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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

#371

Post by warrenm »

nsteel wrote: post #334
warrenm wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure Start with processor pipelining, branch prediction, speculative execution, etc Then move to multiple CPUs/CPU cores A practically-linear program (ie hardly any unpredictable branching) can be run ~5x faster on a 5-stage-pipelined CPU than an unpipelined CPU Liekwise, parallelizable tasks can benefit from multiple CPUs/cores, whereas non-parallelizable tasks will not (much) And then you have performance-per-watt…

All true in the general case. But in the context of comparing silicon nodes (this case, seemingly), the terms "speed" and "performance" are interchangeable and mean exactly the same thing .

I don't read it that way - how did you come to that conclusion?

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

#372

Post by warrenm »

thefounder wrote: post #28
bioemerl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

EU and the US would not accept a merger in the first place.

It's a Taiwanese company

Why do you think the US or EU would get involved?

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

#373

Post by goosedragons »

derefr wrote: post #299
giobox wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It honestly wasn't during this period. in 2001, computers did not last as long as they do today, with performance doubling often every year to 18 months. Ask anyone who lived this period - by 2001, virtually everything had CD-ROM. If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97. For what its worth, Microsoft Office…

You're talking about the period starting in 2001. I'm talking about the period ending in 2001. 2001 was a transition point from slow progress to the sort of performance-doubling progression you're thinking of. PCs running Windows 3.1 stuck around, doing what they do, until ~2002. People kept making games for DOS until ~2002! Then that all stopped. But someone planning a product for release in 2001 , would tend to hav…

Internet access was arguably more equal between rural and urban areas in the late 90s, early 2000s. Few had broadband and dial up was mostly the same regardless where you were living. Most PCs had a CD-ROM drive in 2000. You didn't need good internet to go to a store to pick up a copy of StarCraft, Diablo, Half-Life, Age of Empires, Quake III etc. but you did need a CD-ROM drive and decent PC. I grew up in a rural area too. Most of my friends had games like StarCraft or Diablo too

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

#374

Post by dereg »

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.

This is phenomena is called monopsony and Apple has been doing this since forever (HDs, "retina" displays, glass, semis, etc). In Apple's case, they have essentially subsidize innovation and manufacturing capacity at the expense of temporary exclusivity and I believe that it's been beneficial for the market at large. It's like how guaranteed purchase contracts were instrumental in bringing COVID vaccine development forward.

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

#375

Post by giobox »

goosedragons wrote: post #373
derefr wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about the period starting in 2001. I'm talking about the period ending in 2001. 2001 was a transition point from slow progress to the sort of performance-doubling progression you're thinking of. PCs running Windows 3.1 stuck around, doing what they do, until ~2002. People kept making games for DOS until ~2002! Then that all stopped. But someone planning a product for release in 2001 , would tend to hav…

Internet access was arguably more equal between rural and urban areas in the late 90s, early 2000s. Few had broadband and dial up was mostly the same regardless where you were living. Most PCs had a CD-ROM drive in 2000. You didn't need good internet to go to a store to pick up a copy of StarCraft, Diablo, Half-Life, Age of Empires, Quake III etc. but you did need a CD-ROM drive and decent PC. I grew up in a rural ar…

The idea CD-ROM wasn't ubiquitous in the PC industry and consumer desktops at large in 2001 is just laughable, I'm amazed this is still being debated. Do some people just choose not to remember the explosion in the "multimedia" industry in the 90s?

If you really want to put this to bed, just look at any vintage PC magazine from 97 onwards archived on archive.org, and pay attention to the adverts, which are a literal snapshot of what people could buy at that time. Good luck finding a consumer desktop PC at any price from the Windows 98 era onwards without a CD-ROM.

In 1998, most PC magazines even had demo CD-ROMs stuck to the cover, such was the wide penetration of CD-ROM drives.

> https://archive.org/details/computermagazines

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

#376

Post by Kukumber »

nfriedly wrote: post #344
Kukumber wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obl…

That's not non-sense, that's the reality [1]

It happened with Japan, look at them nowadays [2]

It also happened with Europe, Alcatel and Nokia, look at them nowadays [3]

For some reason, only Microsoft can get away with bribing foreign countries [4, 5]

We seen the extension of it with the ban of chinese's 5G and multiple tech companies, including huawei, wich later unveiled novel EUV patents [6], they maybe knew what they were cooking

TSMC's developing story is also quite revealing, with US officials suggesting sabotaging TSMC [7]

"deep state" nowadays has negative connotation because the government wants it to be that way ('it's a conspiracy' argument), look, it works [8]

And it's not just with tech, there are some suspicious stories in other industries, car [9] and metal manufacturing [10] for example

After all these stories, seeing Samsung having to drop plans for a homemade chip with advanced homemade fabs instantly ring bells, specially when the house was tainted with similar stories [11]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/04/18/s...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent#Lawsuits

[4] - https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_...

[5] - http://techrights.org/2014/05/28/microsoft-brazil/

[6] - https://www.techspot.com/news/97072-huawei-patents-euv-litho...

[7] - https://eurasiantimes.com/us-taiwan-should-destroy-its-semic...

[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_State...

[9] - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_Carlos_Ghosn (i couldn't find english coverage)

[10] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Pierucci

[11] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kun-hee#Scandals_and_contr...

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

#377

Post by jb1991 »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #338
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not true. Depending upon the processor choice, M1, M1 pro, or M1 max, you get 1, 2, or 4 external monitors. Up to 64 GB ram. Do you really need more than 64 GB? The number of users who actually need more are a very small part of the market.

And the M1 Ultra even offers up to 128 GB RAM -- and that is also unified with GPU RAM.

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

#378

Post by newsclues »

simongray wrote: post #253
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…

There was no iTunes music store at that time. Apple was advertising how fast iTunes could rip music from a CD and in my experience it was definitely optimised for that.

Yes.

They made it easy to add your existing collection to digital, and also import a library from the friendly pirates.

Then they made it easy to buy new music, after people were in the ecosystem.

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

#379

Post by LeanderK »

rcarr wrote: post #345
LeanderK wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becaus…

I would love to upgrade, the short battery life is just really immensely frustrating because I need my laptop a lot outside the house too. And it is often slow, especially with too many tabs open. But it's way too much money for me right now. My comment was more a reply to:

> 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

which I felt can't be true because my laptop is ancient by modern standards but still usable. Not as snappy as I would like it to be, but also not terrible or unusable.

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

#380

Post by __anon-2023__ »

edude03 wrote: post #143
Waterluvian wrote: post #4

These headlines always make it sound like the chips are fungible. Is it that they’re basically saturating the entire production capacity with their orders?

Yeah that's exactly what's happening - TSMC predicts they can make N chips per Y period, and apple has said they'd like 100% of Y period to be dedicated to making chips for Apple.

Plus an exclusivity agreement to ensure no sharing is happening.
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