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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

#361

Post by ar_lan »

jdmichal wrote: post #317
ar_lan wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 becau…

The iTunes being discussed here was not a streaming platform. It was a library management platform (2001) that also offered purchase and download of FairPlay DRM-laden music files (2003). Later it would offer DRM-free MP3 download for select music (2007) and eventually its entire catalog (2009).

> The iTunes being discussed here was not a streaming platform.

I never said it was. The point was not a comparison of iTunes to streaming - but the proposed UX enhancement iTunes provided mapped a way that was even simpler than pirating per u/HarHarVeryFunny, which made it worth it at the time to switch from pirating in their mind.

Streaming made this even easier in my opinion, and was the catalyst that prompted me to stop. Granted - when I was a teenager, I simply didn't have any money even for iTunes purchases - but when Spotify came around, I had just gotten my first job, and made the switch then.

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

#362

Post by ar_lan »

shaunsingh0207 wrote: post #351
ar_lan wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 becau…

100%. I stopped pirating altogether for a few years because everything I needed was conveniently available, at a low price. I've told multiple people that if anime had a netflix equivalent with nice UX, I would happily pay for it. Sadly now I feel like the UX and recommendation system of netflix/disney/hulu/etc. is genuinely worse than just pirating. I still pay for spotify though, its feature full, fairly cheap, and…

Yeah - the streaming fragmentation really does feel like it's being brought back full circle. I think I'm in the minority of binging a show only when it's completed, and only ever subscribing for a service for a month-at-a-time.

Although, I do keep Disney+ for my child, and Peacock because I still watch the Office a lot.

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

#363

Post by ProfessorLayton »

Eisenstein wrote: post #279
flatiron wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people forget that the first ipod was firewire only and firewire was a very apple thing at the time. it wasn't until they gave in and changed it to usb (and released iTunes for windows) that it really set the world on fire.

When the iPod came out USB 2.0 had just been created. USB 2.0 wasn't in widespread use for at least a year or two after. USB 1.1 was 12mbits/s -- that is 1.5MB/s. Firewire was 400mbit/s. Accounting only for bus speed, filling up a 5GB iPod would have taken 54mins[0] for USB 1.1 vs 1.6mins[1] for Firewire 400. [0] 1000MiB/1024MB * 5000MB = 4,883MB / 1.5MB/s = 3255s [1] 4,883MB / (400mbit/8) = 98s

It's also worth pointing out that Firewire had the ability to charge and sync the iPod simultaneously. USB ports didn't output multiple amps like they do today, so not only did it take longer, but one would also end up with a warm iPod with even less battery life left after adding music via USB.

Apple even made dual Firewire/USB cables to allow the (Firewire) charging brick to be used while syncing.

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

#364

Post by chongli »

derefr wrote: post #274
giobox wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) It would have still been pretty odd to see a PC with no CD-ROM drive in 2001. It wasn't a given a machine would have a DVD-ROM drive in 2001, but CD-ROM was cheap by 2001 and rather ubiquitous. Most home PCs in a box started shipping with CD-ROM in the mid 90s, along with Windows 9…

> by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one. Yeah, but a piece of consumer electronics requiring someone to own a computer produced in the last five years (as a Firewire Mac would have been at the time) is a surprising choice, and especially so in that era. The majority of scanners and printers produced in 2001 were still parallel-port driven, because peripheral companies c…

I got my first Mac in 1995 (Performa 5200CD). Obvious from its name, it had a built in CD-ROM drive.

I had the internet throughout the rest of the 90’s, dialing up via a series of external modems. 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, and eventually a 56k modem. I downloaded MP3s and played them with SoundJam MP (which Apple bought and reskinned as iTunes).

That computer was so slow (75MHz PowerPC 603) that it took nearly all of its resources to play an MP3. However, my next computer was a B&W Power Mac G3 (released in 1999) running at 400 MHz.

The difference was night and day, way more than the 5 times implied by the clock speed. Around that time I also got cable Internet (6Mbit) which was far faster than 56K dialup (yes, more than 100X faster).

By the time the iPod came out I had more music than could even fit on the 5GB hard drive. I waited till the 3rd gen and got the 40GB model.

I honestly don’t think my experience was atypical of computer enthusiasts at the time (the type of people who read Slashdot and later HN). It was only grandmas who bought a Pentium 120 in the mid 90’s and hung onto it for decades.

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

#365

Post by tokinonagare »

andreigheorghe wrote: post #215
pietroq wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

cool story, now try writing a "Hello World full stack web app" in turbo pascal.

It's actually quite easy if you can find a networking library: bind and listen on a socket on port 80, read text until you get GET / HTTP/1.1, discard whatever comes after, write back a response containing "Hello World" in the correct format (few lines of text) and that's it! A new full stack web app is born.

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

#366

Post by Merad »

newaccount74 wrote: post #209
avisser wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

What you want is a curved ultrawide monitor like the Samsung Odyssey G9. I have one of them (49"). The curve is critical, because it allows the entire surface of the monitor to be basically the same distance from your eyes... meaning you can just glance to the side to use that app you placed in the corner. I have good vision but even for me a non-curved 49" ultrawide is unpleasant to use because the edges and corners are so far from your eyes. The 49" size is also large enough that it almost completely fills your field of view when seated normally.

A 75" TV is going to cost you a lot of money for a very ineffective display. It's so large that you'll probably have to physically move several feet to see the edges, meaning that realistically only about half the screen is usable.

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

#367

Post by BirAdam »

ls612 wrote: post #297
BirAdam wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for true geometry, current 5nm at TSMC is actually a gate pitch (spacing between the gates) of 51nm and interconnect (smallest possible distance between the centers of adjacent wires on interconnect metal layers) of 28nm. Intel 4 is 50nm gate pitch and 30nm interconnect. So, they're between 1nm of each other. As an example, IBM did create 5nm transistors on silicon nanosheets with GAAFETs in 2017. The spacing betw…

But the "5nm" label still has meaning insofar as a "3nm" process allows proportionally more density (5/3 increase) right? I guess the trillion dollar question is how many more node shrinks are left before quantum tunneling problems overwhelm solutions to them.

That is correct. We would expect some kind of fractional shrink equivalent to the numbering system used.

Intel expects to shrink from 4 to 3 to 20A and finally 18A. Apparently, decent progress has been made on 20A, so at least 3 shrinks should be expected. TSMC has a roadmap to 2nm, and they expect to slow down after that. Samsung has plans for 1.4nm. My guess is that one major player to fall out around the 20, 18, 14 angstrom area. My present thought is that this will be Samsung. I think expect one or two shrinks before Intel or TSMC falls away. One more after that, and then some other technology may need to step up to the plate.

I had long thought that something like gallium arsenide would replace silicon allowing for higher frequencies, but cost might be prohibitive. The world after the shrinks may just be a logic and efficiency war.

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

#368

Post by jiggawatts »

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?

The new Notepad on Windows struggles to open files just a few hundred MB in size and visibly stutters and freezes when doing not much on a high end gaming PC.

It is apparently an iron law of the Universe that all available computing power must be wasted.

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

#369

Post by boppo1 »

ar_lan wrote: post #240
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

The quote on this at the time was:

Piracy is free. How do we beat 'Free'?

'Easy'.

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

#370

Post by rekoil »

runeks wrote: post #350
dom96 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not so much that they don't have the money (they don't, I agree), but the bigger issue is even if they could their margins aren't nearly as good as Apples are.
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