> One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well

This has been part of their playbook for decades. I distinctly remember some folks from Wolfram (maybe Stephen Wolfram himself?) demo Mathematica running on Intel macs (and talking about how easy it was to port) as part of announcing the transition to Intel.

It was Theo Gray:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kcfGsOKXO5M&cbrd=1

100%. They are even paying developers to work on optimizing Blender for Metal, so that Blender was ready for HWRT from day one.

> One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well.

What exactly is the problem? Microsoft, Sun etc did the same. Microsoft has a library of software and put in “fixes” so old code that used undefined behavior would continue to run as the os was upgraded.

I don’t think that’s a problem - more like it’s under-appreciated how smart it is. A lot of hardware enthusiasts like to talk about raw capabilities but you can end up with something like the Cell processor if you aren’t careful to make sure those features are used. This is where Apple’s approach is an interesting long-term play: they have been pushing things like the Accelerate framework since the PowerPC days (when you could see e.g. MATLAB get big performance wins simply by dropping in a new BLAS library to replace the unoptimized one it shipped with) and now they’re in the unusual position of being able to line everything up on the same release schedule, too. Sun could have done that on paper but their hardware was rarely competitive and they bit off more than they could chew trying to reinvent every concept of computing portably in Java, and Microsoft has always suffered from being downstream of Intel’s decisions.

> ...but you can end up with something like the Cell processor if you aren’t careful to make sure those features are used.

The Cell hardware didn't turn out how Sony expected either - hence adding an Nvidia GPU at the 11th hour, and bumping up the console price significantly.

I never used it on the console side but we had few pitches for HPC offerings. Back then nobody cared about the GPU but the test runs basically doomed it: the peak performance would have been nice but it required pretty massive rework of each program before the results weren’t bad and we had some memory-latency sensitive workloads which would have suffered horribly. We spent less money on Opterons which were faster on every existing app and since multiple supercomputing systems mixed the two I suspect that was a common decision.

> Hardware-based ray tracing is pretty attractive. As soon as renderers start making use of it, you'll see render speeds practically double over the previous equivalent M2 machines and considering low power consumption and other things, for some the M3 quickly becomes a pretty enticing offer.

Even with hardware acceleration it’s so expensive there is no way they’ll make it a core part of any of their renderers.

I think you may be talking about game engines and realtime rendering when the previous comment was about offline renderers.

Your comment just made me google "apple m3 skyvase", because that's such a delightfully silly idea (using skyvase as an example for offline rendering in 2023, not talking about online renderers in general).

(skyvase.pov was the customary benchmark scene back when pov-ray was a thing, somewhat popular as an FPU-centric real life benchmark in the early Pentium age)

You'd think large software makers like Autodesk would ensure their software works on Mac, but they are the main reason I still have PCs running windows at home – Revit doesn't have a Mac version, doesn't run on Wine and is extremely slow on Windows ARM

> One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well.

Genuine question, what app is able to utilize ANE? It seems like it's been there for multiple generations and yet nothing makes use of it.

> Genuine question, what app is able to utilize ANE? It seems like it's been there for multiple generations and yet nothing makes use of it.

It is not directly exposed/documented, but instead leveraged by system ML-oriented frameworks like Core ML and Vision where appropriate.