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

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

#101

Post by zekica »

personjerry wrote: post #79
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 AMD-powered computer is more energy efficient than a M1 for example?

Apple M1 Pro vs AMD 5800u - 2 months apart (October vs December 2021). 5nm vs 7nm TSMC. They have comparable performance (60-120% in multi core depending on the task, 90-110% in single core) and the same power draw.

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

#102

Post by moffkalast »

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).

[flagged]

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

#103

Post by Vvector »

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?

Launching new processes and building fabs for them is expensive and very risky. Pre-selling the output helps mitigate some of those concerns.

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

#104

Post by Kukumber »

cubefox wrote: post #85

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?

Qualcomm was not forced, Qualcomm was not able to compete with M1 chips

Qualcomm is a for profit, they are not forced to be bad, being bad mean less profit, they are just inefficient and had a different strategy, they saw competition coming and they panicked, they are not used to innovate they prefer milk their customers with small and insignificant upgrades every once in a very while as well as making use of their influence with the deep state to kill any weak competition (Samsung's Exynos)

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

#105

Post by sigmar »

Aromasin wrote: post #7
Waterluvian wrote: post #4

These headlines always make it sound like the chips are fungible. Is it that they’re basically saturating the entire production capacity with their orders?

Depends on your definition of "supply". The argument is mainly just semantics. They're not wrong per-se. A better phrase might have been "production" rather than supply. I agree, supply sounds like I'm buying an off the shelf component, not a custom designed wafer. In short, Apple is set to purchase every wafer that TSMC produces when they launch their N3 node. How long for should have, but hasn't, been specified. It…

>It's safe to assume that by "entire supply" they mean "until TSMCs next node"

Is that really safe to assume? Maybe the original paywalled story is more precise with language, but the use of "all available orders" and "100% of the initial N3 supply" seems so vague to me. Could initial mean first month of full scale production?

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

#106

Post by achenet »

flakeoil wrote: post #65
highwaylights wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect it would be more likely they’d just go straight to ASML and start building their own fabs. That said, they may see enough value in their TSMC deal that it’s simply not worth what would be an eye-watering outlay for something that in the end may not really save them all that much. It’s probably not seen as a bad thing internally that other rivals aren’t able to get on 3nm either, which wouldn’t be true if App…

> I expect it would be more likely they’d just go straight to ASML and start building their own fabs. Yeah, right. As if it is that simple. Just construct a building and put ASML machines inside and off you go.

easy as spinning up a CRUD app

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

#107

Post by DennisP »

amoss wrote: post #62
jb1991 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious why not? Apple Silicon so far has improved performance, and reduced power consumption. Does that mean that it’s a larger chip than the others that came before it?

There is a trade-off between the three kinds of improvements. It is possible to pick some points (for example) that give a less than maximum power reduction as well as a less than maximum speed improvment. I think the comparison would be the Apple Silicon that they released is larger than a (hypothetical) alternative that only improved performance but kept the other two constant.

Maybe X*Y*Z=K but K increases over time. Ten years ago, we couldn't do what we can do now.

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

#108

Post by piyh »

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).

Is there any Windows machine that's fanless and at M1 speeds?

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

newaccount74 wrote: post #54
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.

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).

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by criddell »

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…

Do those same eye limits apply to printers? A 24” 4k screen is 180 PPI (according to Google). Can you tell the difference between a page of text and images laser printed at 200 dpi and 1200 dpi?
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