Apple is an existential threat to the PC

[wco81]

Yeah not having discrete GPU support is a liability but I guess Apple decided the market for people who need that is not going to offer them the ROI.

They know what their MP sales were. Probably not enough to justify iterating regularly.

 

[Wesker]

Very interesting results, and it's the first benchmarks I've seen of AI/LLM.
M4 Max actually manages to outperform the RTX 4090 once model sizes become too big for the 4090's RAM pool.

 

[MfA]

That's what tensor parallelism is for in AI/LLM ... just plug in more RTX 3090s (don't really need 4090 with low batch sizes). Even across PCIe tensor parallelism works good enough.

Though unless it's for porn, you can just do it in the cloud too.

 

[Pressure]

It's interesting to see the E cores in the M4 nearing the P cores of the M1. Faster in some and still slower in other areas.

More observations here: Inside M4 chips: CPU core performance (by Dr. Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company).

 

[MfA]

Seems Valve is having another go at steam machines, they have a "powered by steamos" mark now.

Will they actually spend some money on it and handle it like Google handles Chromebooks, with Valve handling all software including firmware updates, or will it be another failure?

 

[Kaotik]

Seems Valve is having another go at steam machines, they have a "powered by steamos" mark now.

Will they actually spend some money on it and handle it like Google handles Chromebooks, with Valve handling all software including firmware updates, or will it be another failure?

They've been adding features for competing handheld class PCs for a while now, but no signs so far it would be getting readty for desktop release

 

[MfA]

Even for other handhelds, if they don't commit to handling the full update responsibility (including firmware and bios) and QA their releases on them, it will be a clusterfuck.

If they put their mark on it, they need make sure they can deliver similar quality as for their own hardware. Otherwise it will just hurt the brand.

 

[tuna]

Seems Valve is having another go at steam machines, they have a "powered by steamos" mark now.

Will they actually spend some money on it and handle it like Google handles Chromebooks, with Valve handling all software including firmware updates, or will it be another failure?

The infrastructure for doing all this is way more advanced these days compared to when the Steam machines were a thing. Now we even got things like fwupd.

 

[MfA]

That's really the least of it. Taking on the responsibility of testing across all the devices they certify and the long term responsibility of software support and bugfixing equally for those devices as for the Deck, that's where the costs are.

Companies want to shirk responsibility, Valve with its clique organization structure probably more than most. Can't build a really solid brand (or ecosystem) like that though.