Circles within circles; Apple to separate CPU from GPU

I should stop being amazed at how tech (and life generally) often moves as a series of smaller circles within larger circles and how what was old is new once more, but when I read this it did make me chuckle a bit...

In a departure from previous designs, Apple is expected to separate the CPU and GPU in the M5 Pro, Max, and Ultra chips to improve production yields and thermal performance.

Maybe there will be a practical use for that Mac Pro chassis after all...

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Maybe there will be a practical use for that Mac Pro chassis after all...

The Studio may end up more limited than the Mac Pro.

Interesting.

Not that i am on the look out for a new Mac, I have spent enough money over the last couple of years, Mac, Printer and other stuff .

But I will look at this closely, thank you for the info.
I know someone who may be interested, she has been planning to update her trash can Mac for a while.

To my mind the present M2 Mac Pro is completely pointless as against the present M2 Mac Studio, given you could fit 12 Studios into the same space as a single Mac Pro 😂

Good to know (or at least have some inkling) of what’s coming down the pipe.

Tell your mate that Trash Can Mac is practically internet folklore around these parts. Feel like it’s an old friend of mine by now 😜

Edited by Pheasant (Thu 02-Jan-25 09:11:24)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Good to know (or at least have some inkling) of what’s coming down the pipe.

Tell your mate that Trash Can Mac is practically internet folklore around these parts. Feel like it’s an old friend of mine by now 😜

It is still working well, but is a few years old and have done a lot of work over the years. This is the longest she has gone without buying a new mac. She is not a fan of the newer macOS versions, I am pretty sure she still has the original Os on it or one above it.
When did macOS started becoming more like a mobile OS?


The problem is now, if she wants to update to another Mac, she has little choice and she is never going to change to Windows ,

But this new M5 may be worth her waiting for, but then again, maybe not.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

When did macOS started becoming more like a mobile OS?

Many people I know hate the way the Mac has copied the iPad. I guess Apple feel they can sell more Macs to people whom already know their mobile products. It has made the Mac more a "consumer product" but in the same way the annual major upgrade of macOS has introduced unreliability.

The problem is now, if she wants to update to another Mac, she has little choice and she is never going to change to Windows ,

Never say never, on the right hardware Windows is now quite competitive. As the ARM architecture from Qualcomm gains ground (for laptops) things will be very interesting.

But this new M5 may be worth her waiting for, but then again, maybe not.

There is always a new chip, any time you look, something coming.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

When did macOS started becoming more like a mobile OS?

Many people I know hate the way the Mac has copied the iPad. I guess Apple feel they can sell more Macs to people whom already know their mobile products. It has made the Mac more a "consumer product" but in the same way the annual major upgrade of macOS has introduced unreliability.

The problem is now, if she wants to update to another Mac, she has little choice and she is never going to change to Windows ,

Never say never, on the right hardware Windows is now quite competitive. As the ARM architecture from Qualcomm gains ground (for laptops) things will be very interesting.

But this new M5 may be worth her waiting for, but then again, maybe not.

There is always a new chip, any time you look, something coming.

24H2 is wonderful, in that respect too (just to be balanced) 😎

Another fail...

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

[I much prefer the Xmas surprise that Openreach gave me personally 🤣]

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

24H2 is wonderful, in that respect too (just to be balanced) 😎

I've got issues with enterprise Linux on servers; none of these OSes is perfect!

[I much prefer the Xmas surprise that Openreach gave me personally 🤣]

USB/Ethernet scanning has always been a nightmare. I've used VueScan (awesome bit of third party software) to get old USB scanners working, but my employer gave up and all the MFD units scan to a PDF and send via email.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Many people I know hate the way the Mac has copied the iPad. I guess Apple feel they can sell more Macs to people whom already know their mobile products. It has made the Mac more a "consumer product" but in the same way the annual major upgrade of macOS has introduced unreliability.

I did not know any difference really, I only used Mac Os for doing some things, never really used the OS much.

But I can understand what she means, it was the same when we went from Windows 7 to 10 and more so to 11.

As for reliability, my Mac have been very reliable

Never say never, on the right hardware Windows is now quite competitive. As the ARM architecture from Qualcomm gains ground (for laptops) things will be very interesting.

It may be interesting, but believe me, she will never have a Windows machine. She only had one and and that was Xp and she said she would never have another one.
she have always been a Apple person, computer wise anyway, going back to G3 and G4 macs.
She still has a few.

There is always a new chip, any time you look, something coming.

True, i thought it was slowing down a bit PC wise, a newer PC is not a lot of different to a PC of around 5 years old.
Arm is a different thing.
Still got to think about updating my gaming machine, but not going crazy and in no rush, it is still working.

i done spending now for a while, hardware wise, with the printer and Cricut.

Well it depends on what you see / experience, but from being on the edge of an IT dept with tens of thousands of laptops, split equally Windows and Mac, there is little difference in the traditional reliability. This is probably because everyone now uses SSD storage and soldered in memory chips. (as long as the Windows laptops are premium competitors to Apple's, e.g. MS Surface Laptop against the MacBook Air)

The Mac M3 and M4 are faster for some computation operations, but not everything. Works well for those areas where Apple has put specific features into the M series processor; but so many people in business use web based apps, or use MS Office or similar (Google Workspace, LibreOffice) that the processor is never normally taxed.

It comes to preference of which file manager you like in many cases; or if a specific application you need for your work is only available on one operating system. Which is less and less an issue it appears.

i doubt the majority of people really care, as long as it does what they want. My brother have just bought a Acer n100 based machine just for some office stuff, he is not bothered about it being superfast as long as it does what he need it to do.
He does have a faster machine for his music stuff, need it to run Abalton live.

My old AMD machine is still working, it has got a few problems, but nothing major, but it is over 7 years old.

My M2 pro Mac is okay for video editing, I doubt going to M3 or M4 will make much if any difference, not that I am going to.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

i doubt the majority of people really care, as long as it does what they want.

And this is why the sales statistics show that home users (massive number) only buy a computer (PC/Mac, laptop/desktop) for some business type task. The majority of home users now does their internet on mobile devices; sites such as gov.uk (tax, car stuff etc) had to ensure they worked on mobile a long time ago.

The business world would add to your sentance, and is secure, whatever their insurer or regulator requires. Many require audit proof monthly that the latest patches are installed, this means most businesses I know are running macOS Sequioa or Windows 11. Some on Win10 will be on Win11 by August 2025 just to meet this.

The business cost of not being insured/compliant with regulator is much higer than replacing / upgrading.

In your case any Mac with an M series CPU (from 2020's M1 based Air) is going to be supported for Apple for 6 or 7 years of updates. Home users may risk a few years after, businesses will replace then, or on a regular schedule if they lease.

Not separate in the way you are thinking of.

They are just talking about it being on a separate piece of silicon, but still on the same package as the CPU.

It seems very unlikely they are going to go back to putting GPUs at the other end of a PCIe bus. Even PCIe 6 x16 is "only" 128 GB/s, which is a long way behind what they can do on the M2 Ultra thanks to the CPU and the GPU both having 800 GB/s to the shared RAM.

Of course dedicated GPUs have more bandwidth than that to their own RAM, but that is at the other end of the PCIe bus to the CPU.

Yeah quite so. The bit about the Mac Pro was a bit a joke / throw away line. I missed off the smilie 😅

lol

I know more people that use tablets or phones than computers these days, I don't own a tablet, unless you count my Kobo ereader and that can't do anything, while it does come with a browser, I would not want to surf the net on it
Phone is too small for me.
I am not a fan of tablets or laptops for that matter.

Most businesses use PC's, I doubt there are many unless they do graphic design that uses a mac and even then, few and far between

I don't know what the company I work for will do about Windows, at the moment they use Windows 10, if it is anything like when they changed from 7 to 10, it may take them a while. I don't know if the machines can officially run 11, they are Dell thin clients and now a few years old.

Windows is still the norm in business for most of the people running corporate web apps or doing email/document/spreadsheet generation.

But it is a bit different in some sectors. Macs are pretty popular in the software development side of business nowadays.

Surveys suggest around 60% of developers use Windows, with macOS and Linux both having about 40% of developers using them (with the number not adding up to 100% as many developers uses more than one OS).

Had a bit more of a deep dive into this last night, it’s really just another die packaging technique from TSMC.

Means they don’t have to cram all the SoC functionality onto one die, which as you increase the size of the die, reduces the yield. Makes the whole exercise uneconomical at some point. If they can stack smaller dies with the same features and functionality, on top of one another or horizontally adjacent then they can get away with smaller dies. Improves their yield, heat dissipation from a single very large die etc.

Pretty much an evolution of the “chiplet” technique used with AMD.