Issue 550

18^th March 2022

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

As John Ternus left us with “just one more product to go, Mac Pro” at the end of last week’s event, my thoughts turned to how Apple might get to that Pro machine from the Studio.

The biggest problem facing the Apple silicon Mac Pro isn’t CPU or GPU performance. It’s memory. You can configure an M1 with a maximum of 16GB, increasing to 32GB for the M1 Pro and 64GB for the M1 Max. With the introduction of the M1 Ultra, the maximum RAM is now up to 128GB. That’s impressive, but it’s a long way from the 1.5TB of RAM you can configure in a current Intel-based Mac Pro.

So how do they get there? Let’s speculate a bit.

The M1 Ultra is effectively a doubled M1 Max, so let’s assume Apple can keep going down that route, and the final form of the M1 family might be a doubled Ultra. That’d be 40 CPU cores, 128 GPU cores, and a 64 core neural engine. It’d also take the maximum memory to 256GB. That’s a lot, but it’s still only 1/4 of a terabyte.

So far, so predictable. Let’s stretch a little. A straight up doubling of the Ultra’s RAM configurations would get us to 128/256GB of RAM. How about if there were one more option, 512GB? We’re getting closer and need only one more iteration of doubling everything to get to a TB!

I think that final doubling might come from the generational change from M1 to M2. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the enhancements with the next M-series generation might allow more RAM on the lower-end chips. For example, it’d be wonderful if the “standard” M2 could be 16/32GB instead of 8/16GB. Following that logic, the M2 Ultra would be 128/256GB, and the hypothetical chip I just talked about, if it arrives as part of the M2 generation, ends up as 256/512/1024GB. That’s in the same order of magnitude as 1.5TB, all without needing to resort to off-die RAM, which would be a significant architectural departure.

My speculation does all feel like a stretch, and no one at Apple has ever publicly said they’re even aiming for 1TB RAM with the new Mac Pro, but it was fun to think about how they might get there. All we know for sure is that it’s not going to be cheap! 🤑

UPDATE: I had missed that someone in the presentation had said “our last chip” or something similar, indicating that the Ultra may be the last in the M1 series of chips. Oops! Although, I’d not read too much into that statement. Apple doesn’t tend to tell the whole story. It was a miracle that the Mac Pro even got a mention in this event!

Dave Verwer

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News

Here’s Ted Kremenek with the details of Swift 5.6, which shipped alongside Xcode 13.3 this week. The most significant change is the any keyword from SE-0335, which Donny Wals published an excellent overview of. I also noticed this tweet from Fabian Fett mentioning Owen Vorhees’ “API breaking changes” feature, which didn’t make the main blog post.

This came out of nowhere, and it’s not a plan for the future. It has already happened! There are published goals, details of a working group that anyone can apply to join, and some first steps that mainly relate to the technology used to build the site.

Having the working group be public and include community members is an excellent way for this to get started, but the announcement raises more questions than it answers. Will Apple be supplying resource to work on website projects, or is will it be entirely driven by community contributions? I can see value in getting the working group involved early, but I feel it will be tough to achieve a thriving site without people dedicated to working on it.

I can’t wait to see how it turns out. I may even put myself forward to be involved!

Tools

I’ve linked to Pulse a couple of times, and here it is again. The Pro version is now open-source and available to everyone, which is terrific news because it remains a fantastic tool. If you ever want to look over your app’s network traffic, you should try it. I’d also recommend reading this introduction to Pulse article published by Mark Struzinski this week.

What’s the simplest way to get a vector SVG/PDF file rendered into raster images in sizes that are very Xcode-friendly? This new app from Karsten Kusche is!

Is there another way of getting faster builds without spending $5,000 on a Mac Studio? Why, yes, there may be! Thanks for the tip, Patrick!

Code

I enjoyed this four-part (1, 2, 3, and 4) series of posts from Marin Todorov on optimising a concurrent filter function. You’ll learn stuff about async/await, learn how to measure performance, and even dip into some 😱 unsafe 😱 code!

I’ve linked to articles about the recent changes to formatting before. Still, I’ve not seen anything as comprehensive as this set of posts from Brett Ohland covering everything from dates and numbers to lesser-known formatted styles like lists and names.

Design

Every part of what you see on screen during Apple events is intentional and obsessed over by teams of people, but it’s all so perfect that it can go unnoticed. I really enjoyed Sahand Nayebaziz’s analysis of some of the diagrams, sets, and slide designs from the Mac Studio event.

For full disclosure, I work with Sahand as part of the One to One tier of my Patreon.

Jobs

iOS Developer @ Konrad Group – Konrad is an amazing community of the brightest minds in tech. We build bleeding edge mobile applications for some of the largest, most exciting companies in the world. We have a team of 250+ developers that work with the latest technologies. – Remote (within US timezones) with some on-site work (Canada)

Mid-Senior iOS Software Engineer @ Nelnet Community Engagement – At NCE, we believe in the power of community-minded organizations. We help those organizations grow their impact by making it easy to engage anytime, anywhere. We help schools, churches, & nonprofits engage their communities through text, web, & branded apps. – Remote (within US timezones) or on-site (United States)

Senior iOS Developer @ Komoot – Touching all parts of the iOS app, your work will make outdoor adventures easily accessible to our users. You’ll develop diverse features for navigation, routing, social interaction and content visualization that will make your work challenging and fun. – Remote (within European timezones)

Senior iOS Engineer @ The Fabulous – Do you have great expertise in iOS app development? Do you like to push technology forward? Do you feel that helping people around the world achieve healthy habits is an important and meaningful mission for you? Then you should join the Fabulous mobile team. – Remote (within European timezones)

iOS Developer @ Doximity – Doximity, the medical network used by over 80% of US clinicians, is hiring passionate iOS engineers (remote). You’ll be part of an amazing product team and work on an app that is constantly evolving. Use your skills (Swift, MVVM, FRP) to be an integral part of our growing telemedicine feature. – Remote (within US timezones)

There are plenty more jobs available over at the main iOS Dev Jobs site. Or, if you’re hiring, don’t forget you can post your job for free!

And finally...

Preparing your … 😅