441–450 of 467 posts
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.
You care about the process node as a main feature? Really? I mean, it's nice and all, but the MAIN FEATURE?
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> make them a less profitable company by not serving other companies? They become part of apple. With a stranglehold on chips the price of apple products as a whole, or their sales, will skyrocket.
Would they? Apple already has the best chips. What makes you think that the average consumer cares that much about even a 20-30% performance difference. It is not like TSMC is the only competent chip manufacturer. Nvidia largely uses Samsung and they are doing just fine.
Can anyone explain to me why these chips don't suffer from quantum tunneling? Isn't there a limit to how small you can go?
> As the thickness [of the gate insulator] scales below 2 nm, leakage currents due to tunneling increase drastically, leading to high power consumption and reduced device reliability. Replacing the silicon dioxide gate dielectric with a high-κ material allows increased gate capacitance without the associated leakage effects.
In other words, the limit hasn't been reached yet.
Also bear in mind 3nm is a marketing number which has a tenuous connection to a technical feature of the lithography. These days it's really just a number which shrinks with each generation to indicate which generation. The transistors are not actually 3×3 nm in size; they are larger.
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Like you said, Napster et al. Apple pretended it came from CDs people had bought.
I surely remember much of my computer time being from ripping my CDs, borrowing friend's CDs to rip, going to the library (excellent source, really), to rip their CDs, etc. Napster was all but toast once iTunes was on the scene, but Kaza and Limewire weren't any better in the problem of getting say, a whole album (those were still a thing) perfectly cataloged with metadata - and in high quality. iTunes made that very…
I think archive.org found a bunch of it, but some of it was deleted.
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*2001 was a transition point from slow progress to the sort of performance-doubling progression you're thinking of.* You are way off here. Lets check a contemporary source to understand the public sentiment at the time: "My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique Your laptop is a mon…
> "My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight" Yes, all that is true... for people who were frequently trying to do anything "interesting" with their computers. Most people didn't try to do anyth…
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Computers get faster in benchmarks . If anything, regular computer tasks like checking your email or editing a file has more latency than 5 years ago. Software bloats to fill whatever container you put it in.
If you use the proper software, it doesn’t. Vim is still as fast as it was 40 years ago if not faster. IO is also getting a lot faster. The SSDs these days are what RAM used to be.
If an M3 mac has over 128gb RAM, I’m upgrading again 96gb is just under the threshold where it makes a difference, for me
Just curious: what do you need 128GB of RAM for? I have 16GB on my desktop and never feel constrained.
I feel constrained in 16GB all the time, and it's mostly due to browser memory usage, whichever browser I use (Firefox, Safari or Chrome). However there are other things running too such as Discord, Telegram, VMware, Libre or MS Office; the GBs add up. If I dare to compile something big, I have to close other things. I'm not even one of those media creators or gamers using heavy graphics!
So, I currently have a late 2013 MBP with 16GB which is going strong still. It's still great, except for RAM and battery. I'm thinking of upgrading to an M2 Max 64GB or 96GB, because I don't want to be caught short with only 24/32GB the way I've felt heavily constrained by 16GB a few years after buying the 2013 MBP.
And I want to get into modern graphics, physics simulations, blockchain simulations, terabyte-scale database engine design, neural nets and chip design more than I have been. I expect those to be memory heavy, enough that even 96GB RAM will be a design constraint. (Then again that's what I said when I bought the 2013 MBP, and in practice I ended up using datacentre servers for the heavy stuff, so I'm still weighing up the purchasing decision, whether it's worth it).
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"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.
Those numbers are just for marketing. There is no feature on the chip that is actually 5 nm, 4 nm, or whatever.
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> 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 the…