melgross

I’m still ticked at Apple’s indifference to direct shareholder benefits. Seriously, a 4% increase in dividend payments when they declare another massive $100 billion in buybacks? It should have been at least a 10% increase and they could have taken a few billion off the buybacks and nobody would have noticed. I’d also rather see them begin to pay off the $132 billion in debt instead of constantly increasing it in order to pay for buybacks. This is not good, folks.

wonkothesane said:

I’m wondering whether we are already reaching the end of each subsequent M chip providing significant speed increases due to their design, and we’re already depending mostly on shrinking the transistors. 

Each M series update has given about a 20% increase in performance. That’s with and without new process sizes.

CarmB said:

melgross said:

CarmB said:

That's a problem mainly because the speed of existing processors is more than sufficient to meet the needs of the vast majority of users. Really fast upgraded to faster still, in real-world use, adds up to no discernible upgrade. Asking consumers who already are facing substantial price increases to pay more for essentially nothing doesn't appear to be a good grasp of what will best serve consumers. In the end, the key to success does lie in making your customers happy. Charging more with nothing to show for it is not how you do that. As the price of acquiring the latest and greatest goes up, it motivates consumers to think hard about upgrading from a working iPhone. So if Apple goes to a higher price point with its iPhone line, it will not end well for Apple. The only way this would work would be if there was compelling functionality added to the iPhone experience as a result of a processor upgrade. Current processors are so capable that it seems unlikely this will happen. 

I can’t really agree with that. With many, if not most phone users playing games that need more and more performance, every boost is a good thing. Additionally, for image processing and other performance intensive apps, better chips are always going to be needed.

There’s no point in saying that things are good enough, because they never are. I remember when it was said that the new IBM 286 computer, with that chip, was all that business needed. Then later, that the single core, because that was what everything was back then, 486 was as fast and anyone needed. We hear people saying this over and again, and they’re always wrong. It’s wrong here as well.

There was a time when advancements in processor power really mattered. We are no longer living in that time. The advancements impacted just about everybody who used a computer. Now, not so much. There are uses that can take advantage of even incremental performance enhancements but these days they represent a niche element. For the vast majority of the tasks that we use our iPhones, Macs, and iPads to perform, processor performance is more than adequate. Weighing that against increasing the price tag and clearly the price hike is far more consequential from the perspective of the typical consumer. 

You’re repeating what you said,  and it’s still wrong. You may not always notice what’s going on in the background when you use a device, but it is going on, and it’s usually dependent on a more complex, powerful chip. Every time you get ac new phone the screen owrforms better because of better graphics capability. Want 120Hz refresh? Then you need more performance. Same thing with everything. You just don’t realize what’s happening to make even mundane things work seamlessly together. You get so used to the better functioning that you don’t think about why.

At what point should ship development stop? 10 years ago? Five? This year? Over the next few years? I hope not.

danox said:

hmlongco said:

Amazing how steadily TSMC advances these processes. It seemed to take Intel generations to go from one process to another.

Intel was resting on their laurels like US Steel, Kodak or Xerox before them….

Kodak wasn’t resting on their laurels. They were convinced to sell two thirds if their company in the late 1900s. They invented digital photography in 1976. But they couldn’t afford the half a billion in losses from it every year as they had nothing else to support that as their competitors did. It’s a shame. I used to work closely with them.

hmlongco said:

Amazing how steadily TSMC advances these processes. It seemed to take Intel generations to go from one process to another.

No. Intel progressed to a new process every two years for a very long time. The politics of the chip business derailed them for a while. There was a big fight between Intel and the others about what to call a process. For decades, a process size actually meant the size of the features used to make the transistors. Then, as sizes began to get smaller, around the 22 to 14nm sizes, companies found it was too difficult to continuing that, so they made variable feature sizes on a chip, with the narrowest width line defining the process size.

 Intel insisted, at 10nm, that all features should be at the 10nm scale. But they couldn’t do it, not unexpectedly. They wasted almost three years trying to do that before giving up. Then they tried, with their process sizes still being better (an Intel 10nm was about equal to other’s 7nm, for example) to use transistors per square mm, but of course, nobody else would agree to that as it put them at a marketing disadvantage.

intel’s problems were caused by other thinks. One of which was Apple’s A series and then their M series, which took interest away from the x86 lines. By the way, while and made a major comeback, they’re in the same boat as Intel.