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Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

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Re: Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

#101

Post by dagmx »

heliophobicdude wrote: post #77
braymundo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish gaming on Mac became more popular due to the same reason.

What are some broken-down reasons why gaming on Mac didn't take off. I'm sure it's a few different reasons all together

A lot of people will likely blame APIs etc, but that’s just an easy scapegoat for people outside the game dev industry.

The reality is likely just market share, hardware and the makeup of that market share.

Macs used to actually be a big gaming platform once upon a time. Myst was a Mac exclusive (built with HyperCard) and Bungie used to make games for macs first before getting bought by Microsoft.

But windows got the upper edge:

1. Much larger slice of the market

2. More of the market is made up of gaming enthusiasts than Macs which are usually either targeting light use, education or professional.

3. You can make affordable gaming PCs with windows. You can’t really do it with any kind of Mac because there’s no product for that market between the Mac Mini and iMac (which were targeted at more casual users) up to the Mac Pro and iMac Pro (which were targeted at professional users)

It’s easier to target the biggest piece of the pie and the one that will buy your products.

That’s why the “API” reason never makes sense, because iOS is THE dominant gaming platform despite having the same APIs as a mac. Game engines often need to support multiple graphics APIs anyway.

So Mac gaming did take off, but it fumbled and never recovered. Part of that is that Apple themselves fumbled as a company, on the verge of bankruptcy before the return of Jobs. What made them successful post his return is also what killed gaming on their platforms: they targeted a different audience.

Re: Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

#102

Post by andrewmcwatters »

heliophobicdude wrote: post #77
braymundo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish gaming on Mac became more popular due to the same reason.

What are some broken-down reasons why gaming on Mac didn't take off. I'm sure it's a few different reasons all together

The biggest reason is that Steve Jobs hated games. It’s well documented. John Carmack also had some words to say about graphics on Macs.

Re: Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

#103

Post by raxxorraxor »

ftxbro wrote: post #16
samwillis wrote: post #2

Some people may criticise the "monopoly" Apply have of TSMC latest nodes, but I think it's ultimately good. TSMC need to know they have a customer for new nodes in order to invest in them, thats what Apple are in the unique position to give with their war chest of cash. This investment by Apple eventually leads its way to other customers and smaller businesses. The whole industry thrives on the wake Apple leaves behi…

It looks like the local-LLM enthusiasts will want to use Apple computers. This is funny to me for some reason, like if the most cost-effective work boot of 2025 is produced by Gucci.

I think it is least likely that we will run local AI instances on Apple hardware to be honest.

But yes, the comparison would be apt. I think people want to solve a problem with dependence on third party services...

No, I expect GPUs with insane amount of memory surfacing and that isn't really a field for Apple yet.

Re: Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

#104

Post by Maursault »

heliophobicdude wrote: post #77
braymundo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish gaming on Mac became more popular due to the same reason.

What are some broken-down reasons why gaming on Mac didn't take off. I'm sure it's a few different reasons all together

I don't think the race is over yet, but it is really entirely up to developers, not Apple. Apple Silicon isn't quite 3yo yet, and it is hard to say right now what the gaming landscape will look like in another five years. Technically, however, though it is somewhat of a cheat, as soon as Apple released the first M1 Mac, the new platform instantly had nearly an order of magnitude more games than PC. While there are something like 50K games available through Steam, and x86 Macs only had like 7K, as soon as the M1 was released, early Apple Silicon Mac users had access to something like 450K AppStore games from iOS and iPadOS. Plus, Steam was ported to macOS, and Rosetta 2 allows many x86 PC games to run adequately in emulation (virtualized + emulation). This may not be satisfactory for hard core gamers than need massive fps, but I don't think it can be honestly claimed anymore that Macs suck for gaming. At the very least, they're competitive, and that's only going to get better, though how much better is, again, up to developers.

Re: Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

#105

Post by gpderetta »

samwillis wrote: post #65
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local LLMs do best on big GPUs, which aren’t an option on Macs. What Apple has done with the M-series silicon is really impressive, but it’s not as fast as big, dedicated GPU silicon. > like if the most cost-effective work boot of 2025 is produced by Gucci. Apple M-silicon laptops are high quality, but they’re not the same as overpriced luxury goods. The price of entry level M1/M2 Macs is extremely reasonable, IMO.

> it’s not as fast as big, dedicated GPU silicon It's not yet . Apples combined memory architecture enables them to significantly cut the cost of bundling more memory for various GPU, Neural or other domain specific cores. I believe they will catch up or even overtake Nvidia as the leading AI platform. Desktop AI class GPUs are hell expensive. If Apple can get something 50% as performant, but in an iPhone Pro or MacB…

but AI class GPUs are expensive because NVidia can pretty much ask whatever it wants as it has no competition. If Apple were to become competitive in the area, things can change.

Re: Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

#106

Post by AndrewKemendo »

drexlspivey wrote: post #69
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #58

I’d love some super smart technologist in this forum to give a realistic and practical pathway to disrupting apple in the mobile or “computer” market. Given the fact that Apple has such a dominant position in every part of the supply chain infrastructure I’m challenged with being able to see how any organization could possibly come up with something that pushes Apple into bankruptcy.

China invades Taiwan?

Is this legitimately the only realistic option?

Re: Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

#107

Post by nabakin »

samwillis wrote: post #2

Some people may criticise the "monopoly" Apply have of TSMC latest nodes, but I think it's ultimately good. TSMC need to know they have a customer for new nodes in order to invest in them, thats what Apple are in the unique position to give with their war chest of cash. This investment by Apple eventually leads its way to other customers and smaller businesses. The whole industry thrives on the wake Apple leaves behi…

I'm excited for the M3 too. I hope this is the generation Apple adds AV1 hardware support. If they don't, I have no confidence they will ever add support

Re: Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

#108

Post by klodolph »

audunw wrote: post #52
reacharavindh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy the competition that Apple brings to the computing market with M* chips. As an innocent bystander in the world of AI, neural networks etc, I wonder if Apple Silicon and its neural cores would become the proprietary brake like CUDA is for ML work. That is if they do something phenomenal with the 3nm facility and bring about some hardware that only they can do.. I'd rather have a healthy competetive ecosystem w…

I think it's too early for AI/ML acceleration to standardize on an API. It takes a long time to figure out what abstractions we should standardize on before we can make a universal API. Consider the whole history of OpenGL, Metal, Vulcan, WebGL, WebGPU... It would have been a mistake to keep using OpenGL, and WebGL was perhaps a mistake from the beginning. It was the wrong abstractions. Metal and Vulcan are clearly b…

A bit harsh to say that WebGL was a mistake from the beginning. The spec was released in 2011, along with some initial implementations. At the time, Vulkan didn't exist (2016). Not even Metal (2014) or Mantle (2013) existed yet. I don't think even the AZDO folks had done their work yet.

WebGL looked pretty damn good in 2011. It was based on OpenGL ES 2.0, which was the latest version of OpenGL ES, and the great thing about OpenGL ES is that it's a little cleaned up from OpenGL and reflects the capabilities of a broad class of graphics implementations.

Re: Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

#109

Post by rowanG077 »

hardware2win wrote: post #94
iknowstuff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha yes compiling a kernel should be the focus. Forget all the advancements in instant computational photography, on-device voice recognition and Siri, 4K HDR 60fps stabilized videos, 120Hz retina screens running perfectly smooth animations on an all day lasting battery, because neckbeards can't compile a kernel

Whats the difference between taking photos/videos on a phone from 2018 and cutting edge?

50% more optical zoom. Real-time image stabilization. 4x the pixels. Deep fusion/photonic engine which vastly improves image clarity due to merging multiple pictures into a final image.

Re: Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

#110

Post by ajmurmann »

heliophobicdude wrote: post #77
braymundo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish gaming on Mac became more popular due to the same reason.

What are some broken-down reasons why gaming on Mac didn't take off. I'm sure it's a few different reasons all together

I think it might be a chicken/egg problem. Most Macs of don't come with hardware that's good for games. That doesn't matter though because no consumer asks for better gaming hardware in new Macs because there aren't many games. People who care about games, know they don't get it on Macs and thus have either a console or a gaming PC in addition. I play games, but generally it's just a nice surprise if I see that a Steam game supports macOS. It's so far away from being a viable primary gaming system that it's just accepted at this point.
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