Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple introduces M4 chip

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#401

Post by password54321 »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #264

> M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today. I always wonder what crazy meds Apple employees are on. Two RTX 4090s is quite common for hobbyist use, and that is 1321 TOPS each, making two over 69 times more than what Apple claims to be the fastest in the world. That performance is literally less tha…

Just two 4090s? If you don't have at least 8 4090s do not even call yourself a hobbyist.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#402

Post by syncsynchalt »

cletus wrote: post #227
izacus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple usually massively exaggerates their tech spec comparison - is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get double the battery life) or is it half the power use in some scenarios (so we'll get like... 15% more battery life total) ?

IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1]. As for CPU power use, of course that doesn't translate into doubling battery life because there are other components. And yes, it seems the OLED display uses…

> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims

Yes and no. They'll always be honest with the claim, but the scenario for the claimed improvement will always be chosen to make the claim as large as possible, sometimes with laughable results.

Typically something like "watch videos for 3x longer when viewing 4k h265 video" (which means they adapted the previous gen's silicon which could only handle h264).

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#403

Post by jiehong »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #186
EduardoBautista wrote: post #13

The 256gb and 512gb models have 8gb of ram. The 1tb and 2tb models have 16gb. Not a fan of tying ram to storage. https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/

If these things will ever get MacOS support it will be useless with 8 GB of Ram. Such a waste of nice components.

People always complain dev should write more efficient software, so maybe that’s one way!

At least, chrome wouldn’t run that many tabs on iPad for sure if it used the same engine as desktop chrome

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#404

Post by themagician »

MBCook wrote: post #313
NorwegianDude wrote: post #264

> M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today. I always wonder what crazy meds Apple employees are on. Two RTX 4090s is quite common for hobbyist use, and that is 1321 TOPS each, making two over 69 times more than what Apple claims to be the fastest in the world. That performance is literally less tha…

That’s not a neural processing unit. It’s a GPU. They said they had the fastest NPU in a PC. Not the fastest on earth (one of the nVidia cards, probably). Not the fastest way you could run something (probably a 4090 as you said). Just the fastest NPU shipping in a PC. Probably consumer PC. It’s marketing, but it seems like a reasonable line to draw to me. It’s not like when companies draw a line like “fastest car und…

[flagged]

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#405

Post by sroussey »

dhx wrote: post #293
philistine wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, TSMC's N3E process is somewhat of a regression on the first-generation 3nm process, N3. However, it is simpler and more cost-efficient, and everyone seems to want to get out of that N3 process as quickly as possible. That seems to be the biggest reason Apple released the A17(M3) generation and now the M4 the way they did. The N3 process is in the A17 Pro, the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The A17 Pro name seems t…

N3E still has a +9% logic transistor density increase on N3 despite a relaxation to design rules, for reasons such as introduction of FinFlex.[1] Critically though, SRAM cell sizes remain the same as N5 (reversing the ~5% reduction in N3), and it looks like the situation with SRAM cell sizes won't be improving soon.[2][3] It appears more likely that designers particularly for AI chips will just stick with N5 as their…

SRAM has really stalled. I don’t think 5nm was much better than 7nm. On ever smaller nodes, sram will be taking up a larger and larger percent of the entire chip. But the cost is much higher on the smaller nodes even if the performance is not better.

I can see why AMD started putting the SRAM on top.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#406

Post by MBCook »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #365
MBCook wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a neural processing unit. It’s a GPU. They said they had the fastest NPU in a PC. Not the fastest on earth (one of the nVidia cards, probably). Not the fastest way you could run something (probably a 4090 as you said). Just the fastest NPU shipping in a PC. Probably consumer PC. It’s marketing, but it seems like a reasonable line to draw to me. It’s not like when companies draw a line like “fastest car und…

Of course a GPU from Nvidia is also a NPU. People are spending billions each month on Nvidia, because it's a great NPU. The fact is that a GPU from Nvidia is a much faster NPU than a CPU from Apple. It is marketing as you say, but it's misleading marketing, on purpose. They could have simply written "the fastest integrated NPU of any CPU" instead. This is something Apple often does on purpose, and people believe it.

A GPU does other things. It’s designed to do something else. That’s why we call it a GPU.

It just happens to be it’s good at neural stuff too.

There’s another difference too. Apple’s NPU is integrated in their chip. Intel and AMD are going the same. A 4090 is not integrated into a CPU.

I’m somewhat guessing. Apple said NPU is the industry term, honestly I’d never heard it before today. I don’t know if the official definition draws a distinction that would exclude GPUs or not.

I simply think the way Apple presented things seemed reasonable. When they made that claim the fact that they might be comparing against a 4090 never entered my mind. If they had said it was the fastest way to run neural networks I would have questioned it, no doubt. But that wasn’t the wording they used.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#407

Post by bonestamp2 »

a_vanderbilt wrote: post #216
mvkel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here it is in an OS that can't even max out an M1! That said, the function keys make me think "and it runs macOS" is coming, and THAT would be extremely compelling.

We've seen a slow march over the last decade towards the unification of iOS and macOS. Maybe not a "it runs macOS", but an eventual "they share all the same apps" with adaptive UIs.

Agreed, this will be the way forward in the future. I've already seen one of my apps (Authy) say "We're no longer building a macOS version, just install the iPad app on your mac".

That's great, but you need an M series chip in your mac for that to work so backwords compatibility only goes back a few years at this point, which is fine for corporate upgrade cycles but might be a bit short for consumers at this time. But it will be fine in the future.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#408

Post by beeboobaa3 »

praseodym wrote: post #10

"With these improvements to the CPU and GPU, M4 maintains Apple silicon’s industry-leading performance per watt. M4 can deliver the same performance as M2 using just half the power. And compared with the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a fourth of the power." That's an incredible improvement in just a few years. I wonder how much of that is Apple engineering a…

> And compared with the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a fourth of the power

It can deliver the same performance as itself at just a fourth of the power than it's using? That's incredible!

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#409

Post by nblgbg »

praseodym wrote: post #10

"With these improvements to the CPU and GPU, M4 maintains Apple silicon’s industry-leading performance per watt. M4 can deliver the same performance as M2 using just half the power. And compared with the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a fourth of the power." That's an incredible improvement in just a few years. I wonder how much of that is Apple engineering a…

That doesn't seem to reflect in the battery life of these. They have the same exact battery life. Does it mean it's not entirely accurate? Since they don't indicate the battery capacity in their specs, it's hard to confirm this.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#410

Post by moooo99 »

cletus wrote: post #227
izacus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple usually massively exaggerates their tech spec comparison - is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get double the battery life) or is it half the power use in some scenarios (so we'll get like... 15% more battery life total) ?

IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1]. As for CPU power use, of course that doesn't translate into doubling battery life because there are other components. And yes, it seems the OLED display uses…

They are pretty honest when it comes to battery life claims, they’re less honest when it comes to benchmark graphs
Post reply on HN