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What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

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Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#81

Post by zozbot234 »

alkonaut wrote: post #77

What is the biggest hurdle for the M2 Mac Pro? Is it connectivity that isn't suppported by the chip? E.g. when they want external DRAM and GPU, the M2 SoCs simply don't have that capability so a whole new SoC would be required, with features that would only be used in the Pro, making it a questionable investment? Or is there a more technical hurdle, e.g. that supporting external Dram and third party GPU would require…

Couldn't you connect external DRAM to a Mac Studio via Thunderbolt if you really wanted to? Or is that still missing the same memory coherence semantics as actual DRAM sticks?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#82

Post by eole666 »

dagmx wrote: post #30
pjmlp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market of VFX, which without an Mac Pro, might end up going back to Windows or custom built Linux desktops, like many Hollywood studios did when migrating away from SGI, and Pro wasn't still an option.

VFX has largely been on Linux workstations since the demise of SGI. There’s never really been a Mac presence at the workstation level at those studios. Windows is already in many studios due to VR or Virtual Production work, since Unreal Engine kind of sucks on anything that isn’t Windows, and the same goes for VR. However there are a few areas that Macs are used heavily and where I don’t think Apple need to be worri…

"macOS has much better colour handling than windows". How is that ? Do you just mean apple screens have a better color calibration when you get them ? Or the OS come with some tools to handles colors in some ways Windows can't ?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#83

Post by coldtea »

UltraViolence wrote: post #61
klelatti wrote: post #49

Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have many roles: - A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users. - An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.…

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

The Mac are what sustained Apple pre- and post-Jobs, when it WASN'T YET about "unprofitable vanity products". If the iPhone goes down, the Macs are exactly what Apple still has going for them...

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#85

Post by ksec »

zozbot234 wrote: post #59
ksec wrote: post #13

It seems strange to include the Mini. As it is more of an Intel Mac for those who somehow still need Intel macOS for whatever reason. The memory capacity is limited in ARM Mac. So if you want high capacity memory you go to Mac Studio. And with Mac Studio, which brings us the next question. What are the Market Mac Studio couldn't compete with Mac Pro. If it is not powerful enough now, will possibly another doubling of…

> will possibly another doubling of LPDDR6, that is 512GB with 1.5TB/s of bandwidth Will DRAM really scale to that extent at the device fabrication level, though? We're already seeing limits to scaling with SRAM.

>We're already seeing limits to scaling with SRAM.

I am assuming you mean the transition from TSMC N5 to N3. Which was expected. N2 with GAA will get some density improvement.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#86

Post by chaos_a »

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #74

What I like about Apple is that they have such a clear product lineup that it allows for speculation like this article. On the other hand Microsoft's surface lineup makes no sense and is super confusing. That's true for Samsung as well. Even if these companies had the engineering capacity to make chips like M1; I doubt they would attract even a fraction of the media attention enjoyed by Apple.

Apple has done this since Steve Jobs returned to apple the late 90's, they cut down all of the unnecessary models and products lines that were causing this kind of confusion.

They've kinda gone that way again with sticking the "Pro" and "Max" terms onto everything, especially the iPhone models.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#87

Post by KyeRussell »

coldtea wrote: post #83
UltraViolence wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

The Mac are what sustained Apple pre- and post-Jobs, when it WASN'T YET about "unprofitable vanity products". If the iPhone goes down, the Macs are exactly what Apple still has going for them...

That’s…so long ago. The Apple with a two trillion dollar market cap and a spaceship campus is not the Apple of that era. The wider market and world aren’t what they were then, either. It doesn’t mean very much at all.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#88

Post by mark_undoio »

girvo wrote: post #52
ksec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Which is the question I have been asking since 2015 . From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap. >but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip…

Silly idea: could they put a M-series processor connected to a Xeon as a coprocessor to get the “benefits” of both wrt. adding their NPU stuff? Would that even make any sense?

Hardware level stuff is a bit lower than my area but...

The two tricky things I'd anticipate are:

What does it look like to hardware? Different CPUs speak different protocols to maintain a cache coherent view of memory. So they couldn't easily share memory in a completely natural way - but GPUs manage to share memory between host and GPU, so it can be done (just not necessarily as conveniently to software).

What does it look like to software? Lots of weird options here. Most convenient for software compatibility is it the Intel is also somehow running MacOS (or appears to be). I guess you could do that - it'd be like having a two node cluster in one machine. But that's not as convenient as being able to distribute computation between compatible CPUs.

None of that is a complete technical blocker to a company that controls their stack, I'd just guess it would make it too inconvenient / expensive for them to do.

That said - as an intern, years ago, I once had access to a piece of prototype hardware that had an x86 chip in one motherboard CPU socket and a non-x86 chip in the other (with various adaptation hardware to allow them to play nice). I think that was more a proof of concept than anything else, not necessarily viable without other hardware changes. Interesting nonetheless.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#89

Post by eloisant »

devwastaken wrote: post #68
UltraViolence wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

That will be really difficult to do considering apple needs macs to develop iPhone. Apple dogfoods it's own hardware, that's why it's the best.

If Apple decides that the Mac has to go, it won't be that hard to port their development tools to Windows or Linux.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#90

Post by NathanielK »

BooneJS wrote: post #8

Xeons have many, many PCIe lanes. Apple Silicon only needs enough HSIO for SSD and Thunderbolt ports, and they’ve released all of the non-internally-expandable machines already. They needed a chip that added 48+ PCIe lanes to the package so they could satisfy the relatively few Mac Pro customers. And without external DRAM, they’ll never be able to provide as much memory as a low-end Intel chip in the Mac mini at the…

The on package DRAM for the current macs isn't anything special. It's just normal LPDDR running at normal LPDDDR speeds, same thing you find in your phone. On package has many advantages, but it's not a hard requirement.

The bigger is how much LPDDR5 memory they can hook up to their 512bit memory controller.

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