4 ms·
It's a mixture of several problems: * TSMC N3B being a bit of a flop (yield issues, too expensive) * Brain drain from Apple's chip design teams over the last
by scrlk 3y ago
It's a mixture of several problems:
* TSMC N3B being a bit of a flop (yield issues, too expensive)
* Brain drain from Apple's chip design teams over the last few years
* Tim Cook trying to push the average selling price up to keep revenue growth going in the face of sales declines (e.g. hobbling memory bandwidth, reducing the number of performance cores for M3 Pro)
I don't expect there to be a M1 style generational leap for a long time, expect 2010s Intel style yearly performance gains from here on out.
- pier25 3y agoThe GPU is increasing a lot though. Another point is the CPU improvements are constant. In about two years the base M3 is now on par with the M1 Max.
- hajile 3y agoThe GPU is critical to future profits though. Apple really wants your monthly subscription to Apple Arcade and they want to expand in other game areas which is why they've been paying AAA companies to optimize for Mac. This also ties into their VR headset where gaming will be one of the core features.
- the-golden-one 3y agoHardly any AAA companies are optimising for the Apple GPU. MoltenVK is where all the interest is. Even if they did, there is very little in Apple Arcade which taxes the GPU, most target the lowest common denominator in terms of supported iOS/phone combinations. The original Apple Arcade strategy was for AAA titles, but for whatever reason that wasn’t pursued, so now we have a tonne of casual games and re-releases of old titles. Apple just seems to run hot and cold on gaming.
- philistine 3y ago> The original Apple Arcade strategy was for AAA titles Can you prove that statement? I bet you can't, cause it's simply not true. Every Arcade title is playable from an iPhone to a Mac by way of Apple TV. It was never going to get AAA titles.
- the-golden-one 3y agoHere you go. A simple google would have found that. Apple wants more Grindstones. https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/30/apple-arcade-strategy-shift/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/30/apple-arcade-strategy-shift/
- philistine 3y agoHow is cancelling contracts with some developers equal to they wanted AAA titles but messed it up.? There’s no correlation.
- yunohn 3y agoI mean, they keep putting desktop class CPU+GPUs in their mobile devices - all just to play an Angry Birds remake? I own almost every Apple device in the ecosystem, but I never game on them…
- zarzavat 3y agoIt’s true but the problem with the GPU is Apple’s addiction to RAM money. Yes the GPU is improving in performance but it does you no good if it has to share a tiny amount of system RAM with the CPU.
- forrestthewoods 3y ago> The GPU is increasing a lot though. Is it? Does it matter? Unified RAM is cool. But I’d rather have an Nvidia 4090.
- pier25 3y agoIn a laptop?
- forrestthewoods 3y agoI was thinking about the desktop variants. Apple Silicon is amazing. But if you’re doing heavy GPU it’s not very exciting.
- stevenhuang 3y agoIt's very exciting in the local LLMs space, where the unified memory allows fast inference of large models.
- dagaci 3y agoI read that the bandwidth is 50% lower on the M3 combined with a lower CPU core coun. This reduction will impact inferrence performance. It maybe better to stick with M2 series if you really really think spending $10k on a laptop mac to do inferrence slowly (but faster than a plain PC of course) make sense.
- blktiger 3y agoWeren't all of the new M3 Macs announced the same price as they previously were or lower? Same with the recently announced iPhones? Or am I mis-remembering? Seems like prices not increasing given all the recent inflation are actually a price decrease pretty much across the board not an increase on the average selling price?
- scrlk 3y agoEntry level pricing for a MacBook Pro now starts at $1599 rather than $1299.
- sroussey 3y agoAnd it has a downgrade from a Pro chip to a non pro chip.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- npunt 3y ago13" Macbook Pro had M2 not M2 Pro
- eyelidlessness 3y agoNo it doesn’t. The previous (cheaper) entry level MBPs were non-Pro M2 (and non-Pro M1 before that).
- floydnoel 3y agoThat thing had the same CPU as the MacBook Air. There was nothing "pro" about it. I'm so happy it's finally gone!
- ch_sm 3y agothe new one also has the non-pro, non-max M3.
- deleted 3y ago
- GeekyBear 3y ago> expect 2010s Intel style yearly performance gains from here on out Intel saw very little gain this year at all in return for a 400 watt power draw under load. The plain old M3 saw a 20% performance gain along side efficiency gains. Having a 22 hour battery life is insane and you certainly aren't going to manage that with a 400 watt power draw.
- pretzel5297 3y ago400 watts is on a desktop chip where there is no concept of battery life. 20% increase on performance is compared to M1 not, M2 - which also had 20% increase in performance on M1.
- GeekyBear 3y ago> 20% increase on performance is compared to M1 not, M2 Nope. > The M3 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of about 3,000 and 11,700, respectively, in the Geekbench 6 database. When you compare these scores to those of the M2's single-core and multi-core scores (around 2,600 and 9,700, respectively), the M3 chip is indeed up to 20% faster like Apple claims. https://www.laptopmag.com/laptops/macbooks/apple-m3-benchmarks-leak-is-it-as-scary-fast-as-apple-said https://www.laptopmag.com/laptops/macbooks/apple-m3-benchmar... > 400 watts is on a desktop chip where there is no concept of battery life. Yes, and in exchange for that ridiculous 400 watt power draw, Intel saw negligible performance gains. > In some areas, the extra clock speeds available on the Core i9-14900K show some benefit, but generally speaking, it won't make much difference in most areas. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21084/intel-core-i9-14900k-core-i7-14700k-and-core-i5-14600k-review-raptor-lake-refreshed/15 https://www.anandtech.com/show/21084/intel-core-i9-14900k-co... Intel only wishes they could hit a 20% gain in exchange for all that increased power draw and heat. As that review noted the best improvement they saw in any of the common benchmarks was just 6%.
- slaymaker1907 3y agoI wonder how much thermal throttling is going on with these benchmarks? 400W seems ridiculously difficult to cool. The 13900 was difficult if not impossible to cool for throughput without water cooling.
- jeo123 3y agoFor Apple, yes incremental increase but not for Huawei and recent Elite X.