Apple Orders Entire Supply of TSMC's 3nm Chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

Re:Apple Orders Entire Supply of TSMC's 3nm Chips for iPhone... by smoldesu on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @10:33AM (#34897162)

AMD had the Ryzen 4800u shipping with a similar power envelope and higher multicore scores. Battery life was a good few hours shorter than the M1, but it was also manufactured on 7nm versus the Apple's 5nm. Performance tends to favor people on the denser node, so it's impressive to see x86 still competitive by modern standards.

If you need further evidence of this pattern, look at Nvidia's ridiculous 40-series cards. More expensive than a used car, but they were able to secure TSMC's 4nm node and annihilate everyone else. Apple did the same thing with M1, and it looks like that's what they're gearing up for with M3.

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Re:Apple Orders Entire Supply of TSMC's 3nm Chips for iPhone... by wewtyflakes on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @11:37AM (#34898212)

Customers care about this:

> Battery life was a good few hours shorter than the M1

They do not care about this:

> ...but it was also manufactured on 7nm versus the Apple's 5nm

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Re:Apple Orders Entire Supply of TSMC's 3nm Chips for iPhone... by smoldesu on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @04:01PM (#34902662)

I agree. It's worth noting that the 4800u was on store shelves 18 months before the first M1s were released, however. Apple Silicon was released into a market that had had already seen comparable APUs.

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Re:Apple Orders Entire Supply of TSMC's 3nm Chips for iPhone... by freehorse on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @06:44PM (#34904778)

> similar power envelope

Power envelopes are reported in very misleading ways by companies, in practice it is not even close. The way they report stuff is having their cake and eat it too: the benchmarks results assume boosting their frequencies above the base one, while the "power envelopes" advertised are on the base frequency. It becomes quite apparent when you run them on battery, where M1/2s continue performing the same as plugged in, and amd/intel laptops underperform, while also not even lasting as much as apple's on battery.

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