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jankotek

How would make ARM chip DDR RAM cheaper? I expect Apple to finally fix cooling and power management, but that is all.

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By saving money on CPU, they can now pack in more RAM to keep the price up, and give the machines a competitive edge.

RAM Prices on Mac where never reasonable.

Upgrade prices where never reasonable.

Why would Apple ever reduce upgrade prices just because they might save 100$ on a CPU?

And why would you assume that the development of your own inhouse ARM CPU would make such a financial difference? After all, you have to develop a CPU.

And what? Apple reports over 25% profit; Why would you even assume that Apple is doing anything for you? They could easily reduce there profit margin for you. They don't.

It's a fallacy to believe that costs have anything to do with prices, except as a lower bound.

I wonder how much they’ll save. They sell millions of cpus and can distribute the engineering cost across them, but compared to amds/intels processor numbers it seems small.

Plus it seems that the fact that they now need developer to write video drivers/ compiler optimizations etc are all additional costs.

They payoff can be big, but so are the risks.

Anyway Apple charges too much for DRAM capacity CTO option so Apple could cut prices now if they wish.

I think we will see custom acceleration hardware in the future to support stuff like video editing

Don't most computers already have hardware accelerated encode/decode via cpu/gpu?

The real point is, Apple is an integration company that has now added self-made silicon to its toolset. Whereas in the past, they created the M chips for tracking motion in phones and watches, and the T chips for Secure Enclave and Secure Storage, the roadmap Apple displayed during the keynote indicates they are going to create specialty chips for any application that makes sense.

How big is that market?

Big enough that they already sell an fpga card for the Mac pro to do it.

Huge. Everyone edits video now.

Yea, not in a way that requires specialized hardware though. Edits on the phone are already virtually instantaneous.

… because of the specialised hardware and the tiny video resolutions supported.

Tiny?

2688x1242 isn’t tiny.

Neither is 4K at 60fps.

Without color grading or other usual video correction.

Once you start to tinker with your images, the picture change quite a lot for the cpu/gpu

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