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The assholery part here is not about who keeps the change. It’s about telling a gas station boy “that’s how you got rich”. What makes you rich is first of all being born rich, which most rich people tend to ignore. On the few cases were we are really talking about people with humble beginnings, it’s all about making your time count. If the guy was really rich, the time it would take the boy to get inside, take 2 doll…
Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP
101–110 of 206 posts
Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP
#102Thanks to being based on their phone chips Apple came out of the gate with the M1 and cleaned everyone’s clock on performance-per-watt while putting in good to great numbers in general (as a CPU). But their rate of improvement on the A series has been slowing on general tasks. They’re on the same process node, and only increased frequency a bit. Is it really that surprising that performance didn’t take a massive jump…
Tech journalism needs a dramatic story. So every product is either world changing or a complete failure.
To their credit, with many billions on the line, products do have a bit of a tendency to be a failure if all they can do is tread water.
Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP
#103Why does the biggest and richest company in the world ever have to suffer from talent leaving because they don’t get paid enough? It just doesn’t make any sense.
Steve was notoriously and sometimes arbitrarily cheap. Apple retains some of that.
Shame that the market is slow to punish and inertia continues to reward.
Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depending on how you define richest Apple could very well be the richest. It has something like 200 billion dollars in cash in hand. I would be surprised if any company could match that.
Often unreported, Apple also has $100B in debt. Google and Microsoft have a better net cash and cash equivalents position than Apple. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/long-te...
Getting debt is the only way they could bring their cash home to avoid tax.
Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There's another factor that completely dominates. It's all about the fabs. Intel lost the performance lead, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TS…
> No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TSMC's fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs . The fixation on the fab process is bewildering. Yes, it does help, but it is also an optimisation step t…
Fab process is very important. The fast design is nothing if you can't build it.
Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
The assholery part here is not about who keeps the change. It’s about telling a gas station boy “that’s how you got rich”. What makes you rich is first of all being born rich, which most rich people tend to ignore. On the few cases were we are really talking about people with humble beginnings, it’s all about making your time count. If the guy was really rich, the time it would take the boy to get inside, take 2 doll…
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Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP
#107Thanks to being based on their phone chips Apple came out of the gate with the M1 and cleaned everyone’s clock on performance-per-watt while putting in good to great numbers in general (as a CPU). But their rate of improvement on the A series has been slowing on general tasks. They’re on the same process node, and only increased frequency a bit. Is it really that surprising that performance didn’t take a massive jump…
Get that performance from where though?
The big M1 numbers came from getting ahead of the rest of the market on 5nm TSMC, and critically from packing everything into the SOC so physical distances were reduced by multiple orders of magnitude (which has already been the case for the A series). That’s been done now, so the low hanging fruit is gone there.
Performance gains from here should be expected to be identical to AMD as they’ll be moving on TSMC’s cadence (it’s AMD who might actually see similar jumps on the low end if they go the Apple route and move everything to the package).
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple has already started looking to stand up it’s own fab. They have large and very predictable needs now, and could likely get ahead of ASML’s queue by throwing money and scale at the problem - not least because it would help them muddy the waters as to what Apple Silicon actually is more, which fits the marketing better.
Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP
#108Thanks to being based on their phone chips Apple came out of the gate with the M1 and cleaned everyone’s clock on performance-per-watt while putting in good to great numbers in general (as a CPU). But their rate of improvement on the A series has been slowing on general tasks. They’re on the same process node, and only increased frequency a bit. Is it really that surprising that performance didn’t take a massive jump…
> They’re on the same process node, and only increased frequency a bit. It's going from N5 to N5P, chosen by Apple over N4. > But no one [expects] that from Intel or AMD every year anymore. That's not accurate, a minor performance upgrade after almost 2 years is the exact thing Intel has gotten a lot of flack for in recent years. The fact that people are willing to defend it is really exclusive to Apple and their unb…
Intel got criticized for minor improvements year after year. It's important to look at these on 5+ year timescales, since the improvements aren't evenly spread out. Especially since gains often depend on manufacturing process improvements.
Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad used to tell a story when as a kid he worked at a gas station. Guy shows up with a Ferrari, asks for a full tank, pays with a large note and my dad asks him to keep the change. The guy replied - boy, I got a lot of money Really, a lot. You know how I got them? I never gave anything away for free. Hand that change over.
That just illustrates that a lot of rich guys are entitled assholes. The correlation between assholery and driving an expensive car in particular has been studied. https://youtu.be/1EHhFwGeQLc
I worked in the service industry in UK for a few months for the richest and most privileged people out there. I got the chance to work in events where members of the royal family were present or events where the most famous and rich people in the world were the guests.
My observation is, the assholes are everywhere but also the nice and polite people. I can't really generalize it for rich or poor, I did not see that simple pattern.
At that time my hourly wage was about 8 pounds and a lady at an extravagant event gave me 5 pounds and told me to keep extra good care of the table. She somehow expected to have private waiter for the night for 5 pounds sterling but I took extra good care for about 45 minutes and when she asked me why I wasn't working for her specifically any longer, I explained that 5 pounds will do just that much and she agreed.
I recall once a very rich person screaming at the waiter because did not like the foam of the coffee and a few instances of rudeness but overall these were rarities.
If anything, the managers were much much bigger arsholes towards the employees because they could afford it(because the employees were mostly students or immigrants like me who need the money to sustain life until they find a proper job). Employees with higher status were big assholes towards the more junior ones.
Most social interactions with the rich or famous that I had or have seen were very positive and polite.
In some instances I was at fault and they were very understanding and tolerant. Once I failed to deliver the coffee of a famous F1 racer at breakfast and he didn't make a big deal of it(If I was him, I would probably be much more rude). Victoria's Secret models were just fine too when received flat champagne.
I'm not convinced that rich people being assholes in social interactions is a real thing. IMHO the pattern is, people who are privileged in their own social group are the assholes.
Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP
#110From Anandtech's deep dive into the performance and efficiency cores in the A15, which are reused here in the M2. Performance Cores: >Apple A15 performance cores are extremely impressive here – usually increases in performance always come with some sort of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency. Apple here instead has managed to reduce power whilst increasing performance, meaning energy efficiency is impr…
This is a really great article from Anandtech with benchmarks and analysis, it explained a lot of things. > The overall performance gains are quite disappointing when you factor in the raw cost increase that comes with this new M2 and the fact that it has been nearly 2 years since the M1’s introduction. Also the logic of article in the title is little weird to me. M1 was introduced in the same year as A14, they use t…
It is looking like A16 will be on a smaller node. Likely manufacturing it on the current node would be too expensive due to increased transistor count.
Available volume on the new node will be much smaller, so they had to prioritize. This is likely why only the iPhone pro will get the A16.