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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

#201

Post by pietroq »

papruapap wrote: post #174
ChrisRR wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Fun fact: Turbo Pascal was 38KB and that included the editor, compiler and debugger. It was lightning fast, compiling 10s of kSLOC in mere seconds on a 4.77MHz single-thread 8088 with 640KB of RAM. Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :)

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

#202

Post by seymourhersh »

coder543 wrote: post #192
morcheeba wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you must not have seen the pre-ipod players. The Personal Jukebox was 2.5 larger than an ipod. It didn't fit in a pocket and the grey plastic felt cheap compared to the ipod's shiny metal back. It really felt experimental, and nothing like the polished Walkmen Sony was making.

That's... also what I'm saying, yes. I think we agree? iPod was not successful because it was the only thing offering high storage capacity. It wasn't the only one. iPod was successful because it offered a touch wheel, iTunes, and Apple's brand recognition. As you point out, it also had very good build quality. None of these things have to do with some exceptional storage capacity.

Apple’s brand recognition wasn’t anything special at the time. The iPod was essentially their first meaningful entry into consumer music. Compared with say Sony, they were nobody - a recently failing maker of outdated computers.

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

#203

Post by thunderbird120 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #64
jb1991 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34894943

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.

>TSMC and Samsung have adapted to new generations without any real hiccups

Samsung has been having serious issues for years and TSMC is currently having serious issues with N3. Samsung's issues are too complicated and longstanding to go into but TSMC's issues are simpler and more recent. Their base N3 process (now called N3B) is a bit of a dud with apple being essentially the only major customer. The issue is with cost and yields, N3B just doesn't make economic sense for most customers. TSMC is aware of this and is racing to fix this. The fix is known as N3E which is an "enhanced" "version" of N3. The reason I put quotes around both of those words is because N3E actually has relatively little to do with N3B, there is no direct path to transition N3B chip designs to N3E, and because it features some improvements, but also some significant regressions in performance compared to N3B. The highest profile regression is the total lack of SRAM density improvements compared to N5. Sticking a huge chunk of SRAM on the chip has become very important to modern chip performance so this is a really big deal. The process is "enhanced" mostly in terms of economics, not performance, and it's coming an entire year after N3B. This has essentially delayed TSMC's "real" N3 node an entire year while also reducing its performance advantage over competitors. There's been a lot of discussions about the implications of this in the hardware space[1][2]

[1]https://www.semianalysis.com/p/tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-e...

[2]https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7048/n3e-replaces-n3-comes-in...

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

#204

Post by coder543 »

seymourhersh wrote: post #202
coder543 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... also what I'm saying, yes. I think we agree? iPod was not successful because it was the only thing offering high storage capacity. It wasn't the only one. iPod was successful because it offered a touch wheel, iTunes, and Apple's brand recognition. As you point out, it also had very good build quality. None of these things have to do with some exceptional storage capacity.

Apple’s brand recognition wasn’t anything special at the time. The iPod was essentially their first meaningful entry into consumer music. Compared with say Sony, they were nobody - a recently failing maker of outdated computers.

But compared to the brand recognition of Remote Solution? The Remote Solution Personal Jukebox beat iPod to the punch by 2 years on offering a high capacity 5GB portable MP3 player, but it was not some runaway success. Apple's brand recognition was far higher than Remote Solution, which certainly was a factor in helping iPod to succeed where Personal Jukebox did not. (Not the only factor, of course, but one factor.)

Apple's brand may not have been as good as Sony in the music space, but Apple was still a very well-known brand, even if they were struggling at the time.

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

#205

Post by LeanderK »

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"

I use a mid 2014 MacBook pro. I spend my days in vscode, a terminal and safari. So far it's still going strong. It's sometimes laggy, of course, and the battery life is really bad, but in general it's still a machine that can be worked with.

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

#206

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

notjustanymike wrote: post #89
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.

I forget the exact timeline, but I think part of it too was music pricing. Physical media (tapes, records) had gotten very expensive, and almost everyone was pirating MP3s from Napster etc. Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it.

I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not not. Google search suggests it may have been 1 or 2 years later, but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods ?

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

#207

Post by seymourhersh »

coder543 wrote: post #204
seymourhersh wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s brand recognition wasn’t anything special at the time. The iPod was essentially their first meaningful entry into consumer music. Compared with say Sony, they were nobody - a recently failing maker of outdated computers.

But compared to the brand recognition of Remote Solution? The Remote Solution Personal Jukebox beat iPod to the punch by 2 years on offering a high capacity 5GB portable MP3 player, but it was not some runaway success. Apple's brand recognition was far higher than Remote Solution, which certainly was a factor in helping iPod to succeed where Personal Jukebox did not. (Not the only factor, of course, but one factor.)…

As has been said elsewhere - it didn’t beat apple to anything because it was giant, had a poor UI and no meaningful companion software. It was a prototype that wasn’t ready for the market. Nothing more.

Comparing the iPod to junk that happens to match on one spec or another tells us nothing.

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

#208

Post by coder543 »

seymourhersh wrote: post #207
coder543 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But compared to the brand recognition of Remote Solution? The Remote Solution Personal Jukebox beat iPod to the punch by 2 years on offering a high capacity 5GB portable MP3 player, but it was not some runaway success. Apple's brand recognition was far higher than Remote Solution, which certainly was a factor in helping iPod to succeed where Personal Jukebox did not. (Not the only factor, of course, but one factor.)…

As has been said elsewhere - it didn’t beat apple to anything because it was giant, had a poor UI and no meaningful companion software. It was a prototype that wasn’t ready for the market. Nothing more. Comparing the iPod to junk that happens to match on one spec or another tells us nothing.

> As has been said elsewhere

Elsewhere... as in the comment that I replied to? Which you then replied to me?

I was literally in agreement with the "elsewhere" that you're referring to. Your comments are confusing to me. Storage capacity was not the thing that made iPod successful, even though the anecdote at the top of this thread is trying to make that argument. There were a number of other factors that were more important. That's what I said and that's what the "elsewhere" also appears to have said. That's exactly what you just said too, so you're literally agreeing with me, but you want to argue for some reason.

Still, "Apple" was a much better brand than {someone no one has ever heard of}, which matters for something like the Personal Jukebox.

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

#209

Post by newaccount74 »

avisser wrote: post #113
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'm over 40. I can't see all the pixels on a 4k display, let alone 8k. I'm still happy with my 2013 MBP w/ Retina.

It's not just about the resolution, it's about physical area.

My plan is to buy a 65" or 75" 8k TV and use it as computer monitor. I'll have a screen that is as big as my desk.

A display of that size will allow me to have my IDE, source control, terminals, log files, the app that I'm developing, my email, the CI dashboard all visible at the same time.

Of course I'll mainly use the bottom center of the huge display, but I think it will be a completely different experience when you no longer have to cmd-tab between apps but can just glance up/left/right to see what's going on.

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