tht

TheObannonFile said:

tht said:

TheObannonFile said:

The numbers don’t check out here on CPU.

if they improved the single core, and then added 2 more CPU cores (high performance I assume), the multi core should be a good bit higher than that.

somebody help me out in the math here. 

It's 8+4 not 10+2. Just 8 performance cores. They added 2 more efficiency cores according to rumors.

Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh, ok, that makes a lot more sense on the math.

I’m curious, are the additional high efficiency cores there to help so as many tasks as possible on less power to extend overall battery life? I can’t think of another reason why to add additional efficiency cores. 

Yeah, you would think so. The curious decision was why they dropped down to 2 efficiency cores for the M1 Pro or M1 Max chips when the M1 has 4 efficiency cores. These cores are very small. Were they that hurt for die size that they could not include 4 eff cores in the M1 Pro/Max chips? There are a lot odd decisions in the M1 Pro and M1 Max decisions. I don't know if it truly saved them time and money to do it the way they did, but that is the only reason I can think of.

Marvin was right about the GPU performance in the M2 Pro/Max. If they can match the 30 to 40% performance uplift on GPU, it's a nice win. There's actually another 30% to 40% uplift they can do by having the performance scale better with more GPU cores. If they can solve their GPU core perf scaling issues as well as have more perf per core, an M2 Max could have 60% to 80% improvement in GPUs. I'd hazard a guess that the GPU tile memory is too small to support a lot GPU compute loads and it can't feed the cores. Whatever it is, they need to fix it.

I still think they should have added CPU cores from the M1 Pro to M1 Max versions. Go from 8+2 in the Pro to 14+4 in the Max, and repeat with successive generations. They should do this, or have the GPUs be capable of doing more CPU ops, so CPU type loads scale accordingly to prices. Still weird that the M1 Pro isn't in a Mac mini or iMac 24. There are too many "no" responses within their marketing group.

That's 20k wafers per month right?

Some envelope math: 300mm wafer diameters are 70,000 mm2 in area. Using 100 mm2 for chips, that's about 600 chips at 85% yield. 20,000 wafers is 12m chips per month. Apple's share is 4m chips per month, or 12m per quarter

iPhone 14 models will still be selling in 2024, along with other A16 device, as well as Mac chips if M2 Max based chips are fabbed on 4nm, though their chips will be 2x, 4x, 8x the size of a 100 mm2 chip. So, 20k wafers per month at this plant will be enough to fulfill, what, 20% of the product line? At best.

It's a start. With TSMC slowing down in the fab tech race, don't be surprised if Apple contracts Samsung or Intel. There needs to be another TSMC plant in North America and a couple in Europe to really diversify and protect against the craziness of humanity.

cornchip said:

Still hating the camera bump. 

Yup. Would like them to offer an optional camera module with worse cameras but is flush with the back. For both iPhones and iPads.

One place where they could a camera bump? Mac laptops 

blastdoor said:

The iPad Pro might be the best argument in favor of allowing “side loading”. I’d love to install R on this thing! 

There is an R programming app in the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/r-programming-compiler/id1158038782

Every once in a while, I do some Python scripts on my iPad and Pythonista has been fine. There actually are some Linux/Unix CLI environment iPad/iPhone apps where the app is running a Linux environment, and you are using terminals with most CLI tools and common programming environments. C, C++, Lua, Perl, Python, etc.

With extended display support in Stage Manager, it becomes a real option for me to use as a laptop replacement. Apple still needs to let these apps arbitrarily install packages that don't come with their apps though. Oh, and Keynote, Microsoft Office, etc, need to be the full featured versions. MS loves to do not implement the one feature you need on environments and OSes that are not important to them. Apple needs to get on the ball too. Everyone. iPadOS apps should have every feature that the macOS, Windows app does.

ravnorodom said:

US already has a fabrication factory called Intel. Apple and Intel just don't get along. Where's that $52 billion from government is going to go? Intel or TSMC in Arizona? There is no other company in the US is capable of producing CPU chips.

Intel wasn't in the business of being a merchant chip fab for the vast majority of its existence. The fabs that they have, basically the best fabs in the world until 2018, were designed and built to fab Intel chips. They probably need billions to just be able to fab non-Intel designs. Fabless chip vendors (AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Broadcomm, Texas Instruments, Infineon, etc) were essentially left to go to Samsung, TSMC, GlobalFoundries, etc.

30 years ago, chip fab was cheap enough for smaller companies to have their fabs. A lot of people say Moore's Law this and Moore's Law that, where chip transistor densities double every 18 to 24 months due to economics of computing life cycles, but what's never said is that Moore also said the cost of designing and building a chip fab doubles every 18 to 24 months too. The cost to build a TSMC N3 fab is 2x the cost to build a TSMC N5 fab. A TSMC N3 fab is somewhere around a 20b USD.

As long as this cost of building advanced chip fabs is exponential like this, it sets up a Highlander situation where there can only be one. Only 2 or 3 companies will have enough money to get to 3nm. Maybe 1 or 2 companies for 2nm. To fund the next fab, it means you need to capture more and more of the market or create more markets to sell chips into in order to fund the next round. TSMC winning the smartphone chip vendor war, with Apple winning the revenue and profit game funding them, meant they could outspend Intel in getting to the next fab node.

What happens at 2nm, or 1.5nm or 1.2nm? Fabs at that level will probably cost 50b to 100b. Only huge nation-state economies will be afford it. So, the CHIPS act is a kind of a precursor to what will eventually happen. What the company is a US company or a foreign company really doesn't matter too much. It's really having a closed cycle capability locally that's free of global economic "headwinds" as it were.