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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

#91

Post by hbn »

dewey wrote: post #57
newaccount74 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M2 Pro chips finally allow 8k displays! That's a pretty significant new feature (at least on Macs, Windows has supported 8k displays for some time already).

I know zero people with a 8k display, I wouldn't call that a significant new feature.

I know people have made naive comments about computers for years, "why would you ever need more than 8MB of RAM?", etc

But I genuinely believe 4k is the upper limit where you stop seeing benefits in increased resolution for a monitor. Our eyes do have limits after all! I have pretty good vision and 4k is enough, and at that point I'd prefer focus on other aspects of picture quality like color accuracy and higher refresh rate.

It's already annoying enough how large a screenshot of your monitor comes out (just tested on my desktop and it came out to 10MB). 8k is unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.

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

#93

Post by nordsieck »

dewey wrote: post #57
newaccount74 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M2 Pro chips finally allow 8k displays! That's a pretty significant new feature (at least on Macs, Windows has supported 8k displays for some time already).

I know zero people with a 8k display, I wouldn't call that a significant new feature.

> I know zero people with a 8k display, I wouldn't call that a significant new feature.

From what I understand, even 4k is usually a waste for a living room TV when viewed across the room from a couch. People just don't have the visual acuity to really tell the difference.

But I can easily tell the difference between 4k and 8k when a 43" TV is 16" away from me.

I get that companies want to make money so the new tech is going into big TVs. But at some level, it's very strange to me.

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

#94

Post by officeplant »

cubefox wrote: post #76
newaccount74 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M2 Pro chips finally allow 8k displays! That's a pretty significant new feature (at least on Macs, Windows has supported 8k displays for some time already).

Didn't the M1 MacBook have the much more basic issue of only supporting a single external monitor via HDMI?

Regular M2 still has the same limitation of two total displays. Unless you use USB->HDMI adaptors that have their own display controllers.

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

#95

Post by brailsafe »

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…

It'll help make the lightest and smallest devices even more capable than any other competing laptop. After using my work issued 16" M2 Pro, my 2019 intel mbp is crawlin slow, particularly with Docker. Build times can always be faster, battery life always better, cooling efficiency better.

The real life luxury of just being able to toss a 14" macbook pro that weighs almost nothing into your bag and have a savage development machine with up to 96gb of ram, no fan noise and minimal heat, great battery life, is very valuable.

I've started noticing all the processes that really bog my intel mac down. Indexing, running out of ram, builds, etc.. I was pretty pessimistic about macs for a while, but it feels right now like when they started putting retina displays in them. My previous mac couldn't even smoothly play a 1080p YouTube video very well.

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

#96

Post by nordsieck »

hbn wrote: post #91
dewey wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know zero people with a 8k display, I wouldn't call that a significant new feature.

I know people have made naive comments about computers for years, "why would you ever need more than 8MB of RAM?", etc But I genuinely believe 4k is the upper limit where you stop seeing benefits in increased resolution for a monitor. Our eyes do have limits after all! I have pretty good vision and 4k is enough, and at that point I'd prefer focus on other aspects of picture quality like color accuracy and higher refr…

> But I genuinely believe 4k is the upper limit where you stop seeing benefits in increased resolution for a monitor. Our eyes do have limits after all!

I think it depends on how big the monitor is. You're probably right for 27" monitors. But running a 43" TV as a monitor, the pixel density is quite a bit lower than I'd like.

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

#97

Post by mgkimsal »

amelius wrote: post #40
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #29

The article has no information on what this statement means. I'm sure TSMC hasn't just walked away from their other customers like NVidia and AMD. TSMC is still in process of ramping up production of their 3nm process (the article mentions they'll reach 45,000 wafers per month by March), so the only sensible reading of this statement seems to be that Apple are getting first X months (where X is unspecified) of produc…

The article says: > Apple has reportedly secured all available orders for N3, TSMC's first-generation 3-nanometer process that is likely to be used in the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro lineup as well as new MacBooks scheduled for launch in the second half of 2023. Note that they phrase it as: first-generation.

"all available orders" might also mean there were some orders already taken by others, and "all available" means "everything that was left"?

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

#98

Post by eptcyka »

cubefox wrote: post #76
newaccount74 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M2 Pro chips finally allow 8k displays! That's a pretty significant new feature (at least on Macs, Windows has supported 8k displays for some time already).

Didn't the M1 MacBook have the much more basic issue of only supporting a single external monitor via HDMI?

The M1 Pro and M1 Max can have multiple display outputs. The M1, be it in the Macbook Air, Mac Mini or Macbook Pro could only ever have 2 display outputs. On laptops, one of those was permanently reserved for the built in display.

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

#99

Post by dragonelite »

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).

Yeah i guess its mostly apple buying up the most advance nodes capacity at TSMC. It should be interesting once Intel and AMD get on the same node level as Apple hardware then a comparison can be made.

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

#100

Post by _kbh_ »

kijin wrote: post #63
jojobas wrote: post #12

Why does TSMC do that? When Apple has better options TSMS will be dumped, as with IBM and Intel before. Why hurt goodwill with other customers?

This is not the first time I've heard of TSMC reserving a very large portion of their production capacity for a single customer, especially in the early days of a new process node. I guess there's an inherent risk in being the launch customer for a new node (unexpected delays, low yield, bugs, etc.) that can only be offset by exceptionally large volume. Maybe there's a gentleman's agreement among Apple, Samsung, AMD…

Another part of the reason is that Apple reportedly bankrolls a large amount of the R&D for new nodes for TSMC
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