Posts by Mot524

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

NPU efficiency

https://john-zhihong-wang.medium.com/benchmarking-apple-macbook-pro-m1-for-deep-learning-inference-101428887da7

Mileage varies depending on which network you run, but for MobileNet it looks like the M1 GPU is 50% faster than the M1 CPU, and the M1 NPU is 250% faster than the GPU (350% as fast).

Also, fun fact, the M1 NPU maxes out at about 3.6 watts whereas the M1 GPU uses 10-15 watts.

So there's a huge performance gain, and a power efficiency gain of about ~12x.

So for everybody who's wondering "why don't they just use the GPU to do this NPU stuff" you're basically wondering why anybody would do something 10+ times more efficiently.

Look at Apple

If you're not sure what value an NPU provides, look at what Apple has been doing with theirs for years (not including all their new "Apple Intelligence" stuff):

- Image processing stack for photos and video (means they don't have to put dedicated image processing hardware on their chips BTW)

- Text/image/facial recognition for indexing photos/images

- Facial recognition for Face ID

- Speech to text, improves latency for e.g. Siri, dictation, etc.

- Presumably translation in their language translation app

- Probably improving microphone recording quality for e.g. FaceTime?

A lot of people on this thread seem to think that an NPU is only good for running LLMs but they seem to have missed most of the point.

Re: All I see...

NPUs have specific functionality, i.e., doing neural network stuff. Not malware.

What you're suggesting is akin to saying that somebody is going to figure out how to take advantage of a chip's video encoder to run malware.

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

Re: Elon Musk's assassination joke bombs

Surely you're joking?

He's only in hot water BECAUSE he's rich and famous.

I'm sure there are millions of people on X who make similar posts but nobody gives a s**t about them exactly because they're not rich or famous.

AI PCs are here but a killer application for biz users? Nope

What about 2020?

Apple has been selling "AI PCs" since 2020, seems to not be that big of a deal?

Intricate mission to de-ice a space telescope is go: Euclid's 'eye' is clear

I wonder if they didn't just position the mirrors to catch more light than they usually would?

Euro shoppers popping more and more premium phones in the basket

Re: Unscientific anecdotal sample

Old phones struggling with new versions of iOS hasn't really been a thing since the iPhone 4, which had a relatively weak GPU and couldn't handle some of the new graphical effects in iOS 7. There were ways around this (you could turn off many of the effects). Anything made in the last ~7 years has had no problem running the latest version of iOS.

As for insisting on the latest version of iOS, that's fine. When people talk about the longer duration of software support for iPhones, they mean that older iPhones can run the latest version of iOS. So if you want an app that insists on a more recent version of iOS, just upgrade to that recent version of iOS. No problem.

As for apps asking for "new licenses" due to hardware or software updates, that's not a thing. In fact that's not even theoretically possible with Apple's monetization models for apps. I suppose an app developer could release a new version of an app as a completely separate app (not sure if Apple allows this), but then everybody would be required to pay for the completely different app to get the "update," not just people who updated iOS.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Gas doesn't magically appear in fuel tankers either.

I'll put you out of your misery here, what you're looking for is called "well to wheel" (WTW) efficiency. To figure out true efficiency, taking all losses and costs and emissions into account, it's necessary to consider all the steps of drilling, transporting, refining, etc. etc. oil for ICE vehicles, and to take into account how electricity is generated and transmitted for EVs.

Roughly speaking, EVs are approximately as efficient as ICE vehicles if the electricity for the EV is generated by burning coal or diesel. Throw some renewable energy sources into the mix and EVs become more efficient, obviously.

How could resistive heating be less than 100% efficient?

Any inefficiency would result in... heat.

Right, because gas just magically appears at gas stations. No losses or emissions involved in getting it there at all.

China chokes exports of semiconductor secret sauces gallium and germanium

Re: Middle Kingdom

Middle Kingdom is the direct translation of the word that the Chinese use for China. There's nothing cute about it.

Apple's new iPhone 6 vulnerable to last year's TouchID fingerprint hack

I see what's gone wrong here

Lots of self-styled security "experts" complaining about Apple's Touch ID system.

The problem is that your only experience with fingerprint scanners is when you see them used in in an episode of Alias to secure biological weapons, so you assume the only reason to have a fingerprint scanner is to provide an ultimate, definitive, unbreakable level of security.

And here you come on your white horse to point out that Apple's fingerprint scanner for consumer cell phones is actually NOT ideal for securing biological weapons. Well, yes, great, well spotted, I suppose.

Maybe you should be doing a bit of introspection and asking yourselves why your expectations for a fingerprint scanner are coming from works of fiction. Just sayin'.

Tim Cook in Applerexia fears: New MacBook THINNER THAN EVER

"Look at those small, frail people with fragile birdlike bones that who can't handle an extra two pounds worth of laptop. They are so small and fragile. Like their laptops."

I'm 6'1 and I can bench press over 200 lbs. I know, I'm not Arnold, but it's not a small amount either. And I notice a big difference between my old 5 pound laptop and my current 2.3 pound MacBook Air. Maybe it's a moment-of-inertia thing (or just regular inertia thing) where the weight is effectively multiplied when you're carrying it in a backpack or swinging it in a duffel bag, but I was reluctant to pack my old laptop unless I really needed it, whereas I have literally gone on 2 day trips with the MBA without realizing that the laptop was in my bag until I got home and unpacked. Now that's a convenient size and weight.

A few people have made fun of my small laptop and I know a few big men who have deliberately purchased matching big laptops. But my manliness isn't really threatened when I'm using my laptop for scientific computing and my friends are using their 8 lb laptops for email and Facebook.

Apple fanbois DENIED: Mac Pro deliveries stalled until April

Re: Why yes, I can imagine and pull my hair out at the same time.

"Who are these people who have the money to buy this toy but no security or cost cutting systems management? I suspect it is still just a strange status symbol among a select group of nerds who don't know what the real world is like."

Ah, the arrogance of somebody who thinks his situation is the only one that's "real world" and tougher than other peoples' situations. Your Dell computers sound very nice but you do know that anybody who works with a supercomputer or a cloud like Google's, Amazon's, or Microsoft's would take one look look at your setup, shrug their shoulders, and go back to their own "real world" situation, right?

The new Mac Pro has a target audience. I know an independent graphic designer who will be buying one to edit video and do 3-D modeling (a little too involved for an iMac but not involved enough to require a render farm) and it should fit his needs nicely. You are not in the target audience, but that doesn't mean the target audience doesn't exist.

Apple's Windows XP moment: OS X Snow Leopard left to DIE

Re: I can sort of understand it

"I can too, to some extent, but why does Linux run on more or less anything without this "legally required to support older hardware ..."

Of course, if Apple made it a priority, I'm sure they could support just as much hardware as Linux. But they don't. Technically speaking, no sane person can argue that it's easier to support more hardware. More testing is required, existing code is more complicated and thus harder to maintain and improve, new code is harder to write, etc. So while somebody might not _like_ that Apple drops support for hardware at a relatively quick pace, it's hard to argue that there's no technical justification for doing so.

At one point I was pretty annoyed that support was dropped for a particular model of MacBook but not a Mac Mini with exactly the same processor that was actually _older_. But then I found out that the MacBook had a different/older UEFI version with different capabilities and reasoned that they no longer wanted to spend their time supporting that firmware and it had nothing to do with the processor/chipset. So while it might sometimes seem arbitrary, I have yet to see a case of Apple dropping support for something with literally no technical justification.

"Don't you think it's more about a demand to sell new hardware than adding some "if,then,else". Please don't fool yourself."

I'm sure Apple is _aware_ that they are likely to sell more new hardware if they drop support for something but, as mentioned above, I'm confident that when they drop support for something, there's a technical reason, and not just a business justification. That's why you see so many irate posts to the tune of "hey, my hardware is 2 years newer than this other supported hardware, why can't I use the new OS?" etc.

Thundering gas destroys disks during data centre incident

Re: Utter BS

Lived in CO most of my life. Never experienced or heard of the air pressure negatively impacting hard drives, including friends who work at IT installations at CU Boulder and who live/work at ski resorts at 9000+ ft. (Also, airplanes are usually pressurized to around 8000 ft equivalent. Haven't heard of any hard drives crashing when used on an airplane.)

New iPad mini gobbles Retina display, 64-bit brain, puts on little weight

Re: more or less the same size and resolution as any competing 7-8" tablet.

"Either your calculator isn't working, or your definition of "a few pixels" is generous to say the least."

Well, it's 256 pixels (20%) in one direction and 32 pixels (4%) in the other. Those aren't exactly huge numbers. In terms of raw number of pixels, it's a 23% or 30% difference depending on how you look at it. When you consider that Apple quadruples the number of pixels in its retina display, or that going from 720p to 1080p means a 2.25x increase, that 30% difference puts the iPad mini and the 2012 Nexus 7 square in the same "generation" of displays.