Apple Announces The M2 Ultra SoC - 24 Core CPU, Up To 192GB Unified Memory

[Volta]

What does "take them seriously" mean in this context? Apple has a 2.89 TRILLION dollar USD market cap. They are the most valuable company on the planet.

Yeah, there are too many idiots buying their crap. Nobody sane will waste money on them and their mediocre products.

[OrenJMaurice]

If you are correct, and there is a good chance you are considering Apple was the first to have a hardware H264 encoder years ago, then the M3 will have a huge advantage over AMD and Intel based systems, at least for a while.

Where's the source of that ? Back in the day, H.264 encoders were external cards (available only for PC, not mac) - Then Intel added QSV, which made H.264 encoding reasonable in 2011. When did Apple add "hardware H.264 encoding" exactly, and in what fashion, given that they were using intel silicon ?

[samuelec]

Another good option is a business class ThinkPad from Lenovo, those have Linux preload support. Notice I didn't say any ThinkPad because as I learned the hard way buying an E series and expecting to use it as a Unix workstation with OpenBSD is foolhardy. Too many rough edges.

Well, we got the lenovo x1 carbon (gen 10). It has a MIPI webcam which doesn't work on Linux and it seems it won't work for another year or so because of the current intel/lenovo driver support .
We also have experienced all sort of crashes, freeze and to me sometimes the keyboard just stuck repeating the last character forever, then everything else is frozen except the mouse pointer but you can't do or click on anything, just shutdown holding the power button.
A nightmare. Imagine how productive it is working with it

[ryao]

It is and isn't at the same time. Obviously the same chip running at a higher frequency is faster than not. I am also talking about a generalized CPU. Java is also really stupid to use for something that needs preformance if that's what you mean by ja. I would have to actually examine the software you are talking about to know why it is so slow.

The term generalized CPU does not exist and is your own invention. You also were comparing different chips, not the same chip. No matter what you do, you will never get a M2 to operate at 7GHz. You would have better luck getting a Raspberry Pi to operate at 4GHz. There are many factors that affect the clock speeds attainable by a CPU. One would be signal propagation delay. In order for a modern CPU to operate, signal propagation must complete before the end of a clock cycle. Since, the rate of signal propagation is constant, this places a hard limit on the circuit lengths that can reach a given clock speed. The typical way that shorter circuit lengths are achieved is through pipelining and reaching even 1 gigahertz typically involves a pipelined design. 7GHz would more than double the clock speed of the M2, and reaching that would need substantial changes to the design of the M2. This does not consider other factors, such as the choice of transistors. Not all transistors are equal. Some are not able to run at high clock speeds, but are very low leakage while some are able to run at high clock speeds, but are high leakage. The M2 is unlikely to be using transistors that can operate much beyond its target operating frequency for efficiency reasons, so that would be another reason that the M2 would not reach 7GHz no matter what you do.

By the way, the reason better cooling enables higher clock speeds is because the physical properties of silicon change with temperature. People explain things far better than I can in online physics forums:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32691/if-and-why-does-cold-temperature-affect-semiconductors

I guess another reason would be that above a certain temperature, the hardware would fail due to parts of it undergoing a phase change, which is also why CPUs have thermal throttling mechanisms to protect themselves.

[ryao]

Wiping piece of shit like macos is the first thing sane user will do. Why would someone want to waste all of those cores for utter slow, insecure spying joke?



No thanks, you can keep your spyware if you want.

Unlike Windows, there is no evidence that MacOS is spying on end users. If you search, you might find a claim to the contrary that was never corroborated or complaints about optional online services, but that is very different from the OS spying on users.

[Alexmitter]

excellent Max OS

Joke of the day

[mrg666]

Every time I see this kind of Apple news. I always want to buy an Apple computer/laptop but just for a moment. I know how nice is their macOS, XNU microkernel, POSIX compliance, Quartz, and all that. However, I know I will end up getting a Thinkpad or Latitude and install Linux. It would be so nice if somebody gifted a MacBook to play around though.

[NobodyXu]

Every time I see this kind of Apple news. I always want to buy an Apple computer/laptop but just for a moment. I know how nice is their macOS, XNU microkernel, POSIX compliance, Quartz, and all that. However, I know I will end up getting a Thinkpad or Latitude and install Linux. It would be so nice if somebody gifted a MacBook to play around though.

You can buy M1 mac mini, it is quite cheap compared to MacBook or Mac Studio/Pro.
Since you aren't going to carry it around and you don't need super-power chips, M1 is all you need.

Besides, the M1 base model have better SSD performance compared to M2 base model.

Just make sure to upgrade ram to 16G, 8G nowadays is a bit small.

[WannaBeOCer]

Dang it Apple and your high-performance desktop/workstation ARM monopoly!

Where's Ampere? Nah, they only care about server and cloud...
Where's Qualcomm? Nah, they only care about mobile and low-cost...

Where are the other people!

Qualcomm bought Nuvia which was founded by three Apple engineers. Qualcomm was suppose to launch their PC chips this year but was sued by ARM. Never expected the adoption of the arm instruction set to be halted by ARM.

By the time these are finally launched Intel/AMD will have efficient x86 processors out. Lunar Lake should be able to rival ARMs performance per watt.

[mrg666]

You can buy M1 mac mini, it is quite cheap compared to MacBook or Mac Studio/Pro.
Since you aren't going to carry it around and you don't need super-power chips, M1 is all you need.

Besides, the M1 base model have better SSD performance compared to M2 base model.

Just make sure to upgrade ram to 16G, 8G nowadays is a bit small.

I'll check. It would be refreshing to use a non-x86 cpu too. Thanks!