Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023(macrumors.com) |
Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023(macrumors.com) |
As a complete other aside, I'm excited to see what comes with the M3, particularly any neural cores. I would be much more excited about all the new AI tools if they could be run locally, Apple are again in the unique position to be able to make that possible for the masses. WWDC is hopefully going to be super interesting.
What we need is a sudden and massive increase in memory on these chips to make having LLMs viable on everyday affordable devices. I do wander if that may be something Apple surprise us with.
The bottleneck on advanced processes is how fast ASML can build its EUV fabrication machines and they're extremely complicated pieces of kit with lots of specialized parts that are also extremely complicated pieces of kit. Even with all our modern production ability we're limited in how quickly we can assemble these machines that can actually do the lithography and everybody wants them.
ASML currently has a backlog of 100 machines. Intel, Samsung, TSMC, they all want them. They sell for $200m+ a piece. Everyone has the cash for them. ASML just can't produce them fast enough.
What Apple has done with the M-series silicon is really impressive, but it’s not as fast as big, dedicated GPU silicon.
> like if the most cost-effective work boot of 2025 is produced by Gucci.
Apple M-silicon laptops are high quality, but they’re not the same as overpriced luxury goods. The price of entry level M1/M2 Macs is extremely reasonable, IMO.
But yes, the comparison would be apt. I think people want to solve a problem with dependence on third party services...
No, I expect GPUs with insane amount of memory surfacing and that isn't really a field for Apple yet.
The iPhone and Mac have good performance and power efficiency, but people will always want their phone and laptop to do more and get longer battery life. Apple customers’ appetite for compute is practically bottomless.
I don't think so, the typical iPhone user has not scaled up their compute needs much past the 2015 A9.
And if you exclude the computational photography stuff, I could imagine some users don't take advantage of it at all.
I'd rather have a healthy competetive ecosystem where people writing software need not say stuff like "needs CUDA to work or needs Apple Neural cores to work" and instead says something like "need XYZ acceleration provided by CUDA cores, Apple Silicon, and AMD blah.."
Consider the whole history of OpenGL, Metal, Vulcan, WebGL, WebGPU...
It would have been a mistake to keep using OpenGL, and WebGL was perhaps a mistake from the beginning. It was the wrong abstractions. Metal and Vulcan are clearly better abstractions for GPU APIs, and it really doesn't matter too much that Metal is Apple-only because they're close enough that you can have a good Vulcan API on top of Metal (MoltenVK). That is, what matters is that we converge on the same abstractions, and those take a long time to get right.
Now in the end we've gotten WebGPU (which isn't only for web browsers btw, can be used from native apps too) that can provide a nice universal cross-platform API.
I mean, does anyone doubt that thinner process nodes will be in demand?
Sure, 3nm is marketing too, but there are hard limits and reliability might suffer if manufacturing cannot keep up.
Don’t all the big tech companies have giant cash accounts?
Honestly, I just wish that they'd refresh the Mac Studio. I know that probably won't happen in any processor generation which they plan to roll out the Mac Pro, though.
There are so many ways to benefit. I've never owned an Apple product in my life! And yet, I own an AMD CPU that was built on a TSMC process. I feel like that benefits me. Would that TSMC process be as good if they didn't have Apple as a customer? Maybe not. I don't know for sure - it's not something I obsess over.
It would be different if the products you could buy outside of Apple were actually bad. (And for some people who want fanless Apple Silicon, a lot of laptop alternatives are bad, but for my needs, both desktops and laptops with fans are fulfilling my needs and wants.)
I would say consumers benefit if the leading process node is used on them, wouldn’t you?
I don’t understand the problem. The most efficient processes are always dedicated to mobile devices where the premium is worth it.
Sounds like FUD to me.
And if Apple leaves TSMC will be left with the pants down.
The Economist had a good article a few months ago about the volume of chip manufacture by country and process size. The takeaway is Taiwan leads < 10nm, the US and Taiwan lead 10-22nm, and that > 22nm is an interesting mix including South Korea and China.
Chart: https://www.economist.com/img/b/400/834/90/media-assets/imag...
Article: https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/02/02/americas-hoped-for...
It's weird to think we're dependent on single companies for such important things.
https://wccftech.com/samsung-secures-3-nm-advanced-chip-orde...
No surprise, the N3B ("first gen") process has bad economics and poor yields. Everyone else is waiting for N3E, which is pretty different to N3B.
See: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-e...
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7048/n3e-replaces-n3-comes-in...
prob not his worse case scenario :)
Yes, this would lower QoL pretty significantly for both countries.
TSMC isn't moving their cutting edge production here. The fabs will be a node or two behind.
That's a big no. What's actually happening is that TSMC is building a new factory in Arizona, including training a brand new US workforce. It remains to be seen whether it can even be done. Toyota famously failed with a similar attempt in Fremont, California.
It's a question of whether TSMC is successful because of some sort of strategy that is compatible with American work culture, or do the actual Taiwanese workers play a significant part in their success? Unanswered thus far.
Given the fact that Apple has such a dominant position in every part of the supply chain infrastructure I’m challenged with being able to see how any organization could possibly come up with something that pushes Apple into bankruptcy.
My guess is that only another Apple could dethrone Apple. That's to say a company that produces high quality products with strong branding consistently over multiple decades. Google and Samsung are competitors but in my mind, as an Apple user, their products are not worthy quality wise of the luxury prices they demand.
Apple has too much power, no for profit company or person can responsibly wield with that much power.
The success of capitalism to meet the demands of a consumer are entirely dependent on competition. By vertically integrating their business, Apple has made it impossible to compete.
I am really excited about the M3. The M1, with its unified memory it can already run decently large LLMs. It would be great if Apple was able to make the M3 even better at that. In addition, it seems like there is a lot of momentum in releasing models that the user can run on consumer hardware. I would love to have my own private LLMs running on my own hardware
Not everyone is banking on EUV for 7nm, though. TSMC will extend today’s 193nm immersion and multiple patterning to 7nm, with plans to insert EUV at 5nm - [0]
Chip making is capital intensive, and a new factory that costs to the tune of $20 billions only allows a vendor to stay ahead of the competition for a few years. It’s entirely possible that Intel or Samsung will lead the race at the next technology milestone. They have work cut out for them of course. TSMC has been in the foundry business for a long time.
It definitely would be nice if there were more options at the cutting edge, but it's like that for good reasons and it's not likely to change.
What's the overall annual dollar amount TSMC sells, and of that, what percentage is Apple, regardless of the specific production line?
* Apple Silicon CPUs have a Neural Engine specifically made for fast ML-inference
* Apple supports PyTorch (https://developer.apple.com/metal/pytorch/)
* Apple has its own easily accessible machine-learning framework called Core-ML (https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/)
So it would be inaccurate to say that they are not doing anything for the ML community.
Sure, sometimes it means they get the newest bestest chips a year early and the fans can party, but if you're an anti-fan just remain patient and I suspect one of these years you will be the one with reason to party.
TSMC said that the leading node will always be in Taiwan and N+1 will be outside.
[1] https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/05/mlc-llm-mobile-laptops/
WebGL looked pretty damn good in 2011. It was based on OpenGL ES 2.0, which was the latest version of OpenGL ES, and the great thing about OpenGL ES is that it's a little cleaned up from OpenGL and reflects the capabilities of a broad class of graphics implementations.
So your first hit single should be about how important grass cultivation is to modern meat production: "Hay, seriously."
To grow without being acquired they would need to avoid funding from investors and be extremely disciplined. That's probably never going to happen in this space.
Using market power would be threatening TSMC to shop elsewhere if they sell the same tech to others. I’ve not heard claims they do.
I also think TSMC is the one having market power there, but given that Apple pay’s a lot for them to build the tech, that may not be as large as one would think.
I just don't think Samsung is really that far behind as right now both companies are just selling promises.
Every Japanese auto maker has had US plants for decades. Toyota's oldest, in Georgetown KY, has been there since 1986.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Motor_Manufacturing_Ken...
> Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
> Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-an...
What games are you referring to?
It's anecdotal but I don't know of any iOS/iPadOS user that plays anything remotely demanding. Most users I know don't game. Those that do usually play casual games like Candy Crush.
The reality is likely just market share, hardware and the makeup of that market share.
Macs used to actually be a big gaming platform once upon a time. Myst was a Mac exclusive (built with HyperCard) and Bungie used to make games for macs first before getting bought by Microsoft.
But windows got the upper edge:
1. Much larger slice of the market
2. More of the market is made up of gaming enthusiasts than Macs which are usually either targeting light use, education or professional.
3. You can make affordable gaming PCs with windows. You can’t really do it with any kind of Mac because there’s no product for that market between the Mac Mini and iMac (which were targeted at more casual users) up to the Mac Pro and iMac Pro (which were targeted at professional users)
It’s easier to target the biggest piece of the pie and the one that will buy your products.
That’s why the “API” reason never makes sense, because iOS is THE dominant gaming platform despite having the same APIs as a mac. Game engines often need to support multiple graphics APIs anyway.
So Mac gaming did take off, but it fumbled and never recovered. Part of that is that Apple themselves fumbled as a company, on the verge of bankruptcy before the return of Jobs. What made them successful post his return is also what killed gaming on their platforms: they targeted a different audience.
People who only browse the web need barely more than a Core 2 Duo, even now, and most devs and media professionals will find an M1 Pro to fill their needs somewhere between reasonably and very well. You know what almost nobody will turn down though? Laptops that are cool to the touch and rarely need to spin up fans and all manner of battery powered device that lasts longer, even doing “real” work.
Of course there will always be those who need the fastest big iron they can find and don’t care if they have to feed it 2000W and cool it a 15lb heatsink with ear piercing fans, but this group is comparatively niche.
Apple has been plenty happy to work with the CCP in the past, so I don't understand how/why this would bankrupt Apple or really even cause them lots of problems.
https://www.techspot.com/news/96291-taiwan-destroying-tsmc-e...
So TSMC would probably become irrelevant in due time if there were strong sanctions against China. That, and the persistent rumour that Taiwan has a plan to literally blow up the fabs if China invades gives us a picture were invading Taiwan is ideological for China, not an economic power grab.
Realistically PRC will glass most of TW defense, start a blockade and leverage continued acess to western semi to try to constrain conflict. It's not like PRC can maintain TSMC without western input. Keeping TSMC running is pretty much the only strategic goal in everyone's interest.
Asianometry YouTube channel did a few really good videos on chip fabbing and the unique challenges. Scale is addressed IIRC. Highly recommend.
If you have a way to churn them out please let Zeiss SMT know.
What in the process wouldn’t work with this method?
Presumably a lot of the machinery needed to build these components is incredibly specialized too. That machinery won't be purchasable off the shelf. It will be ordered custom with long lead times, and (again!) could have bottlenecks in production that make it simply impossible to deliver in large quantities.
I'd bet (with no supporting evidence, just a gut feeling) that this industry needs to know five years in advance what the demand for chips in a given process node is going to be just to set up the supply chains to manufacture the right number of lithography machines. If that estimate is wrong, it'll take so long to build up that infrastructure that you might as well not bother, and just try to get things right for the next node.
For example, the mirror might require extremely high purity silica, made in a top-notch cleanroom environment. To produce 2x, you don't just need 2x the raw material, you need 2x the air filtration systems, purifying machines, trained staff.
Which is fine, that large footprint can be doubled! But maybe this whole process is only going to be state-of-the-art for 5 years, and after that won't command top dollar.
Testing of EUV lithography machines is very complicated and slow process. You cannot scale it without magically cloning all the test engineers and technicians.
Making a super-flat mirror is extremely difficult and requires state-of-the-art facilities, and state-of-the-art equipment. And highly trained, experienced employees. And there aren't enough of any of that to scale rapidly.
It's not just about scaling 1 input. You have to scale the entire supply chain.
i.e. they need to project out demand x years in advance because their things are expensive and slow to build, and their components vendors have the same problem with the additional problem that their components vendors only have one customer for some of their products: them.
There is no other equivalent use for much of what they need so if they fuck it up they've got too much equipment too fast.
This is a classic hardware business problem.
Even if it was possible to double the production for free in a year then without new orders when this come online you only have 50 orders left to process ...
If you look some plane production backorders are in the decade I believe atm. Looking at the A320 orders you can see how they ramp up production (and this ramp up might production line switching from aircraft type not new lines) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320neo_famil...
For processing speed, Ms are fast but I agree not anywhere near a top Nvdia chip.
For memory size, the memory on an M chip can be used as graphics memory, so a person could get an M2 today with 128GB of graphics memory for ~ $5k. Not bad considering an Nvidia chip approaching that memory size is several times that much.
It'd be pretty silly for Apple to cram in big, dedicated GPU when 99.9% of their customers don't care and don't want to pay for it, especially considering that anyone that does want big, dedicated GPU can outboard as much GPU as they want.[1] And many seem to think that the onboard GPU along with Neural Engine should be adequate for local LLM.
Apple Silicon doesn't currently have any provision for external graphics cards.
1) Apple Silicon won't support PCIe.
2) Apple doesn't want it to.
There is no cheaper way to have 50gb of memory allocated to your GPU compute pipeline (buy a 64gb macbook pro or studio). So yes big, only the fast aspect remains a reason to buy expensive dedicated gpu's
It's not yet. Apples combined memory architecture enables them to significantly cut the cost of bundling more memory for various GPU, Neural or other domain specific cores. I believe they will catch up or even overtake Nvidia as the leading AI platform.
Desktop AI class GPUs are hell expensive. If Apple can get something 50% as performant, but in an iPhone Pro or MacBook Air, thats going to change so very much.
Caveats: In the US, with low ram and low storage.
Without these caveats you look at about 2000€ or so (m2 macbook air with 16gb of ram and non-halved storage performance in Germany). That can still be a decent deal for what you get, but "extremely reasonable" -- not quite.
Genshin also needs a A10 as minimum.
With low quality graphics admittedly, where you'd get this information?
If there is enough money sitting on the table, it seems like it would be worth it to do that. But it sounds like it would take too long with uncertain returns?
Is it nice to have faster ARM chips? Yeah. Does it mean that Apple has a monopoly position? Not really, they just have an edge right now, I'm sure they pay eye-watering amounts to TSMC.
Intel could compete on the lower price end, but they don't, they're instead trying to convince you that they're the fastest chips on the planet, and funnel a power plants worth of electricity through the chip to get there. But they could come back to prominence with a lower power, slower, lower price chip.
I think it's an interesting question because the power you critique in Apple seems to be market share, and I'm misunderstanding how you think that is not the people voting their own opinions with their own money, thus canonically democratic.
I am sure I'm overlooking something you're thinking, so thought why not ask.
Conceptually, the idea that an individual signals their support for a business by "voting with your dollars" makes logical sense. However it breaks down for a few reasons I detail below.
1. Illusion of product choice. Apple and Google are the only realistic options for 99% of smartphone users in America. You'll say look at all these other choices and point to a handful of alternative options, however unless you are in a completely different culture, or decide to join a counter-cultural movement you're going to choose a smart phone from Apple or Google because that's the culture we live in and you will be out of the loop if you do not. You might quibble that people could do something *if they only did [x, y, z]" but that's not how groups of people work and you know it. I think at this point over a TRILLION dollars has been spent convincing everyone that if you don’t have a smartphone (with blue text) then you’re not part of the real culture. Bernays proved long ago that propaganda works and it's literally the driving external motivation for our entire culture.
2. Illusion of organizational choice. But let’s say you did vote with your feet and you want to support Nokia. Great, however now all you're doing is supporting another major corporation that wants to be in the same position as Apple, but they just have different owners in a different country. Switching didn't do anything to actually diffuse power, its simply choosing a different privately owned dictatorship to align to. Apple and Google are really no different here, so choosing one over the other nets the same thing in terms of concentration of economic power.
3. Political power. The power that these companies wield in the regulatory capture game reaches far beyond any choice you may think you have or any chance you have as a small company to have an equivalent voice – if for no other reason than you can’t afford a congressman or supreme court justice. So all those "choices" you want still have to comply with whatever the corporate lobby thinks the law should say about technologies and they aren’t bashful with writing legislation. (Every government has their acquisitions system captured by major capitalist corporations)
4. Companies delegate responsibility for externalities. Recycling is a great example here. It's well known that the plastics industry has decided to "pass the decision" along to consumers by stamping their products with 1-5 recycling indicias. Problem is, most recycling systems cannot process or do not have recycling demand for anything 3-5, forcing consumers to do the work to differentiate. In fact, these same plastics companies KNOW that they are not recyclable yet intentionally do not reduce usage, meanwhile greenwashing their products to convince consumers that they are. Ok now do that for every other externality or illegal practice like slavery wages and wage theft, PFAS, CFC's, child labor etc... and there would be basically no companies in business
5. Consumers must know everything to make an actual informed choice. OK, so you say, “well I’m smart enough, I want to make a purchase that is good quality, has a net positive impact on resource use, uses pro-social labor practices and is inside my budget” in order to do this you need to spend an hour researching every supply chain and review etc… to get past the submarine articles, general marketing propaganda, obscene obfuscation of operating practices and on and on and as a result almost nobody has the time or energy. So then people look to third party review sites (all corporate sponsored) so you can’t actually trust the reviews.
The fact that people COULD do something differently is held back by the fact that most people WONT because corporations have structured everything to support the structure that supports them. In no way is this democratic because it doesn’t actually include what the alternatives could be and WE DO NOT BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ALTERNATIVES. So doing anything other than scamming people or trying to find a sucker left holding the bag (aka an EXIT opportunity/Liquidity event) is “off the beaten path.”
So in this scenario you end up with Windows being catapulted from its current ~75% global marketshare to a 90%+ virtually-unopposed monopoly, and even less reason for Microsoft to make Windows a good product.
But that said, even if MS did get all the market, when the concern is Apple's closed and walled-garden approach, wouldn't an MS world be better? I am certainly no fan of Windows, but it does seem much more compatible, and usable in broader ecosystems than Macs do.
There’s literally hundreds of ways to organize people’s labor that isn’t just private capital Vs private capital but there seems to be best few leaders that are thinking outside the box.
My preferred approach here is actually building a powerful democratic cooperative, and I’ve written a ton on this site alone on that. That seems like it’s equally as hard as trying to build a direct competitor, with the upside that it’s Democratic. Why shouldn’t we try?
So no, Apple is not the big tech with the most cash. They do have a much higher market cap than the others but it's simply based on their brand image and speculation.
It's based on their consistently enormous income generation.
Apple has $114 billion in operating income over the past four quarters. Alphabet is close to $75b by comparison; Microsoft is $83b; Meta is $29b. Amazon is a joke at $12b (which is increasingly being reflected in their very mediocre stock market performance; Amazon stock has nearly contracted on an inflation adjusted basis over five years).
For large corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, etc., profit generation is overwhelmingly what matters. Apple has led the way on that for a long time now and it's reflected in their market cap.
Apple: ~$395bn Microsoft: ~$200bn Amazon: ~$500bn Meta: $116bn
Amazon extracts a poor margin out of their $514 billion in sales. Over the past four quarters their operating income margin is a pathetic ~2.4%.
Apple's operating income margin is ~29.4% by comparison. They have a vastly superior business.
Eventually Amazon investors will tire of the terrible stock market returns that present Amazon is generating and the garbage that is retail and they'll demand the company split itself up. That will involve spinning off AWS so investors can realize max value for that (before it's too late and growth slows to a crawl in that space).
So it refers to a credit balance, and it does not mention investments.
Before Metal, macOS used to ship with old OpenGL versions. I remember around the Tiger days (10.4) OpenGL was 4-5 years old compared to the version shipped in Windows. And with DirectX, Windows had a better API about two decades before Metal for macOS was released.
I do agree with your other points. Macs are expensive so they are always going to be a niche market. And in most countries, Apple products are luxury products.
Another point is really that Windows GPUs have always been more powerful. If you wanted to play the latest AAA games at good quality and fps you had to be on Windows.
And there's also an ouroboros vicious circle. Devs don't put effort into the Mac because there aren't many gamers on it, and there aren't many gamers on it because dev don't put too much effort. And it doesn't help the decisions that Apple has taken to further ostracize themselves form the desktop gaming market.
> iOS is THE dominant gaming platform
In the US. Worldwide iOS has like 28% market share I believe.
Nevertheless, Apple could really become a gaming powerhouse outside of mobile. If they released an AppleTV with a gamepad and an M3 chip, they bought or partnered with a couple of good console/desktop game studios (not mobile game studios).
The AppleTV already has games but there's not a lot of good content and Apple doesn't even provide an official gamepad. It's clear Apple doesn't care much about gaming outside of iOS.
Seriously though, one hiccup for gaming in macs is the screen resolution: it’s not until recently you could get good performance at such high dpis in games, especially on a laptop. Now that gpus can push those pixels better than before, it will start being more viable to make games for macs
Also, macs are all about being premium while enabling ecosystem lock in. When they have to compete with diy desktops with hot swappable, upgradeable hardware, how can apple possibly charge such a premium for their gaming machines? How can they differentiate via software when gamers don’t care about their os — they want their os to get out of the way so they can game? Apple can’t. So they don’t even try. It would hurt their brand to be seen struggling like that
They won’t compete until they see a way to use their playbooks to gain a platform advantage. Eg, ar/vr with m3 chips
Most games are using off the shelf engines that support Metal anyway, so I think api would only matter for the small subset of games using custom engines.
Regarding your point of the US, I should clarify that I didn’t mean by market share, though I suppose that’s also true in the US. I meant by profit.
According to the WSJ , Apple makes more from gaming than Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Activision combined worldwide.
Linux is just non existent from a mainstream audience perspective, let alone the gaming market.
>Most games are using off the shelf engines that support Metal anyway, so I think api would only matter for the small subset of games using custom engines.
Today yes, it's easy to make a Mac game wit UE or Unity. But back 15-20 years ago?
BTW I'm not arguing API is the main reason Mac failed as a gaming platform. Just that it cannot be ignored.
>According to the WSJ , Apple makes more from gaming than Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Activision combined worldwide.
Don't me wrong, Apple is huge, but that's incorrect. Sony still makes more money than Apple.
https://www.gizmochina.com/2022/06/01/apple-rank-3rd-gaming-...
Maybe the figure you're thinking about is that iOS enabled the most consumer spending? (not the actual money Apple mades from gaming)
The problem with OpenGL ES AIUI (especially in the early days) is that it exposes lots of hardware specific weirdness. The reason this works for iOS is the same reason it works for Nintendo etc. Millions of devices with identical hardware.
Windows supports both DirectX and Vulkan.
So someone either rewrites DXVK to support Metal (fool's errand) or we add Yet Another Translation Layer to the mix. Something tells me the industry and users would be better off if Apple supported both Metal and Vulkan at a hardware level. Seems plausible for a company of their size.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-doesnt-make-videogames-bu...
(Non paywalled summary)
https://www.nme.com/en_au/news/gaming-news/apple-profited-mo...
Of course the WSJ may be wrong, but it’s based off of profit whereas your link seems to be revenue. Which would enable both to be true I think.
Regarding the other point of 15-20 years ago, OpenGL only started stagnating on the Mac with 4.1 in 2010. Prior to that gaming was still really missing on a Mac.
I’m also in agreement that it can’t be ignored. I just think it’s overstated.
But in general I think we’re saying the same things, and debating the nuances.
I think it would take quite a significant investment — as much or more than e.g. Framework has sunk into building their hardware business — to smooth the desktop Linux experience out enough to appeal to non-developer Mac users. That last "10%" that the desktop Linux is missing is hard. It'd also probably take a unprecedented level of cooperation from hardware component manufacturers to make high quality Linux drivers available for components from day one (the general consumer isn't going to want to wait somewhere between half and a full generation for robust hardware support, as is the case with the components in many prebuilt computers).
That's not impossible but it'd take a confluence of events that I don't see as particularly likely.
> …wouldn't an MS world be better? I am certainly no fan of Windows, but it does seem much more compatible, and usable in broader ecosystems than Macs do.
Compatibility and flexibility are qualities Windows has now at least in part due to meaningful competition. Make no mistake, Microsoft would love to command a walled garden of their own if they could, and in the absence of Macs they could probably boil the frog into making such a thing reality.
Under GAAP, cash (and cash equivalents) includes currency on hand, deposits in bank accounts, and any highly liquid investments that have an original maturity of three months or less. Cash equivalents are short-term investments that are readily convertible to known amounts of cash and have original maturities of three months or less from the date of purchase
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000320193/386e8c0...
So they have $25 billion in cash/cash equivalents (T-bills), $31 billion in "Current Marketable Securities" which are just those that are liquid this year so short-term debt and the like, and then $110 billion in long-term marketable securities which can be medium term bonds and other investments on a >1 year timeline.
Add those up and you get to $166 billion which is a good proxy for the amount of money they can invest today.
Not really. When you hook up an external PCI chassis with a graphics card inserted, it sees the PCI expansion slot and the GPU just fine, it just doesn't have a driver for the GPU.
It could be that Apple does away with it entirely and the Mac Studio is the new Pro.
Or they might make a machine with PCIe support, but make it so expensive that only people with a serious need get access to it.
Or something else.
Or the Mac Pro will be released without PCIe GPU support, and Apple will be able to leverage increases in Apple Silicon GPU performance to eliminate any need or desire for PCIe GPU, drawing away high end GPU customers from nVidia and AMD and locking them into Apple Silicon and the Apple ecosystem.
Maybe. But graphics cards aren't the only thing people put into PCIe slots.
Right, so there will be PCIe slots for expansion, they just won't support PCIe GPU, just like Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis for Thunderbolt now. It isn't the PCIe slots that break compatibility, its the difference in architecture between x86 and Apple Silicon that makes them incompatible.
Thunderbolt supports PCIe, and for most devices Apple Silicon does also, but GPU is different enough from audio interfaces and NVMe that it isn't just a "load the driver and plug it in" situation. GPU is vastly more complex than other PCIe devices. Apple Silicon and x86 architectures are not compatible, so GPU for x86 is not going to work with Apple Silicon with merely a software driver.
It's going to take hw translation and other technology that is not yet available for Apple Silicon, thus Apple's recent patent applications,[1] showing that Apple is either exploring supporting outboard GPU or locking anyone else out from their method of doing so, but either way is no guarantee they'll complete development or release, because it seems just as if not more likely the roadmap for Apple Silicon GPU performance will outpace nVidia and AMD GPUs.
But, again, claiming, "it just doesn't have a driver for the GPU" is a staggering oversimplification.
[1] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...