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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

#391

Post by Tagbert »

cubefox wrote: post #258
Tagbert wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"There have been only minimal improvements in chips going form 5nm to 4nm as a result." I'd like to see evidence for that, i.e. that the change from 4nm to 3nm offers significantly larger efficiency improvements than the change from 5nm to 4nm.

The chip industry articles I have seen say that 4nm is not mean fully smaller than 5nm and really can be just considered a version of 5nm. I don’t have the background to give you more than that but the message has been consistent across multiple tech writers.

You can see it in the smaller performance gains of 4nm A16 chips vs 4nm A15 chips from Apple.

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

#392

Post by nemetroid »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #262
meindnoch wrote: post #123

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"

> 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. This is one of those HN comments that has me feeling like I live in a different world than the commenter. What Electron apps are you using that are really that slow? I use several of the popular Electron and CEF apps on a daily basis and e…

When i switch back and forth between two channels in Slack, it takes a noticeable amount of time. I’d say 300-400 ms or so. Is it significantly faster for you, or do you consider that to be fast?

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

#393

Post by bitL »

Tagbert wrote: post #390
bitL wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am talking mostly about replacing the ugly cut-off at the top with a "smaller hole" instead, not really caring about any software functionality from iPhones.

that notch contains a camera, a couple of sensors and some mounting hardware. Eventually Apple might be able to engineer a smaller version and maybe eventually have them under the display but so far that has proven difficult. In the meantime, the notch is a cleaver method to increase the screen size without making the overall case larger and it does so by making use of a part of the screen that is normally little use…

They already did the miniaturization with iPhone 14 Pro which is why I asked. I don't really need to go through a rationalization why this ugly hack is good for me.

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

#394

Post by kylehotchkiss »

xiphias2 wrote: post #34

M2 was a skip generation for me, looking forward to M3. Maybe the same with iPhone. I generally care about process node as the main feature of a computer.

The M2 air was a major hardware upgrade from previous airs. I love mine dearly, from the long battery life to the super cool blue/black color way. The performance is unreal for something without a fan.

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

#395

Post by a_e_k »

boppo1 wrote: post #369
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 quote on this at the time was: Piracy is free. How do we beat 'Free'? 'Easy'.

How much is your time worth?

Low cost but easy may still come out cheaper than "free" if you place sufficient value on your time.

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

#396

Post by rocket_surgeron »

xiphias2 wrote: post #141
helf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You care about the process node as a main feature? Really? I mean, it's nice and all, but the MAIN FEATURE?

Yes, as computers don't really get faster anymore, and I travel all the time (right now writing this from a hotel restaurant), the biggest change I notice is in battery time, which depends on energy efficiency improvements that usually come with process node change. I'm not being sarcastic.

>Yes, as computers don't really get faster anymore

This was true from the late 2000s to about 2017 but in the last four years or so computers have gotten much, much faster.

Obviously, it is workload dependent. If all you use is a web browser then you may not notice. If you use a computer for any sort of parallelizable processing work the last four years have been transformative.

For workstations, performance has doubled in single-threaded applications since 2019 and since more cores are standard you can see up to a 10x increase in performance. For servers the performance improvement is even greater.

I do synthetic aperture radar processing and image generation and can get through 10x the amount of data in a day than I could in 2019. That's just CPU stuff, for GPU stuff it's even more-- I can do stuff now that was impossible in 2019 due to VRAM limitations.

There have also been specialized accelerations included in CPUs like the JavaScript optimizations Apple baked into the M1, which definitely do make a noticeable difference if all you use a computer for is web browsing.

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

#397

Post by shepherdjerred »

newaccount74 wrote: post #245
shepherdjerred wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. How far away are you going to sit??

Normal desktop monitor viewing distance (at the back of an 80cm deep desk), but I'm going to use it at 1x scaling. 65" will probably make the text too small -- I think the ideal resolution would be an ~80" display, but 75" and 85" TVs would be wider than my desk.

This is an interesting idea. You should write a blog post or something about your experience once you've settled in.

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

#398

Post by jiggawatts »

mepian wrote: post #333

The world really needs Intel Foundry Services to succeed, this doesn't look like a healthy market.

Intel is installing high-NA lithography tools from ASML in their new fabs and should be able to manufacture 3nm chips soon. Unfortunately they’ll certainly reserve 100% of that capacity for themselves.

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

#399

Post by creatable »

rcarr wrote: post #177
meindnoch wrote: post #123

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"

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,…

Tauri is not inherently faster. On the largest platform (Windows), Tauri scores similar performance numbers to Chromium. Why? Because it's still Blink under the hood, since the system browser is Edge.

The instances in which Tauri is faster are when you write your business logic in Rust and your frontend logic in JS.

Simply switching to Tauri will not instantly speed up your app.

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

#400

Post by oyashirochama »

throwawayx134ax wrote: post #388
shaunsingh0207 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Crunchyroll?

One of the original anime pirate sites.
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