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VR38DETT is unlikely to be useful to the average consumer. I don't know why they are using low/high on the article. It's just tiered like yesteryear's i5 vs i7

VR38DETT is unlikely to be useful to the average consumer. I don't know why they are using low/high on the article. It's just tiered like yesteryear's i5 vs i7 for mobile chip; but using i5 vs i7 was highly misleading to consumers because it would lead people to think that there is some great gap between the two chips (when they were the same chip at different clock speeds).

Topfi 2y ago
I suspect they are using low/high in the article because there are massive differences within the respective tiers. Look at the M4 Pro. There is a variant with 8p4e and 16 GPU cores, as well as one with 10p4e and 20 GPU cores. That is a very significant difference, and to compare it to i5s and i7s (or Ultra 5 and Ultra 7), remember that Intel had designations within those tiers. It was never just an i5, it was a 3570k or 9900k and while not perfect, it was still easier to look up than saying the less or more powerful M4 Pro. Essentially, these are six very different SOCs sharing only three names. If they aren't clearly separated by Apple, then the media must find some way to communicate that. I fear though that rather than more clear, the path taken, most noticably, by Nvidia of mixing and matching tiers with completely different silicon will win out, trying to use 4080 branding for both AD102 and AD103 parts certainly didn't harm their long term prospects.
- dagmx 2y ago
  They’re 3 SoC designs and a binned variant of each. That’s different than 6 very different SoCs as your comment says. Each tier has different capabilities, ie the pro is not a binned version of the max and the base is not a binned version of the pro.
  - Topfi 2y ago
    Yes, they are binned different, I could have phrased that even more clearly (whether bins of the same silicon should be considered different SOCs or not, I can see arguments for either though agree more with the former), but that does not affect the point I made. Let's look at Nvidia again. AD102 is used in the RTX 4090 Ti, RTX 4090, RTX 4080 Ti, as well as a less common variant of the RTX 4070 Ti. Each uses the same underlying silicon, just differently binned with certain parts fused off, similar to Apple. Yet, and this was the point I made, what Apple currently does would be equivalent to Nvidia just calling all of them RTX 4090 Ti (they are the same underlying design after all), with reviewers and customers left to hunt down the specific core counts and differences between them. And as mentioned, Nvidia tried something even more egregious with the 4080 12Gb, though (this time) were faced with such backlash that they pulled it back. Whether with Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, Nvidia or AMD, every time these practices aren't pointed out by the media, we get closer to a world were a 4080 12Gb will be pushed onto consumers who assume launch day reviews of the "proper" 4080 show equivalent performance.
    - dagmx 2y ago
      The analogy doesn’t quite work because the product isn’t the processor, it’s the Mac or the GeForce card. In that sense, both NVIDIA and Apple are doing the same thing.

Topfi 2y ago

I suspect they are using low/high in the article because there are massive differences within the respective tiers. Look at the M4 Pro. There is a variant with 8p4e and 16 GPU cores, as well as one with 10p4e and 20 GPU cores. That is a very significant difference, and to compare it to i5s and i7s (or Ultra 5 and Ultra 7), remember that Intel had designations within those tiers. It was never just an i5, it was a 3570k or 9900k and while not perfect, it was still easier to look up than saying the less or more powerful M4 Pro. Essentially, these are six very different SOCs sharing only three names. If they aren't clearly separated by Apple, then the media must find some way to communicate that. I fear though that rather than more clear, the path taken, most noticably, by Nvidia of mixing and matching tiers with completely different silicon will win out, trying to use 4080 branding for both AD102 and AD103 parts certainly didn't harm their long term prospects.

dagmx 2y ago
They’re 3 SoC designs and a binned variant of each. That’s different than 6 very different SoCs as your comment says. Each tier has different capabilities, ie the pro is not a binned version of the max and the base is not a binned version of the pro.
- Topfi 2y ago
  Yes, they are binned different, I could have phrased that even more clearly (whether bins of the same silicon should be considered different SOCs or not, I can see arguments for either though agree more with the former), but that does not affect the point I made. Let's look at Nvidia again. AD102 is used in the RTX 4090 Ti, RTX 4090, RTX 4080 Ti, as well as a less common variant of the RTX 4070 Ti. Each uses the same underlying silicon, just differently binned with certain parts fused off, similar to Apple. Yet, and this was the point I made, what Apple currently does would be equivalent to Nvidia just calling all of them RTX 4090 Ti (they are the same underlying design after all), with reviewers and customers left to hunt down the specific core counts and differences between them. And as mentioned, Nvidia tried something even more egregious with the 4080 12Gb, though (this time) were faced with such backlash that they pulled it back. Whether with Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, Nvidia or AMD, every time these practices aren't pointed out by the media, we get closer to a world were a 4080 12Gb will be pushed onto consumers who assume launch day reviews of the "proper" 4080 show equivalent performance.
  - dagmx 2y ago
    The analogy doesn’t quite work because the product isn’t the processor, it’s the Mac or the GeForce card. In that sense, both NVIDIA and Apple are doing the same thing.