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Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

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Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#271
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

About the area, keep in mind that not every part of a chip is composed of dense logic: Typically, sram (cache memories for example) doesn't scale as much as core logic, and interconnect (connections between the cores, DDR, etc...) almost don't scale at all. This is highly dependent on the design of the SoC, but the core logic is rarely the largest of the three, so you will not see a 35% reduction of the total area of…

> About the area, keep in mind that not every part of a chip is composed of dense logic

No, but improving density still makes it smaller (for an otherwise-"identical" offering) :)

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an embedded developer I'm always surprised that physicists and engineers spend decades pushing the limits of physics, for software devs to come along and make text editors no faster than they were on Windows 3.1

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?

In many cases developer resources are more expensive than hardware or network resources and the decreased efficiency of modern software reflects that.

We can all agree software is not as resource efficient as it used to be on the whole.

Beyond that we’d have to discuss specific examples and benchmarks.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm over 40. I can't see all the pixels on a 4k display, let alone 8k. I'm still happy with my 2013 MBP w/ Retina.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but alongside 3nm processes there’s a cutting edge technology called “glasses”…

Glasses help with focusing, but they don't help if your sensors (retinas) are just degrading.

Putting a very fancy lens on a 0.3MP sensor doesn't give you higher resolution photos.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#274
post #260
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods The first iPod was a Mac-only Firewire device. "You need a Mac with Firewire support to even use this thing" set a minimum platform spec that also made other things implicit — in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) iTunes the software was introduc…

> in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) It would have still been pretty odd to see a PC with no CD-ROM drive in 2001. It wasn't a given a machine would have a DVD-ROM drive in 2001, but CD-ROM was cheap by 2001 and rather ubiquitous. Most home PCs in a box started shipping with CD-ROM in the mid 90s, along with Windows 9…

> by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one.

Yeah, but a piece of consumer electronics requiring someone to own a computer produced in the last five years (as a Firewire Mac would have been at the time) is a surprising choice, and especially so in that era. The majority of scanners and printers produced in 2001 were still parallel-port driven, because peripheral companies couldn't be sure that most people even had a computer with USB1.0 support yet. Windows XP was CD-only, but Windows 2000 still had a floppy-disk edition!

I wasn't really implying that Apple forced the spec of "a Mac with Firewire" in order to guarantee access to a CD-ROM drive; but it certainly did help, in the sense that if they had supported USB (or god forbid, parallel) from the start, and perhaps Windows from the start, then there would almost certainly have been people who bought an iPod for use on their Pentium 120 (like the one I was still personally using in 2001!), only to belatedly realize that they had no way of getting music onto their PC in order to then offload it onto the iPod.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forget the exact timeline, but I think part of it too was music pricing. Physical media (tapes, records) had gotten very expensive, and almost everyone was pirating MP3s from Napster etc. Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it. I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not not. Google search suggests it may have been 1 or 2 year…

>music pricing. For sure. My memory of those days is getting hazy, but IIRC CD's from top artists were going for $15-$16 in the late 90's. Maybe $12 if you were lucky. Considering inflation and that you might only want two of the twelve songs on the disk, you could easily be paying $10/song (in 2023 dollars). Big chunk of change especially for a pre-teen or teenager.

I seem to recall typically being able to buy major CDs in the $14 range in ~1995, but the expensive stores (Tower Records) charged $18.99 and up which is very clear in my mind. That's more than $37 in today's money.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My plan is to buy a 65" or 75" 8k TV and use it as computer monitor. I'll have a screen that is as big as my desk. How far away are you going to sit??

Normal desktop monitor viewing distance (at the back of an 80cm deep desk), but I'm going to use it at 1x scaling. 65" will probably make the text too small -- I think the ideal resolution would be an ~80" display, but 75" and 85" TVs would be wider than my desk.

Might take about 10 minutes to migrate your mouse from one corner to the other!

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#277
post #274
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) It would have still been pretty odd to see a PC with no CD-ROM drive in 2001. It wasn't a given a machine would have a DVD-ROM drive in 2001, but CD-ROM was cheap by 2001 and rather ubiquitous. Most home PCs in a box started shipping with CD-ROM in the mid 90s, along with Windows 9…

> by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one. Yeah, but a piece of consumer electronics requiring someone to own a computer produced in the last five years (as a Firewire Mac would have been at the time) is a surprising choice, and especially so in that era. The majority of scanners and printers produced in 2001 were still parallel-port driven, because peripheral companies c…

It honestly wasn't during this period. in 2001, computers did not last as long as they do today, with performance doubling often every year to 18 months. Ask anyone who lived this period - by 2001, virtually everything had CD-ROM. If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97.

For what its worth, Microsoft Office 97 was last version to come with floppy disk release alongside the CD-ROM (46 floppies too...). That tells you a great deal about the state of CD-ROM in the late 90s. Office 2001, CD-ROM release only. There are many other examples you can point to. The PC game industry was ~100% CD-ROM or optical media in 2001 too.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#278
post #210

Do we know if Apple is getting rid of the notch for M3 macbooks in favor of the "dynamic island" solution from iPhone 14 Pro?

that would make no sense in the context of a MacBook. The phone notch and dynamic island is a freestanding element. The notch on the MacBooks is embedded in the menubar. There would be no “island”. It might be possible for Apple to add Live Activities to the notch on the MacBook (That is what those dynamic notices are called) but only if more software publishers put in the effort.

I am talking mostly about replacing the ugly cut-off at the top with a "smaller hole" instead, not really caring about any software functionality from iPhones.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just it, being first to the market is sometimes more important than worrying about competitors. They killed it so hard with the ipod that even if the zune was a better device at the time people wanted the ipod.

people forget that the first ipod was firewire only and firewire was a very apple thing at the time. it wasn't until they gave in and changed it to usb (and released iTunes for windows) that it really set the world on fire.

When the iPod came out USB 2.0 had just been created. USB 2.0 wasn't in widespread use for at least a year or two after.

USB 1.1 was 12mbits/s -- that is 1.5MB/s. Firewire was 400mbit/s.

Accounting only for bus speed, filling up a 5GB iPod would have taken 54mins[0] for USB 1.1 vs 1.6mins[1] for Firewire 400.

[0] 1000MiB/1024MB * 5000MB = 4,883MB / 1.5MB/s = 3255s

[1] 4,883MB / (400mbit/8) = 98s

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an embedded developer I'm always surprised that physicists and engineers spend decades pushing the limits of physics, for software devs to come along and make text editors no faster than they were on Windows 3.1

>no faster In terms of latency it's usually slower by an order of magnitude. There should be a law that mandates developers to use at least two generations older hardware than the average consumer.

Doing development work on a 10 year old ThinkPad dramatically changed how I think about performance in my software.

With a tiny bit of attention to performance you can do insane things

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