Apple downgrades new M2 iPad Air, 9-core GPU instead of 10-core | Hacker News Reader

Apple downgrades new M2 iPad Air, 9-core GPU instead of 10-core

9to5mac.com

52 pointsjanandonly54 comments

The variant with the 8-core GPU is most likely also a binned version of the 10-core GPU variant. It's a lot easier to enable/disable cores than to produce different silicon for minor spec differences.

It may be that Apple's yield of 10-core GPUs is lower than expected, but those GPUs validate just fine with 9 cores enabled. Or maybe Apple had another marketing reason, such as further differentiating the iPad Pro.

theoretically, a single defect will impact overall device yield by

  fraction of area for GPU / total device area * defect density

so, if all the GPUS are 30% of the device area, with a 5% defect density, binning from 10 to 9 is going to increase total yield by 1.6%

square that for binning from 10 to 8 so 3% yield improvement there (so ~4.6% total)

if the TMSC 3nm process is up at 10-20% then this starts to get material

They probably found that the 10th one was systemically defective, and is just disabling it now vs a crap shoot which shipped products will crash or not when using theirs. Much like what they'd do with the batteries when they'd go wonky.

Or it's simply that much cheaper to yield a 9 core than a 10 from their production. Gotta stretch that profit margin even more, they don't make enough of apple users already.

I'll bet it's a yield + dont-want-a-lawsuit combo

why lawsuit?

Apple gets sued for things all the time. I think there's a whole class action system set up for it.

"iPhone owners get $92 payouts from Apple in phone-throttling settlement"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/iphone-owners-ge...

etc...

"Some iPhone users eligible for $349 in lawsuit settlement payout over audio issues"

"Apple Lawsuit: M1 MacBook Pro and Air Have Display Hardware Defects, Causes Screens to Crack"

"AppleCare Class Action: Apple Agrees to $95 Million Settlement for iPhone, iPad Users Given ‘Remanufactured’ Devices"

"Apple Agrees to $50 Million Settlement Over Butterfly Keyboard Complaints"

If you make a marketing claim, the government can sue you for not selling what you say you are.

This doesn’t apply to puffery claims though, which is why Apple could have said ‘the new M2, with the best number of cores ever!’ And been fine with whatever.

I wonder if you can unlock that missing core with the pencil trick[1].

[1] https://computer-communication.blogspot.com/2007/06/unlockin...

Doubtful because it's Apple, possibly configured by laser or wire jumpers just prior to package encapsulation.

Older GeForces were hackable similarly, but then Nvidia shifted to specific resistance values: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398555

I forgot the /s.

Obviously but I bet someone in the future will decap future "vintage" random chips to determine if additional cores exist and/or can be unlocked. Dial-a-yield configuration and bin sorting are how yield is maximized and supply chain SKUs are minimized which aren't precisely optimal on individual examples.

I was looking at my paperweight at the office on Friday, an Athlon Socket A CPU, staring at the tape and graphite, thinking about how and why I dragged the lead to do some magic. Thanks for the reminder.

Contemporary Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40533761

with this downgrade is it still be able to run the ipad calculator app? Does anyone know? Because in software side of Ipad IOS, that is the biggest innovation in years.

> in software side of Ipad IOS, that is the biggest innovation in years

That would be iSH, slow but functional Alpine Linux emulation for iOS.

https://ish.app

I use it all the time, it's great - I just wish ssh-agent worked on it.

Hopefully the Apple gods will bestow VMs upon iPad Pro at WWDC.

with the export restrictions, only the abacus app will work in global markets.

I think the regular calculator would work fine. Not sure about the scientific calculations tho.... Should work properly I guess?

the new calculator app is only available on the M4 version because of hardware limits. /s

A couple years ago Apple added the concept of swap to the new iPad Pro version of the day. M1 finally had the power to support it.

I must’ve hallucinated running swap on my Amiga way back when.

Even the original iPhone would've had plenty of power/performance to smoothly handle swapping for Amiga applications. Your Amiga would certainly not have had the power to handle swapping for iPad applications. You cannot simply ignore the role that workload differences have here, when the whole point was to offer an acceptable user experience.

I can and shall. Any recent modern iPad Pro had plenty of ability to implement swap. I won’t believe that something in the M1 somehow made that possible for the first time ever in that device, especially when Macs with lesser capable CPUs have had swap for decades.

Lots of possible reasons: performance, ecosystem bugs, limitations with the A-series of processors, issues with the disk itself, security, dealing with disk encryption, who knows.

Believe what you want, but blanket statements like that are beyond silly.

Did Amiga use flash memory with a limited number of write cycles for storage?

No, but my contemporary-to-the-M1-iPad MacBook Pro did.

It should be interesting to see if they actually sold iPads with less GPU cores than the specs say, or if the downgrade is just for a new SKU.

It seems pretty clear that it was a mistake and that all of them sold in the last three weeks were 9 core variants.

I don't think that's clear at all. My immediate assumption was that the 10-core yields were lower than expected and they have a glut of 9-core chips.

The device was released May 7th, less than a month ago. Yields haven't changed that much in three weeks.

More importantly, the M2 was released two years ago, built on a fab process that entered volume production the year before that. Yields on that chip are as mature as they're going to get.

I am not so sure of that. Apple does seem like the kind of company that would create an entirely new SKU just for improving margins in a certain product. It all helps differentiating the iPad models.

The device was released May 7th, less than a month ago. And there's only one SOC option listed on the website. I'd agree with you if there was multiple SKUs listed, but there isn't. It's the only SKU listed.

That's a rather large mistake for a multi trillion dollar company with a very small selection of products. Wtf?

Imagine a world where you can upgrade your device's RAM, storage, and cores with a simple digital purchase. It’s a bittersweet idea—practical for many, yet potentially pricey. Could Apple be considering this innovation?

Innovation as in tried by Intel[1] in 2010 and discontinued after a massive wave of criticism?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service

IIRC IBM still uses this “innovation” in their mainframes.

GMTA. What's old is new again. And at many enterprises, 'nobody can get fired for recommending Apple'. 'Crippled hardware unless you pay up': talk about the quintessential protection racket.

No. This isn’t a B-tier Apple punditry podcast.

Will anyone notice a difference?

Apple consumers have been insulated from the semiconductor industry practice of binning for years by high margins and insane growth. Basically Apple could afford to throw out the "only 9 cores work" chips (or whatever) instead of selling them as separate products or performance tiers (or whatever). But now the unit growth is levelling off, so they need to squeeze for "growth" by expanding profits instead.

And one way you do that is by selling the extra chips you'd previously been flagging as yield failures.

The MacBook Air with M2 is already sold with either 8 or 10 GPU cores. Having an iPad Air with M2 use 9 GPU cores is completely unsurprising and unremarkable. The only thing noteworthy here is the mistakes in the spec sheet and press release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#Variants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2#Variants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M3#Variants

All of the M-series processors so far have been sold in at least two bins.

When I got my M2 Macbook Air in 2022 I had a choice between 8 and 10 GPU cores. I always assumed the 8 core ones were binned 10-core units, too.

Just living with that sort of waste is not very Cookian. I am surprised that it took this long.

Who buys iPads anyway? I have two and I regret it. Totally useless iPadOS, built entirely around Apple's ecosystem (Magic Mouse and Keeb), so much compute power restricted by a greedy company that is worried about their MacBook sales in case iPad becomes a real computing device.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNv2EOc6ma0

I have been using an iPad Pro as my primary computing device for more than a year now. It works pretty wonderfully for my use case. I just finished writing my dissertation on it last week, actually. I have an old MacBook that I use for specific tasks once or twice a week, but otherwise my iPad, pencil, and keyboard/mouse/5k monitor on my desk works really, really well — better than a laptop by far for my workflow: Zotero/Markdown/MSWord/Logseq/Obsidian.

I’m very happy to not use a general purpose computer anymore, to be honest.

I think the fact that you have to use a MacBook once or twice a week for specific tasks says everything.

The iPad Pro has been literally as fast as a MBA and supported KB/M input alongside touch and pen for years but you still run into weird edge cases where it's either too janky and time consuming to do on the iPad (e.g. file management) or some really basic app is just missing.

> Who buys iPads anyway?

I do.

> I have two and I regret it.

Apparently, so do you.

Reminds me of my favourite Bushism:

"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.'"

I’d never in a billion years trust anyone with this lack of awareness of the niche nature of their own priorities and desires to build software.

The iPod is wildly popular. Not everyone has the same philosophical bent as you.

Ipads are widely considered by analysts and the tech press to be, well not a failure exactly, but a marginal product that has yet to find its niche.

This is despite the fact that they solidly outsell macs. And if they were not from Apple but were a private company they’d be considered one of the few remarkably enormous hits in the tech industry. But Apple is so big it (supposedly) doesn’t matter.

I use an air for taking notes, because handwritten notes are all searchable, and some document annotation. That makes it worth it for me though my mac is my main drive.

Good thing you're not in charge of designing Apple products.

iPad is amazing for reading and casual content.

In particular, I like annotating content in books.

There are more than half a billion iPads out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com