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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

#231

Post by scarface74 »

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

Apple couldn’t build at scale either and didn’t have to for the first couple of years. It took two years to sell the first million.

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

#232

Post by philistine »

dragonelite wrote: post #99
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).

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.

That will never happen. Apple has too much buying power. AMD and Intel don't make the most popular phone in the world, so they can't put down the money to compete for fab space.

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

#233

Post by wewtyflakes »

smoldesu wrote: post #161
hbn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first M1 devices released in November 2020. Where is AMD's competitive chip that came out July 2021?

AMD had the Ryzen 4800u shipping with a similar power envelope and higher multicore scores. Battery life was a good few hours shorter than the M1, but it was also manufactured on 7nm versus the Apple's 5nm. Performance tends to favor people on the denser node, so it's impressive to see x86 still competitive by modern standards. If you need further evidence of this pattern, look at Nvidia's ridiculous 40-series cards.…

Customers care about this:

> Battery life was a good few hours shorter than the M1

They do not care about this:

> ...but it was also manufactured on 7nm versus the Apple's 5nm

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

#234

Post by scarface74 »

bioemerl wrote: post #25
etempleton wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they? With the current arrangement they get all the benefits and none of the risk. If TSMC falters they can go to whoever supplants TSMC and make the same arrangement and continue to have the latest and greatest chips.

> Why would they? They could annihilate all competition in the market except for them. Every single Android phone would be forced to use subpar manufacturing from there on out.

They honestly already have. They make 80% of the profit in the cell phone market. And even their low end SE is two years ahead of the competition in performance.

Besides buying a major supplier out and then getting rid of their other customers is value destructive.

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

#235

Post by cronix »

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…

Hah, no. It was their world class commercials. Not a single one of my twenty-something friends bought because of specs when they came out. It was these that everyone talked about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTs5pOn7XFU

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

#236

Post by Tagbert »

cubefox wrote: post #61
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…

This comparison is somewhat disingenuous. Why would they compare 3nm to 5mm, when the current TSMC process is 4nm, not 5nm? We don't know how (un)impressive the improvements of the 3nm process are, when we don't know how much of the difference between 5nm and 3nm merely comes from the difference between between 5nm and 4nm.

From what I have read, 4nm is not really a significant process change and is really just a variant of 5nm. There have been only minimal improvements in chips going form 5nm to 4nm as a result. 3nm really is different.

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

#238

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

manmal wrote: post #69
maven29 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got there by skimping on IO

Please elaborate. IO is really not an issue in the M* machines I‘ve used - on the contrary.

none of the M1 laptops let you use multiple external monitors and all of the M1 products have much lower limits on storage than PCs.

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

#239

Post by EricE »

xedrac wrote: post #159
yieldcrv wrote: post #124

If an M3 mac has over 128gb RAM, I’m upgrading again 96gb is just under the threshold where it makes a difference, for me

Imagine how popular the M3 and friends would be if people could buy it off Newegg/Amazon and use an operating system of their choice?

No more popular than it is today. The vast majority of regular people don't give two cents about what is under the hood - just what a computer can or can't do with them.

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

#240

Post by ar_lan »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #206
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 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 year…

> Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it.

I think this is why Spotify/Netflix are so successful. Streaming a good amount of content for a reasonable price is more convenient + less time wasted (+ less stress and moral implications) compared to pirating.

I used to pirate music/videos all the time and the moment those services were available I stopped because it was just easier to use them. Good UX can trump many other factors.

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