Well, of course. That's what linear improvement means. If you walk a mile every day the ratio of improvement after 100 days is much smaller than after 5 days. But you still have walked the same distance.
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M3 Chip Generation - Discussion Megathread
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Well, of course. That's what linear improvement means. If you walk a mile every day the ratio of improvement after 100 days is much smaller than after 5 days. But you still have walked the same distance.
I know.
What I mean is that the perceived progress, which is not a difference but a ratio, is decreasing. At some point the user will not notice the speed improvements compared to the previous generation.
Which is ok. I personally don't see the need to update the iPhone every year, but hey I suppose the shareholders demand it.
Ah, I see. Yes, I agree. We started noticing the effects of this a while ago, which is why CPUs started scaling horizontally (more cores/threads). Single-core performance is fundamentally limited by data dependencies inside the reel-world codes as well as maximal frequencies at which circuits can run. One will inevitably hit a plateau with the current computing model. It's possible that Apple is already very close to maximal exploitable IPC, which is why it seems that the only improvements come from increasing the frequency...
It is also entirely possible that the entire industry will grid to a halt and that we will encounter a technological barrier unless some fundamentally new way of doing computing is developed.
Unless you are an app developer or have someone to hand down the device to then it makes zero sense to replace annually.
If I was married and had 4 kids I'd have 2 iPhone plans on odd years, 2 iPhone plans on even years and 2 SIM-only plans. Every year spouse and I would have that year's iPhone and my kids would receive the hand me down for them to use from year 1-3.
As early as the 90s phone replacement was every 2 years.
Today it has been lengthened to more than 2 years like every 3/4/5/6 years.
Phone makers adjusted this by making significant industrial design changes every 3/4/5/6 years.
It is like buying cars. Some replace every 100,000km, on a schedule or every time a significant industrial design change is made.
Between significant industrial design changes are minor cosmetic upgrades to the platform. Only noticable to connoisseur.
Same with the iPhone... you'll only notice by the color difference, island and size of the rear camera module.
Significant industrial design changes would be
- 1 camera without flash
- 1 camera with flash
- 2 camera with flash
- 3 camera with flash
- 4 camera with flash
I believe we are seeing the fundamentally new way of doing computing - and that is with dedicated ASICs/silicon optimised for unique, tightly grouped tasks, and move away from a generalised monolithic CPU core/cores.
We already have encode/decode for ProRes, AV1, and silicon for encrypt/decrypt for file fault.
And now ray-tracing.
Why not other silicon that's optimal for other tasks we do in computing? Is there something better than a monolithic generalised CPU at say... managing photoshop layers and masks? Or handling virtual instruments and plugins in audio applications? What about just simple stuff like typing and rendering text on-screen? Could that be handled by dedicated circuitry? The list goes on.
Scott
I would argue that specialisation is as old as computing itself, and that it goes both ways.
Take something as basic as floating point numbers, which we usually take for granted. You can perfectly well do them using the general-purpose integer execution units. And that's what we were doing not so long ago — but it's slow and a waste of energy. So as soon as transistor budgets permitted for some opulence, hardware designers moved these computations to specialised hardware. And there are many examples like these, from specialised cryptography instructions to trigonometrical functions in hardware (something that would be unthinkable luxury in early 80-ties for example).
But we also have enough examples of the opposite developments too. Remember gaming sound cards? They have quickly vanished when CPUs became fast enough to do audio effect processing in real time (and now hardware raytracing allows to do really complex audio stuff on the GPU as well). Similarly, early GPUs contained configurable fixed-function hardware for computing visual effects (e.g. Nvidia's register combiners), this stuff has completely disappeared now, replaced by the programmable pipeline, even though the fixed-function hardware is more efficient.
At the end of the day, it's all about solving practical problems. If we had unlimited computing power, nobody would bother with specialised hardware. But at the same time one doesn't want to build a custom accelerator for every little thing. Tasks like raytracing, compression (and I consider encode/decode a subset of compression), deep learning inference are unique and important enough to justify dedicated hardware. Managing photoshop layers or rendering text is probably not, especially since it can be expressed as a subclass of parallel programs for which accelerators — GPUs — already exist.
To sum it up, no I don't believe that there will be a proliferation of task-specific accelerators. We will certainly have plenty of modules to do specific tasks, but these are all tasks that do not require programmability or flexible logic. But developers should definitely learn about different classes of problems and how to distribute work across available hardware.
You forget that batteries, according to leaks, are bigger in iPhone 15 lineup, while providing the same battery life, which means that the subsystems of iPhone 15 lineup are actually less efficient than previous generation, which already was less efficient than previous generation.
I keep reading complaints about how the 10% is meaningless because it’s proportional to clockspeeds. That’s shortsighted.
People tend to forget, but increased clockspeeds are a legitimate way to improve performance. Operating frequency is a consequence of lithography and architecture improvements.
Not all performance increase can/should come from better IPC. Clockspeed is an improvement in itself.
People tend to forget, but increased clockspeeds are a legitimate way to improve performance. Operating frequency is a consequence of lithography and architecture improvements.
Not all performance increase can/should come from better IPC. Clockspeed is an improvement in itself.
You make a lot of good points. But the neural engine won’t simply be twice as fast, producing quicker results. It will run twice as many operations in the same time, which is significant in another way.
I still remember when Apple’s "it just works" approach led to so many daemons and services working in the background of OSX that you couldn’t use your dual-core Intel Mac until it had indexed every file and recognized all faces in the photo library.
Nowadays the neural engine provides a separate place for all those calculations, which create this desired "my computer already knows" feeling. Steve Jobs was always eager to demonstrate that the Mac had done what you want, before you even knew it. That’s why the neural engine will never run idle. Apple will always find yet another heuristic to check incredible amounts of data to better adapt the OS response to the user.
More energy consumption doesn’t necessarily equal lower efficiency. If the main camera sensor rises from 12 to 48 megapixels, a little more energy consumption is to be expected. Anything less than a quadrupling of energy should be considered a win.
How many times has leaks been on the dot?
I'd hold off any comment until we get at least YouTube reviewer feedback.
I'd like to know if fast charging moved from 27W to 35W as speculated by media.
What's the charge time at 12W vs 35W? This is of particular interest to many car users who often find themselves nearing 0% power and need at least 50% before a drive ends.
iPhone 15 Battery Capacities Revealed in Regulatory Database
Apple does not advertise battery capacities for its new iPhone 15 lineup, but MySmartPrice has obtained this information from a Chinese regulatory...
www.macrumors.com
Enough?
I am disappointed that Apple did not take the opportunity to increase battery mAh and instead offered a lighter weight iPhone.
Would be nice if 221g 15 Pro Max had the same weight as the 240g 14 Pro Max but with more battery like say 5,000 mAh instead of just 4,422 mAh.
Longer battery life = Lesser recharge cycles = Longer battery health before replacement
iPhone Pro Max battery mAh
- 15 Pro Max: 4,422mAh
- 14 Pro Max: 4,323 mAh
- 13 Pro Max: 4,352 mAh
- 12 Pro Max: 3,687 mAh
- 11 Pro Max: 3,500 mAh
- Xs Max: 3,174 mAh
Like if say Steve Jobs was not that stubborn about phabtlets back in 2010 and knew how unpopular the iPhone mini was we'd have 2015 iPhones 6 4.7" by 2010 iPhone 4 3.5".
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More megapixels draw more power. It also needs to have a front-to-back system to support it as well.
People may be concerned that Apple seems to have chosen the easy way to improve the performance of a CPU (increasing clock speed) rather than the hard way (increasing IPC). They may therefore be concerned about whether this will happen again in the future and why it has happened (CPU design is getting harder and harder, lack of talented designers...).
iPhone 15 Battery Capacities Revealed in Regulatory Database
Apple does not advertise battery capacities for its new iPhone 15 lineup, but MySmartPrice has obtained this information from a Chinese regulatory...
Enough?
Im not sure what it is you are arguing for. According to this data we are talking about 70mAh difference, that’s likely less than manufacturing variance between individual battery units. What kind of meaningful impact do you expect from 2% nominal change in battery capacity? Do you think Apple should have added 10 minutes to their advertised battery life or something?
P.S. Also, what do you mean that "the subsystems of iPhone 15 lineup are actually less efficient than previous generation, which already was less efficient than previous generation"? I just looked up the DxoMark battery tests and I don't see any meaningful differences between the battery life of 13 and 14th gens.
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13 Pro Max lasts longer on battery, albeit slightly, than 14 Pro Max, while doing the exact same, every day tasks.
This is correct,
Apple moved away from Intel because they were stagnating, and the A-series was on track to outperform them. The M1 made a huge splash because it offered great performance at crazy low power draw, and pretty much everyone extrapolated performance gains from the previous ten years of A-series processors.
When it seems like those goals aren’t being realized, it makes people anxious whether Apple can continue to deliver competitive speed.
As for their chip design team, the people here knowledgeable seem to think Apple’s doing good. If they say so, I have no reason to doubt them.
As for Intel and AMD, they seem like they’re just going all out in speed, wattage be damned. If that’s what it takes to compete with the M-series cpu cores, then I don’t think it’s Apples chip designers we need to worry about.
I think it’s more prudent to focus on GPU. It’s what most people seem to tear into the M-series for anyway. And to their credit it is, I believe, Apple stands to gain the most.
Yes, but that's just nitpicking (especially considering the fact that 14 Pro Max has a much brighter display). I don't see how one can claim that there is a systematic/considerable difference in battery between the two series. The new display is likely less power efficient, the SoC (A16) is more power efficient, so you end up with more or less the same thing.
As far as 15 series go, benchmarks will be instructive. It doesn't make much sense to make a story based on a 2% capacity difference in a regulatory filing.
I would question the assumption that clock=easy vs IPC=hard. Redesigning an architecture to allow for higher clock speeds at equal or lower power is hard. It’s not always done just through die shrinks. Silicon experts feel free to agree/disagree.
Besides, we know that A17 also presents important architectural improvements not related to speed.
Well, we don’t really know if the clocks that the A-series runs at are the limit of stability or whether they’re conservative.
If the former is true then, yeah there’s difficulty. If the latter, then it’s basically just an overclock, something that enthusiasts do on PCs.
With A17 Pro having USB 10Gbps & 4K 60Hz will we see macOS on iPhone?
It would make my every 2 year replacement cycle even more worth it.
It would make my every 2 year replacement cycle even more worth it.
You’re looking at it backwards, we just need a cellular modem for Macs!