261–270 of 467 posts
Why hasn't Apple just bought TSMC?
> Compared to 5nm process, the first-generation 3nm process can reduce power consumption by up to 45%, improve performance by 23% and reduce area by 16% compared to 5nm, while the second-generation 3nm process is to reduce power consumption by up to 50%, improve performance by 30% and reduce area by 35%. What kind of real-world impact are we likely to see on the 3nm chips for the new iPhone and M3 macs? These figures…
For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. Paraphrasing the old saying: "What TSMC giveth, Electron taketh"
This is one of those HN comments that has me feeling like I live in a different world than the commenter. What Electron apps are you using that are really that slow? I use several of the popular Electron and CEF apps on a daily basis and everything is fast.
The exceptions are anything that loads over a network. Spotify, Slack, and others can feel “slow” when the content is loading from a backend over the internet, but obviously that’s not the fault of the UI
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Can we stop the hyperboling? The amount of multitasking we can do on consumer computers today is nowhere close what is what possible only 10 years ago. About text editors... you can use blazing fast editors if you want like cli-base ones, notepad++ or sublimetext... If devs are not using those to code anymore there may be reasons, right?
Fun fact: Turbo Pascal was 38KB and that included the editor, compiler and debugger. It was lightning fast, compiling 10s of kSLOC in mere seconds on a 4.77MHz single-thread 8088 with 640KB of RAM. Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :)
You’re doing something extremely wrong if this is the case.
Or more likely, the people complaining about “10 minute” web app compile times are just repeating hyperbole they found in other cynical comments.
> Compared to 5nm process, the first-generation 3nm process can reduce power consumption by up to 45%, improve performance by 23% and reduce area by 16% compared to 5nm, while the second-generation 3nm process is to reduce power consumption by up to 50%, improve performance by 30% and reduce area by 35%. What kind of real-world impact are we likely to see on the 3nm chips for the new iPhone and M3 macs? These figures…
This is power consumption of (some of) the chips alone. That's pretty good, but the power consumption of the screen, cell radio, bluetooth, accelerometer, microphone, GPS - all of these add up to more than the power consumption by the chip. And not all of them, especially not the screen is going to be affected by TSMC's process change. Obviously there's many caveats here based on how each person uses their device. Bu…
I've seen this comment over and over again, everytime an increase in processor efficiency is talked about and yet those gains usually do result in a very noticiable improvement on battery life.
Remember how Apple bought up most of the 5nm capacity for their M1 chips? Qualcomm was then forced to go with Samsung, which resulted in the Snapdragon 888 and 8 Gen 1 SoCs being pretty inefficient compared to the TSMC competition, like the Mediatek Dimensity 9000. Will something like this now happen again?
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The M1 Pro and M1 Max can have multiple display outputs. The M1, be it in the Macbook Air, Mac Mini or Macbook Pro could only ever have 2 display outputs. On laptops, one of those was permanently reserved for the built in display.
Specifically you need the 14 or 16 inch M1 Pro for multiple display outputs. The M1 Pro 13 inch only supports one external display. Same with the M2 Pro 13 inch. This is very confusing imo
>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…
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For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. Paraphrasing the old saying: "What TSMC giveth, Electron taketh"
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,…
Sublime Text was always faster than all of these (and still is) but that’s not why people are picking text editors.
Tauri is great for certain use cases but it’s not even close to a replacement for Electron at this point (having used both).
Optimizing for speed above all else is the kind of thing that appeals to a subset of programmers, but most people just don’t care about at all as long as it’s fast enough. Products like VSCode are more than fast enough for all but a few people who like to count milliseconds.
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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…
What browser are you running? My 2017 Mac runs 4k YouTube videos without a glitch in Safari.
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"Speed" != "Performance" '70% logic density gain' sounds like 'reduce area by 35%' to me The only one that might not line up is 'reduce power consumption by up to 50%' vs 'up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology' ...but you have to know what's being compared before deciding the numbers do (or don't) make sense
> "Speed" != "Performance" Can you elaborate?
Start with processor pipelining, branch prediction, speculative execution, etc
Then move to multiple CPUs/CPU cores
A practically-linear program (ie hardly any unpredictable branching) can be run ~5x faster on a 5-stage-pipelined CPU than an unpipelined CPU
Liekwise, parallelizable tasks can benefit from multiple CPUs/cores, whereas non-parallelizable tasks will not (much)
And then you have performance-per-watt vs raw hertz count: today, most people seem to care more about performance-per-watt than raw "performance"
Ie, ceteris peribis, a 30w 4 core CPU at 1Ghz is going to be more favorably viewed than a 100w 6 core CPU at 1.8Ghz - you can throw 12 "low power", "slower" cores at the problem for ~10% less power draw than the "high power", "faster" cores
Then you can also look at the relative efficiency of different CPU platforms and/or microcode changes in a single platform: that was the major selling point of Apple's anti-Intel ads 15-20 years ago - the PowerPC was "faster" than the Pentium because it was "more efficient" at several families of tasks (even though the raw clock speed of the PPC was typically lower than the comparable Pentium offerings)
This comes up with the Apple M-series CPUs vs the Intel chips they replaced - they may not be "faster" (in raw ghz), but they're more performant