Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can run ARM Windows under Parallels, which is good enough for me.
Ah just updated my comment. I really dislike how slow Parallels is.
Funny, I never notice that.
Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
521–530 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#522I don't understand why they don't update the entire lineup whenever a new chip comes out, especially if really only swapping the chip in the macbook pro and imac here. On a separate note does anyone have any insight on how unified memory compares to vram in the context of machine learning performance? Considering an H100 with 80GB costs like $30k a maxed out macbook pro with 128gb unified memory for $5k is interestin…
It makes a world of sense if you think of it from a logistics point of view, especially considering Apple sells insane volumes of everything they sell.
It costs less to manufacture the current generation ship and the last generation chip concurrently, it allows them to push the newest generation chip out the door faster without running out of supply or having to open up excessive production lines.
>H100 vs apple silicon
while it's only one spec, H100 has over 2TB/s of memory bandwidth and Apple silicon caps out at 400GB/s. H100 in general kicks the pants out of Apple silicon performance and has far more support. These parts aren't really in the same league but Apple Silicon has become a popular hobbyist choice for LLM inferencing.
Also see: The Jetson AGX Orin 64gb, Nvidia RTX A6000 48gb, AMD Radeon Pro W7900 48gb, two nvlinked 24gb 3090's.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technical explanation is that on the base M1/M2 SoC there is one Thunderbolt bus that supports 2 display outputs. On the MacBook Air one output is connected to the internal display leaving one output for an external display. (The Mac Mini that uses the same SoC is limited to 2 external displays for the same reason) To support more displays they would have to add support for a second Thunderbolt bus to the base So…
Is this an actual hardware issue though? One issue is MacOS has never supported DisplayPort MST (Multi-Stream Transport) EVER as far as I can tell. MST allows for multiple display streams to be natively sent over a single connection for docks or daisy chaining monitors. Back on Intel Mac's if you had a dock with 2 displays or daisy chained 2 together you would get mirrored displays. The exact same Mac/displays in boo…
You can get multiple displays from a single port, the hubs are just expensive.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#524If it doesn't run Windows, is it really a PC?
PCs and Windows are not synonymous.
PCs didn't start running Windows until they were nearly 10 years old, and then Windows was just an option. Shortly after Windows became popular, Linux emerged too and some people were running Linux on their PCs instead. There have been many other OSes on PCs over the years.
I've owned and used many PCs, yet hardly ever needed to use Windows. Even when I developed software that ran in Windows, including games, I used Linux to do the development :)
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But others have caught up You mean others now got to use TSMC's 4nm process? These new M3 chips are probably on the 3nm process, Apple is still a generation ahead here. It looks like Apples aim is to always stay a generation ahead of its competition, I wonder how long they can keep that up since they aren't running their own fabs.
Oryon seems to have caught up in performance despite being on N4 (which is just 5nm++), but it's an ARM design from the guys who made M1 in the first place. M3 seems like it generally underwhelms. A17 had like a 3% increase in IPC. They didn't discuss battery much and I suspect that's because ramping the clockspeeds to over 4GHz isn't so good for the battery benchmarks. The most worrying part is the transistor count.…
the backstory here is that TSMC N3 is a trainwreck, it's now separated into two different nodes, N3B (for bad) and N3E (enhanced). N3E gets the promised step that was originally for N3, but it only enters volume production next year. Supposedly it will actually bring costs down (and yields up) because this is where some additional steps go EUV. Both TSMC and Samsung have been fucking around with their marketing around nodes to try and say they're first in volume 4nm production, but both are having problems with the final bosses of FINFET at 3nm and after this both TSMC and Samsung do GAAFET and solve a different set of problems. Past that lies... nothing. Hyper-NA seems dead.
In the meantime, M3 is on N3B despite very low yields, which surely applied design pressure to keep size down, and the power gains are not as good, and also the density is worse than promised. Apple also surely feels pressure to keep prices high (bait-tier M3 base option with 8GB lol) and honestly they probably are going to be tough to justify on a performance/efficiency basis compared to very fierce ARMv8 competition (we are now testing the thesis there's no difference lol). Apple still has advantages but man do they take you to the cleaners for the result, a loaded apple laptop is obscene. I chose to go for an older loaded M1 Max instead of waiting for M3, because I could actually get a nice laptop that wouldn't impose limits on a prosumer etc. 1TB is all anyone can afford still and that's really silly.
(SSD prices in particular are absolutely inexcusable lol. Mandate a M.2 NVMe 3.0/4.0/+ port please, EU, it's time. Don't care how it works, slot it into the side or whatever if you want, it can be single-sided 2230 or 2242 if you want (or caddy-loading, the icy dock standard lol), but it's time.)
https://global.icydock.com/products-c5-s48-i0.html
https://global.icydock.com/vancheerfile/images/mb873mp-b_v2/...
I also wonder if losing a bunch of the PA Semi team to whatever startup (it may have been nuvia or tenstorrent lol) may also have hurt apple's velocity on A16/A17. There were a lot of apple silicons before M1, after all. But certainly TSMC is a bunch of the problem here.
I think they'll hustle to refresh it and do M3+ as a fast follow in 6-12 months with N3E, the cost economics are very favorable to jump as soon as there's the volume. That doesn't mean MBP gets refreshed immediately though, they'll ramp on the phones (iphone 16/16 pro, etc) and base-tier M3+ or whatever first.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#526I'd prefer if there'd be higher RAM limits for each variant: * ~~Ultra~~ Max probably has an adequate limit with "up to" 128GB * Pro would be nicer to have "up to" (say) 64GB, rather than 'only' 36GB * Base perhaps "up to" 32GB, rather than 24GB There are some situations (running a VM or three with different OS(es)) where there really isn't a substitute for more bits.
[deleted]
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#527Finally time to upgrade my 2017 i7. For over 1 year the battery meter has said "Service Recommended" and in the last 2-3 months multiple key caps are literally falling off and regularly get jammed while I try to type.
I figure the 16" with M3 Max and 64 GB is a good machine that will last me 5-6 years but I'm not sure if I should pony up for the 2TB storage upgrade.
I just pray this revision won't have some unexpected problems. I'm actually glad it seems to only be a spec bump so I won't be taking on any new tech. Hopefully any issues have been shaken out from the M1 and M2 releases.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But others have caught up You mean others now got to use TSMC's 4nm process? These new M3 chips are probably on the 3nm process, Apple is still a generation ahead here. It looks like Apples aim is to always stay a generation ahead of its competition, I wonder how long they can keep that up since they aren't running their own fabs.
Apple signed a deal with TSMC to purchase nearly all of their available 3nm chips for the next year. Ethical or not, they positioned themselves to ensure almost no competitors could develop on 3nm until they did first since no fab on earth has the scale of TSMC. They could ride this plan for years if it pays them.
not only is outbidding the competition not unethical (as a sibling notes), apple actually is very involved in the early node work etc. a lot of this work is literally done for apple, it is "exclusive games" in the "this game would not have been made without the sponsorship" sense. this literally would not have been brought to market on the same timelines if Tim Apple wasn't signing a couple billion dollars a year to TSMC right upfront.
Apple pays lavishly to support TSMC's early node research, and they get their say in what happens in the R&D process, and very early insight into the node and their say on how it would work for them as they do their rollout. TSMC gets carried through the research phases much faster than their competitors can do, and it's led them to be on an absolute tear starting with 7nm. And they absolutely cannot fill the same level of demand with the same level of R&D funding from any of their competitors.
It's been a healthy, productive long-term partnership, TSMC is maybe the only supplier Apple can't boss around and Apple is certainly a client that is always too big to fire. Doesn't mean every apple product is good (and TSMC can still flub, and their competitors are catching up a little bit) but Apple can move whatever they need to lol, they are masters of supply chain managment. They can cover TSMC's mistakes if needed, and they have insight into exactly what is happening as the node is developed and how they need to maneuver their product stack around to exploit it.
Engineers study designs, CEOs study logistics. Also true of NVIDIA btw lol, they are very logistics-oriented because they make up such a large marketshare. How many companies on the planet are ordering big bulk runs of GDDR? Well, if we are ordering 20% of the planet's GDDR on a fixed timetable then maybe we can get a custom version, micron, right? (9 months later, GDDR5X/6X is born lol)
It is an interesting contrast to Intel - this is almost the same kind of synergistic relationship as intel's own fab and IP side have historically had together. Did intel fail because they had a tight fab-design coupling, or did they fail because they had a rotted internal culture and then the fab slipped a bunch?
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is more that "is it worth buying this new m3 or should I buy a secondhand m2 for half the price?"
I don't think you're going to find any M2s for half the price. They hold their value pretty solidly.
They won't if the M3 turns out to be a significant upgrade.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#530How did Apple become so successful making high-end CPU chips on their own so quickly?
I don't think we're comparing apples to apples here (excuse the pun). These chips have something like 10% of the instructions that a typical x86 chip does. Once the big CPU players start producing the same kind of chips, I greatly expect Apple's power to performance advantage to drop significantly, if not be overtaken by the likes of AMD, etc.
> I greatly expect Apple's power to performance advantage to drop significantly, if not be overtaken by the likes of AMD, etc
Nope. Apple and AMD both use TSMC for manufacturing. It's all made by the same factory. AMD does not have the advantage there. Apple buys the most capacity on the most advanced process nodes since they place much bigger orders (Apple also has 10x more cash than AMD).