Why? How would having no GPU upgrade at all have been better than having a minor one?
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iPhone 14 Pro Faced 'Unprecedented' Setback Leading to Removal of New Graphics Processor
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You’re the only one, who keeps talking about triple-A games and PC gaming. As if Ray Tracing automatically means RTX 4090. Nobody wants to copy or compete with this hot mess.
Sure, make up your own story based on contradicting the report, written by journalist who don’t understand anything about chip making. The fallacy of that reasoning is that you can’t rely on them idiots getting it wrong. They don’t know enough and might accidentally have quoted the "several individuals that claim to possess first-hand knowledge of the incident" correctly. They wouldn’t know better and release the true stories together with the fake ones.
People getting excited about Dynamic Island speaks volumes about how boring these upgrades have become.
Yes, and that's kinda the point. If Apple wants to add raytracing to the desktop, in an attempt to chase AAA gaming -- something nobody seems to think Apple is doing -- they'll have to split the GPU model feature set. Raytracing on a phone is a big net loss, sapping everybody's batteries to support logic only a very very few would actually even notice let alone enjoy. It's not worth balkanizing the GPU instruction set -- and remember, the fault line is mobile vs desktop, not phone versus Mac.
A16 is pretty different in CPU department and memory support.
A16 ALSO apparently mounts the RAM differently. Rather than the traditional PoP that has been used forever, the A16 design appears to be something like a thing slab of glass with DRAM directly mounted on one side, and the Apple SoC on the other side and via's through the glass. This undoubtedly reduces z-height and the energy cost of communicating with DRAM.
Unfortunately no-one has printed any public details of a teardown on the A16 packaging; the above was described in a very rough fashion on a Japanese site (in Japanese, so AI translation for the win!) but details remain unclear.
Even the A15 packaging was somewhat strange. That was still PoP, but an unusual form of PoP that appeared to use "stiffener" silicon; it maybe have been a trial run for the A16 design where the stiffener silicon is more obvious of value? But the A15 is like the A16, very few package focus, no public discussion.
I mention these to make the point that it's just silly to claim that Apple has stopped innovating in this space. They have been forced to reschedule because of covid (which both delayed their internal work and slowed down all their partners) but innovations in all sorts of area continue to appear -- but you only see them if you look for them...
Something like?:
‘Hey Boss, our team made this cool real-time ray tracing core! It uses too much power at the moment but we are confident we can get that down.’
Headline:
’Ray tracing capability removed from iPhone at last moment.’
‘Hey Boss, our team made this cool real-time ray tracing core! It uses too much power at the moment but we are confident we can get that down.’
Headline:
’Ray tracing capability removed from iPhone at last moment.’
I’m sure they quoted people accurately, and the journalist doesn’t understand how the pieces fit together.
There’s no way timeline adds up as the story stands today, but hey some people were cited so that just throws out how long the chip engineering cycle is. People were cited after all…
Raytracing factors into whatever “rOS” capabilities they’re building, the gaming portion will be just a benefit (assuming developers adopt it).
Let's see: "Apple [...] was forced to scrap plans for the new GPU late in development". You're right, such a time as late in relation to some time span doesn't exist. The whole space-time continuum would need to collapse to make this statement come true. Great you spotted that mistake. The whole story is debunked now. /s
Yup. Apple tends to have a chip design pipeline of about three years.
The basic story of “Apple has prototyped raytracing, but couldn’t ship it in time for the A16” is plausible. Beyond that, The Information’s authors are inserting random nonsense to embellish their juicy story.
“Apple discovered the flaw”
I see no evidence of a flaw.
“in the iPhone 14 Pro's GPU late in the device's development cycle”
Absolutely no way. That would be catastrophic. It’s impossible to course-correct on hardware designs “late in the cycle”. They either mean “two years ago” by “late”, or they’re making this up.
“meaning that it had to hastily pivot to revert largely to the GPU from the A15 Bionic chip from the previous year's iPhone 13 lineup.”
They may have had to cut a planned design change, but there’s no way this was ”hasty”.
“The error resulted in Apple restructuring its graphics processor team and moving some managers away from the project, including the exit of key figures that apparently contributed to Apple's emergence as a chip design leader.
The report goes on to reveal how Apple's chip design team has been forced to contend with a loss of talent in recent years, with the company having lost dozens of key people to various silicon design companies since 2019, as well as interpersonal feuds and lawsuits with chip startups.”
So they lost some people and reshuffled some teams. None of that is relevant for the A16. It’s conceivable that, ca. 2019, some folks were working on a raytracing feature, then left before it worked well, and management decided not to take the risk and instead postponed the feature. But nothing about that is “hasty”.
USB-C, ray tracing, smoother rounded chasis, all at once? Must be Xmas, 10 months from now.
Let’s say that 1 of 10 people shoots in ProRAW. That sounds crazy to me! I’d say 1-3%. But realistically just you and few other people on MR 😅.
Burn those ray-traced OLED rays on my retina! I mean why not, if some games/apps can make use of it.
Totally unsurprising. This is frankly online with several missteps Apple has been making recently. And it all begins with failing management. Sorry to say but the newly eviscerated Apple leadership team (stemming from the shakeup after Jobs death over ten years ago) is starting to show just how thinly veiled their vision for the future is.
- written on my overpriced and overhyped iPhone 14 Pro Max. LOL
- written on my overpriced and overhyped iPhone 14 Pro Max. LOL
That’s exactly what I’m getting that. This story paints a narrative that I’ve seen floated here multiple times, recent departures are somehow effecting a chip that ships this, or even last year.
This story seems like the journalistic equivalent of a Gish Gallop.
That’s…just not how any of this works in terms of timescale.
Bingo bango! Apple NEVER planned ray tracing for the iPhone 14. Folks need to recognize the classic Apple PR: hype a bleeding edge technology by claiming they were “that close” but had to pull it “at the last minute,” but “stay tuned” because the next product will have incredible feature.
Ouch this sounds pretty bad if true. Hopefully another year will let them work out the remaining issues.
Today’s journalists only use twitter as sources. There’s a reason they all went mad about Elon. They would lost literally their only known “sources.” 😂
What's funny is that most of the people who are upset/critical/cynical of this feature not shipping in the iPhone 14 wouldn't buy it this year because they are waiting for the USB-C iPhone 15 next year.
Much ado about nothing.
Much ado about nothing.
Yep. Because iPhone is the center of Lightning port ecosystem. If the iPhone move on to usb-c, it’s practically dead regardless of how many of popular Apple accessories still use it.
There’s a lot more to this story that presented. These graphics capabilities lineup quite well with what will be required to make rOS a reality. The new chip process and these features will likely arrive together. I doubt these engineers have a complete picture of what Apple is planning. They have a long history of keeping teams in the dark on the true purpose for their part of the project.
But, again, how many augmented reality headsets will they sell per iPhone? Raytracing benefits a tiny niche but penalizes every mobile user.