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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

#91

Post by dmitriid »

akamaka wrote: post #27
teruakohatu wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now. It will simplify MacOS when they end Intel support.

That’s aside from the point. They could accomplish that by simply killing off the Mac Pro line. The question is how they will pay for a high-end chip when they no longer can rely on Intel to spread out the development cost among many customers.

> They could accomplish that by simply killing off the Mac Pro line.

In the time after the trashcan Mac Pro they lost a significant portion of the professional market. And while that market is relatively small, it's highly influencial.

By the time Final Cut Pro X was unveiled Apple could boast that 60% of Hollywood movies are edited on a Mac. Now? Not so much. And this probably extends into other areas, too.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#92

Post by scarnie »

UltraViolence wrote: post #58

I have famously predicted that sales of Mac's will decline and could even lead to a rout. Many professionals need Intel CPU support in order for them to run Windows on their Macbooks natively. And no, emulation isn't an option. I predict that Mac sales will sag and that this will lead Apple to slash more and more models, eventually undermining the legitimacy of the platform. Most users will switch to Linux on Intel l…

Famously

It would be helpful if you have facts or data to back your statements up.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#93

Post by zozbot234 »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #78
runeks wrote: post #72

What excites me about apple Silicon is this: performance that is roughly on par with competing x86 CPUs combined with ~5x lower power usage. My M1 MacBook Pro can run full throttle on all 8 "performance" CPU cores for an hour without the fans ever spinning up. This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU, which is simply not possible with x86 (unless you severely compromise on the definitio…

> This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU I'm not too sure about that. The current 20-core CPU from Apple is inside the Mac Studio, and it has quite a monster of an air cooler. It's obviously going to be much harder to put that (or something more powerful) inside a laptop, even with all the chip improvements...

Well of course it does, who wants to be thermally throttled on a desktop-class machine? You're assuming that desktop and laptop use must support the exact same scenarios which is not true among x86-64 users either.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#94

Post by IshKebab »

yywwbbn wrote: post #73
IshKebab wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably it isn't that low volume. Just low volume compared to their other products. They can probably heavily base a more powerful chip on their existing designs but with more cores & cache, so design should be relatively cheap. Manufacturing the masks etc. is probably around $10m which is probably fine given how expensive Mac Pros are (and it would simplify their software if they can ditch Intel entirely).

I think IO would be a bigger issue than scaling performance. Somebody buying a mac pro would probably expect support for discrete and expandable ram.

That's just connectors though isn't it? It uses a standard RAM interface already.

Maybe it needs more PCIe lanes but again that probably doesn't need much design work.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#95

Post by michaelt »

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...

The Mac and the iPhone are like a 100ft yacht and a cruise ship tied together.

If the cruise ship sinks, the yacht might be a great help - or it might get pulled down with it.

Luckily, the cruise ship doesn't show any signs of sinking at the moment.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#96

Post by akelly »

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.

Apple doesn't want you to know this but they do their mechanical and electrical design on Windows PCs (using Siemens NX and OrCAD respectively)

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#97

Post by brailsafe »

esskay wrote: post #56
jamujamu wrote: post #4

Hopefully what’s also left is a 27-inch iMac with M2 or M2 Pro chip inside. The current 24-inch iMac just doesn’t cut it, and the Mac Studio + Apple Display combo is way to expensive compared to the price point of Intel iMacs.

I'd imagine most people going for the Mac Studio arent touching the balked Apple Display. It's been riddled with problems and at that price point you can get far better displays now. The panel they're using dates back to 2017 so it's not exactly like you're getting the latest and greatest in screen technology.

When you really look into what's available, there's a fair bit of variation in the market for different customers, but there's incredibly few 5k+ displays at 27 or ~30 inches. Like zero if you discount the LG. Everything else is kind of ok, but not always a good replacement.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#98

Post by ngcc_hk »

eloisant wrote: post #89
devwastaken wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really as it is not their philosophy. Ipad OS is the one.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#99

Post by nine_k »

NathanielK wrote: post #90
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.

Maybe the very ability to make a 512 bit-wide memory controller stems from the very short, very tightly controlled and shielded lined between the DRAM chips and the controller?

(No idea if it's so, but DRAM is such an analog HF beast that a controller needs training before it can work with a particular chip, in a particular slot on a particular system board. It's automatic but it's there, and it must have limits.)

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#100

Post by ngcc_hk »

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…

Could it be many still need CUDA and hence unless they can somehow fit in Nvidia they … But they do not want to. Hence not sure what is the point other than they can win the war against CUDA.
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