crowley

jdw said:

lkrupp said:

Hey AppleInsider, social media sites are removing disinformation, lies, and conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and the vaccines. Why aren’t you doing the same? There are now a number of these bullshit posts from that crowd in this thread. Do your duty to protect the truth.

Leave AppleInsider alone!  Leave people spreading lies alone!  It's called FREEDOM OF SPEECH, friend.  If some crazy wants to preach the world is FLAT, let them.  A few Jim Jones crazies will follow the lies, but most of the population will not be deceived.  The most worrisome thing these days isn't the crazies or lies.  It's suppression of speech in the name of the greater good.  Time to read George Orwell, friend.  I get much more of an eery feeling from those who wish to censor others than I do from the crazies who spread lies.

mr lizard said:

crowley said:

It stinks that an app can be made non-functional by the developer, even though network connectivity is not actually used in the app, and especially when users have put money into the app.  I love Nintendo, but their entire approach to mobile is garbage.

On the contrary, the app refuses to function unless it has a constant network connection. Even a minor blip in connection (e.g. if you're travelling and your train goes into a tunnel) causes the app to lock up until connection is restored. 

Marvin said:

avon b7 said:

One of my doubts here is if we will finally see a move to cloud 'computing' in these next few years and away from needing local power both in terms of pure compute performance and the energy required to achieve it.

I've seen white papers pointing in that direction but I always remember the 'netbooting' scenarios that were the 'future' years ago and never really materialised. 

For things like video processing and real-time feedback, cloud computing isn't practical. Video footage is TBs of data, uploading data to the cloud for processing is the biggest hurdle. For things like rendering, cloud computing works better as the processing load is much higher than the data size.

crowley said:

Marvin said:

Intel and AMD vastly overprice their workstation and server chips because it's such a low volume market and high cost investment. Apple can make these chips at a fraction of the price and they don't need to overprice them because selling chips isn't a line of business they are in, their profit comes from the sale of the whole unit. Apple Silicon allows Apple to undercut Intel/AMD in price by as much as $12k.

Seems like a whole load of assumption going on there.  How can Apple make low-volume, high-cost investment chips at a fraction of the price?  You say it as if it's a given, but there's no certainty there.

And if their profit comes from the sale of the whole of the unit then how can they undercut Intel/AMD by as much as $12k?  That's only $1k less than the price of a Mac Pro equipped with the best processor Apple will BTO!  That top of the line Mac Pro comes with an Intel 3275M which is around $3000 retail, so your numbers don't make sense to me at all.  

Apple might be able to achieve some economies of scale by reusing chips that they've developed for other machines, but that will mean the Mac Pro has few advantages over those other machines apart from expansion slots (at a hefty premium).  I doubt they will do that.  And if they have to invest in a higher grade of performance chips for the Mac Pro then they may be able to do better and/or cheaper than Intel and AMD, but that's yet to be seen.

Apple can make more cost-effective high-end chips because they are only building them for their own use and only have to produce a single unit. Intel/AMD make dozens of chip models and each one has to have a separate design and manufacturing process. They have to charge customers thousands to make that process profitable.

Apple only has to manufacture around 50k chips per year for high-end use. Even if it cost them $500 per chip to manufacture, that's $25m.

The current high-end spec of the Mac Pro is $24k for both CPU and GPU. Apple can match that spec on Apple Silicon for over $12k less. There are PCs that are in this price range too:

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16859152110
https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-PRO-3995WX/dp/B08V5HPXVY
https://www.amazon.com/EVGA-24G-P5-3975-KR-GeForce-Cooling-Backplate/dp/B08J61SS5R/

Apple can make something competitive with this performance-wise for a much lower price on 3nm chips. They have complete freedom to make whatever they want. They've said in the past, the Mac Pro is a passion project for them, it doesn't make a lot of money and now they don't have to pass any revenue on to Intel or AMD.

Like I say though, the tower form factor hasn't made much sense for Apple to keep making it for at least a decade and it makes less sense now than ever with such efficient hardware. Apple has stated repeatedly their goal was always to make the hardware disappear, that's why the new iMacs are so compact. The Mac Pro has stuck around as an ugly wart on that goal for far longer than necessary and this was only due to the failings of Intel, Nvidia and AMD over the years. Now they can go it alone and build exactly the hardware they want.