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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

#171

Post by dhosek »

nekoashide wrote: post #131
cubefox wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how big a difference this made. If I remember correctly there were iPod alternatives with similar drives pretty quickly.

That's just it, being first to the market is sometimes more important than worrying about competitors. They killed it so hard with the ipod that even if the zune was a better device at the time people wanted the ipod.

It didn’t help that the Zune was sold in a fecal shade of brown. Apparently the product designers never watched Reservoir Dogs.

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

#172

Post by tambourine_man »

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).

Likewise, history will tell you we'll periodically see obnoxious hacker news comments claiming the M-series can’t possibly be better than what the x86 world has to offer.

We’ve been reading for decades that ISAs don’t matter that much anymore, and yet everything that needs good battery life is ARM. Intel was the undisputed manufacturing kind for 40 years or so. Things change.

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

#173

Post by causi »

tambourine_man wrote: post #152
causi wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could any of them build at scale? Honest question. IBM has had 1nm transistors and etched their logo by manipulating individual atoms for years. And yet, if you want the best chips by the thousand/millions you run to TSMC

Define scale. Microdrives were quite common at the time. I used one with a PCMCIA reader before the first iPod and a couple years later I had an MP3 player and a PDA with one. I recall being giddy at the fact I could keep a text copy of wikipedia in my pocket.

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

#174

Post by papruapap »

ChrisRR wrote: post #128
meindnoch wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can we stop the hyperboling? The amount of multitasking we can do on consumer computers today is nowhere close what is what possible only 10 years ago.

About text editors... you can use blazing fast editors if you want like cli-base ones, notepad++ or sublimetext... If devs are not using those to code anymore there may be reasons, right?

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

#175

Post by joaogui1 »

Havoc wrote: post #158

At what point does this become a monopoly issue? Sure others could have outbid hypothetically so it is on paper fair but Apple has a lot of cash.

2 issues in fact, one is TSMC being the only one capable of making these amazing chips and the second is Apple buying their entire supply. Now if any of that counts as a monopoly I don't think so

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

#176

Post by coder543 »

edude03 wrote: post #134
cubefox wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how big a difference this made. If I remember correctly there were iPod alternatives with similar drives pretty quickly.

The fact that we're talking about the 'iPod' & Apple and not the 'iRiver xyz' I think shows it made a big difference. Yes, I know, survivorship bias, but apple has a history of not releases products unless they think they're good enough (for their own definition of good) and if apple hadn't had found a way to make it store enough songs to be a differentiator we probably would never have heard of the iPod, nor would w…

> I think shows it made a big difference

No, it doesn't. It shows that something made a big difference, but that thing absolutely does not have to be the amount of storage.

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

#177

Post by rcarr »

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"

The rust community seem to be leading the fightback on this but I think it'll be about 5 years before there's a big switch over. If I owned a popular electron app, I would definitely be thinking about starting to write a Rust version or migrating to Tauri because if you're not then somebody will be. Once that Rust version hits feature parity with your core functionality people will end up jumping ship for the faster, shinier version, just like people jumped ship from Atom to VSCode. Big Electron hitters like the aforementioned VSCode seem to be banking on people switching over to cloud which I'm not sure I see the majority doing. I find the UX of using VSCode in the browser not that great.

I'm already in the minority because I do all my work in Sublime Text so I might be completely wrong about all this, but this is how I suspect it will play out.

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

#178

Post by 908B64B197 »

hedora wrote: post #117
notjustanymike wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn’t read it that way. Jobs was good at noticing something would become possible 2-3 years before the rest of the industry. Flash-based players existed back then, and would have followed the trajectory the iPod jumped on a few years after it launched. The iPod interface was middling. (iTunes really, really sucked, but the device was nice) Enabling podcasts was a big deal though. I’ll give them that.

In retrospect it sucked.

But at the time, iPod + iTunes + Mac was a better combo than anything else available on the market.

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

#179

Post by etempleton »

bioemerl wrote: post #170
etempleton wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Apple would spend probably over 100 billion dollars to buy TSMC and make them a less profitable company by not serving other companies? All this would do would weaken TSMC and strengthen other chip manufacturers for a couple years of absolute chip dominance. But they already have chip dominance, so it is for essentially zero gain.

> make them a less profitable company by not serving other companies? They become part of apple. With a stranglehold on chips the price of apple products as a whole, or their sales, will skyrocket.

Would they? Apple already has the best chips. What makes you think that the average consumer cares that much about even a 20-30% performance difference. It is not like TSMC is the only competent chip manufacturer. Nvidia largely uses Samsung and they are doing just fine.

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

#180

Post by foobiekr »

tambourine_man wrote: post #152
causi wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could any of them build at scale? Honest question. IBM has had 1nm transistors and etched their logo by manipulating individual atoms for years. And yet, if you want the best chips by the thousand/millions you run to TSMC

The IBM drive was commonly sold with early DSLRs like the Canon 10D. It was very common and routine. I am even aware of some products in the embedded space that used it.
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