As mentioned elsewhere, it's also important to remember that the batteries were fully serviceable - available for purchase, nicely compartmentized and with easy connectors. The products were definitely not designed to die with their batteries. They just weren't compliant with the new rules - this is quite different than a certain fruit company that have historically made battery replacements difficult for even service technicians to complete without consequences like constant user prompts.
I imagine the various products had their specific own conflicts with the rules, like requiring too much disassembly (the Pro controller in particular has to be disassembled from the front first), or the Switch 2 holding the battery with double-sided tape. Not to mention that you might not realize that the screw are JIS spec, stripping them with the Philips screwdriver you found in your drawer. Also triwing.
To be clear, all the mentioned Nintendo products are already designed for battery replacement, with well-contained battery units and easy connectors, and the batteries are available and problem-free to replace unlike for a certain fruit company.
The redesign is because the ease of accessing the batteries did not comply with the new rules. The pro controller in particular requires almost complete disassembly to get to the module, and the Switch 2's battery uses double-sided adhesive which is finicky. Joycons can also be a bit finicky to navigate for the uninitiated.
Also, as the device is Japanese, it uses JIS screws rather than Philips (in addition to triwing), which could surprise some. These are superior for service - Philips screws are specifically designed to strip during assembly to prevent over-torquing - but they do require you to have the right, "exotic" screwdriver. As JIS screwdrivers are compatible with and superior in bite even for Philips screws, it's a good habit to just always use those instead for electronics. iFixit kits and such include them.
I recently changed the battery of my Switch 1, if for most of the process it was easy, and I really struggled on two points. 1) the plastic part into which the screws are screwed broke, and it is tough to remove them. 2) ungluing the battery with isopropyl alcohol without breaking anything was very long for me.
I recently changed the USB port of my Fairphone 4 and it was just unscrewing and screwing.
So for me it is a great change from Nintendo.
There's been some recent developments with removing batteries glued to the device: use floss or some other thin string and saw through the glue. The string won't pierce the battery and can fit in tight spots.
At some point, only charging worked (and for one usb-c cable only on one side, which is weird given connecter is symmetrical), data and usb-audio stopped working.
With my previous Samsung phone contact became very unreliable after 3 years. A new connector costs only a few euros, but I cannot do the soldering by myself and it cost me around 40€.
Phillips Heads: The design is often criticized for its tendency to cam out at lower torque levels than other "cross head" designs. There has long been a popular belief that this was a deliberate feature of the design, to assemble aluminium aircraft without overtightening the fasteners.[15]: 85 [16] There is no good evidence for this suggestion, and the property is not mentioned in the original patents.[17]
They describe it as a feature in their later 1942 patent (US2474994A), in the description of which they mention it to protect against powertools with poor torque control, claiming that a better screw would only be possible if power tools and their torque control were perfect and that it is therefore a required feature.
The original designs did not reference this though, so it seems more like them adopting an observed behavior as a feature - so the statement that it was originally designed to be that way is indeed off, but the company did adopt the behavior in official paperwork.
It has more to do with manufacturing techniques. Screw heads are stamped. A cone shape, with all sloped sides, is easier to stamp reliably. Even the famed Robertson bits from canada have a slight slope for this reason.
If I were to speculate, the point of phillips head was to just be easier to use than flat head while still being easy to manufacture 90 years ago. The better heads introduced since then have more intricate designs that require more precise manufacturing than a simple stamp
I work with a product that has to use Philips head for one specific area. I hate those damn screws. They all need to be torqued to a specific value and this requires putting an significant amount of force axial to the screw to keep the driver from slipping. If you do slip, you'll probably strip the head and now it needs to be replaced. It doesn't help that there's a gasket around the plate that adds extra running torque. Good luck getting a countersunk #2 screw out. The rest of the product uses hex heads so those are incredibly easy to install.
Your comment is interesting but next time say "Apple," right to repair isn't really about this Portlandia-esque mealy mouthed nerdery your rhetoric trades in. The batteries cost "$1" so I should be able to just buy them and quickly replace them. It's that simple.
Excuse me? That derogatory tongue-in-cheek way of referring to that company is not "mealy mouthed nerdery", as everyone and their mother understands who I am referring to. The lawsuit mitigation communication I suspect you're confusing it for requires it to be genuinely unclear who you mean.
However, batteries cannot cost $1 unless you want $1 worth of battery. Modern batteries are genuinely complex devices with extremely tight assembly tolerances, and something like a phone battery should be expected to be more like 10-40 USD.
Cheapo cells exist, but they genuinely have issues like poor assembly tolerances introducing risks of it deciding to spontaneously transform into a pocket-sized smoke machine.
Am European, yeah but pozidriv was never used for tiny screws. We have also pretty much migrated all screw sizes to torx nowadays, so I only ever really see pozidriv on older appliances and hardware, while Philips mostly happen on imports.
Philips in PZ screws is generally going to cam out like a regular philips head, just because you're not biting into the top with the PZ... triangle bits? I'm sure there's a technical name haha. So you can get by with that, a self-selected crappy philips experience when you could've chosen pozidriv bliss.
Philips in JIS screws is an exercise in anger management. IIRC, JIS has a much wider angle on the bottom of the drive, making it sink into the head less than a philips drive would, so it's a great way to turn your philips driver into an artisanaly-rounded single-hole punch.
I think I've read somewhere that JIS was phased out after Philips standard included some of JIS features and that theoretically modern Philips screwdrivers should be compatible with JIS.
The JIS, ISO and ASME standards for cross head screw drivers are fully compatible.
The myth that JIS needs special screwdrivers is caused by people using either using the wrong size (easy at small sizes), using a worn-out or poorly-made screwdriver, or using Pozidriv (which is genuinely very different).
Anecdotally, about 5 years ago I bought a set of off-brand "premium" screwdrivers, where it turned out the Phillips head ones (yes there are two L's in there) were so far outside the standard I had to just throw them in the trash.
You got the wrong standard. JIS B 1012 type H is Philips equivalent, but what people refer to as the JIS screw is JIS B 1012 type S. JIS B 1012 Type S ("JIS") and ISO 8764 (Philips) are entirely different screw and scredriver profiles. See https://www.peterverdone.com/jis-cross-head-screws-and-drive....
The Philips screwdriver has lobes with a large multi-stage taper that ejects the screwdriver from the screw upon torque. The JIS screwdriver lobes are in contrast almost perfect 90 degree angle with a tiny filet in the center - not dissimilar to the Frearson screw.
A Philips screwdriver will be unable to insert all the way into a JIS screw due to this taper, exactly similar to how the extra lobes on a Pozidriv screwdriver collides a Philips screw. Attempting to apply torque with this partial engagement puts you at very high risk of stripping the screw.
A JIS screwdriver however does work perfectly fine in Philips screws, often even better than the Philips screwdriver as you did away with one half of the "screwdriver ejection feature".
There's a reason that iFixit goes out of their way to make both JIS and Philips bits, and warn you in their guides. They aren't really in the business of trying to cram more bits down your throat for fun.
>it uses JIS screws rather than Philips (in addition to triwing)
I don't think this is an issue for anyone who has had to disassemble a japanese device before, and the bits are widely available online. Countless youtube videos have discussed that JIS vs Philips in the consumer space are largely compatible outside of american aircraft construction.
I've stripped out every sort of head. It isn't the heads fault really. Lack of thread treatment and/or correct application of torque is the cause and can happen to any head.
iPhone batteries are actually relatively easy to access and replace. The only annoying thing that Apple (and most other gadgets) insist on is adhesive strip mounting of the battery. Just use screws please.
We should also keep in mind that the problem isn't datacenters, but how they are built.
Datacenters do not have to be noisy. Datacenters do not have to cheap out on cooling solutions. Datacenters do not need to be powered by mobile gas turbines left on trailers to pretend they're not permanently installed to avoid having to get permits.
Those corners being cut is not what make AI datacenters possible or competitive. That race is purely chip supply.
For reference, I work in an industrial neighborhood where there are quite a few new datacenters from big providers. The buildings are ugly for sure, but unless you're staring at it you'd have no idea it was there. I could try to pay more attention to see if I can hear it if I focus on it, but I suspect the sound of nearby rustling leaves will be too deafening to make out anything.
The noise is often from backup power solutions like diesel generators that need to be turned on regularly. Maybe that’s what the turbines are? I can’t imagine a data center getting provisioned with a turbine as its primary power. But yes a data center can be silent most of the month.
Very open to being corrected on any of this, it’s just my own understanding but I’m not in the industry.
To my understanding (which can be wrong) these gas turbines are not backup generators, but used as primary or supplementary power sources during normal operation where the grid cannot supply (or when grid cost is unfavorable). In one clip (which is a bit sensationalist so I'll refrain from posting it as it may derail) shows a park of some ~24 large gas turbines - each of which sized like a small building - with about half in operation at that time.
Indeed, there is some noise from backup generators when tested (or in use), but with a bit of preparation, good palcement and sequential testing you can make that not too disturbing.
> Datacenters do not need to be powered by mobile gas turbines left on trailers
The others I agree with, but Im not sure this is true. The US government has proven itself completely incapable of expanding electricity production and grid infrastructure. How exactly are you supposed to power your datacenter when you cant access any electricity?
1. Build your datacenter near supply. If there were consequences to ignoring the rules or being a bad neighbor with municipality, state or federal government baring their teeth, more optimal locations with regards to supply and noise would also end up being the cheapest and safest location for them.
2. Build supply near your datacenter. Solar and wind are both very cheap right now, but requires buying more land, same for a proper gas power plant in its own building with appropriate noise and pollution treatment.
3. Make investment into infrastructure a prerequisite for the project instead of just complaining about it and making into an excuse for cutting corners.
Even if you need to have local supply, "mobile gas turbines left on trailers to pretend they're not permanently installed to avoid having to get permits" is never a necessity.
The US govt does not build out infrastructure. They at best subsidize it over long periods of time.
To answer your question, you build your datacenters where there is capacity or you plan with the utility in the area you want to build. This process takes years.
They are not doing that. They are building them as fast and as cheaply as possible.
As a result they are cutting corners and are leading to all of the complaints.
They are as a result stealing from the future to make a profit today.
The grid does not have gigawatts of extra base load capacity available as that has always been looked upon as wasteful.
There is no path that turns "I would like to terminate my pregnancy if the outcome is unfavorable" into "I would like to commit genocide on everyone whose genetics I do not like".
Granted, someone who already wishes for or aligns with the idea of ethnic cleansing might start by only publicly sharing their wish for the former to begin with, but I don't see a sensible argument for it being a natural extension of the former.
"I would like my child to not be deaf" -> "Many (most?) people would prefer their child to not be deaf" -> (3) "Deaf community shrinks" -> "Social support for deaf people is reduced/seen as not necessary" -> "Parents of deaf children are blamed for carrying out the child" -> "Parents are nudged (forced) to terminate the pregnancy" -> goto (3)
In a some way this is already happening (eg Judges forcing cochlea implants on babies while denying the parents support in learning/teaching sign language to the child)
Many people see this as an attack on the deaf community and their culture - and I have to agree.
In terms of slippery slopes, this argument is climbing atop one. Where does that end? Should we ban doctors from performing surgeries that would save someone's hearing? Should we ban protective gear that might diminish the size of the deaf community?
It's simply a horrible argument to suggest that you have to protect a disadvantaged community by making sure they don't shrink. There's much better ways to be respectful of the great human beings these people are.
Who shows them in "bad light"? Sane people see the condition itself in "bad light" not the people affected, who deserve compassion, help, accommodations etc.
Twisting things around to make people seem bigoted for saying that disability is bad (not that disabled people are bad) is just evil.
It has to be turned around 180 and we have to point out that this push is moral corruption and evil. Even if it comes in part from deaf people it is evil. It doesn't matter what mental acrobatics is developed around this, to wish for other people to become disabled is evil and morally outrageous.
It's the same with the "obesity is actually not unhealthy" crowd, all part of the same ideological matrix.
But then the same enlightened crowd turns around and pushes to legalize euthanasia for depressed people in their 20s...
A shrinking deaf community has nothing at all to do with ethnic cleansing, and social support does not shrink for less common diseases - it's usually the opposite, with support proportional to how rare and inconvenient the disability is.
Let's try a small thought experiment: Some birth defects stem from dietary issues in the mother during pregnancy, like folic acid deficiency or alcohol consumption.
Let's imagine that we discover that deaf children are primarily caused by a particular vitamin deficiency during pregnancy. We can then either spread the information so parents can supplement, or even fortify foods and cause the community to massively decline or even disappear - or we could withold the information on the vitamins to artificially maintain the population of the deaf community.
You could even extend it to a scenario where we end up relying more and more on artificial insemination or other early processing - the impact of many dietary deficiencies happen extremely early, so to maintain the community we would then have to artificially cause said deficiency to maintain the population of the deaf community.
Heck, we can always just make people deaf later if you wanted to maintain their community. We could also make more people get into "accidents" so that the quadriplegic community is maintained. Sounds absolutely insane when you start to discuss maintaining the population of disabled communities, doesn't it?
Back to the topic, cleansing of the deaf in this context implies a hatred for deaf people in general and wanting to remove all deaf people, which is an emotion entirely unrelated to sympethesizing with the disability of being deaf and wanting to avoid causing more such disability.
Many people see the deaf community as something that should ideally disappear by curing them.
I wonder if 100 years ago, the same activists would fight for survival of the leprosy community and its specific culture.
I can understand glorifying pathology if nothing can be done about it. It is a form of coping, similar to the coping that we usually engage in with regard to death. But once the underlying condition starts being curable and the glorifiers attempt to block treatment of children in the name of maintaining the pathology for future generations, they IMHO cross the line to outright evil.
Deafness is a huge handicap, in many ways significantly worse than blindness. That the victims of this horrible ailment start to self identify with it isn't a reason to subject new humans to it.
I have previously had to install simple things like doorbells for deaf people, which is done through a very strobe light that can be seen from almost the entire apartment... if you're not behind a closed door at least.
The idea of it being genuinely difficult for a person to be warned or notified is terrifying. Put your phone in your bag and you might as well have left it at home. Honking, people yelling or screaming for you to move out of harms way, even air sirens... You'll have no idea.
Then maybe install the strobe lights in all important rooms? Most people have there phone on silent/vibration anyway and recently everybody uses noise-canceling headphones outside to not be bothered by other people...
All the infrastructure that would support deaf people (like additional signal lights, vibration signals, subtitles...) are also very helpful for everybody else in specific situations.
> Then maybe install the strobe lights in all important rooms
What are important rooms?
> Most people have there phone on silent/vibration anyway and recently everybody uses noise-canceling headphones outside to not be bothered by other people...
> Everybody is handicapped part of the time
A phone on silent still blasts public safety warnings at full volume. A phone on vibrate can still be heard. Noise-cancelling headphones still let the outside through at a lower volume.
I agree, though one could make the argument that our modern nanny states have been pretty brutal at enforcing health policies during covid, and if they convince themselves that they can eradicate certain diseases by mandating DNA patching or pregnancy terminations, them doing so "for our own good" is in the realm of the possible.
But we are in coercion territory. What I am saying that we already practice eugenics without coercion, we just don't call it that.
As far as I can tell, our modern nanny states haven't been 'pretty brutal at enforce health policies during covid'.
I agree that there were pretty strong restrictions, many of them unnecessary. But in most places the population was pretty compliant or otherwise ignored the demands. I don't remember much brutality.
A problem is that some see 2 as a subset of 1, upset at the idea that parents would wish to terminate pregnancies early that have strong indications of defects. I do imagine a good chunk of those people are of the horribly broken belief that abortions should be outlawed altogether, so not sure how many specifically go against such "filtering".
Granted, if everyone were sequenced and had access to that information it probably wouldn't take too long before certain categorizations became a requirement on the dating profiles, and that's a slippery slope...
(Regardless, nature filters us all by genetics in several stages, and our entire concept of sexual attraction and social groupings are based on the most direct form of priliminary selection for genetics that evolution could achieve with our limited available senses.)
>I do imagine a good chunk of those people are of the horribly broken belief that abortions should be outlawed altogether, so not sure how many specifically go against such "filtering".
no, it is quite quite bafflingly the other way around. those who are against abortions non-religiously almost always make exceptions for rape, risk to the woman's life or health, and things like Down's.
Well, this is about USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which is a mess created by USB IF for good old, blue USB A connectors. Not USB-C complexity.
USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 is the very rarely supported 20Gb/s variant of USB 3, and making devices now that require that for full performance is a weird decision, with high-speed capable ports generally having wider support for either USB4 or Thunderbolt3+. I imagine the reason would be that some chip with an otherwise poor market fit got cheap...
Throwing this into the mix definitely doesn't improve the USB-C "what does this port support" conundrum, but this specific one predates USB-C and is not at all something you'd normally hit.
3.2 Gen 2x2 (and the occasionally relevant 1x2 if you have a weak cable) are USB C only.
USB C ports and cables have 4 USB 3 "superspeed" lanes rather than two. When you use an A to C cable only one pair of those connects. The point of the "x2" modes is that they use the second pair of lanes that would otherwise go unused.
Except of course they don't always go unused. DisplayPort Alternate Mode sends DisplayPort over those two "unused" lanes getting you USB 3 data alongside a half speed DisplayPort connection. (or alternatively full speed DisplayPort on all four and only USB 2), and then of course Thunderbolt 3 and modern USB4/TBT4 use all four lanes and tunnel everything.
However, I'd hold that this is an extension of the USB 3 mess that predates USB-C, even if the x2 mode specifically was a USB-C addition.
The important thing for people to know is that support for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 is practically non-existent: TB3 came before as a well-established (but premium) solution, and USB4 just two years after to commoditize it. A complicated solution with mid-tier bandwidth and none of the flexibility didn't attract attention, so support is poor.
10 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces do not require 20 Gb/s USB ports for reaching maximum performance, they already reach that on 10 Gb/s USB ports, despite of what the writer of TFA believes.
The main application of 20 Gb/s USB ports is to connect external NVMe SSDs, when faster USB 4 or Thunderbolt ports and SSDs are not available.
For an external NVMe SSD on USB, a 20 Gb/s USB port will double the throughput, unlike for a 10 Gb/s Ethernet interface where any improvements are completely negligible.
I do not think that 20 Gb/s USB Type C ports are "very rarely supported". Every mini-PC or desktop motherboard that I have bought during the last 10 years had at least one such USB port.
Such ports appear to be rare only on laptops, because most laptops have very few USB ports.
> 10 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces do not require 20 Gb/s USB ports for reaching maximum performance, they already reach that on 10 Gb/s USB ports, despite of what the writer of TFA believes.
While this may be theoretically (almost) possible, I’m quite sure this is absolutely not the case in practice.
For example see these benchmarks of one of the more recent USB to Ethernet chipsets [1], that can reach ~9.5 Gb/s on USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 but only between ~6.2 to ~7.3 on 3.2 Gen 2x1 laptops.
Edit: Haha, didn’t realise TFA was by the same author as these benchmarks but he’s done a lot of testing and benchmarking of these kind of devices over a long time, and it agrees with all the other benchmarking from other people I’ve seen too!
In Ethernet, "10 Gbps" refers to the actual Ethernet frame throughput. The raw physical coding rate is usually somewhere around 10.3125 Gbps to account for this.
In USB 3.2 Gen 2x1, the actual USB packet throughput is 9.697 Gbps and the "10 Gbps" refers to the raw encoding rate.
This difference means you are guaranteed to lose at least a few hundred Mbps off maximum performance. It's not really a practical concern, but it's not an error to say 10 Gb/s USB ports lack the bandwidth needed to support the maximum performance of a 10 Gbps USB Ethernet adapter.
>Every mini-PC or desktop motherboard that I have bought during the last 10 years had at least one such USB port.
Are you talking about USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 though? Because I've never seen any MiniPC with this port and as for motherboards, I checked my local retailer and only ~15% of currently sold ones have Gen 2x2 (mostly high-end ones).
Most of my mini-PCs have been Intel NUCs (or more recently an ASUS NUC). I also had some Gigabyte and Zotac mini-PCs and a few others from less well-known vendors. IIRC almost all had one such 20 Gb/s USB Type C port, unless they had one or two faster Thunderbolt ports.
With mini-PCs, I frequently use external SSDs, so I certainly used those ports at their full speed.
The only mini-PCs that I had in recent years without such a fast USB port were Arm-CPU based, as those are typically starved in fast peripheral interfaces in comparison with the Intel/AMD CPUs.
> The main problem is USB-C's bandwidth complexity - especially when paired with the Realtek RTL8159 Ethernet controller, which requires USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) to get the full rated 10 Gbps speeds
Jeff's statement wasn't that 10 Gb/s Ethernet requires 2x2. It's that that requirement comes from a very specific controller.
It uses 128b/132b encoding so 10Gb/s USB ≈ 9.69Gb/s you do then have USB framing overhead but it's probably around 2% on typical 1500B ethernet frames. So all in you are losing probably 5% or so to overhead.
I am of the opinion that 5Gbe is a much more sensible speed for a laptop adapter right now as it uses half the power and can obviously run full wack on 10Gb/s USB so you're looking at like 5Gbe vs ~9.4Gbe.
Stop insisting on Cat.6A (and related) copper cables for speeds beyond 1000BASE-T (maybe beyond 2.5G by now), just use dumb multi mode fiber it's way easier technology-wise and if you want power you can have that as well.
At distances where Cat.6A is even an option the demands on the fiber are very low.
And it uses less power than the BASE-T PHY.
The cable at least without integrated power is very thin as well, unless you can't respect it enough to not kink it, in which case you'd want a thicker one just to prevent you from being able to break the fiber.
I kind of a agree, but it's not going to happen for a long long time. The practicalities are just a nightmare.
How do I power an access point with fiber? Ok we add an AC wall socket to the ceiling but now we need a 'brick' to convert to DC. How do I remotely hard reboot an access point if it were to crash?
Fiber termination requires a fusion splicer and a trained engineer, sharps box etc. The power socket needs an electrician. It's just such a nightmare in comparison, install is going to be more expensive, longer to fix faults, less flexible to move a socket etc
Both 10 Gb/s Ethernet and 10 Gb/s USB have bit data rates that are 3% lower than 10 Gb/s, due to encoding (64/66 bits for Ethernet, 128/132 bits for USB).
So the their maximum speed is approximately 9.7 Gb/s.
Then for Ethernet there is a protocol-dependent overhead, e.c. depending on whether TCP or UDP is used, and depending on whether standard packets or jumbo packets are used.
The TCP overhead can reach in the worst case up to close to another 3%, reducing the achievable TCP throughput to around 9.4 Gb/s.
The USB frames add some extra overhead, but it is normally not important in comparison with other factors that can reduce the throughput.
All that a 20 Gb/s USB port can do is to reduce the overhead of the USB frames, but that is a negligible improvement. Using jumbo Ethernet frames (which are 6 times bigger than standard frames), if both ends support them, is likely more useful for increasing the throughput, than using a 20 Gb/s USB port.
10 Gig ethernet is 10GBps usable rate (before packet overhead). The line rates are higher to accommodate this.
For 10GBase-R, it's typically 10.3125 GBps, with a 64/66 encoding. For 10GBase-T, it's 4 lanes with PAM-16 at 800 MBaud -> 12.8 Gbps raw.
> 10 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces do not require 20 Gb/s USB ports for reaching maximum performance, they already reach that on 10 Gb/s USB ports, despite of what the writer of TFA believes.
The first half is true, the second half is not. Remember overhead. You don't need 20GB/sec, but you need to take into account the USB overhead.
The display controller and render device are completely distinct logical devices, even though they are often grouped in a "GPU". On mobile architectures they are quite far separated, leading to annoying problems surrounding what we on Linux call "split drm devices".
Updating plane properties such as to move the cursor plane around or disable it would by itself not block on render activities, as they are completely distinct blocks.
The render hardware could be powered down, but I doubt powering it up and compositing the cursor would take long enough to complete to cause any noticable lag.
Under the Linux APIs, updates to the display controller are done through KMS atomic commits, and one mistake you could do display-server side would be to provide a fence in this atomic commit that the scheduler will use to wait on long-running GPU work before using the provided graphics buffers. Under this API, none of the changes - including mouse movements - would then be applied until that fence is signalled. Changing plane associations can lead to resource reallocations that can be a bit heavy.
Not sure if the kernel driver in macOS works anything remotely similar to this, and the driver could also just be dumb and block on unrelated things ("let's just wait another vblank to see this apply....", "as we only need one plane now let's power down hardware and wait for that to settle..."). It could also just be windowserver that waits for work to finish on its own, not providing any cursor updates in the meantime.
The reality is that it will take reverse engineering or looking at actual code to know what's going on.
No, the cursor just uses an overlay plane, and mobile architectures usually have far more planes (sometimes even an arbitrarily configurable amount), and more flexible hardware compositioning overall than desktop GPUs for efficiency reasons.
EDIT: Also note that there is nothing new with the Neo here, as all Macs since the M1 have used the same chip architecture as the iPhone.
Desktop GPU designs did not focus on tiny efficiency gains, and often only has a primary plane, a single overlay plane (for e.g., a video), and a dedicated cursor plane. Some even have to share a single overlay plane between all connected displays. It's a recent thing for desktop GPUs to get more flexible in this area, in part to improve laptop battery life in the cases where the laptop is almost entirely idle.
(For those unaware, a "plane" here is the entity in the display controller you configure to show a rendered graphics buffer, in a particular location and with particular transforms. You commonly have one plane that just covers the whole screen, and then sometimes put dynamic content on top in other planes so you can avoid having to redraw the main buffer when smaller bits of it change, like a video player or cursor. You could also e.g., scroll by rendering an entire document in advance and then move the plane around to reveal parts of it.)
At least for Nvidia and AMD desktop GPUs/cards, the priorities are:
#1 (by far) "can it play [hot game of the moment] in 4K?"
#2 (maybe) "is the fan noisy in desktop mode?"
#3 (for nerds) "can I run LLMs on it?"
I don't think top efficiency in desktop mode is on anyone's list, and even if it were, it would be hard to come up with a design that uses hundreds of watts when running top-tier games or LLMs, but also uses as little as possible when idle?
No, rather that they focused on peak performance, i.e., "churn out the most raw throughput at 400W+", rather than "get as close as possible to 0W when idle or in common uses".
Very different metrics - the former is about optimizing your architecture for pushing the most operations, the latter is about being able to power as many things off as possible.
TL;DR: Low power draw for laptops and phones is about who can reduce to the lowest performance, with the most hardware turned completely off while still just barely performing the task at hand. Completely different ballgame.
Peak performance happens at peak power draw and is a matter of having as much hardware as possible pushing as many operations as possible at any given point without spontaneously combusting. Those who have the most advanced manufacturing process, or architecture with the most execution units and best able to keep all units busy wins.
Peak power efficiency is about being able to turn as much hardware off as possible, and having lower quiescent current ("leakage power"), with bigger, beefier chips naturally having higher quiescent currents.
What is talked about here is about gating hardware such that you can shave off milliwatts or microwatts when the system is completely idle, by taking tasks that otherwise use slightly larger blocks that would have to remain on and moving them to smaller, more dedicated blocks. For example, being able to play a video with most render capabilities powered down because the display server can take the output of a hardware video decoder block and feed it straight into a display controller plane.
I meant peak performance vs peak performance though. An M1 Ultra uses 25% of the energy of an RTX3090 but gets 70% of the FPS. And in synthetic tests the M1 Ultra can get as close as 95% (!).
Nvidia (and AMD and Intel) just suck at efficiency. There is no excuse for such a performance-per-watt delta. The same is true in CPU land.
Once the first ARM Steam Deck launches gamers will realize they've been had for a decade.
Something is being misunderstood, here, it’s not an iPhone crammed into a laptop in a way that requires add’l software work. A simple analogy that fits is its a MacBook with cheaper parts and a M0 series chip.
That's not quite true, as every SoC requries quite significant software bringup for an OS that makes other software engineering tasks seem miniscule in comparison - macOS and iOS just share enough common code that it's not as big of a deal for Apple.
Also not sure why you'd label it as "M0", as trivially beats the M1 on several metrics.
Just a nit: Post-CRTs, there is no longer a "standard gamma curve", but many different transfer functions and many errors stem from misunderstanding this.
Even within "SDR"/"sRGB", many mistakes crop up from people erroneously mixing content encoded with the piecewise sRGB transfer function with content encoded according to a plain gamma 2.2 transfer function. And this is before we are getting into e.g., incorrect blending spaces or mismatched primaries.
But yes, it is purely a matter of compression, with many options for exactly what dynamic range you need and how you want your content defined (e.g., sRGB, gamma2.2, scRGB, HLG, PQ, ...), with linear light primarily reserved as an intermediate space for color conversions and blending - something your display server and any software working with arbitrary color spaces will be using.
That is why I said "standard gamma curves", and not "standard gamma curve", as each standard specifies a slightly different curve, for various reasons.
Such differences in standards already existed in analog television, because, depending on how they were made, the CRTs also had slightly different transfer curves from grid voltage (where the video signal was applied) to anode current (which is proportional with the luminance of the pixel component), and the regional TV standards accounted for the dominant manufacturers of the CRTs sold in that region.
Grid voltage had no real impact, but the field rate of early monochrome broadcasts were locked to mains frequency, hence regional differences in frame rate.
NTSC was gamma 2.2, and PAL/SECAM was gamma 2.8, which was indeed initially partly caused by local manufacturing differences before international brands took over, but neither "standard" was really followed by anyone. In the end, concluding that it was all a total mess, we split the difference in the early 90's by formally defining both to gamma 2.4 in BT.709. As such, their curves are the same.
(Manufacturing derivation was outside the scope, as manufacturers did whatever was convenient or sold sets, going all over the place with their response curves regardless of what region they were from or targeted. This remains true today - see any new TVs standard color response.)
> Apple does have some good counter arguments. Where there is data, there will be bad actors who want that data - and I trust Apple far more to behave than I trust some random shell company being run by some secret service.
As a EU citizen, sharing your data between Apple and Google which puts said data under free-for-all US intelligence access - which is known to have "questionable" habits and give basically no rights or insight as a to-them foreign citizen - is effectively trusting "some secret service".
To be clear, I am not one to fear use Apple for intelligence reasons, but not through a pretense that my data is safe from it, and certainly not because I believe it would be safer than using, say, a service based in Germany or France.
I'm more concerned with data brokers trading personal data out in the open, collected with minimal control from all the other apps and webpages we use throughout our day.
reply