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  • NextGen_Gamer - Friday, July 21, 2023 - link

    Going to be an exciting Apple event later in September with the 3-nm A17 Bionic SoC :)
  • Dante Verizon - Saturday, July 22, 2023 - link

    I can't even imagine why anyone cares. 20% gain on synthetic benches, useless AI and such... Yeah, Huge Win
  • Zoolook - Saturday, July 22, 2023 - link

    While the SoCs undoubtedly will be high performers, the most interesting thing nowadays with moving to a new node isn't about absolute performance but increased efficiency, you can do more with the same energy.
  • akdj - Sunday, July 30, 2023 - link

    True Zoolook,
    Like unplug your laptop and get the same performance, have it last a full day getting real work done and not worrying about low power modes, etc
  • brucethemoose - Saturday, July 22, 2023 - link

    If they shipped with 32GB of RAM, I would.

    That is enough for Llama 70B.
  • tipoo - Saturday, July 22, 2023 - link

    Weelll, I sorta do for a different reason than peak performance, iPhones may have a screen boost mode in the sun now, but they still quickly dim the screen and then start throttling the SoC in the sun, I hope 3nm and the new shrunk display driver help with both things.

    Also - the rarer RAM jumps from Apple phones are a bigger deal in my experience than the year to year chip upgrades, 8GB should be a nice upgrade.
  • escksu - Monday, July 24, 2023 - link

    Its more of efficiency rather tha outright performance gains. This could translate into slight longer battery life (notoriously short these days).
  • akdj - Sunday, July 30, 2023 - link

    I care. 20-30-40% increases in speed and decreased energy consumption around the similar savings in objective measurements of power, speed and efficiency - EG exporting stills; RAW or motion or rendering and finalizing the motion or audio you’re fixing to export.

    My iPhone 14 Pro Max and iPad M2 obliterate my two or three year old computers… PC/Mac alike when it comes to getting real work done.

    I don’t pay attention to synthetic benchmarks, who does?

    I use software that is in some cases designed cross platform (macOS/Windows) or iOS/iPadOS and Android - and your example of a 20% ‘gain’ is the equivalent of working 10 hours a day or 8. Or keep working 10 and make 20% more cash.
  • GC2:CS - Saturday, July 22, 2023 - link

    A17 should rather be great if Apple wants to compete with what intel and AMD is cooking at 3nm
  • tipoo - Saturday, July 22, 2023 - link

    The lead of the last decade since A7 seems to be the smallest it's ever been, with SD8 gen 2 being pretty close on CPU and actually leading on GPU (plus having hw rt on it, its use in phones being questionable but should be good for M3) compared to A16, so I do wonder if having the lions run on N3 will let Apple leap out ahead again with a significant increase in per core performance. I wonder if they'll also ever move past 2+4 on phones.

    Excited to see M3 though, that's probably the MBA I'll get.
  • Dante Verizon - Saturday, July 22, 2023 - link

    And ? I think we already have plenty of performance in smartphones, there's no real use for it, not for the vast majority. Web pages and apps already open in one second, as any mid-end device has 8GB of ram and fast storage. The only moderately exciting smartphone-related thing I've heard about is Samsung using some new technology taken from EVs to increase the battery density of the Galaxy S24. Everything is so Meh these days.
  • name99 - Sunday, July 23, 2023 - link

    The reason Android will always lag Apple is that Android is always about price optimizing what mattered five years ago, not investigating what will matter soon.

    We all (including Apple) know that phones are now fast enough for "normal" compute, and the Apple phones are even fast enough for current gen computational photography and image extraction. So what's next?
    Well...
    Look at:
    https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220156045A1
    https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220101914A1
    https://patents.google.com/patent/US11694733B2

    Apple seem to be seriously all-in on AI, including language AI. But in the usual Apple way, rather than hype and promises, they're saying nothing before a product is ready, but are quietly designing the hardware necessary to up-end what's possible in this space on even a phone...
    The first of those patents is 2020; so maybe that's enough lead time from the idea to see something in the A17/M3 this year? Or maybe still another year or two required to move through design, optimization, manufacturing, them writing and optimizing SW?
  • PeachNCream - Saturday, July 22, 2023 - link

    Is this actually 3nm or are we talking more like wrapped in air quotes with a little star next to it that points to a disclaimer about how its not really a 3nm process?
  • tipoo - Saturday, July 22, 2023 - link

    This is a real generational jump in node, not like 4nm really being 5nm warmed over. N3E being different than N3B doesn't change this.
  • TomWomack - Saturday, July 22, 2023 - link

    The air quotes have been there for a very long time; the "3nm process" has a metal pitch of 24nm and a gate pitch of 48nm, whilst a 45nm process had a metal and gate pitch both of 160nm, and TSMC 16FF has a metal pitch of 70nm and a gate pitch of 90nm.
  • nandnandnand - Sunday, July 23, 2023 - link

    It's not worth talking about except for an occasional reminder for the newcomers.
  • escksu - Monday, July 24, 2023 - link

    I have to say I am not particularly keen in 3nm. This is because of much higher cost compared to 5nm and the cost is passed on to consumers. I would say we are hitting a limit on how much we are willing to pay for a mobile phone.
  • PeachNCream - Monday, July 24, 2023 - link

    Agreed! This year I had to upgrade out of my LG Rebel 3 which I got for $10 as a refurbished phone quite a few years ago. I ended up with a TCL A3 and though it still has a headphone jack and removable battery (with a few extras like 3GB of RAM vs 2GB and 32GB of storage instead of 16GB) it set me back $40!

    Sure it's faster and has more of everything, but I didn't even need any of those capabilities since the Rebel 3 was perfectly okay. Android 7 was the problem because it was too old to run my bank's software. I guess there were security implications as well, but it was all software rather than hardware.

    Some of that was inflation and some of it was refurb vs new, but paying $40 for a phone feels utterly stupid in 2023 and I'm terminally miffed by Tracfone for bumping the price of handsets. I can't even imagine what the massive number of idiots on mainstream contracts buying thousand dollar phones are going to do with themselves when they can't get their pocket cellular candy because they're not upper middle class.
  • jjjag - Monday, July 24, 2023 - link

    I think you are incorrect on that point. Everybody said that back when phones were no longer "Free with Contract", then they said that when phones passed $200, then $500, then $1000. Combined with forced obsolescence, forced battery life degradation with software upgrades, peer pressure amongst the Zoomers, and other factors, and people will pay whatever Samsung and Apple tell them to pay. Combined with the fact that smartphones never became a PC-replacement , which means you still have to buy one of those, and the cost of technology is higher than ever and moving up at an alarming exponential pace. By most measures, around 2015 was the bottom for overall cost of technology related items, and it's now to the point where 10 year projections show technology as actually CREATING poverty, rather than helping to solve it, which it had been doing for many years before.
  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, July 25, 2023 - link

    There are days I don't bother to turn on my PC. A bluetooth keyboard and a phone stand (~$30 USD total from Amazon) and my laptop has far less usage than it ever has in the past. It doesn't even have a desktop-friendly UI or screen share like Dex or whatever Samsung calls it.

    PCs do, I very much agree, are a generally unnecessary cost at least in the way a lot of people decide to use them. Overabundance of input power, frequent upgrades, tinkering and tweaking that kills components, whole home cooling to offset waste heat generation, time thrown away trying to earn money as a streamer and/or time thrown away playing rather than job-seeking or investing in self-betterment. The TCO of a PC for an enthusiast/gamer/streamer can often be hundreds of thousands of USD equivelent currency over the years in direct and indirect costs and lost/never obtained income that most people don't even realize they missed. It's quite sad, but their losses power an entire industry of people that feed off them and benefit from it so that is unlikely to change in the near term.
  • xol - Wednesday, July 26, 2023 - link

    TSMC wafer costs of $20,000 may have been exaggerated .. https://www.eetimes.com/tsmcs-3-nm-push-faces-tool... is now claiming 16-17k if yields improve..

    @17k per wafer chips should be cheaper, but still expect price increases as consumer because made up reasons

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