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Apple Reportedly Worked on Two 'Extreme' Chips

DavidSchaub said:
Nobody said it was "necessary", but it is a perfectly reasonable guess that it was Apple's hope/plan to use the same Jade dies for 2C and 4C. Maybe in a couple decades we'll find out how close the M* Quadra got to being released.
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That 'hope/plan' is primarily to save Apple money, not to solve the customer problem/workloads. Which is likely why it failed at Perf/$.

It wasn't that it couldn't be technically built. The problem was relatively few would be willing to buy one. it isn't doing what Apple Silicon to the rest of the Mac products in the line up where Pref/$ is substantially increasing.

Similar to the $999 XDR stand... it 'worked' in the market until it didn't. The Extreme probably didn't even get some rabid Apple targeted buyers to buy into it.
 
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deconstruct60 said:
That 'hope/plan' is primarily to save Apple money, not to solve the customer problem/workloads. Which is likely why it failed at Perf/$.

It wasn't that it couldn't be technically built. The problem was relatively few would be willing to buy one. it isn't doing what Apple Silicon to the rest of the Mac products in the line up where Pref/$ is substantially increasing.

Similar to the $999 XDR stand... it 'worked' in the market until it didn't. The Extreme probably didn't even get some rabid Apple targeted buyers to buy into it.
Click to expand...
It probably would have been an absolute monster for the time, but as a monolithic chip even Apple wouldn’t be able to justify the losses on manufacturing such a behemoth per wafer…
 
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NT1440 said:
It probably would have been an absolute monster for the time, but as a monolithic chip even Apple wouldn’t be able to justify the losses on manufacturing such a behemoth per wafer…
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4x a "max" die couldn't have been a monolithic chip. The M1 Max by itself was already in the 1/2 reticle range. Even a 2x bigger die was going to run into reticle limits. ( Ultra's TSMC-InFO packaging has been rectile limited which presented limits on Max size previously ). Let alone doubling that again.

As have gone from TSMC N7 , N3 , N2 doubling the cores in the same space has gotten more practicle.

Nvidia was doing recticle size dies. But they were not anywhere near affordable to buy, but there was enough customers that is clearly worked for them. However, there were absolutely not selling those chips into one product from one single vendor for a smallish subset of that target market.

Cerabras is selling whole wafer SoCs and making money. But very different price point from a Mac Pro.
 
Eric_WVGG said:
The entire point of what I was saying is that it's a valuable niche market. Saying “Apple shouldn't make supercars because most people by phones” is like saying Porsche shouldn’t make souped up 911s because most of their customers buy Cayennes.
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Ok, I was making the point that anything “super high end computer” is not a valuable niche market. Or, probably more correctly, not valuable enough (considering the size of the Mac business vs “everything else Apple does”) Apple has successfully grown their business far beyond the Mac and even far beyond just Apple users. For many products in their lineup, they’ve said roughly half are being purchased by folks new to Apple.
 
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