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Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

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Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#141

Post by sjwright »

saagarjha wrote: post #98
macintux wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are Mac volume numbers even a rounding error relative to mobile devices?

Mac sales by volume are about 10% of iPhone sales.

While 10% is small in relative terms, it's still huge in absolute terms. And the Mac also remains an important nexus for Apple's wider ecosystem, even if a significant majority of their customers will never own one. Because of the way Apple technology is developed, and by virtue of being largely untethered and unmanaged, Mac is the bootstrap platform for everything else Apple does. It doesn't always have to be so, but I don't see Apple releasing anything else which could take its place.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#142

Post by zachberger »

raydev wrote: post #138
hmottestad wrote: post #134

As someone with an 8 year old MacBook Pro that isn’t all that much slower than my 2019 16”.... I am so glad Apple is still pushing the envelope. Back in the old days we used to get a doubling of performance every year or two. Then Intel got into trouble and has been producing the same chips for what 4-5 years? Essentially just minor changes. It’s not really Apple’s fault that the rest of the industry is lagging so ba…

My 2013 high end 15" MBP gets pretty hot when I'm watching 1080p or higher videos. Chrome+YouTube is even worse, it even drops frames. Compiling Swift is even worse than that. I have a work-provided 16" MBP that does all these things effortlessly.

I have an early 2013 MBP and its still a champ, none of those problems.

I'd suggest popping off the bottom and cleaning out the dust, I do this about once a year.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#143

Post by Dylan16807 »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #120
ChuckMcM wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to this: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15538/samsung-starts-mass-pro... Which has Samsung in production of their 7nm node this year as well.

Samsung's process seems to be consistently DOA.... by the time it is stabilized, its already behind everyone else. Consequently, almost all of Nvidia's current troubles stem from being unable to do all of their fabrication at TSMC, and the yields for Samsung 8nm being very poor. Nvidia recently canceled the 2x RAM variants of their 3070 and 3080 cards (and not because of insufficient GDDR6x, only the 3090 takes that)…

Surely the ram variants use the same chips. Why cancel those because of yield? I wouldn't expect total demand to change by a significant amount...

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#144

Post by totalZero »

kilburn wrote: post #107
desiarnezjr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the problem there is? Any one of those companies are all long term TSMC customers and I have no doubt have solid working relationships with them. They would have had similar opportunity to book that fab capacity too.

The problem is the assertion that "It's Apple's engineering and design". Engineering & design don't buy you the entire world's supply of the best in class fab capacity for some months: money does. It seems to me apple's marketing and product strategy has more to do with bringing in that money than actual engineering and design, contradicting the original assertion.

At the risk of sounding cheeky, Apple's engineering and design are the sole source of the money involved.

Apple's involvement with TSMC also provides TSMC with an opportunity to learn from Apple. Nobody books an entire pure-play foundry without taking the time to figure out what they want to do with that manufacturing capacity in the first place.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#145

Post by Dylan16807 »

raydev wrote: post #138
hmottestad wrote: post #134

As someone with an 8 year old MacBook Pro that isn’t all that much slower than my 2019 16”.... I am so glad Apple is still pushing the envelope. Back in the old days we used to get a doubling of performance every year or two. Then Intel got into trouble and has been producing the same chips for what 4-5 years? Essentially just minor changes. It’s not really Apple’s fault that the rest of the industry is lagging so ba…

My 2013 high end 15" MBP gets pretty hot when I'm watching 1080p or higher videos. Chrome+YouTube is even worse, it even drops frames. Compiling Swift is even worse than that. I have a work-provided 16" MBP that does all these things effortlessly.

Are they using the same amount of hardware acceleration?

If one has support for VP9 and one doesn't, then most of that is not because the cores changed in performance, it's because the video decoder got rearranged.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#146

Post by Dylan16807 »

hinkley wrote: post #63
coherentpony wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These things aren't _really_ two-dimensional. They're not really three-dimensional either, but they are objects built out of layers of two-dimensional things. When you measure number of transistors per unit area you will inevitably see something more dense than the "number of 5nm square in a millimeter of area". It's the silicon equivalent of measuring one's BMI.

Video games used to call their pseudo-3d display 2.5D, or if they were feeling fancy, isomorphic. There is a little freedom in the Z axis, but not very much. But if speed of light matters to performance, then a chip design that increases the z axis decreases the euclidean distance between any two gates, which should (or at least could) matter to performance, right?

> But if speed of light matters to performance

It barely matters. Gate delays and thermal limits outweigh distance by a huge factor. If you need to go further distances then you can wait one cycle and cover a relatively huge length.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#147

Post by nazgulnarsil »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #135
FPGAhacker wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, when node sizes where based off of a gate that meant logic gate? I always thought it was the transistor gate width.

My experience with the marketing speak around process nodes. 1) In the way back times, (think Intel 8080A) the complexity of the chips was advertised in "logic gates". More gates = more impressive chip. 2) But logic gates weren't equivalent from one process to another, and so it switched from "logic gates" to "transistors." More transistors => more impressive chip. (this is when I left Intel for Sun Microsystems) 3)…

Thank you for this elucidating comment.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#148

Post by nazgulnarsil »

totalZero wrote: post #144
kilburn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the assertion that "It's Apple's engineering and design". Engineering & design don't buy you the entire world's supply of the best in class fab capacity for some months: money does. It seems to me apple's marketing and product strategy has more to do with bringing in that money than actual engineering and design, contradicting the original assertion.

At the risk of sounding cheeky, Apple's engineering and design are the sole source of the money involved. Apple's involvement with TSMC also provides TSMC with an opportunity to learn from Apple. Nobody books an entire pure-play foundry without taking the time to figure out what they want to do with that manufacturing capacity in the first place.

Yeah, I'm tempted to say something like: it takes a while in your career before you figure out the enormous difference between companies who do engineering and design and companies who do design and engineering.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#149

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

topspin wrote: post #133
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Efficiency, performance and cost are strongly related to density. Price less so; that's a function of supply and demand. They are related, of course, but the important stuff can be measured more directly by looking at how well programs work on a given computer. I think it's just a little odd to praise one cherry-picked, arbitrary metric for being less game-able than another cherry-picked, arbitrary metric. Especial…

It's a story from a site that focuses on fabrication technology and the semiconductor market place. The topic is device density. This is of interest, even if it doesn't interest you.

I appreciate that it's of interest to some people. So is the node figure you denigrated in your original post, though.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#150

Post by bentcorner »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #102
mucle6 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy an iPad pro because time and time again we have seen that optimizing is not a priority for the majority of business. I think the cynicism here is that if only these frontend developers would just learn to optimize we would all finally be better off. I think there are two factors that push against this though. First, if you learn to optimize then you can charge more for your labor, and you will likely get a job so…

Amazon and Google have published a truly tremendous amount of data about how fraction-of-a-second differences in loading time can have outsized impacts on bounce rate. It continues to be amazing to me that so many businesses just completely fail at understanding this basic truth. Speed is a competitive advantage. Doubly so when many of your competitors don't realize it.

You're not wrong, but if you're trying to view your local city hall meeting minutes or paying for your garbage bill, it's not like you can go somewhere else.

And it's true that the people paying for it could go elsewhere, but page performance probably weighs pretty low on that list.

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