The modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way outperforming the software teams.
Doing good job is rewarded.
Apple's Hardware Chief, John Ternus, seems to be next in line for succession to Tim Cook's position.
Apple M5 chip
251–260 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple M5 chip
#252The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet). All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware. Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same task…
The Broadcom WiFi support 320Mhz while N1 is stuck with 160Mhz. There were report of N1 not supporting 4096 QAM as well but I didn't check.
> The Broadcom WiFi support 320Mhz while N1 is stuck with 160Mhz.
I was at a Wi-Fi vendor presentation a while back and they said that 160 Mhz is pretty improbable unless you're leaving alone and no wireless networks around you. And 320 Mhz even less so.
In real life probably the best you can get is 80 Mhz in a really good wireless environment.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#253It’s unfortunate that this announcement is still unspecific about what they improved in the Neural Engine. Since all we know about the Neural Engine comes from Apple papers or reverse engineering efforts ( https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine ), it’s plausible that they addressed some quirks to enable better transformer performance. They have written quite interesting papers on transformers on the Neural Engine:…
Faster compute helps, for things like vision language model that requires bigger context to be filled. My understanding is that ANE is still optimized for convolution load, and compute efficiency while the new neural accelerators optimized for flexibility and performance.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#254I am wondering if Apple's focus is off lately with this drive for AI. So far all they are showing in that presentation is that I can have "the ability to transform 2D photos into spatial scenes in the Photos app, or generating a Persona — operate with greater speed and efficiency." And by making Apple AI (which is something I do not use for many reasons, but mainly because of Climate Change) their focus, I am afraid…
I'm interested in reading about your low-carbon lifestyle that is so efficient you got to the point of giving up machine inference.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#255Does the M5 feature the UltraFusion connector which would enable the Ultra variant?
that would likely only be present on the Max chip of the M5 generation
Re: Apple M5 chip
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I would do for Snow Leopard on the M class hardware.
do you mean literally 10.6 on AS or do you mean something as good as it was
Something that good.
It was coherent, (relatively) bug free, and lacked the idiot level iOSification and nagging that is creeping in all over MacOS today.
I haven't had to restart Finder until recently, but now even that has trouble with things like network drives.
I'm positive there are many internals today that are far better than in Snow Leopard, but it's outweighed by user visible problems.
It shouldn't surprise you I think that Android Jelly Bean was the best phone OS ever made as well, and they went completely in the wrong direction after that.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. Back in the day you wouldn't buy a MacBook because it was powerful. Most likely it had a very shitty Intel CPU with not a lot of cores and with thermal challenges, and the reason you bought it was because macOS.
> very shitty Intel CPU with not a lot of cores and with thermal challenges Very often the intel chips in macbooks were stellar, they were just seriously inhibited by Apples terrible cooling designs and so were permanently throttled. They could never provide decent cooling for the chips coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices.
> They could never provide decent cooling for the chips coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices.
Curiously they managed to figure this out exactly when it became their silicon instead (M1 MacBook Pros were notably thicker and with more cooling capacity than the outgoing Intel ones)
Re: Apple M5 chip
#258It’s unfortunate that this announcement is still unspecific about what they improved in the Neural Engine. Since all we know about the Neural Engine comes from Apple papers or reverse engineering efforts ( https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine ), it’s plausible that they addressed some quirks to enable better transformer performance. They have written quite interesting papers on transformers on the Neural Engine:…
MLX doesn't use the neural engine still right? I still wish they would abandon that unit and just center everything around metal and tensor units on the GPU.
Oh, I overlooked that! You are right. Surprising… since Apple has shown that it’s possible through CoreML (https://github.com/apple/ml-ane-transformers)
I would hope that the Foundation Models (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels) use the neural engine.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#259It’s unfortunate that this announcement is still unspecific about what they improved in the Neural Engine. Since all we know about the Neural Engine comes from Apple papers or reverse engineering efforts ( https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine ), it’s plausible that they addressed some quirks to enable better transformer performance. They have written quite interesting papers on transformers on the Neural Engine:…
I can only guess that significant changes in hardware have longer lead times than software (for example). I suppose I am not expecting anything game-changing until the M6.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#260The claimed 1.6x increase in video game frame rate compared to M4 seems pretty good. Looking forward to seeing it tested out in practice.