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Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

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Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#191

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

I think you are exactly right, but we should celebrate that!

This kind of competitive pressure will inspire a response from Intel and other firms.

The result I would predict and hope for in a few years would be better chips from everyone in the market.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#192

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

I don't think Apple will go back to creating server infrastructure again. In the interim, I know Amazon created an ARM server chip called Graviton, and I'd like to run a kubernetes cluster on that

They should do a cloud they have some very unique tech like foundationDB based SQL RDBMS and M chips and prob a lot more cool thingies.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, every competitor is going to upgrade to these and if you stay with inferior Intel products, you give yourself competitive disadvantage. Unfortunately this is the current state of play. If I won't be able to achieve something the same speed competitor can, I put myself in a bad spot. I try to not mix emotions and business, however for a personal machine, I am rocking 5950X and it is awesome.

> I am rocking 5950X Irrelevant from a mass market perspective. That chip is still out of stock at Best Buy and the Amazon third party version is marked up 54% versus MSRP. Incidentally the 11900k is also out of stock at many retailers, but it's so much cheaper. You can still buy a pre-binned version that clocks 5.1GHz; even with markup that costs 30% less than the aforementioned third party 5950x. Availability and p…

Mass market isn't buying individual PC parts and assembling the PC, they're buying prebuilts or using whatever their office mass-purchased. Go on dell.com right now and you can order a PC with a 5950x and RTX 3080. Good luck buying either of those individually without writing a web bot.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#194
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're honest most customers aren't going to notice the performance differences, it will mostly be people with heavy work loads.

Not true at all. M1 and follow-ups are about single thread performance, the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice.

> the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice

Remember when Apple made the Power Mac QUAD, to indicate that the system had FOUR processors, because "men should not live of single thread performance alone"?

> "With quad-core processing, a new PCI Express architecture and the fastest workstation card from Nvidia, the new Power Mac G5 Quad is the most powerful system we've ever made," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement.

Of course they can't advertise the multi core performances, because they are lower compared to similar systems, just like with the Power Mac they could not advertise that the system was greener, because it wasn't.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#195

I really want the next MacBook Pro to support driving two 4K monitors over thunderbolt and have an option to buy 32 gigs of ram.

The current RAM restrictions in the M1 are dumb restrictions resulting from the fact that you can't get LPDDR4X chips larger than 8GB in size (the M1 has two on SoC LPDDR4X chips).

This year we should see a lot of CPU manufacturers change to (LP)DDR5 for memory - high end Samsung and Qualcomm SoCs are already using LPDDR5. It's a safe bet Apple is also switching to LPDDR5 which would put the upper limit on 64GB for the M2. This is notably still lower than the 128GB you can put in the current 27" iMac (for an eye watering $2600 extra), but is an amount far more pro users can live with.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#197
post #80

Is anything known about the chip? The deal breaker of M1 (for me) as it currently stands is the amount of RAM it can handle (16 GB). Edit: Mistyped 16 as 1, sorry about the confusion

I've only read very rare workloads actually be constrained by 16GB on the M1, what use case do you have that you know will be hampered on a M1?

My Ableton starter template project takes about 22GB of RAM to open. Music production is a pretty common use case that can be very heavy on RAM.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#198

I hate to say that, but I am likely going to buy M2 Mac. I don't like Apple and their anti-competitive tactics, but I admit they won their spot for now. However, as soon as good PC competitor comes in, I'll drop Apple like a hot potato.

Of all the operating systems, I'm finding macOS to be less annoying than the rest. So far Apple did not make a single computer suitable for me, but if they would release something like Mac Pro Cheap Edition (or whatever, I just want workstation-level specs for $2k), I'll switch to it. I don't really care about M1 or Intel, I think that any modern CPUs are fast enough for any tasks.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#199

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

I don't think Apple will go back to creating server infrastructure again. In the interim, I know Amazon created an ARM server chip called Graviton, and I'd like to run a kubernetes cluster on that

A lot of other fairly standard cloud native technologies don't yet work on ARM, notably istio, even though most implementations of kubernetes itself will work. This is the major thing preventing me from being able to use a Macbook even for development (at least an M1, but that's all I have).

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#200
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a 55" 4K Samsung TV as a monitor. It cold boots quickly and has no latency or subsampling issues in the right mode. I can recommend it as a more cost effective alternative to multiple monitors. The amount of available screen space at 1:1 is refreshing (not as crazy as imagined though), but it makes me realize how grainy "normal" monitors are. In some years 8K TVs might be cheap enough for an upgrade, but on tha…

One thing about TV's is that they are grainy up close. Being a 55" you probably don't sit very close to it, but how does it overall feel e.g. in font quality? And I also wonder if it's good for your eyes to focus on something that's constantly far away. I would think a mixture of the two (normal distance to a PC monitor with frequent breaks) would be preferred.

> how does it overall feel e.g. in font quality?

> they are grainy up close

Hmm, maybe it's its "TV-ness", but the individual pixels look pretty sharp to me at a close look (no quantum dots or weird pentile arrangement, that should definitely be looked out for), but I have no other low DPI display to compare it to. My reasoning was always "it's just an LCD panel, why would it be different" and so far I feel proven right.

> I also wonder if it's good for your eyes to focus on something that's constantly far away

My appeal-to-nature-argument would be that the natural human mix would probably have been much heavier towards looking into the distance than it is now (see the massive rise of near-sightedness in cities), so it can only be better than what we're currently doing.

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