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>I had read somewhere that the interposer that enabled this for the M1 chips where not available. With all my love and respect for "Apple rumors" writers; this

by klausa 2y ago

>I had read somewhere that the interposer that enabled this for the M1 chips where not available. With all my love and respect for "Apple rumors" writers; this was always "I read five blogposts about CPU design and now I'm an expert!" territory. The speculation was based on the M3 Maxes die shots not having the interposer visible, which... implies basically nothing whether that _could have_ been supported in an M3 Ultra configuration; as evidenced by the announcement today.

sroussey 2y ago
I’m guessing it’s not really a M3. No M3 has thunderbolt 5. This is a new chip with M3 marketing. I’d expect this from Intel, not Apple.
- klausa 2y ago
  Baseline M4 doesn't have Thunderbolt 5 either; only the Pro/Max variants do. The press-release even calls TB5 out: >Each Thunderbolt 5 port is supported by its own custom-designed controller directly on the chip. Given that they're doing the same on A-series chips (A18 Pro with 10Gbps USB-C; A18 with USB 2.0); I imagine it's just relatively simple to swap the I/O blocks around and they're doing this for cost and/or product segmentation reasons.
  - sroussey 2y ago
    Which means this is a whole new chip. It may be M3 based, but with added interposer support and new thunderbolt stuff. Which, at this point, why not just use M4 as a base?
    - kridsdale1 2y ago
      Could be that M4 requires a different TSMC fab that is at full production doing iPhones.
      - operatingthetan 2y ago
        Or they are saving the M4 Ultra name for later on ...
    - klausa 2y ago
      >Which, at this point, why not just use M4 as a base? I imagine that making those chips is quite a bit more involved than just taking the files for M3 Max, and copy-pasting them twice into a new project. I imagine it just takes more time to design/verify/produce them; especially given they're not selling very many of them, so they're probably not super-high-priority projects.
- hinkley 2y ago
  TB 5 seems like the sort of thing you could 'slap on' to a beefy enough chip. Or the sort of thing you put onto a successor when you had your fingers crossed that the spec and hardware would finalize in time for your product launch but the fucking committee went into paralysis again at the last moment and now your product has to ship 4 months before you can put TB 5 hardware on shelves. So you put your TB4 circuitry on a chip that has the bandwidth to handle TB5 and you wait for the sequel.
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    Sounds like you’ve seen some things.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      The world is full of features that didn't make the cutoff for launch date. I believe there's one or two of these publicly known in Apple's history, but it's an old tale.

by klausa 2y ago

sroussey 2y ago

I’m guessing it’s not really a M3. No M3 has thunderbolt 5. This is a new chip with M3 marketing. I’d expect this from Intel, not Apple.

klausa 2y ago
Baseline M4 doesn't have Thunderbolt 5 either; only the Pro/Max variants do. The press-release even calls TB5 out: >Each Thunderbolt 5 port is supported by its own custom-designed controller directly on the chip. Given that they're doing the same on A-series chips (A18 Pro with 10Gbps USB-C; A18 with USB 2.0); I imagine it's just relatively simple to swap the I/O blocks around and they're doing this for cost and/or product segmentation reasons.
- sroussey 2y ago
  Which means this is a whole new chip. It may be M3 based, but with added interposer support and new thunderbolt stuff. Which, at this point, why not just use M4 as a base?
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    Could be that M4 requires a different TSMC fab that is at full production doing iPhones.
    - operatingthetan 2y ago
      Or they are saving the M4 Ultra name for later on ...
  - klausa 2y ago
    >Which, at this point, why not just use M4 as a base? I imagine that making those chips is quite a bit more involved than just taking the files for M3 Max, and copy-pasting them twice into a new project. I imagine it just takes more time to design/verify/produce them; especially given they're not selling very many of them, so they're probably not super-high-priority projects.
hinkley 2y ago
TB 5 seems like the sort of thing you could 'slap on' to a beefy enough chip. Or the sort of thing you put onto a successor when you had your fingers crossed that the spec and hardware would finalize in time for your product launch but the fucking committee went into paralysis again at the last moment and now your product has to ship 4 months before you can put TB 5 hardware on shelves. So you put your TB4 circuitry on a chip that has the bandwidth to handle TB5 and you wait for the sequel.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  Sounds like you’ve seen some things.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    The world is full of features that didn't make the cutoff for launch date. I believe there's one or two of these publicly known in Apple's history, but it's an old tale.