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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

#121

Post by causi »

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…

At the end of a routine meeting with Toshiba, the engineers mentioned a new product they had in the lab that would be ready by that June. It was a tiny, 1.8-inch drive (the size of a silver dollar) that would hold five gigabytes of storage (about a thousand songs), and they were not sure what to do with it.

Keep in mind that 1.8 inches was not remotely the smallest hard drive size at the time. The 1.3 inch Kittyhawk microdrive was released by HP in 1992, the 1-inch IBM microdrive in 340MB was released in 1999 and the 1GB in 2000.

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

#122

Post by krono »

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…

Here is the story in video format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1dzNuyq6O0

I highly recommend checking out the other videos by that YouTube channel as well.

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

#123

Post by meindnoch »

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…

For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. Paraphrasing the old saying: "What TSMC giveth, Electron taketh"

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

#125

Post by nicoburns »

moffkalast wrote: post #111
nordsieck wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But simultaneously you won't be looking at that giant monitor from the same distance, but much further away. So it really shouldn't make that much of a difference as long as the angular resolution checks out. I've currently got a 32" one running 1080p, from a normal viewing distance I can't see any pixels at all. Going beyond that and having to render 4x as much already seems super gratuitous. 8K is just completely r…

> But simultaneously you won't be looking at that giant monitor from the same distance,

You might be if it had a higher pixel density. There are plenty of people who run 2, 3 or even 4 smaller monitors next to each other at close distances. That could potentially be replaced by one much larger 8k monitor in the future.

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

#126

Post by cubefox »

officeplant wrote: post #94
cubefox wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is crazy. Couldn't much weaker Intel chips do this years ago?

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

#127

Post by turnsout »

nsteel wrote: post #15
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…

> 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…

> Also are these Apple's numbers?

Hope it's obvious, but no, they are not Apple's numbers—this is a rumor about unreleased products.

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

#128

Post by ChrisRR »

meindnoch wrote: post #123
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…

For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. Paraphrasing the old saying: "What TSMC giveth, Electron taketh"

As an embedded developer I'm always surprised that physicists and engineers spend decades pushing the limits of physics, for software devs to come along and make text editors no faster than they were on Windows 3.1

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

#129

Post by pwinnski »

moffkalast wrote: post #111
nordsieck wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But simultaneously you won't be looking at that giant monitor from the same distance, but much further away. So it really shouldn't make that much of a difference as long as the angular resolution checks out. I've currently got a 32" one running 1080p, from a normal viewing distance I can't see any pixels at all. Going beyond that and having to render 4x as much already seems super gratuitous. 8K is just completely r…

So many assumptions here! I use tooling to divide my 4K monitor into five rectangles: two across the top each taking up 1/4 of the screen, and three across the bottom each taking up 1/6 of the screen. Even with that, I have to layer some things, and am often actively working with three or more of the "virtual screens" at once.

I am old enough that I've started to wear reading glasses to counter my age-related presbyopia, but if I had an 8K monitor it would probably sit less than two feet from my face just as this 4k monitor does, and I would make use of every pixel.

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

#130

Post by asah »

sofixa wrote: post #41
John23832 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would run afoul of antitrust laws? I don’t see it.

TSMC is a critical supplier of Apple and a bunch of Apple's competitors. Making it Apple-exclusive would kill AMD, Nvidia and most Android phones (Samsung and Huawei are the only exceptions using subpar non-TSMC chips) overnight. There is no way in hell that any antitrust regulator allows Apple to destroy their competitors with an anticompetitive purchase of a supplier.

...but meanwhile it's still fine to corner the market on 3nm...

(nevermind that modern chips are a hybrid of different feature sizes...)

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