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Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

macrumors.com

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Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#81

Post by coffeebeqn »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #60
deanc wrote: post #11

> Compared to 5nm process, the first-generation 3nm process can reduce power consumption by up to 45%, improve performance by 23% and reduce area by 16% compared to 5nm, while the second-generation 3nm process is to reduce power consumption by up to 50%, improve performance by 30% and reduce area by 35%. What kind of real-world impact are we likely to see on the 3nm chips for the new iPhone and M3 macs? These figures…

History suggests we will see obnoxious hacker news comments about how the M-series processors are some unrivaled alien technology that will be forever unbeaten when it comes to performance followed by AMD releasing a low wattage CPU with better multicore performance about 8 months later (or whenever they get fab capacity anyways).

What I really want is for them to release a lineup like Aerith - the super efficient Steam Deck SoC for the general market so we get more fun forms of computers

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#82

Post by [deleted] »

bookofjoe wrote: post #51

>Apple’s iPod, by comparison, was made far more pocketable thanks to the inclusion of a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drive. The story behind how Apple came to acquire these hard drives for the original iPod is interesting. >Jobs had expressed interest in building a portable music player in late 2000 and had tasked Jon Rubinstein with making it happen. The problem, however, was that Jobs wanted a player that was small and sl…

[deleted]

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#83

Post by matwood »

napolux wrote: post #55
hotpotamus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that the launch failed because it had such a long wait time (assuming due to popular demand) has a sort of Yogi Berra quality that I appreciate. He was the one who said, "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded". If the launch was delayed because of technical issues then that would be another matter. I'm really not too up on the differences between phones and the specifics of one launch or another these da…

> Saying that the launch failed because it had such a long wait time (assuming due to popular demand) has a sort of Yogi Berra quality that I appreciate. He was the one who said, "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded". Do we really know what happened? Lack of silicon? high demand? logistic fails?

Has everyone already forgotten all the covid lockdowns in China?

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#84

Post by hbn »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #60
deanc wrote: post #11

> Compared to 5nm process, the first-generation 3nm process can reduce power consumption by up to 45%, improve performance by 23% and reduce area by 16% compared to 5nm, while the second-generation 3nm process is to reduce power consumption by up to 50%, improve performance by 30% and reduce area by 35%. What kind of real-world impact are we likely to see on the 3nm chips for the new iPhone and M3 macs? These figures…

History suggests we will see obnoxious hacker news comments about how the M-series processors are some unrivaled alien technology that will be forever unbeaten when it comes to performance followed by AMD releasing a low wattage CPU with better multicore performance about 8 months later (or whenever they get fab capacity anyways).

The first M1 devices released in November 2020.

Where is AMD's competitive chip that came out July 2021?

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#85

Post by cubefox »

Remember how Apple bought up most of the 5nm capacity for their M1 chips? Qualcomm was then forced to go with Samsung, which resulted in the Snapdragon 888 and 8 Gen 1 SoCs being pretty inefficient compared to the TSMC competition, like the Mediatek Dimensity 9000. Will something like this now happen again?

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#86

Post by SuchAnonMuchWow »

warrenm wrote: post #68
nsteel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reduce power consumption by up to 50%, improve performance by 30% and reduce area by 35% To be clear, you don't get all three. Also, are these Apple's numbers? They are better than what TSMC say (1st gen) 3nm silicon provides: > N3 technology will offer up to 70% logic density gain, up to 15% speed improvement at the same power and up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology https://w…

"Speed" != "Performance" '70% logic density gain' sounds like 'reduce area by 35%' to me The only one that might not line up is 'reduce power consumption by up to 50%' vs 'up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology' ...but you have to know what's being compared before deciding the numbers do (or don't) make sense

About the area, keep in mind that not every part of a chip is composed of dense logic:

Typically, sram (cache memories for example) doesn't scale as much as core logic, and interconnect (connections between the cores, DDR, etc...) almost don't scale at all.

This is highly dependent on the design of the SoC, but the core logic is rarely the largest of the three, so you will not see a 35% reduction of the total area of the chip: only of the areas the most densely packed with logic. What you could have for example is a 35% more powerful neural network accelerator in the same area as the previous generation. But you will not have 35% bigger cache.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#87

Post by formerly_proven »

jb1991 wrote: post #73
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow - desperation indeed. It's amazing how Intel, who had such process expertise, managed to screw up like this, while TSMC and Samsung have adapted to new generations without any real hiccups.

Resting on laurels. Just like how IBM declined despite its prominence and capabilities, how BlackBerry lost... getting too confident or too comfortable.

Rather the opposite is true, Intel 7 was too ambitious and delayed for ages as a result, which caused a cascading delay of their entire product lineup for multiple generations.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#88

Post by saiya-jin »

helf wrote: post #59
xiphias2 wrote: post #34

M2 was a skip generation for me, looking forward to M3. Maybe the same with iPhone. I generally care about process node as the main feature of a computer.

You care about the process node as a main feature? Really? I mean, it's nice and all, but the MAIN FEATURE?

don't take random internet people's saying at face value, some folks state 1000 things a day of which maybe 5 are still valid tomorrow

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#89

Post by notjustanymike »

bookofjoe wrote: post #51

>Apple’s iPod, by comparison, was made far more pocketable thanks to the inclusion of a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drive. The story behind how Apple came to acquire these hard drives for the original iPod is interesting. >Jobs had expressed interest in building a portable music player in late 2000 and had tasked Jon Rubinstein with making it happen. The problem, however, was that Jobs wanted a player that was small and sl…

Interesting article, thanks for that. One of my key takeaways is the iPod represented not one but multiple simultaneous tech revolutions. Consumer storage until then unseen, paired with material and interface design that companies hadn't considered a priority.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#90

Post by newaccount74 »

napolux wrote: post #2

Considering how failed was the launch of the iPhone 14 Pro (I had to wait for 45 dayss before getting mine) and sales of the "iPhone 14" (which is just an iPhone 13, basically) this is just expected

> which is just an iPhone 13, basically

It's a repairable iPhone 13. I went with an iPhone 14 over the 14 Pro because of that -- I don't care as much about the "Pro". What I care about is that I don't want the repair costs for a cracked glass to be so high that it's cheaper to buy a 2 year old used phone.

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