7 ms·

I think this is cool if they’re the future of the Mac, but aren’t these chips just wasted in the iPad? I say this as an iPad Pro (1st-gen) owner ... it’s alread

I think this is cool if they’re the future of the Mac, but aren’t these chips just wasted in the iPad? I say this as an iPad Pro (1st-gen) owner ... it’s already way more processing power than I can really use, because after trying for months to get a sensible workflow going (mostly based around Pythonista, Editorial and RealVNC) I’ve relegated it to a OneNote and Netflix machine. What’s the point other than the coolness factor? Is it some future AR-type application?

Moto7451 6y ago
My understanding from talking to friends who work at Apple and some of the product briefs is a lot of the hardware is used for video and photo processing. Video games take advantage of the extra CPU/GPU power as well. I don’t think that’s all that Apple specific as there are increased ISPs and security chips on other phones as well.
samatman 6y ago
Not if you start juggling several streams of 4k video, it's not. Also, one can play games on an iPad, and games will soak up arbitrary amounts of CPU and GPU power.
jagged-chisel 6y ago
I'm sure Apple consider the iPad Pro as a testing ground for these chips.
kitotik 6y ago
Audio and Video work will take all the transistors you can throw at it. Things like GarageBand and 3rd party software synthesizers can easily max out even latest gen iPad Pros. Not to mention games…
Cookingboy 6y ago
>What’s the point other than the coolness factor? So Genshin Impact can look and run beautifully XD
manmal 6y ago
Having a more-powerful-than-necessary CPU has many benefits, here are some: - Less heat produced > allows for smaller heatsinks and, as a result, smaller devices or bigger components - Performance bottlenecks become less likely - Features like 120hz display refresh rate become possible without the user noticing degradation - Faster OS boot and app starts - Ability to do more work locally vs using a server (see the many ML features) - Tech debt in system code is less of an issue - code can be shipped early and optimized later
- bhj 6y ago
  Battery life. The faster a task is completed (at a given power cost) the sooner the CPU can go back to standby.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Not so fast, especially these days. CPU power consumption is highly non-linear. You may well be benefitting from running a task longer, at a slower speed, and using less transistors.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      In general time-to-sleep is still the defining factor in keeping battery life long. Sure, there are low-power cores, but I believe most UI code will not run at it since it's given high priority by the system.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  Not to mention it extends the life of the device. If a device is only just good enough for now, what will it be like in 4 years time. I currently use a 6 year old ipad air 2 and it feels very snappy and does everything I use it for well. Apple also tends to stop updates when the hardware is no longer capable of running the next OS smoothly.
centimeter 6y ago
I bought my iPad Pro because it offered the smoothest RAW photo proofing process of any product I've used. A lot of this is obviously up to software as well as hardware, but still - the beefy processor is useful here.
- mceachen 6y ago
  Faster CPUs certainly help everything go faster, but what you're asking of the CPU may matter much more than how fast the CPU is. RAW processing is actually a really interesting application, and rendering time depends heavily on what you do with the bits from the sensor. If you use non-linear interpolation, 2-50x the time to build. If you do highlight recovery, 2-5x the time to build. If you only need half the native resolution, build time may be reduced 2-4x. Basically "viewing a RAW image" can take 100 milliseconds or 15 seconds (on the same hardware!), depending on how you're interpreting the sensor data. (Source: playing with dcraw and libraw to rasterize raw images for PhotoStructure)
urthor 6y ago
Never underestimate the PUBG Mobile/Genshin Impact demographic basically. There's a lot of corner cases there where certain consumers value it a lot. Also performance per watt is a huge deal. The expanded power envelope that improved PPW brings allows 120hz displays which are battery hogs.
- Reason077 6y ago
  I wonder if Apple Silicon means we might finally get PUBG on Mac. If they can make it work on an iPad, they can make it work on a Mac with similar hardware... right?! I'm already missing the glorious few months that PUBG could be played on Mac via Stadia.
  - urthor 6y ago
    Basically, no. The issue was never the instruction set, you still have to support the interface and the OS which nobody is bothered to do because cost benefit. Changing the chip isn't going to change the code base of the operating system.
    - lunixbochs 6y ago
      Unless they specifically opt out, almost all iOS apps will be available on Apple Silicon macs at launch.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        It will probably run, but I wonder if the UI will be usable on macOS?
        lunixbochs 6y ago
        Some iOS and Android games support keyboard/mouse I think. You can also potentially map mouse movement to joystick movement for relative games like shooters. There are people who play pubg mobile on desktop with BlueShift or whatever already. Barring that maybe there will be a market for apps that make playing iOS games with keyboard and mouse easier.
jiggawatts 6y ago
I was just looking into optimising a large web application. I told the customer that using a caching layer such as a CDN would help paper over the worst of the inefficiencies in their application and the network stack. That was true! The download times halved. However, benchmarks with F12 developer tools showed that while downloads reduced from 200ms to 100ms, the overall load times were still seconds, of which about 50% was actual CPU time. (This is typical of large, complex sites built by non-experts or organisations where performance is not a primary concern.) Web sites like these perform very noticeably better if you have more CPU cores or faster CPU cores. Essentially, CDNs are easy to deploy and 5G provides nearly gigabit download speeds, so the bottleneck has shifted back to the CPU for a lot of the web.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  There is no speed of computer which cannot be overwhelmed by badly written code. I guess your point is that sloppy web developers / web companies make poorly performing code and shift the burden of handling it out to visitors’ machines, so those machines have to keep improving to not be left behind? That might be true, but is pretty depressing.
  - ghettoimp 6y ago
    I think "fast, cheap, good, pick 2" applies. Obviously the current bloated, ad-laden state of the web is pretty horrible and indefensible. But if we can keep making compute faster, it should ultimately save programmer time, which can be used to either get cheaper or better programs.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    Conversely: There is no speed of computer which cannot be utilised to reduce developer effort. Faster computers enable easier programming strategies, which improve net productivity. People are expensive, so giving them better "power tools" improves efficiency. We don't complain that coal miners just need to shovel more efficiently. We give them enormous trucks and hydraulic mining shovels.
threeseed 6y ago
Many professionals are using iPad Pro for audio e.g. DAW and video e.g. editing.
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  What DAW are they using? I use my iPad as a remote for Presonus Studio One sometimes, but I couldn't consider using it as the recording system itself, since the AU and VST accessibility isn't there. I would also use my iPad as a synthesiser (eg. Magellan) but then record the audio to a "real" computer, ie the Mac, via a recording interface.
  - empthought 6y ago
    GarageBand is enough for a lot of people. There’s also Cubasis and Gadget 2 (which is more synth focused).
  - EricE 6y ago
    you might enjoy this article: https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/02/a-week-of-podcasting-with-only-an-ipad-pro/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/02/a-week-of-podcasting-with...
wincy 6y ago
I sold my 2080ti and am playing Eve Echoes (new, mobile version of EVE Online) and Among Us, and Civ VI on the 2nd gen iPad Pro I bought used with less than half of the proceeds. The battery lasts a good long time and it feels pretty good to be able to play these full sized games on a screen like this. When I'm not using it the toddler watches some kids shows, and with the keyboard case I can type almost as quickly as I can on my 15" Macbook pro. If it had XCode I'd be set, honestly.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gettingsnarky 6y ago
> I think this is cool if they’re the future of the Mac, but aren’t these chips just wasted in the iPad? Mostly, but by putting them in iPads and iPhones they have been able to scale their chip development to the levels they need to.
saagarjha 6y ago
I work on a x86 interpreter that is only usable because of Apple's massive investment into these chips over the last couple years. I doubt that is what Apple was designing them for, but they are very useful to have as an application developer.
- djxfade 6y ago
  Are you the developer of iSH by any chance? If so, very cool project. Was it hard to get it published in the App Store?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I am a developer of iSH; tbodt did most of the interpreter work though. (Actually, he did most of the work on the app in general–there's a couple more of us who dabble in other parts of development, as well as support, marketing, compliance.) We're glad you like the project :) Getting iSH on the App Store did take some work on our side; we were in contact with Apple to get it approved and in compliance with the guidelines. You may have seen that the version of iSH on the App Store had package management functionality removed. So far we've been able to keep the ability to run Linux programs, as well as import files, unchanged. One interesting thing to see from Apple is that they are not just increasing the performance of their chips, but they are investing heavily in making certain operations faster. For example, in the time since tbodt started working iSH Apple has reduced the cost of uncontended atomics to almost zero overhead (this is especially good for Apple because it immediately makes reference counting code faster, which both Swift and Objective-C spend a lot of time in). iSH doesn't currently do anything fancy there, it just uses full locks everywhere, so this is something that we would be interested in pursuing at some point.
    - johncolanduoni 6y ago
      Faster uncontended atomics should improve uncontended lock performance too, at least if you’re using pthread mutexes (they’re implemented via atomic operations with an os_unfair_lock fallback for the contended case on Apple platforms).
megablast 6y ago
That is the way you want it. You don’t want it the other way.
vmception 6y ago
Even if assuming they were wasted, lower the production cost for everyone else that is not wasting them
fomine3 6y ago
Apple's SoC works really great and impressive, but I don't know why I need such spec for Phone. Even A12 is still great for most workloads. Apple improves camera functionality by its performance but just camera? I wish they find useful uses other than cameras.

Moto7451 6y ago

My understanding from talking to friends who work at Apple and some of the product briefs is a lot of the hardware is used for video and photo processing. Video games take advantage of the extra CPU/GPU power as well. I don’t think that’s all that Apple specific as there are increased ISPs and security chips on other phones as well.

samatman 6y ago

Not if you start juggling several streams of 4k video, it's not. Also, one can play games on an iPad, and games will soak up arbitrary amounts of CPU and GPU power.

jagged-chisel 6y ago

I'm sure Apple consider the iPad Pro as a testing ground for these chips.

kitotik 6y ago

Audio and Video work will take all the transistors you can throw at it. Things like GarageBand and 3rd party software synthesizers can easily max out even latest gen iPad Pros. Not to mention games…

Cookingboy 6y ago

>What’s the point other than the coolness factor? So Genshin Impact can look and run beautifully XD

manmal 6y ago

Having a more-powerful-than-necessary CPU has many benefits, here are some: - Less heat produced > allows for smaller heatsinks and, as a result, smaller devices or bigger components - Performance bottlenecks become less likely - Features like 120hz display refresh rate become possible without the user noticing degradation - Faster OS boot and app starts - Ability to do more work locally vs using a server (see the many ML features) - Tech debt in system code is less of an issue - code can be shipped early and optimized later

bhj 6y ago
Battery life. The faster a task is completed (at a given power cost) the sooner the CPU can go back to standby.
- baybal2 6y ago
  Not so fast, especially these days. CPU power consumption is highly non-linear. You may well be benefitting from running a task longer, at a slower speed, and using less transistors.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    In general time-to-sleep is still the defining factor in keeping battery life long. Sure, there are low-power cores, but I believe most UI code will not run at it since it's given high priority by the system.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Not to mention it extends the life of the device. If a device is only just good enough for now, what will it be like in 4 years time. I currently use a 6 year old ipad air 2 and it feels very snappy and does everything I use it for well. Apple also tends to stop updates when the hardware is no longer capable of running the next OS smoothly.

centimeter 6y ago

I bought my iPad Pro because it offered the smoothest RAW photo proofing process of any product I've used. A lot of this is obviously up to software as well as hardware, but still - the beefy processor is useful here.

mceachen 6y ago
Faster CPUs certainly help everything go faster, but what you're asking of the CPU may matter much more than how fast the CPU is. RAW processing is actually a really interesting application, and rendering time depends heavily on what you do with the bits from the sensor. If you use non-linear interpolation, 2-50x the time to build. If you do highlight recovery, 2-5x the time to build. If you only need half the native resolution, build time may be reduced 2-4x. Basically "viewing a RAW image" can take 100 milliseconds or 15 seconds (on the same hardware!), depending on how you're interpreting the sensor data. (Source: playing with dcraw and libraw to rasterize raw images for PhotoStructure)

urthor 6y ago

Never underestimate the PUBG Mobile/Genshin Impact demographic basically. There's a lot of corner cases there where certain consumers value it a lot. Also performance per watt is a huge deal. The expanded power envelope that improved PPW brings allows 120hz displays which are battery hogs.

Reason077 6y ago
I wonder if Apple Silicon means we might finally get PUBG on Mac. If they can make it work on an iPad, they can make it work on a Mac with similar hardware... right?! I'm already missing the glorious few months that PUBG could be played on Mac via Stadia.
- urthor 6y ago
  Basically, no. The issue was never the instruction set, you still have to support the interface and the OS which nobody is bothered to do because cost benefit. Changing the chip isn't going to change the code base of the operating system.
  - lunixbochs 6y ago
    Unless they specifically opt out, almost all iOS apps will be available on Apple Silicon macs at launch.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      It will probably run, but I wonder if the UI will be usable on macOS?
      - lunixbochs 6y ago
        Some iOS and Android games support keyboard/mouse I think. You can also potentially map mouse movement to joystick movement for relative games like shooters. There are people who play pubg mobile on desktop with BlueShift or whatever already. Barring that maybe there will be a market for apps that make playing iOS games with keyboard and mouse easier.

jiggawatts 6y ago

I was just looking into optimising a large web application. I told the customer that using a caching layer such as a CDN would help paper over the worst of the inefficiencies in their application and the network stack. That was true! The download times halved. However, benchmarks with F12 developer tools showed that while downloads reduced from 200ms to 100ms, the overall load times were still seconds, of which about 50% was actual CPU time. (This is typical of large, complex sites built by non-experts or organisations where performance is not a primary concern.) Web sites like these perform very noticeably better if you have more CPU cores or faster CPU cores. Essentially, CDNs are easy to deploy and 5G provides nearly gigabit download speeds, so the bottleneck has shifted back to the CPU for a lot of the web.

jacobolus 6y ago
There is no speed of computer which cannot be overwhelmed by badly written code. I guess your point is that sloppy web developers / web companies make poorly performing code and shift the burden of handling it out to visitors’ machines, so those machines have to keep improving to not be left behind? That might be true, but is pretty depressing.
- ghettoimp 6y ago
  I think "fast, cheap, good, pick 2" applies. Obviously the current bloated, ad-laden state of the web is pretty horrible and indefensible. But if we can keep making compute faster, it should ultimately save programmer time, which can be used to either get cheaper or better programs.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  Conversely: There is no speed of computer which cannot be utilised to reduce developer effort. Faster computers enable easier programming strategies, which improve net productivity. People are expensive, so giving them better "power tools" improves efficiency. We don't complain that coal miners just need to shovel more efficiently. We give them enormous trucks and hydraulic mining shovels.

threeseed 6y ago

Many professionals are using iPad Pro for audio e.g. DAW and video e.g. editing.

72deluxe 6y ago
What DAW are they using? I use my iPad as a remote for Presonus Studio One sometimes, but I couldn't consider using it as the recording system itself, since the AU and VST accessibility isn't there. I would also use my iPad as a synthesiser (eg. Magellan) but then record the audio to a "real" computer, ie the Mac, via a recording interface.
- empthought 6y ago
  GarageBand is enough for a lot of people. There’s also Cubasis and Gadget 2 (which is more synth focused).
- EricE 6y ago
  you might enjoy this article: https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/02/a-week-of-podcasting-with-only-an-ipad-pro/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/02/a-week-of-podcasting-with...

wincy 6y ago

I sold my 2080ti and am playing Eve Echoes (new, mobile version of EVE Online) and Among Us, and Civ VI on the 2nd gen iPad Pro I bought used with less than half of the proceeds. The battery lasts a good long time and it feels pretty good to be able to play these full sized games on a screen like this. When I'm not using it the toddler watches some kids shows, and with the keyboard case I can type almost as quickly as I can on my 15" Macbook pro. If it had XCode I'd be set, honestly.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gettingsnarky 6y ago

> I think this is cool if they’re the future of the Mac, but aren’t these chips just wasted in the iPad? Mostly, but by putting them in iPads and iPhones they have been able to scale their chip development to the levels they need to.

saagarjha 6y ago

I work on a x86 interpreter that is only usable because of Apple's massive investment into these chips over the last couple years. I doubt that is what Apple was designing them for, but they are very useful to have as an application developer.

djxfade 6y ago
Are you the developer of iSH by any chance? If so, very cool project. Was it hard to get it published in the App Store?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I am a developer of iSH; tbodt did most of the interpreter work though. (Actually, he did most of the work on the app in general–there's a couple more of us who dabble in other parts of development, as well as support, marketing, compliance.) We're glad you like the project :) Getting iSH on the App Store did take some work on our side; we were in contact with Apple to get it approved and in compliance with the guidelines. You may have seen that the version of iSH on the App Store had package management functionality removed. So far we've been able to keep the ability to run Linux programs, as well as import files, unchanged. One interesting thing to see from Apple is that they are not just increasing the performance of their chips, but they are investing heavily in making certain operations faster. For example, in the time since tbodt started working iSH Apple has reduced the cost of uncontended atomics to almost zero overhead (this is especially good for Apple because it immediately makes reference counting code faster, which both Swift and Objective-C spend a lot of time in). iSH doesn't currently do anything fancy there, it just uses full locks everywhere, so this is something that we would be interested in pursuing at some point.
  - johncolanduoni 6y ago
    Faster uncontended atomics should improve uncontended lock performance too, at least if you’re using pthread mutexes (they’re implemented via atomic operations with an os_unfair_lock fallback for the contended case on Apple platforms).

megablast 6y ago

That is the way you want it. You don’t want it the other way.

vmception 6y ago

Even if assuming they were wasted, lower the production cost for everyone else that is not wasting them

fomine3 6y ago

Apple's SoC works really great and impressive, but I don't know why I need such spec for Phone. Even A12 is still great for most workloads. Apple improves camera functionality by its performance but just camera? I wish they find useful uses other than cameras.