It's good to have deep pockets...
Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
401–410 of 467 posts
Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
#402Considering how failed was the launch of the iPhone 14 Pro (I had to wait for 45 dayss before getting mine) and sales of the "iPhone 14" (which is just an iPhone 13, basically) this is just expected
We're you around for the 6+ and 6s+? Those phones were unobtanium for months and months. The 14 Pro being unavailable for 45 days is nothing. And the 14 not selling because people saw right through apple.
I think that was still the trailing edge of the whole "lining up outside the shop at 2am". I also did this once for the first iPad release :) Which really did turn out to be a groundbreaking product release though the actual hardware itself was still quite flawed. It needed a few iterations to become mature.
Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
It's possible you and your acquaintances can't tell. Similarly some people claim they can't tell a difference between a 720p video and higher. Or that they can't tell a difference between 128 kbps CBR MP3 and higher.
However the differences are real and have been measured. [1] [2] You are welcome to argue that the performance work isn't worth prioritizing, but don't fall into the trap of claiming the performance gap doesn't exist.
--
Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
#404>Apple’s iPod, by comparison, was made far more pocketable thanks to the inclusion of a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drive. The story behind how Apple came to acquire these hard drives for the original iPod is interesting. >Jobs had expressed interest in building a portable music player in late 2000 and had tasked Jon Rubinstein with making it happen. The problem, however, was that Jobs wanted a player that was small and sl…
Focus me, sitting at my admin job at uni, downloading MP3s in early 2000, wanting a portable hard drive for all my songs.
All that stood in the way: random temporal mechanics and genetics
Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
#405Earlier 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…
Like you said, Napster et al. Apple pretended it came from CDs people had bought.
I mean, people at the time did have large collections of CDs with tons of music. Piracy existed, sure, but it was something a relatively small number of tech-savvy people were doing. Hell only half of Americans were even using the internet at the time. And at the time, MP3s were super inconvenient - you needed a CD for your stereo or whatever you were listening to music on, and CD-R drives had only just started to become cheap (and by cheap, I still mean several hundred dollars, which was quite a bit at the time). I would be in no way surprised if greater than 90% of the music that was loaded onto the first cohort of ipods came directly from CDs.
Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar for me, caved in and bought a M2. It's great and all, gotta say though, not entirely happy with how unbearable the 2019 intel mbp has become. Yeah, it struggles with YouTube videos and fans are spinning in vacuum cleaner mode. But it didn't in 2019. I feel OS and software updates ruined it. Not what I expect after only about 3 years of use. (obviously it wasn't cheap either) Oh well, still gave Apple my money…
It's worth it being aware that charging those 2019 Intel Macs from the right-hand-side USB-C ports will cause them to overheat and get thermal throttled. Not saying you're doing that or that they are otherwise great machines (they're not) but they can go from being a steak grill back to being a relatively serviceable computer just by switching the charging port.
> charging those 2019 Intel Macs from the right-hand-side USB-C ports will cause them to overheat and get thermal throttled.
Pretty sure you have it backwards, it's charging from the _left_ that causes more throttling.
Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
#407Earlier 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,…
> 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, shinier version, just like people jumped ship from Atom to VSCode. Sublime Text was always faster than all of these (and still…
> most people just don’t care about at all as long as it’s fast enough
People care about speed. Even non-technical people. Every non-technical person I know that has bought a new computer even though they already had one was because of performance. People care about performance so much that they are replacing their whole device! That costs a significant amount of money and comes with a real hassle of transferring their data.
I think people use VSCode over Sublime because of its features, not because they don't care about the speed. It's certainly what got me to migrate from Sublime to VSCode. Sublime is so much faster, but it just doesn't do the things that I want my editor to do. I would instantly switch away from VSCode to a faster alternative if it actually had the subset of VSCode features I care about.
Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
#408Yaay, I can't wait to have more battery life on my "professional" laptop that has no/poor support for anything I use (games, containers, etc)! /sarcasm
All that extra screen time will help me wait for the day that Linux is stable on the platform!
Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
#409Earlier 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.…
> similar power envelope
Power envelopes are reported in very misleading ways by companies, in practice it is not even close. The way they report stuff is having their cake and eat it too: the benchmarks results assume boosting their frequencies above the base one, while the "power envelopes" advertised are on the base frequency. It becomes quite apparent when you run them on battery, where M1/2s continue performing the same as plugged in, and amd/intel laptops underperform, while also not even lasting as much as apple's on battery.
Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, 1…
I wish we would get a picture with all those metrics.
That said, all of those metrics seem huge to what EUV HighNA can do: I remember near "perfect" 7nm "lines" in photoresist.
I wonder what is the resolution of the motors to align all that (I guess piezo electric). And interferometers for alignment, x-rays??