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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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Because clearly that’s what I just said. > it’s simply not worth what would be an eye-watering outlay Sigh.

The problem is not money. It's knowledge. And that knowledge is not in the ASML machines.

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

#342
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why aren't there other companies outbidding Apple?

They can't. Apple is the most valuable company in the world and has more cash on hand than many medium sized countries.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many cases developer resources are more expensive than hardware or network resources and the decreased efficiency of modern software reflects that. We can all agree software is not as resource efficient as it used to be on the whole. Beyond that we’d have to discuss specific examples and benchmarks.

I'm simultaneously grateful that we value developer time and wellbeing over software performance and appalled that we too often forget the relationship between software performance and developer time and wellbeing.

I almost exclusively use "glutenous" apps (browser, VSCode, Spotify, Discord, etc.) and have yet to experience these Electron performance issues decried in HN comment crusades. Everything is perfectly snappy. Ditto for my acquaintances. The ROI on these optimizations likely wouldn't matter for the overwhelming majority of folk.

I could be wrong. I often am. But I suspect that Electron consumes far more resources in the minds of HN users than it does in most computers.

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

#344
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 i…

Perhaps the parent should have said "lead to" rather than "forced", but the point still stands that Qualcomm went to Samsung's foundries, which provided lower quality results.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was a hot turd. In contrast, "plus" variation, which was the exact same chip but manufactured by TSMC instead of Samsung, got significantly better performance/power numbers.

(BTW, I think you're getting downvoted into oblivion because of the "deep state" nonsense. The rest of what you said is reasonable.)

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

#345

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"

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.

Last November, I went from a Late 2013 MacBook Pro to an M1 MacBook Pro and it's phenomenal. Sure, I could get by on the Late 2013 but everything is so much better on the new one, I would hate to go back. I can easily code for an entire day now without having to worry about charging, makes a massive difference if you work outside the house a lot. I'm even thinking of upgrading again whenever these M3s come out because the performance and energy efficiency increases sound nuts. My advice would be to upgrade whenever you can. Even just 'little' things like being able to highlight and copy text out of photos and screenshots make it a vastly better experience.

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Compiling a web app takes seconds as well. The common complaint is the resources needed to run the app as a consumer, particularly when most of the apps you use are all instances of chromium.

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

#347
post #15
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…

>To be clear, you don't get all three.

Actually you do. The branding is called FinFlex, but the upshot is that you can use different FETs for different parts of a circuit. So some critical timing bottleneck blocks could be built with performance optimized FETs and other blocks can optimize for low power.

The numbers from TSMC for N3E are +18% speed improvement at same power, -34% power reduction at same speed, and 1.7x density improvement.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-outlines-3nm-roadmap

>Also, are these Apple's numbers?

Ha ha. That's funny. Does Apple ever release any numbers prerelease?

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

#348
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?

I thought those chips were inefficient because Qualcomm priotised performance and benchmark numbers over battery life.

That's definitely part of the issue, but compare the SD8G1 to the SD8G1+: these two chips are literally the exact same design, but the SD8G1 is manufactured by Samsung while the SD8G1+ is manufactured by TSMC. The TSMC variant ends up being ~10% faster while simultaneously drawing less power: https://www.gsmarena.com/testing_the_snapdragon_8_gen_1_plus...

(Apple, of course, still blows both of them out of the water.)

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

#349
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I don’t see why Tauri would necessarily be faster, from what I understand the main difference is that it uses a browser bundled with OS where possible but that’s not necessarily a faster browser than Chromium

https://tauri.app/v1/references/benchmarks/

I will admit there doesn't seem to be as much in it as I thought there was.

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

#350
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why aren't there other companies outbidding Apple?

Because they don't have the money.

Apple's net income has been at least $20bn every quarter for the past two years[1]. Both Intel and AMD make a small fraction of that[2][3].

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-inc...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/net-inc...

[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/net-income

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