Comment by hedora
1 day ago
So, they’re going to use a more power hungry process for the low end devices? The whole point of the Air and SE lines was that they were lightweight and compact.
Watching a company at that scale completely lose its own plot is depressing. Did they replace Cook with an LLM that compacted its context one too many times?
Edit: This is a bad look for intel too. How are Apple store employees/nerds going to explain this product line bifurcation? “This low end Apple gizmo is a hot mess because it has Intel Inside. Also, it’s $50 more than last year. MAGA!”
What is the more power hungry process?
M5 uses a 3nm process
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-3nm-update-...
but Intel is proposing using their fab configured for the "earliest available sub-2nm advanced node manufactured in North America", according to the article (and from searching outside).
> So, they’re going to use a more power hungry process
This is exactly what Google did when their Pixel SOCs were fabbed by Samsung.
Performance and power efficiency were both substandard compared to TSMC but the chips were cheaper.
Is the 18A process more power hungry?
'Kuo said Apple plans to utilize Intel's 18A process, which is the "earliest available sub-2nm advanced node manufactured in North America."'
What makes you think they are going to be more power-hungry than if Apple manufactured them itself?
The article says it’s going on Intel 18a, which has better performance, but worse density/power consumption than TSMC’s comparable node:
https://www.techspot.com/news/106782-intel-18a-found-faster-...
Unless Apple is going to add active cooling or something to the Air, iPad and iPhone, I’d expect more thermal throttling on the intel chips (though the difference isn’t as stark as I assumed — it looks like Intel closed the gap a bit with 18a).
The performance / power difference between Intel 18a and TSMC 3nm / 2nm is not going to be that wide. Certainly not enough to require active cooling on phones / tablets. The rumor says they are targeting the M series processors anyway, so probably looking at it for their laptops first where there is active cooling and the power envelope is more forgiving.
TSMC's 2nm is much, much higher demand. Apple's probably getting priced-out of the node by Nvidia in much the same way Apple bought out TSMC 5nm before.
Apple's cheaper products and hardware cash cows can't afford to pay that sort of tax, so it makes sense to boot them onto 18A. Those are the binned products that would have been throttling anyways.
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> How are Apple store employees/nerds going to explain this product line bifurcation?
I really doubt most Apple customers care. A few do, but they've long been the minority.
In the days of Intel modems, advising against buying from AT&T and T-Mobile was sound, as the performance was worse than a Qualcomm model.
Yeah; but the ones that don’t care about the details often ask someone “which one should I buy?”
Currently, for MacBooks, the answer is “the small one doesn’t have a fan, so for sustained work like games or iMovie it is slower. However, it is smaller, lighter, quieter and cheaper”.
I really do not see how that advice would change with an 18A chip in the lineup.
Are their egos supposed to feel the performance hit? Is there some cabal of Taiwanese extremists propping up the Mac market?