As a complete other aside, I'm excited to see what comes with the M3, particularly any neural cores. I would be much more excited about all the new AI tools if they could be run locally, Apple are again in the unique position to be able to make that possible for the masses. WWDC is hopefully going to be super interesting.
What we need is a sudden and massive increase in memory on these chips to make having LLMs viable on everyday affordable devices. I do wander if that may be something Apple surprise us with.
The bottleneck on advanced processes is how fast ASML can build its EUV fabrication machines and they're extremely complicated pieces of kit with lots of specialized parts that are also extremely complicated pieces of kit. Even with all our modern production ability we're limited in how quickly we can assemble these machines that can actually do the lithography and everybody wants them.
ASML currently has a backlog of 100 machines. Intel, Samsung, TSMC, they all want them. They sell for $200m+ a piece. Everyone has the cash for them. ASML just can't produce them fast enough.
What Apple has done with the M-series silicon is really impressive, but it’s not as fast as big, dedicated GPU silicon.
> like if the most cost-effective work boot of 2025 is produced by Gucci.
Apple M-silicon laptops are high quality, but they’re not the same as overpriced luxury goods. The price of entry level M1/M2 Macs is extremely reasonable, IMO.
But yes, the comparison would be apt. I think people want to solve a problem with dependence on third party services...
No, I expect GPUs with insane amount of memory surfacing and that isn't really a field for Apple yet.
The iPhone and Mac have good performance and power efficiency, but people will always want their phone and laptop to do more and get longer battery life. Apple customers’ appetite for compute is practically bottomless.
I don't think so, the typical iPhone user has not scaled up their compute needs much past the 2015 A9.
And if you exclude the computational photography stuff, I could imagine some users don't take advantage of it at all.
I'd rather have a healthy competetive ecosystem where people writing software need not say stuff like "needs CUDA to work or needs Apple Neural cores to work" and instead says something like "need XYZ acceleration provided by CUDA cores, Apple Silicon, and AMD blah.."
Consider the whole history of OpenGL, Metal, Vulcan, WebGL, WebGPU...
It would have been a mistake to keep using OpenGL, and WebGL was perhaps a mistake from the beginning. It was the wrong abstractions. Metal and Vulcan are clearly better abstractions for GPU APIs, and it really doesn't matter too much that Metal is Apple-only because they're close enough that you can have a good Vulcan API on top of Metal (MoltenVK). That is, what matters is that we converge on the same abstractions, and those take a long time to get right.
Now in the end we've gotten WebGPU (which isn't only for web browsers btw, can be used from native apps too) that can provide a nice universal cross-platform API.
I mean, does anyone doubt that thinner process nodes will be in demand?
Sure, 3nm is marketing too, but there are hard limits and reliability might suffer if manufacturing cannot keep up.
Don’t all the big tech companies have giant cash accounts?
Honestly, I just wish that they'd refresh the Mac Studio. I know that probably won't happen in any processor generation which they plan to roll out the Mac Pro, though.
There are so many ways to benefit. I've never owned an Apple product in my life! And yet, I own an AMD CPU that was built on a TSMC process. I feel like that benefits me. Would that TSMC process be as good if they didn't have Apple as a customer? Maybe not. I don't know for sure - it's not something I obsess over.
It would be different if the products you could buy outside of Apple were actually bad. (And for some people who want fanless Apple Silicon, a lot of laptop alternatives are bad, but for my needs, both desktops and laptops with fans are fulfilling my needs and wants.)
I would say consumers benefit if the leading process node is used on them, wouldn’t you?
I don’t understand the problem. The most efficient processes are always dedicated to mobile devices where the premium is worth it.
Sounds like FUD to me.
And if Apple leaves TSMC will be left with the pants down.
The Economist had a good article a few months ago about the volume of chip manufacture by country and process size. The takeaway is Taiwan leads < 10nm, the US and Taiwan lead 10-22nm, and that > 22nm is an interesting mix including South Korea and China.
Chart: https://www.economist.com/img/b/400/834/90/media-assets/imag...
Article: https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/02/02/americas-hoped-for...
It's weird to think we're dependent on single companies for such important things.
https://wccftech.com/samsung-secures-3-nm-advanced-chip-orde...
No surprise, the N3B ("first gen") process has bad economics and poor yields. Everyone else is waiting for N3E, which is pretty different to N3B.
See: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-e...
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7048/n3e-replaces-n3-comes-in...
prob not his worse case scenario :)
Yes, this would lower QoL pretty significantly for both countries.
TSMC isn't moving their cutting edge production here. The fabs will be a node or two behind.
That's a big no. What's actually happening is that TSMC is building a new factory in Arizona, including training a brand new US workforce. It remains to be seen whether it can even be done. Toyota famously failed with a similar attempt in Fremont, California.
It's a question of whether TSMC is successful because of some sort of strategy that is compatible with American work culture, or do the actual Taiwanese workers play a significant part in their success? Unanswered thus far.
TSMC said that the leading node will always be in Taiwan and N+1 will be outside.
Given the fact that Apple has such a dominant position in every part of the supply chain infrastructure I’m challenged with being able to see how any organization could possibly come up with something that pushes Apple into bankruptcy.
My guess is that only another Apple could dethrone Apple. That's to say a company that produces high quality products with strong branding consistently over multiple decades. Google and Samsung are competitors but in my mind, as an Apple user, their products are not worthy quality wise of the luxury prices they demand.
Apple has too much power, no for profit company or person can responsibly wield with that much power.
The success of capitalism to meet the demands of a consumer are entirely dependent on competition. By vertically integrating their business, Apple has made it impossible to compete.
I am really excited about the M3. The M1, with its unified memory it can already run decently large LLMs. It would be great if Apple was able to make the M3 even better at that. In addition, it seems like there is a lot of momentum in releasing models that the user can run on consumer hardware. I would love to have my own private LLMs running on my own hardware
Not everyone is banking on EUV for 7nm, though. TSMC will extend today’s 193nm immersion and multiple patterning to 7nm, with plans to insert EUV at 5nm - [0]
Chip making is capital intensive, and a new factory that costs to the tune of $20 billions only allows a vendor to stay ahead of the competition for a few years. It’s entirely possible that Intel or Samsung will lead the race at the next technology milestone. They have work cut out for them of course. TSMC has been in the foundry business for a long time.
It definitely would be nice if there were more options at the cutting edge, but it's like that for good reasons and it's not likely to change.
What's the overall annual dollar amount TSMC sells, and of that, what percentage is Apple, regardless of the specific production line?
* Apple Silicon CPUs have a Neural Engine specifically made for fast ML-inference
* Apple supports PyTorch (https://developer.apple.com/metal/pytorch/)
* Apple has its own easily accessible machine-learning framework called Core-ML (https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/)
So it would be inaccurate to say that they are not doing anything for the ML community.
Sure, sometimes it means they get the newest bestest chips a year early and the fans can party, but if you're an anti-fan just remain patient and I suspect one of these years you will be the one with reason to party.
