screen software platform is obviously Tesla only with contracts for games and services. I'm not sure if, say, they are getting a cut from Spotify subscriptions. They might be. It's not a free for all App Store. You get what you get from Tesla. I don't know what their cancellation policy is.

The software unlocks are at a per-owner level too I think, but perhaps that has changed. The software locks are linked to the account holders, not the car. So if you sell the car to someone else, they may not get the software unlocks and they would have to buy them. Not sure where that landed.

If you sell your model 3 on, does the new owner get to keep/use those features too?

No. The software unlock is per model per account AFAIK.

I buy the acceleration boost for $2k for my Model 3. Enjoy it for a few months. I then sell the car to someone else. That new owner will not have acceleration boost. Same policy with FSD.

If you trade in you car to Tesla or a dealer, the software unlocks will most certainly be erased, and new owners will have to by the software unlocks for that vehicle. It's per account per vehicle.