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Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

macworld.com

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Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#181

Post by pdimitar »

rangibaby wrote: post #180
pdimitar wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to a good guide on how you can use a MacBook Pro with the lid closed all the time? (Obviously with external display[s].) I tried 2 times -- granted they weren't very honest attempts, I hoped to have it done in 5 minutes, but failed. I am looking for a no-BS quick guide if you have one lying around.

1. Make sure an external keyboard and mouse are available, wired or wireless is fine 2. Make sure your MacBook is plugged into power and an external display 3. Close lid 4. Your main desktop should show up on the external display. If your computer goes to sleep you can wake it up by clicking the mouse or typing on the keyboard.

Thanks.

Will that wake the internal display though? That would warm it up and that can be pretty bad when the lid is closed.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#182

Post by rangibaby »

pdimitar wrote: post #181
rangibaby wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Make sure an external keyboard and mouse are available, wired or wireless is fine 2. Make sure your MacBook is plugged into power and an external display 3. Close lid 4. Your main desktop should show up on the external display. If your computer goes to sleep you can wake it up by clicking the mouse or typing on the keyboard.

Thanks. Will that wake the internal display though? That would warm it up and that can be pretty bad when the lid is closed.

If the external display wakes up as your main display with the same desktop picture and icons as your laptop it means the internal display is asleep.

If your mouse is laggy and display looks fuzzy it means your external is mirroring your internal display and that your internal display is on. Turn mirroring off if that happens.

If you’re worried about heat (lid shut mode blocks the vent that runs the width of the keyboard) you can leave your lid open and use your external display normally.

I have not noticed a heat problem using my 2013 MBP Retina in lid shut mode after my two year old threw a phone at the screen (kids! Lol)

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#183

Post by Shorel »

Finch2192 wrote: post #107

Can someone explain to me why this matters? It feels like CPU advancements in recent memory have brought nothing at all. It used to be, in the early days of smartphones, every generation brought something very new, something that can truly be considered an improvement. I remember the first dual core phone, the first quad core, etc. Nowadays, there is no noticeable difference at all. Even now, where phones have indeed…

Ubuntu was working on this, and to be honest, I would very much prefer Ubuntu over Android in order to work or do development.

But it never was profitable enough and it died. Nowadays there are some Android and Windows phones with that ability, and I think they are not very successful as well.

In fact, you claim you want this, but if the technology were successful, you would already have one of these phones and one or more docking stations.

The whole idea could die in a few years.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#184

Post by valuearb »

h1d wrote: post #176
tambourine_man wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a flying unicorn, but still a winged equine: the Mac Nano. A tiny white puck with a single usb-c plug for power and data. Inside, an A12 running OS X. Education and “enthusiast” market. GPIO as a dongle, of course. They can release the A13 version in colors the next year :)

Apple has been targeting the general public filling their needs with easy to use device/software stack and while part of it is starting to fail (dropping AirMac series), I would consider them losing focus if they start to build tiny machines only targeted at geeks. But I do feel that without extending their business what they're going to do with their massive cash just sitting around doing nothing.

Doing nothing is far better than making a dumb acquisition, and most acquisitions are dumb. Just buy back stock, they have plenitude of cash flow to fund reasonable R&D.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#185

Post by valuearb »

jey wrote: post #92
vbezhenar wrote: post #63

I'm not really impressed by this article. I don't see much of a performance improvements in desktop CPUs, so I don't expect them in mobile CPUs as well. They were catching desktop CPUs until recently, but now they are playing on even field, so I doubt that it would be 25% in single-thread. Sure, they could drop more cores, but that's it and only for specific workloads. Also I'm not even sure that I need that performa…

Yeah. All I really want is more RAM so that I can tab between Safari and Facebook without one of them getting unloaded and losing my place.

You shouldn’t lose your place even if the apps get unloaded.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#186

Post by valuearb »

bitL wrote: post #52
abritinthebay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. The main issue is software. Add a Bluetooth keyboard and you can code just fine on iOS. The problem is that there are no native tools for it (that we have access to). That’s actually a very minor hurdle, not a long way at all.

Lacking multitasking is a productivity killer for a developer, typically juggling multiple balls at once.

Good thing iOS has had multitasking sinc the beginning then.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#187

Post by valuearb »

mullingitover wrote: post #108
ianamartin wrote: post #28

The dearth of WWDC rumors this year is really amazing to me. Apple really is taking leaks very seriously. We're 10 days away from the keynote, and absolutely nothing is getting out. This speculation is the best that Macworld can do? No offense to them, but I mean, the rumors are slim pickings. I really hope that Apple fixes its laptop lineup at WWDC. It's a complete and total shitshow right now. And that's coming fro…

> Apple really needs to fix the laptops and give up the goods on the Mac Pro machine. Apple just needs to give up on Macs. They obviously don't care about the product much anymore. License the OS and let OEMs and regular people build machines that can deliver the value that Apple can't or won't.

Apple’s Mac lineup is the most profitable PC business in the world, AINEC.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#188

Post by pizza234 »

znpy wrote: post #86
pizza234 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously, a high power SBC at a reasonable price point would be insanely useful for projects like portable MAME cabinets Right now one can buy an Exynos5422, which CPU wise (I've never tested the GPU) is 4/5+ times as fast as an RPi 3b, for the price point mentioned ( For me, this is effectively a "high power SBC at a reasonable price", however, at the same time, users interested in SBCs (or micro-PCs) seem to hav…

Link/source ? Btw imho the worst part about RPi is that it has poor ethernet performance. This improved a bit with RPi 3+, but still meh.

Here is a Phoronix test suite run:

https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1805276-FO-1703199RI52

It's hard to asses a generic ratio, since the performance increase is wildly variable. I think it can be reasonably assessed a "base" 3x performance ratio against the RPi 3B (with an outlier of 8x).

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#189

Post by pizza234 »

deaddodo wrote: post #133
pizza234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jetson CPU performance is on par with chips like the RK3399 or the Exynos5422, which are 4/5+ times as fast as the RPi 3b (I owned RPi 2/3b series, and the Exynos). Note that the first benchmark in the mentioned article is an outlier.

No, it's not. Having worked with the Jetson platform extensively, the TK1 was equivalent to a 5422 (because they're both built on the vanilla A15 architecture). However, the TX1 and TX2 ("Denver" cores) are closer to (though, still slighty behind) the current SD 835: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6y4atVl-mc And when it comes to GPU compute, it's much more powerful than all the alternatives.

I'll correct to "comparable", as it's more appropriate.

However, it's not a "clearcut no" or "very powerful in comparison", due to the number of cores (no doubt about the GPU, I had made this explicit in the parent post).

I've run the Phoronix test suite (which uses a set of real-world applications)[⁰], and, excluding the outliars for both parts (Redis/OpenSSL), we're talking about 10 to 40% advantage for the TX1, and little more for the TX2; XU4 has even the edge in one case.

They're definitely faster for the majority of use cases, however, I wouldn't classify them as "very powerful in comparison", at least, when considering the performance of an RPi 3B.

[⁰] https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1805276-FO-1703199RI52

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#190

Post by tzahola »

dangoor wrote: post #172
tzahola wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS won’t ever be a development platform. That would necessitate bringing down the AppStore walled garden, which would be a very stupid move from Apple.

Not sure why you say this. There are already various kinds of developer tools on iOS (see Codea, for example). They don't bring down the App Store walls. An Xcode for iOS would be designed to make it straightforward to develop iOS apps and then sign them and upload them to the App Store when you're ready.

Sure, you can have toys like Swift Playgrounds in the AppStore, but real application development takes more than just Xcode. E.g. you need a shell and various command line tools, like otool, lipo, nm.
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