Moore's law is mostly dead these days. Process scaling still happens, but nowhere near at the rate predicted, and there are tradeoffs everywhere now. The Zen 5 core is in fact bigger in terms of die size too.
Is it? Without Googling to backup my intuition, I thought that Moore's Law is still alive, but people just get Moore's Law wrong. A lot of people think it states that PERFORMANCE doubles, but it's number of transistors.
And while in the past, the doubling of transistors DID double performance, it's no longer true.
> I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints.
Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.
"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.
[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.
> Sorry I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Just that "Apple customers use old MacOS devices" is in fact of a piece with "Let's monetize our users" (by stuffing ads into the Settings app in this case). They can't rely on you for upgrade revenue and need to squeeze you in other ways.
No free lunch, basically, unless your software vendor really cooks for free.
> To each their own but I’d rather not deal with XYZ and just get the thing that works.
Yes, but the point of the linked article is that this preference inevitably results in your device spying on you. To each their own indeed.
Edit: and of course I see your P.S. note. But that isn't really responsive. Most Linux users would point out (P.S.) that they'd like their hardware to be faster and lower power or their OS to be a little cleaner. But alas, you can't have everything.
> Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of [hardware that runs Linux]
There was a discussion on this forum just a few days ago wondering why Apple is so hostile to open source support on its devices. And consensus here was that, no, it clearly wasn't due to competetive pressure.
But clearly it is. Because to many consumers, if you have to run MacOS to get an M6, you'll run MacOS instead of Linux. And that makes enshittifying MacOS as a revenue center very tempting.
> Also the OS mostly “just works”
Article is literally about the OS not working as desired, though.
I don't see how that math works? This is a $15k rig under benchmark and per the results it competes very acceptably against... one consumer GPU.
I really don't see who buys this, except people who want the Studio for some other reason. But nothing in the story says you want to fill racks with these instead of Blackwell or TPU parts; it's not even close.
Your math is correct, but it’s math based on today’s economics.
Think of a company like Apple moving onto your turf. They’re not going to cede AI to the cloud. They want their part of the pie.
So in 7 years, how much AI will be handled locally on your iPhone. And will you have repaid all the debt on your balance sheet before Apple eats your lunch
There is zero chance that an LLM approximating a modern frontier model is going to be running on a phone in the next decade. Even if you grant that you could stack enough DRAM dies on top of each other in the package, that would be a three order of magnitude improvement in power efficiency just for the compute.
I think most important thing is that Nvidia doesnt want to give 100% of market to frontier AI labs either.
It's way too easy for 1T+ frontier labs to ditch Nvidia. So Nvidia will also put effort to make sure there are open weights models and local hardware available.
Zen 4 isn't 512 bits wide though, it's a split cycle 256 bit wide SIMD engine otherwise very similar (except in register size) to M6's.
The answer is more that Geekbench is at this point[1] heavily tuned to exactly the code Apple silicon does well: implicitly parallel wide-issue scalar code that you typically get out of modern compilers and JIT engines when throwing mostly-unoptimized "regular source code" at them. Apple has an enormous amount of instruction issue parallelism compared with x86.
The grandparent is looking at transcoding tasks where the limit isn't instruction issue but actual compute hardware on the core. And Apple doesn't actually win by much there.
It's just hard to know what to measure. Geekbench tends to be a metric for "feels fast doing boring interactive user stuff", which probably matches Apple's marketing imperatives well.
[1] Really they keep moving harder in that direction with every release. The "cooling pauses" in v6 likewise seemed very much like an attempt to boost the score on fanless Apple devices. If one were the type to allege a dark conspiracy, this is a tempting spot.
The cooling pause thing was just a dig at Geekbench, not specific to this discussion (thus putting it in a footnote). They tuned (the last version of their) benchmark specifically to give better numbers on hardware that tends to throttle under performance load.
Now... you can make a reasonable case that this matches real world interactive load better. But it also happens to have the practical effect of making Apple's numbers better, and no one else's. The new benchmarks are measuring subtly different things, and the new thing they measure happens to be what Apple wants to sell. At best, that's backwards.
I don't think I agree. In fact I think most of the too-online pontification from P(Doom)-ers and EA and the Rationalists and the like is, if anything, sorta missing the mark more than it hits.
They got the One Big Thing right, which is that AI progress was likely to race way ahead of consensus predictions. And props to them for that. They had vision we didn't.
But their actual advice and specific fears remain, as then, at least as much paranoia as insight. They were right, but they aren't helping any more than any other fringe group.
We need to trust the actual scientists and engineers to save us here, not the bloggers. Which when phrased that way seems hopeful and not doomerist.
I'm talking specifically about discourse like Jacob Coxon's tweet thread and later communication. Those are the folks[1] you want to be listening to, not the nuts with the blogs, no matter how much a particular conspiracy confirms your priors.
Salvation will come in a whitepaper, not a screed.
Debt service costs as a percent of GDP are in fact lower than they were in the 1980's, when things came out fine. Is this the best way to run the budget? Likely no. Should we make policy changes? Certainly yes.
Is the best way to drive that policy argument flinging around adjectives like "catastrophically indebted". No. If you have a suggestion make a suggestion. Screaming about "The Problem" without discussing policy is echo chamber logic.
Buffett claimed you could solve the deficit problem instantly by firing congress when they run deficits. Obviously, untenable (they'll cheat, admin overhead, etc).
You could very easily force congress to balance the budget (both parties and the media have complained endlessly about this for exactly no good reason). You could also freeze spending at current levels and force congress to do it's job: allocate our limited resources most productively.
Hard to get re elected doing the right thing, but maybe we just need a throw away set of leaders to do the hard work?
There are really just two ways to avoid the inflationary spiral. You can either increase income (i.e. grow gdp) or you can decrease spending (i.e. cut entitlements).
This is as close as it can be to clearly explain. The problem is that most of our politicians are not explaining it and instead ignoring it. As an individual the only thing you can do is vote for candidates who are willing to have that hard conversation with the public. Unfortunately it looks like that would require voting for a third party candidate and a vanishingly small minority of the electorate is willing to do that. So given all of that context I'm not really sure that the term "Catastrophically indebted" is wrong.
> Debt service costs as a percent of GDP are in fact lower than they were in the 1980's
This is an amazing use of the "in fact" trope, in exactly the same misleading way[1]. I talked about debt, and you casually shifted to servicing costs which presumes that rates stay historically low...when they're actually rapidly rising. Comical.
In the 1980s, the debt to GDP ratio was less than half what it currently is. Rates were higher, making the debt a crisis level then, but maybe you haven't noticed...rates are going up. Indeed, right now the rates were historically low, and anyone with functioning grey matter saw what was coming.
The US has an absolutely solidified, structural deficit -- utterly zero chance of paying down the debt, and a desperate need to constantly be borrowing more -- and an enormous debt. The trajectory of rates say this is crisis levels.
It's actually kind of funny reading your ridiculous comment -- "screaming", "echo chamber", etc -- when you sound completely in denial.
Your argument is basically the guy that used the "0% interest for six months" checks he just got with his 28% credit card, telling everyone that it's free money, so there's no problem if he goes wild. ROFL.
Sounds like it's time for a $1.5T military budget and a $1.3T bribe! Free money!
Sidenote: When asked about the bond market, Trump seriously offered up the "military solution". Utter insanity.
[1] - It's also simply a lie, making this extra funny. The highest historic servicing cost was 3.2% of GDP. It is currently projected at 3.3%, and that presumes rates don't keep spiralling up. So your "in fact" was simple bullshit, even as you tried the narrative shift by changing from debt to servicing costs.
You're doubling down with more hyperbole. What's the policy suggestion? What do you propose to cut? Where do you propose to find new revenue? What compromises are you willing to make to other priorities and what stands are you taking on which you won't budge?
Shouting about deficits is, to be blunt, just crack for the incurious mind. It's a party you're throwing for people who agree with you. Refusing to treat with the very real (and despite your hyperbole, very soluble) problems is likewise a trick your brain is using to expand the guest list: you can get almost everyone to sit at a "Deficits Suck" table, it's much harder to populate a "Let's Talk About Entitlement Restructuring and a VAT" forum.
But it's the boring wonks at the forum (the one's you're shouting at!) who are ultimately on the hook for saving you.
> What do you propose to cut? Where do you propose to find new revenue?
I'm not American, and no one needs to "save me". The country is a fucking idiocracy, and you elected a fascist self-dealing conman pedophile rapist. I pointed out objective, indisputable reality and you responded with some farcical lies and pearl clutching nonsense.
But you know, when your country is bankrupt, increasing military spending $600B, paying for endless vanity projects for that disgusting bag of shit to emblazon his shameful name on your country for eternity, or even entertaining the disgusting "bribe the population" farce is just fantasy.
Endlessly giving tax cuts and breaks to your kleptocracy/plutocrat class...maybe an incredibly stupid thing to do, no?
Nah, something something 1980s nothing we can do hey let's build an arch to celebrate the most catastrophically destructive president in history!
That ends at the beginning of 2025, and already it was equalling the historic max (which was during a brutal recession, it should be noted). Since then the debt has added trillions more (about $4T), and the rate due on that debt has kept increasing. Oh, and the debt of the US is increasing quite a clip faster than the US economy is "growing", even with the fantasy numbers from the sharpie presidency.
Yeah, jabroni, my statement is 100% confirmed fact. Indeed, it's incredibly optimistic, really, because if rates follow current trends, things are going to get dramatically worse by year end.
The point is not that police are bad and we aren't. You're right that everyone can be tempted to terrible action by access and permission to terrible things.
The very clear point here is that cops are in practice misusing this system without a meaningful safeguard in place to ensure searches are legal. Which is especially worrisome in this country given that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Like, the constitution isn't unclear on this at all.
reply