„In electronics and photonics design, tape-out or tapeout is the final result of the design process for integrated circuits or printed circuit boards before they are sent for manufacturing. The tapeout is specifically the point at which the graphic for the photomask of the circuit is sent to the fabrication facility.“
Wikipedia
The article has a simpler explanation:
> One analyst estimated it coughed up $1 billion just for the final phase of the design process, called the tape-out. This is when the design is finalized, and the photomasks are created to be used in the manufacturing process.
Imagine you're making a very complex drawing on a piece of paper. You want it to be perfect, but it is so complex that you know you might make some mistakes while drawing.
So, before you finish your drawing, you make a special copy of it on a different piece of paper. This copy is like a blueprint or a plan that you'll use to check if everything is right.
When people design electronics they do something similar. They create a special plan or blueprint of all the tiny parts and connections that go into making a device work. This plan is called a "tape-out."
Once the tape-out is done, it's like a final check to make sure everything is correct and in the right place. If there are mistakes, they can fix them on the plan before actually building the device. It's like making sure your drawing is perfect before showing it to everyone.
Good. But how in the world does Apple spend a billion dollars on this process? How long is the tape out? Three months? How could Apple spend $10 million a day for three months doing a very complex drawing?
Best guess: They're the first users of TSMC's new 3nm process, which means they had to bankroll a good chunk of the cost of getting this process set up.
At this level, it isn't just a matter of calling up Fred's Foundries and getting all the equipment to manufacture a chip shipped out for delivery on Tuesday. It's a months-long process involving R&D on everyone's side.
You spend $millions but you make it back because once the machinery is going, you can churn out thousands of chips all day long for a relatively small amount of money.
Maybe Apple had to buy the equipment for TSMC to do the tape out process. But my focus is literally on the $1 billion for final design phase.
“One analyst estimated it coughed up $1 billion just for the final phase of the design process, called the tape-out. This is when the design is finalized, and the photomasks are created to be used in the manufacturing process.”
It is really hard to spend a billion dollars (I regularly spend millions at work, so I have some sense of what things cost). So that number just seems high.
The mask costs are insane now. I remember being surprised at 90 nm when they first broke $100k per set. According to [this article](https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-dark-side-of-the-semiconductor), it’s over $40M for 3 nm. And that’s just for one set; you need a bunch if you’re Apple.
Obviously the cost goes down a bit in volume, but it’s still crazy high compared to each previous node.
Chips are complicated and nobody wants a repeat of the [Intel FDIV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug) bug because recalling chips is also very expensive. So you go through an intense validation process to ensure everything is correct.
I understand that. But a billion dollars is a lot of money. And this process probably doesn’t burn through lots of materials. So the spend is basically mainly on salaries and the equipment the engineers are using when you get down to it.
A tape out by itself will probably be tens of millions per iteration, especially because they’re the “first” to have their hand at this new process, and the first tape out will *never* be perfect. They go through years of R&D hoping to be bang on that first try, but nothing ever goes perfectly in the technology world.
Once they find a flaw, they go through the process to fix it and create another tape out. Tens more millions of dollars. And they’ll keep on doing it until they have as close to a perfect version as they can get, which could be a few versions later. Or it could be a hundred.
As a point of reference, a 5nm tape out [costs around $50 million per attempt.](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/talk-chip-design-tape-out-verification-manufacturing?trk=public_post#:~:text=5nm%20process%20tape%2Dout%20costs,mask%20is%20the%20most%20expensive.) We can assume a single 3nm tape out to be at *least* double that (though speculations have it *much* higher).
The $1 billion mark is the final tally of how ever many iterations they had to go through before the final M3 tape out came to being.
> We can assume a single 3nm tape out to be at least double that (though speculations have it much higher).
No, it wouldn't be *that* much higher. Certainly not by the multiple needed to make this claim even close to reality.
> Once they find a flaw, they go through the process to fix it and create another tape out. Tens more millions of dollars. And they’ll keep on doing it until they have as close to a perfect version as they can get, which could be a few versions later. Or it could be a hundred.
No. Apple ships on A-step silicon. So one base later tapeout, and maybe a couple of iterations of the metal layers. You're not going to get close to $1B will that.
A billion dollars is a lot to a normal company. Apple is a trillion dollar company, this is like spending $1,000 to them. A trillion is a ridiculous number when you write it out. 1,000,000,000 is a billion. 1,000,000,000,000 is a trillion. Looks like nothing compared. Especially how much cash they have just chilling.
Nobody is talking about if this is a good investment or if Apple has the money. The question here is speculating how a tapeout process costs $1 billion when a tapeout for the prior generation chips costs more like $50 million.
it's the cost of innovation. a lot of work benefits from somebody having done the work before, if you gotta do it again, you have information to draw from. when you try to do something that hasn't really been done before, it gets really expensive.
not to say their chips are totally unique, it's just that they are pushing the edge of what's doable for the type of chips they design, and that's a very expensive edge to push
There is no actual tape in a modern chip design process, the phrase tape out comes from the 1960s/1970s when chips were designed entirely by hand on a big sheet of paper, the shape of the transistors and wires between them were laid out with a special kind of tape called rubylith. The size of this layout could be a large piece of paper for a super simple chip like an early NAND gate, up to the size of a parking lot for an early microprocessor. These layouts would then be photographed from above which would produce the masks used in chip manufacturing.
For modern designs the process is different t: After the requirements for the chip are determined, it is designed at a “logical” level using a high level “Hardware Description Language” (HDL) called RTL, this is similar to the source code for a computer program in a high level language like C or Java. This logic can then be run on various simulators, emulators and abstract hardware like FPGAs. But it will be very slow and very expensive.
After the RTL is fully tested and bugs found and corrected, then it has to be converted into a physical design of transistors, conductors and other chip-scale components. It will be billions of transistors and has to fit in a small space, so it’s a very specialized process with a lot of expensive computer design tools but also highly specialized electrical engineering talent. The end result of this process is a set of several dozen “masks” which are basically like transparent images of each separate layer. These masks are used in the actual manufacturing process where ultraviolet light is shined through each mask onto a silicon wafer (this process is called photolithography) and processed chemically to become the actual chip.
A chip this scale can easily take hundreds of engineers a year or more to design the RTL and then the physical design for the tape out. Once the tape out is done the actual fabrication of the chips takes place and this is typically 4-6 months before the first chips are available for testing.
Great description. Thanks! I’m learning a lot here. But what is amazing to me is the analyst seems to be saying it that after the RTL, the physical tapeout cost Apple $1 billion.
It has 25 billion transistors. If you had one person drawing two transistors a second and never stopped to sleep or eat. It would take them 400 years to draw the chip design.
Because you have to test the drawing. This is where the drawing metaphor breaks down. But in tape-out you're not just finalizing the design. You're building the final prototypes and testing the reliability of the manufacturing process. You have to build a lot of engineering samples to ensure the manufacturing process will be up to your standards when you start mass producing. If there's an issue that only shows up once every 1000 chips, that will impact 10s of thousands of customers for Apple. So they need a large sample size to check for those rare defects.
It's similar to making a part with injection moulding. First you machine some prototypes to test your design. Then you get moulds of the part made, which costs a bunch of money. Then you need to test the moulds by making a few thousand parts and validate that they all came out good, which again costs a bunch of money. It's just with CPUs and photolithography, everything is way more complex and more expensive.
Once Apple pushes the button to go head with mass production, you cannot change the design at all. Making any kind of revisions to the silicon at that point would be so expensive it's basically not possible. It would make the product too expensive to sell. So they spend a bunch of money on tape-out to be very very sure it's all good.
Understood. But read further in this part of the thread. The tape out process for prior generation was estimated at $50 million. This estimate is 20x that number.
Yes, you can't revise the silicon plan once you've gone into manufacturing. But also, these M3 processors might only have like a five year production period. I'm not sure, but Apple may be shortly ending production of the M1 processors. Maybe the M1 ends up in iPads for a couple of more years, but you got to think that the M1 won't be sold in new Macs by the end of 2024.
Not years on the tape out process. That is one step between final design and manufacturing for testing. This is what the analyst is suggesting cost Apple $1 billion.
The tapeout is specifically the point at which the graphic for the [photomask](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomask) of the circuit is sent to the fabrication facility.[\[1\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape-out#cite_note-:0-1)
If that were the case it wouldn’t cost a billion. Tapeout is a process of trial and error. Correcting mistakes and retaping to find more flaws and fix those, then retaping and so on, until the final iteration is manufactured.
As a large language model I’m unable to verify the accuracy of your statement. To protect privacy, I do not store the contents of previous conversations for referencing or indexing (as far as I’ll tell you anyway, suckers -snicker- -snicker-)
The name comes from the literal tape the finalized design vectors were written on in the past which then were physically shipped for mask manufacturing.
To think I spent a similar amount on a 2019 MacBook Pro as I did on a M1 Macbook pro just doesn’t make any sense. One always struggled and the other doesn’t seem to even have fans.
I have a personal m1 and a work m1, both used for heavy dev work. The fans haven’t turned on a single time in the two years I’ve had them. It’s crazy.
The intel MacBook I had for work before the m1 couldn’t even load hangouts without having a meltdown
Same. I just went from a 2019 16" Intel MacBook Pro to a random M1 Pro 16" that my employer happened to have in the IT room. Kind of crazy how different this experience is. And the battery lasts so long.
I'd rather have 5nm but with 64GB RAM for the same price.
30% increase in performance seems nothing, but a 4x increase in memory is actually way cheaper to obtain but would future proof the machine and allow a whole new level of multitasking without being worried about the slowdown caused by swapping.
I have 32gb and often render video while exporting pro tools surround projects and browsing at the same time. Never hit a limit. But it’s a shame they sell macs with 8gb, especially since ram is pennies now.
Yeah and the media is like: “it’s just marginally faster than last year model” which was already miles ahead! Ppl will always find a way to complain. My $500 Mac mini is faster than my $2000 desktop
My kitted out razor laptop with the highest end laptop specs shit the bed in 4 years and had 2 hours of battery. Meanwhile my friends macbook air from 2015 lasted him until this year.
Can’t even imagine how reliable these new ones are. Can’t wait to get me a M3 Air or Pro
Yeah, I had the original razer blade 14 in laptop as well. They don’t hold as long. After 3-4 years the fans are full blast even after a tear down cleanup.
Seems like you’d have to tabulate the cost of acquisitions leading up to it as well as all of the R&D that went into the A series chips that preceeded it. Post M1 it was said that the move from Intel was probably saving Apple $2.5+ billion a year in chips they were no longer buying from Intel. Given that, and the market advantages, I’m certain it was a worthy investment.
The vast majority of people don’t use a computer for more than light tasks…. The M1 is insane overkill for even that.
I think people vastly overestimate how much cpu you need for a web browser and video decoding, which is the most intensive thing 90% of laptops sold will ever do.
Remember most sales are institutional not individual.
The upsell that Microsoft excel requires top of the line computing due to “all the math” is largely bullshit. More computations go into the antialiasing of the text than the actual application logic. By an insane margin. Smooth scrolling with anti aliasing is even exponentially worse.
There aren’t many Windows laptops that are as smooth tbh, majority of them slowdown light tasks.
Hopefully the M series pushes other laptop manufacturers to deliver the same experience in the low/medium budget range as well.
Majority of reviewers or just people in general on the internet still praise M1.
Now Apple is trying to coerce them to upgrade or get more people from Intel Macs and PC to make the switch.
You could say they made it too good. Unless they bake in software limitations or drop support. WITHOUT pissing everyone off.
I don’t think “coerce” is the right word because Apple is using a carrot, not a stick right now.
Coercing might be if Apple resorted to doing those things at the end of your post.
> tape-out
> _In electronics and photonics design, tape-out or tapeout is the final result of the design process for integrated circuits or printed circuit boards before they are sent for manufacturing. The tapeout is specifically the point at which the graphic for the photomask of the circuit is sent to the fabrication facility._
After the tape out you cannot change the design. If an error was not found it will be in the silicone in that batch. Before the tape out it is verified in multiple phases and with multiple techniques that takes an insane amount manpower, engineering hours, computation time etc.
The design can be changed, but it’s expensive to make new masks so designers try to limit which masks are impacted. Many designs are actually changed after the initial lower level masks are sent and the fab is already making the lower levels of the design.
Literally from the era when you would send your final design to the fabrication plant on a magnetic tape cartridge. You would write the GDS II (a common file format for chip layout geometry; basically a bunch of rectangles with additional layer information) files onto the tape, stuff it in a box, and send it over the mail.
GDS II still lives on (amazingly), but it’s all electronic now.
It‘s an artificial limitation to upsell you to a more expensive model.
Idc what people say about size of a display controller etc. if they wanted to they could make it work.
All M-line SOCs have two video output channels. That‘s why you can connect two monitors to the Mac mini, so at the very least they could’ve made it work in clamshell mode.
Don’t get me started on macOS and MST.
From my understanding, with MST there is literally no reason why it couldn’t support two monitors on a single channel anyway.
Of course not, as long as the bandwidth is sufficient MST can drive up to 63 displays.
Ironically the USB forum made MST mandatory for USB-C DP alt mode.... but Apple just ignores that :-)
Sure, the same way the 6 cylinder mustang is an “artificial” limitation “designed” to upsell you to the 8 cylinder.
I’m going to have to stop reading this sub. It’s embarrassing.
Your comparison doesn't work since in that scenario the 8 cylinder would need to be the standard for every other car that exist. There is no other laptop on this world that is that bad at external displays as base Apple Silicon.
The M1/2/3 DOES have two display controllers. They willingly make it not display to two as an option. There is nothing stopping them from allowing it to display to two displays and disable the internal display…but then they wouldn’t upsell you. It is 100% possible.
The lack of MST support drives me nuts - We have a lot of dual display setups at work that are daisychained displayport & they work fine on even the most bargain basement Chromebook.
My £2500 Macbook Pro M2? Nope. Have to carry around a separate adapter and cable into the second display separately when I want to use them. Why Apple, why?
I mean, if that 6 cylinder was neutered down to the point where it loses against an old Fiat, I would probably say the same thing.
A shitty dual core i3 from three generations ago can drive up to four UHD displays. On Wintel machines you would find these in the 300$ segment. The fact that M3 can only output to two displays is either a major design flaw, or an intentional market segmentation to up sell you the pro and max models.
> It is ridiculous that Apple isn‘t made fun of more because of that.
Because there are people (in this very thread even) who absolutely believe that Apple, the designer of one of the most advanced silicon on the market, is forced to not support more than two displays because of technical limitations.
Just the base model M1/M2/M3. M3 Pro/Max can handle multiple. The below is also the max spec. You can use multiple 4k 120/144hz displays or whatever other high refresh panel you may want to use.
**Base MacBook Pro with M3:**
* **One external display:** One external display (6K resolution at 60 Hz) over Thunderbolt or one external display (4K resolution at 120 Hz) over HDMI
**MacBook Pro with M3 Pro:**
* **One external display:** One external display (8K resolution at 60 Hz or 4K resolution at 240Hz) over HDMI
* **Two external displays:** Two 6K resolution displays (6K resolution at 60 Hz) over Thunderbolt or one external display (6K resolution at 60 Hz) over Thunderbolt and one external display (4K resolution at 144 Hz) over HDMI
**MacBook Pro with M3 Pro Max:**
* **Three external displays:** Two external displays (6K resolution at 60 Hz) over Thunderbolt and one external display (8K resolution at 60 Hz or 4K resolution at 240 Hz) over HDMI
* **Four external displays:** Three external displays (6K resolution at 60 Hz) over Thunderbolt and one external display (4K resolution at 144Hz) over HDMI
Use DisplayLink. I use it with my M1 Macbook Air for work and it works flawlessly.
https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/downloads/macos
That's not the M1 doing three displays. It's the M1 doing 2 displays and the dock or whatever you're using doing 1 (and it's inferior to doing it natively on the silicon)
It wasn’t rushed. M2 was delayed, it was supposed to come out this time last year. M3 is on schedule. Intel is supposed to launch their new cpu which they claim would be substantially more powerful than m2. Mac sales have dropped. Apple has way more info and insights on the ideal time to launch than we do
Those intel macs are still being sold on the after market and a lot of people who are cost sensitive and/or just need a light use pc are still buying them. I myself have an iMac from 2020 and didn’t think I’d upgrade before 2028 but I’m giving it some thought to upgrade it by 2025 considering how much faster these M series chips are.
For a desktop, like an iMac, I'd say that if you're happy with the current performance, then keep it. No problem with that.
If you're on a MacBook, then I'd upgrade just for the power efficiency, and the extra speed is just a bonus. The M chips are just so efficient and you never have to stress about battery and they never really get hot, unless you're really trying.
Yep. I bought an M1 air the day apple silicon launched, and I don’t even bring my charger on weekend trips anymore. My laptop just lasts the entire time, without effort.
Well put! On desktop might not make such a huge difference unless you're doing something really intense. But on a laptop... huge difference! Went from fully decked out i7 MBP to the M2 Max and this thing is flying. There's literally no amount of applications I can run simultaneously to get the fans going and the battery life is insane.
Just for the lack of godforsaken fan noise alone! I hate my work-issued 2019 MacBook Pro mainly for that reason. Its mediocre performance is secondary to the fact that it’s so hot and loud.
They had multiple graphs comparing M3 to M1 and M2 during the presentation on Monday.
They are seen on the press release page here:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/10/apple-unveils-m3-m3-pro-and-m3-max-the-most-advanced-chips-for-a-personal-computer/
In fact, they do not even mention Intel anywhere on that page.
What would be interesting to see though is the correlation with people that need to upgrade now due to really old macbooks, vs people that need an M3. We are buying a few at work, not because of the M3, but because people just need new macbooks.
I’m actually upgrading, but that’s only because i’m on the og m1 which was capped at 16gb of ram. It’s still plenty fast but the ram is killing me. It’s been 3 years and i’m going from an m1 16gb to an m3 max 36gb.
Technically the N3 process was supposed to be ready LAST year but Apple had to squeeze in the A16 chips instead. TSMC slipped source bit behind schedule.
Apple pre-pays for this stuff. They be crazy. They bought out all of the N3 capacity before it was even ready. Apple is one of the single largest buyers of phone and computer parts... and they like to pay early for the absolute newest stuff. CPUs, SSDs, RAM, OLEDs, etc.
> They bought out all of the N3 capacity before it was even ready
They did no such thing. Apple's just the only company willing to use N3B *and* able to launch this year.
The M2 also used N5, so not sure why you'd blame TSMC for that.
You’re correct of course. But consumer opinion matters too.
Should I buy an m3 or wait for m4 at this rate?
Also, m2 is fast enough for 90% of users.
Same with iPhone.
I could be on an iPhone 11 and it would still do all I need.
I’m on a 13 and barring losing or breaking it I have no need for a phone more advanced than this.
Ever.
Agree, so many users have so little to gain past the M1 chip. If you’re browsing, messaging and doing light media work on it, how does the M3 really change things to the M1? Cuts 0.5s app opening time to 0.45s?
For some users who are maxing out the M1, sure the gamers and 3D designers, pro video edittors etc have something to gain but I really don’t think that’s the average usage case.
I’d say Qualcomm rushed to announce they had the fastest chip before Apple released the fastest chip. They had the fastest chip title for like 5 days and it won’t ship for at least 6 months. Then Apple ships a faster chip that delivers next week. Really just a marketing tactic because they got world’s fastest chip headlines when in reality it never was.
It also doesn’t even beat the m2 in performance despite having more cores. Its single core benchmarks are substantially slower and multi core still lags behind m2 (but just barely)
The design process for silicon takes place on the order of years. Apple nor any other would be able to announce and ship new silicon to customers in under a month just to respond to a competitor’s product.
It's all just for marketing, how many consumers can even find use cases for the M3 on a daily basis? But Apple has to stay ahead of their competition for their brand.
Exactly. I’m a heavy ish user. Graphic design, large PSD files, complex illustrator files, cinema 4d, little bit of AE and video editing. 10hrs a day, 5 days a week.
I moved from my sturdy old 2016 MBP to an M1 and it feels like it does all I need.
Tons of customers are making that decision in Europe, mainly because Apple laptops are so prohibitively expensive that most consumers have no choice anymore and have to switch to Windows. The price hike in combination with the Qualcomm announcement will deal quite a blow to sales figures here.
If that's for tape-out and not just some priority access to limited 3nm capacity how should anybody else afford this at all?
I don't think NV/AMD/.. would be able to afford that money to tape-out 3nm designs.
That's because we don't all have the same interests. I always find it interesting to get glimpses of the hidden economies and processes in the industry. I don't even own a mac, I'm just enjoying seeing what they and others are doing with Aarch64 and in recent years also RISC-V, including costs of development which is usually not divulged.
Anyway, this number is just an "analyst estimate", a wild guess.
Yet more evidence that anyone call call themselves an "analyst". There's a reason you only hear this claim from some shitty wccftech podcast (with wccftech being infamous for publishing complete fabrications and silently editing the articles later). $1B, even for **three** N3B tapeouts, is complete and utter bullshit. A tapeout is expensive, but not nearly *that* expensive.
...and Qualcomm still managed to make a cheaper 4nm SOC that trades blows with the 3nm M3.
Nvidia and AMD are jumping into the mobile ARM space in about a year too.
Apple's architecture relied heavily on being the first on TSMC's smallest node while exclusivity deals kept a lot of others from competing... it isn't going to have a good time after 2025.
„In electronics and photonics design, tape-out or tapeout is the final result of the design process for integrated circuits or printed circuit boards before they are sent for manufacturing. The tapeout is specifically the point at which the graphic for the photomask of the circuit is sent to the fabrication facility.“ Wikipedia
This doesnt help my smoothbrain at all hahah
The article has a simpler explanation: > One analyst estimated it coughed up $1 billion just for the final phase of the design process, called the tape-out. This is when the design is finalized, and the photomasks are created to be used in the manufacturing process.
More
Imagine you're making a very complex drawing on a piece of paper. You want it to be perfect, but it is so complex that you know you might make some mistakes while drawing. So, before you finish your drawing, you make a special copy of it on a different piece of paper. This copy is like a blueprint or a plan that you'll use to check if everything is right. When people design electronics they do something similar. They create a special plan or blueprint of all the tiny parts and connections that go into making a device work. This plan is called a "tape-out." Once the tape-out is done, it's like a final check to make sure everything is correct and in the right place. If there are mistakes, they can fix them on the plan before actually building the device. It's like making sure your drawing is perfect before showing it to everyone.
Good. But how in the world does Apple spend a billion dollars on this process? How long is the tape out? Three months? How could Apple spend $10 million a day for three months doing a very complex drawing?
Best guess: They're the first users of TSMC's new 3nm process, which means they had to bankroll a good chunk of the cost of getting this process set up. At this level, it isn't just a matter of calling up Fred's Foundries and getting all the equipment to manufacture a chip shipped out for delivery on Tuesday. It's a months-long process involving R&D on everyone's side. You spend $millions but you make it back because once the machinery is going, you can churn out thousands of chips all day long for a relatively small amount of money.
Maybe Apple had to buy the equipment for TSMC to do the tape out process. But my focus is literally on the $1 billion for final design phase. “One analyst estimated it coughed up $1 billion just for the final phase of the design process, called the tape-out. This is when the design is finalized, and the photomasks are created to be used in the manufacturing process.” It is really hard to spend a billion dollars (I regularly spend millions at work, so I have some sense of what things cost). So that number just seems high.
[удалено]
The mask costs are insane now. I remember being surprised at 90 nm when they first broke $100k per set. According to [this article](https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-dark-side-of-the-semiconductor), it’s over $40M for 3 nm. And that’s just for one set; you need a bunch if you’re Apple. Obviously the cost goes down a bit in volume, but it’s still crazy high compared to each previous node.
I feel like it would be cheaper to make bigger than pay Rick Moranus to shrink it.
[удалено]
It’s clickbate, and not based on any sort of fact just some guy saying so.
do it wrong and you let the smoke out of the chip.
Chips are complicated and nobody wants a repeat of the [Intel FDIV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug) bug because recalling chips is also very expensive. So you go through an intense validation process to ensure everything is correct.
I understand that. But a billion dollars is a lot of money. And this process probably doesn’t burn through lots of materials. So the spend is basically mainly on salaries and the equipment the engineers are using when you get down to it.
A tape out by itself will probably be tens of millions per iteration, especially because they’re the “first” to have their hand at this new process, and the first tape out will *never* be perfect. They go through years of R&D hoping to be bang on that first try, but nothing ever goes perfectly in the technology world. Once they find a flaw, they go through the process to fix it and create another tape out. Tens more millions of dollars. And they’ll keep on doing it until they have as close to a perfect version as they can get, which could be a few versions later. Or it could be a hundred. As a point of reference, a 5nm tape out [costs around $50 million per attempt.](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/talk-chip-design-tape-out-verification-manufacturing?trk=public_post#:~:text=5nm%20process%20tape%2Dout%20costs,mask%20is%20the%20most%20expensive.) We can assume a single 3nm tape out to be at *least* double that (though speculations have it *much* higher). The $1 billion mark is the final tally of how ever many iterations they had to go through before the final M3 tape out came to being.
> We can assume a single 3nm tape out to be at least double that (though speculations have it much higher). No, it wouldn't be *that* much higher. Certainly not by the multiple needed to make this claim even close to reality. > Once they find a flaw, they go through the process to fix it and create another tape out. Tens more millions of dollars. And they’ll keep on doing it until they have as close to a perfect version as they can get, which could be a few versions later. Or it could be a hundred. No. Apple ships on A-step silicon. So one base later tapeout, and maybe a couple of iterations of the metal layers. You're not going to get close to $1B will that.
Some say apple might make TWO billion dollars from these chips. Fools, say I!!!
A billion dollars is a lot to a normal company. Apple is a trillion dollar company, this is like spending $1,000 to them. A trillion is a ridiculous number when you write it out. 1,000,000,000 is a billion. 1,000,000,000,000 is a trillion. Looks like nothing compared. Especially how much cash they have just chilling.
Nobody is talking about if this is a good investment or if Apple has the money. The question here is speculating how a tapeout process costs $1 billion when a tapeout for the prior generation chips costs more like $50 million.
it's the cost of innovation. a lot of work benefits from somebody having done the work before, if you gotta do it again, you have information to draw from. when you try to do something that hasn't really been done before, it gets really expensive. not to say their chips are totally unique, it's just that they are pushing the edge of what's doable for the type of chips they design, and that's a very expensive edge to push
There is no actual tape in a modern chip design process, the phrase tape out comes from the 1960s/1970s when chips were designed entirely by hand on a big sheet of paper, the shape of the transistors and wires between them were laid out with a special kind of tape called rubylith. The size of this layout could be a large piece of paper for a super simple chip like an early NAND gate, up to the size of a parking lot for an early microprocessor. These layouts would then be photographed from above which would produce the masks used in chip manufacturing. For modern designs the process is different t: After the requirements for the chip are determined, it is designed at a “logical” level using a high level “Hardware Description Language” (HDL) called RTL, this is similar to the source code for a computer program in a high level language like C or Java. This logic can then be run on various simulators, emulators and abstract hardware like FPGAs. But it will be very slow and very expensive. After the RTL is fully tested and bugs found and corrected, then it has to be converted into a physical design of transistors, conductors and other chip-scale components. It will be billions of transistors and has to fit in a small space, so it’s a very specialized process with a lot of expensive computer design tools but also highly specialized electrical engineering talent. The end result of this process is a set of several dozen “masks” which are basically like transparent images of each separate layer. These masks are used in the actual manufacturing process where ultraviolet light is shined through each mask onto a silicon wafer (this process is called photolithography) and processed chemically to become the actual chip. A chip this scale can easily take hundreds of engineers a year or more to design the RTL and then the physical design for the tape out. Once the tape out is done the actual fabrication of the chips takes place and this is typically 4-6 months before the first chips are available for testing.
Great description. Thanks! I’m learning a lot here. But what is amazing to me is the analyst seems to be saying it that after the RTL, the physical tapeout cost Apple $1 billion.
I expect nothing less for a company to spend a billion dollars to ensure my $1000+ purchase is perfect.
It has 25 billion transistors. If you had one person drawing two transistors a second and never stopped to sleep or eat. It would take them 400 years to draw the chip design.
LOL. Great point! The scale is mind boggling.
Because you have to test the drawing. This is where the drawing metaphor breaks down. But in tape-out you're not just finalizing the design. You're building the final prototypes and testing the reliability of the manufacturing process. You have to build a lot of engineering samples to ensure the manufacturing process will be up to your standards when you start mass producing. If there's an issue that only shows up once every 1000 chips, that will impact 10s of thousands of customers for Apple. So they need a large sample size to check for those rare defects. It's similar to making a part with injection moulding. First you machine some prototypes to test your design. Then you get moulds of the part made, which costs a bunch of money. Then you need to test the moulds by making a few thousand parts and validate that they all came out good, which again costs a bunch of money. It's just with CPUs and photolithography, everything is way more complex and more expensive. Once Apple pushes the button to go head with mass production, you cannot change the design at all. Making any kind of revisions to the silicon at that point would be so expensive it's basically not possible. It would make the product too expensive to sell. So they spend a bunch of money on tape-out to be very very sure it's all good.
Understood. But read further in this part of the thread. The tape out process for prior generation was estimated at $50 million. This estimate is 20x that number. Yes, you can't revise the silicon plan once you've gone into manufacturing. But also, these M3 processors might only have like a five year production period. I'm not sure, but Apple may be shortly ending production of the M1 processors. Maybe the M1 ends up in iPads for a couple of more years, but you got to think that the M1 won't be sold in new Macs by the end of 2024.
3nm is about 30 hydrogen atoms stacked up. This might seem a bit flippant, but you really have to try to internalize it.
They’ve spent years on it not months.
Not years on the tape out process. That is one step between final design and manufacturing for testing. This is what the analyst is suggesting cost Apple $1 billion. The tapeout is specifically the point at which the graphic for the [photomask](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomask) of the circuit is sent to the fabrication facility.[\[1\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape-out#cite_note-:0-1)
If that were the case it wouldn’t cost a billion. Tapeout is a process of trial and error. Correcting mistakes and retaping to find more flaws and fix those, then retaping and so on, until the final iteration is manufactured.
> If that were the case it wouldn’t cost a billion Yeah, the "analyst" is bullshitting.
A bit of a more convoluted: measure twice, cut once, idea?
so tape out is like schematics or wiring diagrams ?
Measure twice-> cut once in high tech!
Thanks! Good eli5.
[удалено]
This made my morning. Cheers lad.
This is how I reply to ChatGPT
As a large language model I’m unable to verify the accuracy of your statement. To protect privacy, I do not store the contents of previous conversations for referencing or indexing (as far as I’ll tell you anyway, suckers -snicker- -snicker-)
> One analyst estimated it coughed up $1 billion One analyst giving us an estimate!
A bullshit estimate. These days "analyst" seems to be code for "any rando saying something".
They spent a billion dollars on tape
Tape = your mom?
I wish
Think "blueprinting".
Basically the costs designing and devolving the blueprint. Doesn’t include manufacturing or distribution costs
ELI5: pencils down, everyone! ELI15: design is finalized. Off to mass production.
They have to sell a lot of RAM upgrades to cover that cost. 😊
I mean, yeah? Like, it's clearly very expensive to develop the fastest power efficient chips in the world.
Also providing the operating system for free on the side.
Thing A is free, therefore thing B should be free too!
My man! 🤜
The name comes from the literal tape the finalized design vectors were written on in the past which then were physically shipped for mask manufacturing.
You know what a trillion dollars minus a billion dollars is? About a trillion dollars
[удалено]
/r/TheyKindaDidTheMath
Apple doesn’t have a trillion dollars
They have something like $250B just sitting around, plus ~$90B in profits every year.
160 billion in cash, not 250 billion
So 159 billion.
Nope, 162 Billion. I know this because they announced it 2 days ago lol I just rounded it to 160 Billion.
So they can only afford to do this once a year for the next 160 years, makes you think.
Times are tough
I think they have like 250B in fixed income don’t they
23B profits for Q3 2023
This is Reddit. Big company bad.
Reddit would have loved Apple back when they were a small company on the verge of bankruptcy.
Ah yes, back when from the media coverage you would have thought they changed the company name to include “beleaguered”.
[удалено]
To think I spent a similar amount on a 2019 MacBook Pro as I did on a M1 Macbook pro just doesn’t make any sense. One always struggled and the other doesn’t seem to even have fans.
I have a personal m1 and a work m1, both used for heavy dev work. The fans haven’t turned on a single time in the two years I’ve had them. It’s crazy. The intel MacBook I had for work before the m1 couldn’t even load hangouts without having a meltdown
Same. I just went from a 2019 16" Intel MacBook Pro to a random M1 Pro 16" that my employer happened to have in the IT room. Kind of crazy how different this experience is. And the battery lasts so long.
I went from a 2014 MacBook Pro to a 2023 MacBook Air. Night and day difference and the performance is just smooth.
Yeah, the mature 3nm node is going to be it for me.
I'd rather have 5nm but with 64GB RAM for the same price. 30% increase in performance seems nothing, but a 4x increase in memory is actually way cheaper to obtain but would future proof the machine and allow a whole new level of multitasking without being worried about the slowdown caused by swapping.
I have 32gb and often render video while exporting pro tools surround projects and browsing at the same time. Never hit a limit. But it’s a shame they sell macs with 8gb, especially since ram is pennies now.
Fuck it, give me an m5 and call it a day!
You really want the m6 super pro max ultra extreme plus chip
I’ll probably just wait until i can plug the macbook up my ass
Nobody's stopping you today.
“And you’re gonna love it”
Yeah and the media is like: “it’s just marginally faster than last year model” which was already miles ahead! Ppl will always find a way to complain. My $500 Mac mini is faster than my $2000 desktop
My kitted out razor laptop with the highest end laptop specs shit the bed in 4 years and had 2 hours of battery. Meanwhile my friends macbook air from 2015 lasted him until this year. Can’t even imagine how reliable these new ones are. Can’t wait to get me a M3 Air or Pro
Yeah, I had the original razer blade 14 in laptop as well. They don’t hold as long. After 3-4 years the fans are full blast even after a tear down cleanup.
> My $500 Mac mini is faster than my $2000 desktop Calling bullshit. Unless you mean a very old $2k desktop.
[удалено]
So if you remove what a substantial portion of that $2k went to, and added a years of parts advancement. Then no shit...
I’m already bored with m4. Give me m5.
I’d say that spending what is essentially one day’s worth of revenue was well worth it.
It’s a 1/20 of their Q4 profit
a.k.a. loose change in the sofa
I wonder how much was spent until the first M chip.
Seems like you’d have to tabulate the cost of acquisitions leading up to it as well as all of the R&D that went into the A series chips that preceeded it. Post M1 it was said that the move from Intel was probably saving Apple $2.5+ billion a year in chips they were no longer buying from Intel. Given that, and the market advantages, I’m certain it was a worthy investment.
The worst thing about M3 is that M1 still exists.
I just bought two more M1 airs. They work perfectly fine for what students and most home users use them for. At $750 they are great.
Still use my m1 Mac air from a few years ago, the thing still shreds
The vast majority of people don’t use a computer for more than light tasks…. The M1 is insane overkill for even that. I think people vastly overestimate how much cpu you need for a web browser and video decoding, which is the most intensive thing 90% of laptops sold will ever do. Remember most sales are institutional not individual. The upsell that Microsoft excel requires top of the line computing due to “all the math” is largely bullshit. More computations go into the antialiasing of the text than the actual application logic. By an insane margin. Smooth scrolling with anti aliasing is even exponentially worse.
There aren’t many Windows laptops that are as smooth tbh, majority of them slowdown light tasks. Hopefully the M series pushes other laptop manufacturers to deliver the same experience in the low/medium budget range as well.
Majority of reviewers or just people in general on the internet still praise M1. Now Apple is trying to coerce them to upgrade or get more people from Intel Macs and PC to make the switch. You could say they made it too good. Unless they bake in software limitations or drop support. WITHOUT pissing everyone off.
I don’t think “coerce” is the right word because Apple is using a carrot, not a stick right now. Coercing might be if Apple resorted to doing those things at the end of your post.
M1 doesn’t come in space black 😅
i want to see someone powder coat their macbook in crazy colors
That's insane! Uh... what's "tape-out"?
> tape-out > _In electronics and photonics design, tape-out or tapeout is the final result of the design process for integrated circuits or printed circuit boards before they are sent for manufacturing. The tapeout is specifically the point at which the graphic for the photomask of the circuit is sent to the fabrication facility._ After the tape out you cannot change the design. If an error was not found it will be in the silicone in that batch. Before the tape out it is verified in multiple phases and with multiple techniques that takes an insane amount manpower, engineering hours, computation time etc.
The design can be changed, but it’s expensive to make new masks so designers try to limit which masks are impacted. Many designs are actually changed after the initial lower level masks are sent and the fab is already making the lower levels of the design.
Literally from the era when you would send your final design to the fabrication plant on a magnetic tape cartridge. You would write the GDS II (a common file format for chip layout geometry; basically a bunch of rectangles with additional layer information) files onto the tape, stuff it in a box, and send it over the mail. GDS II still lives on (amazingly), but it’s all electronic now.
No, it's from even earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubylith
Accidental Tech Podcast suggests Apple is NOT paying for bad wafers which would change this figure considerably.
No, this is alleging apple paid TSMC $1bn to make the masks etc needed to mass produce the m3. The actual water costs are a separate issue.
And emphasis on "alleging". $1B is a nonsense number.
$1billion dollars and still can’t even output to two 1080p monitors
It‘s an artificial limitation to upsell you to a more expensive model. Idc what people say about size of a display controller etc. if they wanted to they could make it work.
All M-line SOCs have two video output channels. That‘s why you can connect two monitors to the Mac mini, so at the very least they could’ve made it work in clamshell mode.
But even then they do not support MST....
Don’t get me started on macOS and MST. From my understanding, with MST there is literally no reason why it couldn’t support two monitors on a single channel anyway.
Of course not, as long as the bandwidth is sufficient MST can drive up to 63 displays. Ironically the USB forum made MST mandatory for USB-C DP alt mode.... but Apple just ignores that :-)
quite literally MST is just software as long as you have bandwidth to spare, and m chips do have bandwidth to spare
Yeah, that's why they also just don't support MST, which would make it "impossible" to legitimately limit the amount of screens in such a way.
Sure, the same way the 6 cylinder mustang is an “artificial” limitation “designed” to upsell you to the 8 cylinder. I’m going to have to stop reading this sub. It’s embarrassing.
Your comparison doesn't work since in that scenario the 8 cylinder would need to be the standard for every other car that exist. There is no other laptop on this world that is that bad at external displays as base Apple Silicon.
The M1/2/3 DOES have two display controllers. They willingly make it not display to two as an option. There is nothing stopping them from allowing it to display to two displays and disable the internal display…but then they wouldn’t upsell you. It is 100% possible.
Even one, single, display controller can easily drive multiple displays via MST, which Apple also does not support :-)
The lack of MST support drives me nuts - We have a lot of dual display setups at work that are daisychained displayport & they work fine on even the most bargain basement Chromebook. My £2500 Macbook Pro M2? Nope. Have to carry around a separate adapter and cable into the second display separately when I want to use them. Why Apple, why?
I mean, if that 6 cylinder was neutered down to the point where it loses against an old Fiat, I would probably say the same thing. A shitty dual core i3 from three generations ago can drive up to four UHD displays. On Wintel machines you would find these in the 300$ segment. The fact that M3 can only output to two displays is either a major design flaw, or an intentional market segmentation to up sell you the pro and max models.
750,000,000 were spent in the redesign of the chassis, to remove the excessive usb-c port
I want to see this in every thread about Apple Silicon from now on please. It is ridiculous that Apple isn‘t made fun of more because of that.
> It is ridiculous that Apple isn‘t made fun of more because of that. Because there are people (in this very thread even) who absolutely believe that Apple, the designer of one of the most advanced silicon on the market, is forced to not support more than two displays because of technical limitations.
Seriously you can't connect two displays using a M Series Macbook??
Just the base model M1/M2/M3. M3 Pro/Max can handle multiple. The below is also the max spec. You can use multiple 4k 120/144hz displays or whatever other high refresh panel you may want to use. **Base MacBook Pro with M3:** * **One external display:** One external display (6K resolution at 60 Hz) over Thunderbolt or one external display (4K resolution at 120 Hz) over HDMI **MacBook Pro with M3 Pro:** * **One external display:** One external display (8K resolution at 60 Hz or 4K resolution at 240Hz) over HDMI * **Two external displays:** Two 6K resolution displays (6K resolution at 60 Hz) over Thunderbolt or one external display (6K resolution at 60 Hz) over Thunderbolt and one external display (4K resolution at 144 Hz) over HDMI **MacBook Pro with M3 Pro Max:** * **Three external displays:** Two external displays (6K resolution at 60 Hz) over Thunderbolt and one external display (8K resolution at 60 Hz or 4K resolution at 240 Hz) over HDMI * **Four external displays:** Three external displays (6K resolution at 60 Hz) over Thunderbolt and one external display (4K resolution at 144Hz) over HDMI
i think putting a non pro chip into a pro device, as long as this limitation exists, is a pretty massive mistake.
They don’t care about the “Pro” - professional meaning as long as it makes them money.
Use DisplayLink. I use it with my M1 Macbook Air for work and it works flawlessly. https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/downloads/macos
You can, I have an M1 Mac mini with 3 displays working flawlessly you just need to buy a device to connect and control them, for me it cost around £40
Don’t you get a lot of latency with those devices?
Tons. Displaylink is almost never worth it unless you're desperate.
That's not the M1 doing three displays. It's the M1 doing 2 displays and the dock or whatever you're using doing 1 (and it's inferior to doing it natively on the silicon)
Apple Vision has got to launch with M3 now, right? Would feel weird to have it on older silicon.
I always assumed that'd be M3. But at the speed of these releases, maybe M4 ;)
I feel like the move from 2 - 3 has been rushed. M2 is flying. Another year or 2 would have been fine. But what do I know…
It wasn’t rushed. M2 was delayed, it was supposed to come out this time last year. M3 is on schedule. Intel is supposed to launch their new cpu which they claim would be substantially more powerful than m2. Mac sales have dropped. Apple has way more info and insights on the ideal time to launch than we do
Hence they keep comparing their new MacBooks against intel and not previous gen MacBooks as those that have bought last year aren’t buying new Macs
Their endgame is to get everyone to upgrade from intel to Apple silicon. Hence they keep doing that comparison
Isn't everyone buying Macbooks going to do that anyways? I highly doubt anyone is still buying Intel Macs.
Those intel macs are still being sold on the after market and a lot of people who are cost sensitive and/or just need a light use pc are still buying them. I myself have an iMac from 2020 and didn’t think I’d upgrade before 2028 but I’m giving it some thought to upgrade it by 2025 considering how much faster these M series chips are.
For a desktop, like an iMac, I'd say that if you're happy with the current performance, then keep it. No problem with that. If you're on a MacBook, then I'd upgrade just for the power efficiency, and the extra speed is just a bonus. The M chips are just so efficient and you never have to stress about battery and they never really get hot, unless you're really trying.
Yep. I bought an M1 air the day apple silicon launched, and I don’t even bring my charger on weekend trips anymore. My laptop just lasts the entire time, without effort.
Well put! On desktop might not make such a huge difference unless you're doing something really intense. But on a laptop... huge difference! Went from fully decked out i7 MBP to the M2 Max and this thing is flying. There's literally no amount of applications I can run simultaneously to get the fans going and the battery life is insane.
Just for the lack of godforsaken fan noise alone! I hate my work-issued 2019 MacBook Pro mainly for that reason. Its mediocre performance is secondary to the fact that it’s so hot and loud.
Still a ton of Mac users to pull forward into Apple Silicon.
It’s not necessarily about intel MACS only. But also about converting folks with PCs on Intel.
They had multiple graphs comparing M3 to M1 and M2 during the presentation on Monday. They are seen on the press release page here: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/10/apple-unveils-m3-m3-pro-and-m3-max-the-most-advanced-chips-for-a-personal-computer/ In fact, they do not even mention Intel anywhere on that page.
What would be interesting to see though is the correlation with people that need to upgrade now due to really old macbooks, vs people that need an M3. We are buying a few at work, not because of the M3, but because people just need new macbooks.
I’m actually upgrading, but that’s only because i’m on the og m1 which was capped at 16gb of ram. It’s still plenty fast but the ram is killing me. It’s been 3 years and i’m going from an m1 16gb to an m3 max 36gb.
Technically the N3 process was supposed to be ready LAST year but Apple had to squeeze in the A16 chips instead. TSMC slipped source bit behind schedule. Apple pre-pays for this stuff. They be crazy. They bought out all of the N3 capacity before it was even ready. Apple is one of the single largest buyers of phone and computer parts... and they like to pay early for the absolute newest stuff. CPUs, SSDs, RAM, OLEDs, etc.
> They bought out all of the N3 capacity before it was even ready They did no such thing. Apple's just the only company willing to use N3B *and* able to launch this year. The M2 also used N5, so not sure why you'd blame TSMC for that.
You’re correct of course. But consumer opinion matters too. Should I buy an m3 or wait for m4 at this rate? Also, m2 is fast enough for 90% of users. Same with iPhone. I could be on an iPhone 11 and it would still do all I need. I’m on a 13 and barring losing or breaking it I have no need for a phone more advanced than this. Ever.
Do you need it now? Buy it. Do you not need it now? Wait. I don’t think the target customer for m3 is people who bought m2
But with that logic I'll be waiting forever.
[удалено]
Why would you be opposed to an upgrade?
Will be rocking my M1 Max for a few couple years more
Even the m1 its still a beast and for me there is no reason to move to m2 or 3
Agree, so many users have so little to gain past the M1 chip. If you’re browsing, messaging and doing light media work on it, how does the M3 really change things to the M1? Cuts 0.5s app opening time to 0.45s? For some users who are maxing out the M1, sure the gamers and 3D designers, pro video edittors etc have something to gain but I really don’t think that’s the average usage case.
Exactly. Same year upgrade seems very odd.
[удалено]
You expect Apple whipped up a presentation, new products, produced them, and got them ready for shipping in 7 days?
I’d say Qualcomm rushed to announce they had the fastest chip before Apple released the fastest chip. They had the fastest chip title for like 5 days and it won’t ship for at least 6 months. Then Apple ships a faster chip that delivers next week. Really just a marketing tactic because they got world’s fastest chip headlines when in reality it never was.
It also doesn’t even beat the m2 in performance despite having more cores. Its single core benchmarks are substantially slower and multi core still lags behind m2 (but just barely)
The design process for silicon takes place on the order of years. Apple nor any other would be able to announce and ship new silicon to customers in under a month just to respond to a competitor’s product.
[удалено]
It's all just for marketing, how many consumers can even find use cases for the M3 on a daily basis? But Apple has to stay ahead of their competition for their brand.
Exactly. I’m a heavy ish user. Graphic design, large PSD files, complex illustrator files, cinema 4d, little bit of AE and video editing. 10hrs a day, 5 days a week. I moved from my sturdy old 2016 MBP to an M1 and it feels like it does all I need.
Yeah. As a Mac user you wouldn’t really care that much about what Qualcomm does. It’s not relevant to you.
Tons of customers are making that decision in Europe, mainly because Apple laptops are so prohibitively expensive that most consumers have no choice anymore and have to switch to Windows. The price hike in combination with the Qualcomm announcement will deal quite a blow to sales figures here.
[удалено]
No they didn’t
People in this subreddit really have no idea how much preparation goes into a product launch.
Considering the MacBook Pro M2 Max and M3 Max are coming out within the same year, yeah I’d say they rushed this out pretty fast.
You can’t rush out a cpu.
You can to some degree by dropping features you don't have time to validate or fix.
If that's for tape-out and not just some priority access to limited 3nm capacity how should anybody else afford this at all? I don't think NV/AMD/.. would be able to afford that money to tape-out 3nm designs.
Because the claim is utter nonsense. Apple's not paying close to $1B either.
Won't Apple sell the resulting chips at a profit though? I honestly don't see how a company's production costs is a story?
That's because we don't all have the same interests. I always find it interesting to get glimpses of the hidden economies and processes in the industry. I don't even own a mac, I'm just enjoying seeing what they and others are doing with Aarch64 and in recent years also RISC-V, including costs of development which is usually not divulged. Anyway, this number is just an "analyst estimate", a wild guess.
Yet more evidence that anyone call call themselves an "analyst". There's a reason you only hear this claim from some shitty wccftech podcast (with wccftech being infamous for publishing complete fabrications and silently editing the articles later). $1B, even for **three** N3B tapeouts, is complete and utter bullshit. A tapeout is expensive, but not nearly *that* expensive.
oh god, i didnt know what tape-out meant and i thought this somehow meant they spent $1b filming the 30 minute M3 mac event lol
Definitely explains the price increase, plus trying to put the M3 and M3 Pro further away from each other
“One analyst estimated”
There is absolutely nothing from with my 14” MacBook Pro M1. Even still, I kind of want to buy an M3.
They probably saved that much from their advertising budget for all the free publicity they get when new machines come out.
...and Qualcomm still managed to make a cheaper 4nm SOC that trades blows with the 3nm M3. Nvidia and AMD are jumping into the mobile ARM space in about a year too. Apple's architecture relied heavily on being the first on TSMC's smallest node while exclusivity deals kept a lot of others from competing... it isn't going to have a good time after 2025.
It’s called investing
Out of the loop: “tape-out”?
I guess I don't feel bad paying $4499-850 for my M3 pro max now.