That's not a problem, because the watt usage/heat will decrease by at least 30% with new M3 Ultra chip and there will be a lot of other improvements too.
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MacBook Pro with the new M2 ULTRA?
- Thread starter Appletoni
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Yes and don't forget that if you do for example a CPU intensive task but you don't need the GPU, then the power consumption will decrease a lot. Probably down to 50% or 25% with also means much lesser heat.
The 18-inch laptops with a lot support looks good and it should be obvious that the Apple devices 18-inch and 20-inch MacBook Ultra will look much better:
You'd still have a massively sized MacBook to accomodate an ultra SOC, even on 3nm. The heatsink couldn't shrink enough to avoid an oversized MacBook in the process. Regardless of the engineering wizardry at Apple, they still can't overcome physics and thermodynamics.
Probably never. it isn't going to fit. 20" display. Probably not. It really doesn't solve the problem either.
iFixit's Full 16-Inch MacBook Pro Video Teardown Highlights Internal Design Changes
iFixit earlier this week posted a teaser of its MacBook Pro teardown, and now, the site is back with a full video that gives us a clear look at the...
www.macrumors.com
At about 2:18 of that video they show the 16" and 14" boards in context.
I think this is a snapshot of a 14" board but basically illustrations the same issue. This is a Max
New MacBook Pro in teardown: The M1 Max is huge!
Thanks to a well-known leaker, and a Reddit poster, we can take a look at the inner workings of the new top models.
www.macworld.com
The SoC is placed between the two relatively very large cutouts for the two fans. The Max ends up taking more of a "edge to edge" amount of that middle zone between the two cutouts. Double the package size and will push NAND and other supporting chips out.
The problem for the Ultra is that the SoC is that it is longer (widers side to side in the picture above). It would extend into the zone where the fans are. If try to rotate the SoC 90 degrees then running off the edge of the logic board and under the trackpad.
20" diagonal is not going to be +4" wider. ( c^2 = a^2 + b^2 ... the hypotenuse is going to be longer than either of the sizes. )
The Studio 'stuffs' the fans above the logic board. You have also double the amount of air that need to be passed through the system. So if fans are same diameter and spin at same speeds they'd need to be twice the thicknessl , in addition to being placed on top ( from these views down) of the motherboard. The radiators being blown on by the fans... those also twice as twice the thickness.
The 20" screen isn't going to 'save you' from the primary forces making the aluminum case laptop twice as thick.
. Saying that TSMC N3 is going to 'save you' from all of this is mainly just hand waving. It isn't. The Utlra carries additional RAM in addtion to additional compute die silicon. That RAM isn't N3. And bigger screen just pours more battery life down the drain also. N3 isn't going to help that.
The Ultra brings more required RAM packages. Which means it is always going to be substantially physically larger. A 'too large for a laptop' SoC is always going to be an issue even as the fab processes change. [ The dies Apple uses are not likely to shrink much over time because Apple is chasing doing "more stuff" into around the same size die ... as opposed to making their SoCs much much smaller. ] The RAM packages are not going to get smaller either. ( in the future folks are going to want more RAM capacity , not less. The current ones are already vertically stacked RAM dies. Stacked taller is still going to have about the same footprint. )
All of this is not particularly necessary. The performance of the M1 Ultra is likely going to get increasingly packed into a M4 or M5 or M6 Max. So these gyrations are somewhat pointless over the longer term.
If you throw a 20" screen at the system then have thrown substantial wattage out the window. N3 won't save you from that.
And in order to max the power saving , they'd have to throw away all the N3 performance gains. Is Apple really going to do that? Probably not. You'd get 30% when it was doing nothing ( or almost nothing). When it was doing serious work a vast majority of the power saving probably goes out the window. (prsuming don't kill off a substantial number of cores ... make the mobile Ultra a much lower core count to the desktop one. )
If the overall Ultra package doesn't get smaller , it is not a good fit for a laptop. TSMC N3 , N2 ... none of that change that much.
Apple, like all other chip design companies, designs their SoCs to fit a thermal envelop. This means any M3 Ultra will use a similar amount of power as the M2 Ultra. It will just be faster at the same power level.
That said, could Apple drastically lower the speed of a laptop M3 Ultra? Yes. But I don't think Apple would want to call it an Ultra anymore because it will be signficiantly gimped compared to the desktop Ultra.
And then it'd use more idle power which is not ideal for a laptop. An Ultra in a MacBook is about as dumb as the "M1 in the next iPhone" speculation that people had when it was new.
The 16" is also exactly at the limit of what is allowed for air travel, the battery comes in at 99.6Wh. There is no way to make up for a decrease in battery life since the battery size cannot be increased. The entire design is based around fitting the biggest possible battery.
Battery life will be much worse - maybe half of the 16" MBP M2 Pro? But even at half the battery life, it's still better than most windows laptops.
I think anyone who buys an 18" Ultra laptop is not buying it for the battery life - but as a workstation that you can move to different rooms.
Apple can release a MacBook with M2 Ultra but it will be much slower than the Intel i9 13980HX laptop. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-13980hx-vs-apple-m2-ultra
= Apple must release a MacBook with Extreme chip.
= Apple must release a MacBook with Extreme chip.
Physics and portability both preclude either an Ultra or Extreme version of Apple Silicon in any laptop at this time.
Maybe Apple will release a special version.
Others already solved the heatsink problem and they have a i9-13980hx + RTX 4090 inside.
Google these two and take a look at the watt usage and heat development.
They put a i9-13980hx + RTX 4090 inside an 18-inch case and Apple can't put 3nm M3 ULTRA inside 20-inch?
Apple is generally not a follower. Many manufacturers are doing many things. How many things do you think Apple should follow?
I believe the market for a humongous notebook is not appealing enough for Apple to bother. If it is, I‘m pretty sure Apple will have something to offer. I believe Apple’s SoC can beat the crap out of Intel’s offering in CPU and NVidia in GPU if they care about being king of the hills, but most likely it does not make economic sense for them. Bragging rights do not pay bills.
I have to admit that I do not have data to back me up, but I do believe that Intel and Nvidia’s highest end offering is probably breaking even or maybe making losses and it’s the low and mid tier offerings that’s raking in the profits, the server products division not withstanding. This is not how I understand Apple operates. They want their margins for all tiers of their products.
But the problem if someone needs a laptop is:
-M1 ULTRA isn't inside.
-They could buy the M1 MAX
-But they need to wait every time 2 years = 10 years in total for M6 MAX, until they will get the performance of the M1 ULTRA.
-Why should someone wait 10 years if they can buy directly a laptop with i9-13980HX + RTX 4090?
How does it come that other people do air travel with
I want AltiVec or it can stay rotting on the Apple Store's warehouse as far I'm concerned.
What do you mean with battery life will be much worse?
When you use the Stockfish chess engine like Millions of people, then the battery will be empty after 30 minutes with ultra MacBook instead of 1 hour with max MacBook.
So your argument is that it will be much worse because this people will have 30 minutes sooner an empty battery😂😂😂
But you are right about: Anyone who buys an 18" Ultra laptop is not buying it for the battery life - but as a workstation that you can move to different rooms.
Physics can be solved this way: From 17-inch ROG Scar 2022 to 18-inch ROG Scar 2023 https://www.ultrabookreview.com/61850-18-inch-laptops/
Even Apple increased their MacBook Air from 12-inch to 15-inch = +3 inches. = +7.5 cm.
Portability is not a problem because my muscles are not made from butter.
Even a baby can hold its own weight = 20-inch no problem.
How do you fix your portability problem with 99% of the things from your daily life, which are bigger?
machines like this are in the class of desktop replacement, where machines are basically moved from one desk, plugged in, used, then unplugged and moved to another desk and used, they don’t get used on the move between the desks.
dell is a company makes such a laptop however they put it out under the alienware brand as a gaming laptop, not under Dell, where the mainstream big volume sales are.
reviews seem to indicate that (as would expect) fans ramp up at performance and get noisy and that battery life when using the machine for what intended (ie not just sat web browsing) then battery life is not good, with some people saying that always run plugged in. Someone claims a 9 hr battery run when web browsing however you don’t buy a machine like that spec to browse the web. (And apple claim a lot more for that) Site doesn’t mention battery life itself, so I guess that they aren’t expecting people to be using on battery much.
weight wise it is 8.9lbs vs 4.8lbs for the 16” MBP, or 4.1lbs heavier then the 16” MBP. That case and coolimg is going to add weight.
screen res is also 2560 x 1440 on that screen. Apple to do the retina is 3456 x 2234 and that will use more power to drive higher res. What res to maintain the high 254ppi of the MBP would need to be.
it isn’t a case of Apple CANNOT do it, just that they don’t WANT to make it as there wouldn’t be sufficient sales for them to warrant it. People that buy Alienware gaming laptops are not going to be swapping to a Mac with Apple Silicon and no full Windows x64 compatibility.
the 17” MBP disappeared for a reason.
I'm taking this thread seriously because I'd love a superior Macbook configuration compared to what we have today.
First things first, we probably won't have a form factor redesign for the MBP until 2025-2026 at least, since those happen every 4-5 years roughly (think 2008-2012-2016-2021).
Then, let's talk about the battery. It will never go beyond 99wh since you wouldn't be able to take it on a flight otherwise. But that's fine since light usage battery would last nearly the same compared to a Pro or Max with the Ultra chip, while if you're pushing it with heavy workloads, you'd want to be plugged in anyways.
What about the power supply? The latest USB-C PD allows for up to 240W to be delivered by a single port.
Current MBP 16" PSU rates at 130W so lots of room to grow.
Studio M2 Ultra has a 370W PSU, rated from Apple at max 290W at full load, but reviewers have never been able to get anywhere that value, the maximum ArsTechnica recorded was 90W on full load, so even with 240W you have plenty for powering the screen and peripherals via TB4.
What about cooling? If we rate an M3 Ultra at 90W max, that would be really no concern.
Older Intel MBP had to cool 85W GPUs (Radeon 5500M) plus 45W CPUs (Intel i7 9750h) and they were even slimmer.
Apple could design a cooling system around the current 16" chassis or even a slimmer one spreading out the volume for a bigger 18" screen.
And so we got to the form factor. It would have to be either 16" with same thickness or 18" but thinner, which would be a dream for me.
I/O could be 6xTB4 like the M2 Ultra Mac Studio, and it would justify my purchase for that alone.
So you have the perfect power user/creator laptop, but in perfect Apple style, last but not least, sell it with an exclusive charcoal matt black color with backlit rainbow Apple logo, so it also becomes a fashion statement machine and next thing you know, you have bloggers rocking it on Starbucks tables all over the world and getting posture issues over the weight of a likely 3kg monster being carried in their Louis Vuitton messenger bag. (M2 Ultra Mac Studio weighs 900grams more than the Max one due to heavier heatsink. Serious power WEIGHS!)
It would still be a far more viable machine than a lot of thing Apple has done in the past, and it would sell more than e.g. the latest Mac Pro. In fact it would render useless the whole of their desktop lineup for power users, so I hope it happens.
Just my 2 cents
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