3 ms·

>Portrait Mode blurred backgrounds in FaceTime videos >Live Text for copying and pasting, looking up, or translating text within photos >An interactive 3D glo

by bydo 5y ago

>Portrait Mode blurred backgrounds in FaceTime videos >Live Text for copying and pasting, looking up, or translating text within photos >An interactive 3D globe of Earth in the Maps app >More detailed maps in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London in the Maps app >Text-to-speech in more languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish >On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline >Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance) Most of them make sense; the M1 has the Neural Engine and ISP, and Intel Macs don't. Not sure what's stopping them from enabling additional text-to-speech languages or rendering a globe, though.

ksec 5y ago
>Not sure what's stopping them from enabling additional text-to-speech languages or rendering a globe, though. Text to speech uses Neural Engine as well. Rendering Globe likely uses newer version of Metal only supported on M1.
- saurik 5y ago
  But only for those languages?
  - plorkyeran 5y ago
    Sure? It suggests they have a new TTS engine which they used for the new languages, but they kept the old engine around for Intel macs rather than dropping existing functionality.
  - Uehreka 5y ago
    Feels like the kind of thing where maybe there was an architectural initiative to move from a cumbersome speech data format to something more elegant that required the Neural Engine. Since they already had the old languages in the old format, they kept that data around, but for the new languages opted to only ingest the easier-to-work-with format. But hey, I’m guessing and you’re Saurik: I have a feeling you know more about this than me and may have considered and dismissed this possibility for a good reason.
- out_of_protocol 5y ago
  Last point is nice. Intel? Nah, that's so last millenia. No new Metal for you. Whole lineup is outdated now. More money please
  - NobodyNada 5y ago
    It’s not unusual for features of graphics APIs to be limited by the hardware rather than software; especially Metal which is a very low-level API that more-or-less directly exposes the capabilities of the GPU. Since Apple switched to an in-house GPU architecture for the M1, it’s not surprising that there are some features Apple’s GPU supports that AMD/Nvidia cards don’t. For instance, Apple’s tile-based-deferred-rendering pipeline allows fragment shaders to easily read back the previously color of a pixel in order to implement custom blending effects — an operation that would be prohibitively expensive on other GPUs. Apple publishes a full compatibility matrix showing which features are supported on each GPU hardware family: https://developer.apple.com/metal/Metal-Feature-Set-Tables.pdf https://developer.apple.com/metal/Metal-Feature-Set-Tables.p...
    - out_of_protocol 5y ago
      My point is, everyone else does support older hardware, usually by disabling newest nicest effects (like ray tracing stuff) or switching to fallback version of said affects. Not caring to do such thing is, probably, intentional push for customers to update their hardware
      - Synaesthesia 5y ago
        Oh yeah, Apple are relentless in their push for new platforms and abandoning old stuff. Maybe too much in the Metal sphere of things where there have been some big changes - Metal 1, Metal 2 their "modern" platform they we're pushing for starting at A12 and really now from A14-M1 and the future.
      - zepto 5y ago
        > Not caring to do such thing is, probably, intentional push for customers to update their hardware Not really. Apple has always had a policy of only supporting features that perform as intended. Low fidelity “fallback” versions are simply not part of Apple’s approach to design.

by bydo 5y ago

ksec 5y ago

>Not sure what's stopping them from enabling additional text-to-speech languages or rendering a globe, though. Text to speech uses Neural Engine as well. Rendering Globe likely uses newer version of Metal only supported on M1.

saurik 5y ago
But only for those languages?
- plorkyeran 5y ago
  Sure? It suggests they have a new TTS engine which they used for the new languages, but they kept the old engine around for Intel macs rather than dropping existing functionality.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  Feels like the kind of thing where maybe there was an architectural initiative to move from a cumbersome speech data format to something more elegant that required the Neural Engine. Since they already had the old languages in the old format, they kept that data around, but for the new languages opted to only ingest the easier-to-work-with format. But hey, I’m guessing and you’re Saurik: I have a feeling you know more about this than me and may have considered and dismissed this possibility for a good reason.
out_of_protocol 5y ago
Last point is nice. Intel? Nah, that's so last millenia. No new Metal for you. Whole lineup is outdated now. More money please
- NobodyNada 5y ago
  It’s not unusual for features of graphics APIs to be limited by the hardware rather than software; especially Metal which is a very low-level API that more-or-less directly exposes the capabilities of the GPU. Since Apple switched to an in-house GPU architecture for the M1, it’s not surprising that there are some features Apple’s GPU supports that AMD/Nvidia cards don’t. For instance, Apple’s tile-based-deferred-rendering pipeline allows fragment shaders to easily read back the previously color of a pixel in order to implement custom blending effects — an operation that would be prohibitively expensive on other GPUs. Apple publishes a full compatibility matrix showing which features are supported on each GPU hardware family: https://developer.apple.com/metal/Metal-Feature-Set-Tables.pdf https://developer.apple.com/metal/Metal-Feature-Set-Tables.p...
  - out_of_protocol 5y ago
    My point is, everyone else does support older hardware, usually by disabling newest nicest effects (like ray tracing stuff) or switching to fallback version of said affects. Not caring to do such thing is, probably, intentional push for customers to update their hardware
    - Synaesthesia 5y ago
      Oh yeah, Apple are relentless in their push for new platforms and abandoning old stuff. Maybe too much in the Metal sphere of things where there have been some big changes - Metal 1, Metal 2 their "modern" platform they we're pushing for starting at A12 and really now from A14-M1 and the future.
    - zepto 5y ago
      > Not caring to do such thing is, probably, intentional push for customers to update their hardware Not really. Apple has always had a policy of only supporting features that perform as intended. Low fidelity “fallback” versions are simply not part of Apple’s approach to design.