Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak. I wonder if future perf gains will come, game console-style, from areas besides general purpose computation -- specialized instructions / cores for specialized tasks. Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery lif…
> I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak. I'm not. Let them all scramble and pull out the big guns to try to compete. That's capitalism at it's finest, which isn't exactly what we've been seeing in the CPU space for the prior decades. We got lucky that AMD caught Intel with their pants down recently (if only because it strengthens AMD and makes them a better competitor), but a du…
> And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with
> Slack and select other app makers so that they can
> be a part of the "Marathon" program too.
RIP the general purpose computer. :(
Haha. I was truly truly not thinking along any such lines.Since heterogenuous cores are now a mainstream thing, with a mixture of full-throttle and performance-minded cores on a single die, and the performance cores may be hitting a wall until we get to smaller processes, perhaps the next frontier could be efficiency.
Remember how some software proudly displayed those "optimized for MMX" or "optimized for 3DNow!" badges back in the day? What if there was something like that for apps that optimized for those efficiency cores, and what if the efficiency cores met them halfway by implementing some app-friendly stuff in hardware? Sort of like how some common Javascript string ops have dedicated CPU hardware dedicated to them now.
Anyway, yeah. I'm probably just re-inventing CISC all over again, badly.