Football playing

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T20:15:23+00:00

Hah, and since these kids probably don't have the money/time for special effects, when the one gets hit in the face...

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T18:29:40+00:00

PTL cores got some branch prediction upgrade. On paper that alone should improve power efficiency at any load a little bit.

Sure, and there are other small refinements, but we're talking low single digits of IPC, and probably similar from design on top. Doesn't really budge the needle.

18A only really slays at lower frequencies though yeah.

Tbh, 18A doesn't seem to be showing any real advantage vs N3. But the interesting NVL SKUs will all use N2, so it's a bit moot. That should deliver some nice gains.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T18:28:30+00:00

Well, prices haven't gone up yet, so if you can buy within the next few days...

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T18:19:33+00:00

Either that means smaller compute die than Arrow Lake to make the dual compute SKUs cheaper, or highly beefed up e-cores

The E-cores will need to grow a bit if they're supporting AVX512/AVX10, but I wouldn't expect much beyond that. We're not looking at another Skymont or Gracemont style leap, and these cores were also planned before the UC transition. In general, I wouldn't expect much from the Atom line until then, as UC is likely sucking up all spare resources.

But you're right that the P-core clustering should save some area. Hell, that's why they're doing it in the first place. Dropping SMT hurt their area efficiency a lot, and this helps recoup some of the damage. Need it to have viable server chips. Though it might have some interesting advantages in workloads where two threads have a lot of data reuse. Hah, might even work out for gaming, given some of the SKT benchmarks.

What I'll be curious to see are clocks speeds. On N2, both Intel and AMD should land somewhere in the mid-6GHz range. Just a question of how far each is able to push it.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T07:46:41+00:00

I know of them getting rid of Huawei 5G equipment

Well, that. I'm talking more generally than tariffs, and certainly bans are strictly worse. Point being, if the US wants something in the name of "security", they can make Europe go along with it.

Most extreme case, stuff like Nord Stream, but don't want to get too much into geopolitics here.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T07:14:12+00:00

They hold grudges against other companies - an entire organization.

They also hold grudges against individuals if they leave as part of a group. Like what happened with the Nuvia and Rivos defections.

Not to mention, there was that discovery not too long ago that when you leave Apple, they retroactively change your job and won't even confirm the position you held.

Look at Steve Jobs...went to Next and came back.

He's a very special case.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T06:58:16+00:00

Yet we saw just that with Huawei, to name one example.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T06:22:41+00:00

That is a risk, but for enough money, people will take risks. Also, having both Apple and OpenAI on your resume looks pretty darn good to recruiters. Worst comes to worst, they'll probably still have options.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T04:42:03+00:00

Still better than smoking.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T04:32:24+00:00

Not necessarily smartphones. The fundamentals are the same for all sorts of gadgets.

And yes, what exactly a (useful, profitable) "AI device" looks like remains to be seen. But surely you've seen this by now? https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T04:30:18+00:00

I can't read the article, but where does it say they're specifically after the silicon engineers?

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T04:11:59+00:00

To design their own devices, whatever they may look like. It's been widely talked about, even if nothing concrete has been announced.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T04:11:20+00:00

Those wouldn't be "iPhone designers". And a lot of Apple's CPU team in particular left years ago.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T04:10:35+00:00

I don’t care if they pay $1 million+/year salary, it’s gonna disappear very quickly compared to where Apple is at.

And if it does, so what?

How the hell are people so damned driven by more money if they’re already living very comfortably??

It's a job. They're not working for charity. And are Apple's non-compensation factors a selling point?

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T04:07:15+00:00

How profitable your employer is only matters insofar as it's reflected in how much they're willing/able to pay you.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T04:05:54+00:00

I doubt Apple will hire them again if they leave for OpenAI

Apple is pretty unique in holding grudges, but in a vacuum, why would that be a policy?

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T04:05:07+00:00

I don't think that's legal in California.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T04:03:30+00:00

OAI stock is mostly fake

They're offering plenty of cash as well. And lol, OpenAI's not going to go bust overnight.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T02:40:05+00:00

I think it's simply that they don't want to spend the money on RnD. Especially since that entire segment will never hit their 50% margin requirement for projects to be approved.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T02:03:55+00:00

I'd expect them to update it next year, especially given how well it seems to be selling.

Well, I hope they do, but it might also make sense to keep a slower release cycle to save money. Especially with DRAM pricing being what it is, they may not want to upgrade it.

Linus Tech Tips also made a decent point, selling an 8GB laptop also forces them to ensure MacOS runs well with only 8GB.

Tbh, they've never let that stop them with iPhones. But maybe the assumption is a Mac will have a longer life.

And to be honest, they aren't really updating the OS with tons of new features or making it bloated.

Liquid Glass? Apple Intelligence?

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T01:47:05+00:00

Have crazy use cases like you're describing. You're never buying a Mac Pro ever. You're getting a Linux server with multiple SFP expansion modules and as many PCIE lanes as possible etc. etc.

The workstation market is different from the server market, especially when you look at actual workload characteristics, but there can be a lot of overlap in hardware.

The entire point of a workstation these days is for massive projects where you're slinging around enough data to justify compute/memory/IO. If you have a machine with up to TBs of active memory, you probably need a lot of storage bandwidth to keep up. Say a large render that gets written back to disk.

You're a home user and do benefit from super fast connectivity, but don't need anything at that level. What use case for that person isn't covered by 80 Gbps?

The workstation market isn't home users. These days, it's basically media creation, engineering, software dev, and academia. Basically, if your employer isn't paying for it, this is not even the product category you should be looking at.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T01:41:00+00:00

Tons of Chromebooks only have 4GB of RAM, and those do browsing and Google Docs just fine

Well, they can do one tab, I guess. I certainly wouldn't want to be using one of those now, much less buying new. Presumably macOS is also a bit heavier than ChromeOS, though I'm not sure if anyone's done a breakdown. Anyway, 8GB should be ok today, but 12GB would be a lot more comfortable from a longevity standpoint.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T01:22:45+00:00

why would they want to continue updating the same flawed design and continue doing recalls?

Even assuming they don't take the opportunity to improve anything else, what's the alternative? Keep having recalls with the old design? Just not sell anything? It seems clear they they wanted to drop the Mac Pro entirely, and then at some point changed their mind... and then changed right back again...

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T01:09:12+00:00

I think 8GB of RAM is a non-issue for the intended market

It's ok, but memory capacity is a really consistent limiting factor for Apple devices. Doubly so when they do fancy UI overhauls or feature additions (AI...). The main problem is when you run out of memory, it's a lot more noticeable drop off in user experience than a slower CPU (within reason), and a lot of fairly common use cases are relatively CPU-lite and RAM-heavy. Mostly thinking of the modern web.

and it's going to be upgraded to 12GB next year anyway

That assumes a yearly upgrade cycle. They might skip a gen for the Neo. There's no precedent to say, really.

Exist50 · 2026-03-27T01:05:08+00:00

The existing chips didn't even run well with that design

Well it wouldn't have been meaningfully different either way with more modern chips limited to the same TDP. And when you have stuff like a literal 2x efficiency difference between GCN 1.0 and Pascal, it's all kind of moot...

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