685: The Ability to Be Hotterhttps://atp.fm/685

[edmn@mastodon.social]

@atpfm 46 minutes of Mac Pro goodbyes.

[tsrats@tsrats.net]

@atpfm @marcoarment a way to not run tailscale on every node of your cluster would be to just enable subnet routing on two of them (for high availability) and then connect to the local network IPs from your source which is running tailscale. https://tailscale.com/docs/features/subnet-routers and https://youtu.be/UmVMaymH1-s

[ianrobinson@mastodon.social]

@atpfm Wasn’t there an external chassis with card slots in the past? Could there not be an external enclosure that connects to a Mac Studio via Thunderbolt 5. Giving the expandability of the Mac Pro as an addon for those that need it.

[swampyankee@mastodon.social]

@atpfm Long Islander here. I know where Fire Island is. I have often been to Fire Island. I go to Robert Moses beach quite often. It is on Fire Island and I don’t count that beach as part of Fire Island even though it has the FIRE ISLAND LIGHT HOUSE on it. The vast majority of people that claim to live on Fire Island spend the majority of the year not on Fire Island. Marco, you live on Long Island.

[mpwg@hachyderm.io]

@atpfm Idea for an other tier list: rank all PowerMacs, Mac Pros. How good/bad was it for the time?

[marcoshuerta@vmst.io]

@atpfm @siracusa your ancient Echo may support Alexa+ but not my Sonos One apparently.

[eric_neue@indieweb.social]

@atpfm
@siracusa “…this is going to be a really expensive year for me…”

[one hour later]
@marcoarment “I will bet you five dollars that if Open AI—”

s “I don’t need five dollars”

well which is it??

this year’s WWDC shirt is gonna be a banger I can't wait

[eric_neue@indieweb.social]

@ianRobinson @atpfm I was reading about how audio professionals are going to be in a bind, because Thunderbolt apparently has some detectable latency that PCIE sails through.

This will never happen, but I’d love to see a Mac Studio with a PCIE receptacle on the bottom that could connect into a card enclosure with a widdle interface poking out of the top.

[eric_neue@indieweb.social]

@atpfm … here’s an idea: an anthropomorphic trashcan Mac Pro standing triumphantly with a sword over a pile of cheesegrater and trypophobic* Mac Pros

* this is my name for the hex ball grid thing that was used with a mere two products, possibly the shortest aesthetic statement in Apple history?

[siracusa@mastodon.social]

@Eric_Neue $5 isn’t going to make a dent…

[dschaub@mstdn.social]

@atpfm

While it is a complicated process and going through "Recovery" using a 2nd Mac, all desktop Macs do support "upgradable" storage.

John was even considering doing it for his next Mac, wasn't he?

[dschaub@mstdn.social]

@atpfm

The tradeoff is: a 16-lane PCIe card always has the potential for 4x the bandwidth as ThunderBolt (which has traditionally using only 4-lanes of PCIe).

I'm sure there are lots (a few hundred?) of niche users which Apple is kicking off the platform, who use:
- high end networking;
- high end video / audio;
- high end storage;
- who knows what other shockingly small niches out there.

I'm sure Apple's making the right business choice.

[siracusa@mastodon.social]

@dschaub I was, but now I wonder if third-party prices might end up being worse than Apple’s! Thanks, AI!

[v600@mastodon.au]

@atpfm ʎɐp,פ

@siracusa Australia is girt by sea and is therefore an island....and a country, and a continent. They're not mutually exclusive.

[illustro@mastodon.social]

@atpfm the "mistake", from a Mac Pro perspective, Apple made was going with a monolithic architecture design as opposed to a chiplet architecture design.

AMD has been ruining Intel in the PC chip performance at all levels of the CPU industry in part *because* they chose chiplets as their design paradigm.

They have released in the last two years a couple of white papers that may be of interest:

Chiplet discussion:
https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/solutions/technologies/chiplet-architecture-white-paper.pdf

GPUs using chiplets:
https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/instinct-tech-docs/white-papers/amd-cdna-4-architecture-whitepaper.pdf

[atpfmfanboi@mastodon.social]

@atpfm i’m having trouble getting reliable numbers on what kinds of laptops school districts across the country are buying. My personal experience across three states, 12 districts, and a couple of hundred schools is that very few buildings are still buying Chromebook. And it is entirely because they physically breakdown, not because of device management.

[atpfmfanboi@mastodon.social]

@atpfm so instead of a $200 Chromebook, schools are buying the $500 Lenovo Yoga4. And there is no comparison between that device and the MacBook Neo.

Additionally, school ITs are not encouraging, per se, but they are making it easier for students to bring their own devices. Hot swapping because you left yours at home isn’t an issue: you just get a crappy Lenova for the day. But your MacBook can get into all of the school stuff relatively quickly

[dschaub@mstdn.social]

@illustro @atpfm

Apple's monolithic designs made sense, and scaled up to well to the Max.

With the M5 Pro/Max, Apple is now on heterogenous chiplets, but Apple's not scaling multiples of them (I think it is just a CPU die and a GPU die).

We don't know how they'll scale up to Ultra (or even Quadra... my preferred term), without designing NEW chiplets.

With the M7 and M8 we'll see if Apple gets to multiple CPU dies and multiple GPU dies to allow true efficient scaling.

[dschaub@mstdn.social]

@Eric_Neue @ianRobinson @atpfm

Beyond latency concerns, this doesn't solve the Thunderbolt bandwidth problem (being 1/4 of max PCIe slot bandwidth).

What I think Apple needs to do is:

- Add "bonded multiple cable connections" to the Thunderbolt spec to allow 2-4 Thunderbolt cables between a Mac and a PCIe card slot chassis.

- Then ship such a chassis for $1999

[illustro@mastodon.social]

@dschaub @atpfm oh yes, for the majority of their line, a monolithic design likely makes sense (see the first whitepaper I referenced, early on, for a discussion of the downsides of chiplets). That's why I specifically referenced relating to the Mac Pro.

I do posit they ran into the issues with their monolithic design prior to the Mac Pro: their ultra fusion interconnector meant they got some of the disadvantages of chiplets without the yield & process benefits of true chiplets.