121–130 of 156 posts
Unless Microsoft also drops Intel, I don't see this happening.
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I find the "Apple is too expensive" argument to hold little water when you really look at it. I won't argue that up front you will pay more for the lowest-end Apple laptop/desktop over a Windows laptop/desktop but in my experience Apple products hold their value much better than any Dell/HP/etc product. Even if you hate OS X then you still are better off buying an Apple laptop and running Windows than you are buying…
It is exactly for this reason my next laptop will be a MBP running Linux (I have zero interest in MacOSX). I bought a mid level Vostro a while back and it is absolute piece of shit. Touch pad detects my palm from across the room but is inaccurate when I actually touch it, screen is mediocre and lets dust in constantly, keyboard is mushy with no positive click. The spec looked good and Vostro's used to be ok, the Vost…
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I find the "Apple is too expensive" argument to hold little water when you really look at it. I won't argue that up front you will pay more for the lowest-end Apple laptop/desktop over a Windows laptop/desktop but in my experience Apple products hold their value much better than any Dell/HP/etc product. Even if you hate OS X then you still are better off buying an Apple laptop and running Windows than you are buying…
I find the "holds value" argument to hold little water. While Apple hardware does hold its value very well, most people don't resell their hardware every year or two. Yes, some people do, and they're quite organised and know what they're doing when it comes to moving all their stuff between machines and their setup, but most people don't. As for massive slowdowns, I'm having a problem at the moment in that everyone I…
Please show me a windows laptop that is still worth even half it's value after 2 years.
I like the ARM architecture a lot. It's simple and easy to write software for, all the way from embedded controller stuff to "real" operating systems. But they're not all that great at doing massive computation. We were going to use one in the video path of a popular gaming system for a while, and it turned out to be inadequate by at least an order of magnitude (probably a factor of 100, but comparing CPU cycles to GPU cycles is pretty unfair).
Intel is executing really well, and it'll probably take an alien invasion to dethrone them.
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You're making the incorrect assumption that apple would in fact emulate. As they control the whole stack, they can (relatively) quickly switch architectures. They'd lose the market that does in fact install windows on mac hardware, though that is likely a negligible niche. So for the vast majority of their customers there would not be a performance penalty. Quite the opposite. Apple chips are in terms of tech already…
No. You also lose compatibility with every game and most major applications like Adobe, since all of these use lots of highly optimized, handwritten assembler code for critical sections, as well of all code paths using x86 vector instructions or other hw acceleration. Thanks but no thanks.
A switch like this would kill Thunderbolt and many USB drivers.
Besides, we already saw what happens when Microsoft tried to switch to ARM through WinRT. That was an absolute disaster. Why would Apple try to do the same?
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No. You also lose compatibility with every game and most major applications like Adobe, since all of these use lots of highly optimized, handwritten assembler code for critical sections, as well of all code paths using x86 vector instructions or other hw acceleration. Thanks but no thanks.
They'd also lose compatibility with any 3rd party hardware (think ThunderBolt), any video editing device drivers which were made for the x86 platform will need to be recompiled for the ARM platform. A switch like this would kill Thunderbolt and many USB drivers. Besides, we already saw what happens when Microsoft tried to switch to ARM through WinRT. That was an absolute disaster. Why would Apple try to do the same?
From the article: > Because of this excess baggage, an x86 chip needs more > transistors than its ARM-based equivalent, and thus it > consumes more power and must dissipate more heat. This is true but it ignores the primary reality of "desktop class" processor design today: RAM is the bottleneck in a really major way and most of a desktop class CPU's transistors are dedicated to overcoming this. In the ancient days,…
Problem here is that you are mixing memory latency and memory bandwidth together. We have memory that can easily sustain 16 simultaneous cores in bandwidth (and honestly, memory bandwidth potential is mostly untapped - you only see higher bandwidth benefits for integrated GPUs because they have many more execution units demanding more data). Meanwhile, the latency has been getting worse. The refresh rates increasing…
> Problem here is that you are mixing memory latency and memory bandwidth together.
> If software architects started writing their programs to be core-variable as possible,
The reality is that a great many computing problems simply don't lend themselves to parallelization. Some things are embarrassingly parallel (like a lot of graphics work) but a lot of algorithms simply aren't able to be implemented in a very parallel way since each "step" depends heavily on things you need to calculate in the previous "step." (Example: simulations, games, etc)
Things will improve a little bit, as our languages support easier parallel/concurrent code and our compilers get better at things like auto-parallelization, but this won't magically make stubbornly sequential algorithms into things that scale to two cores, much less "a lot more dumb cores."
> just putting a lot more dumb cores on the die
The "lots of dumb cores" thing has been tried before. Like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine and Intel's Larrabee and things like that. Seriously, don't you think that hardware designers have thought of this before? They have. There's a reason why Intel doesn't just throw 100 Pentium cores onto a single i7-sized die and dominate the entire world.
What would happen to the cost, battery life, and size of an A10-powered MacBook Air? It would be worse in almost every aspect. The cost wouldn't change much, and Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch. The cited CPU cost is the suggested retail price . Apple's volume lets them negotiate huge discounts. Battery life would go up a bit, but battery life is already pretty good on Apple laptops. My 2013 11" Air g…
The discounts aren't that "huge" when compared to ARM chip prices. They are only "huge" in comparison to other Intel customers. But the difference still remains something close to an order of magnitude . It's been shown before that Intel chips make up roughly 40 percent of the BOM/retail price (however you want to account it) of a PC. I doubt it's less than say 30 percent for an Apple Mac. The retail price for a high…
Citation?
I'm saddened that nobody ever brings up video games when talking about these architectural shifts. Practically all PC games in the past few decades have been written for x86, and most of them will never be patched for ARM compatibility. These games are as important to many of us as movies or music, and yet I fear they're destined to disappear from our cultural memory if this shift ever happens. Virtualization just wo…
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Problem here is that you are mixing memory latency and memory bandwidth together. We have memory that can easily sustain 16 simultaneous cores in bandwidth (and honestly, memory bandwidth potential is mostly untapped - you only see higher bandwidth benefits for integrated GPUs because they have many more execution units demanding more data). Meanwhile, the latency has been getting worse. The refresh rates increasing…
1. Memory isn't just slow because they went for capacity not performance (except vacuously), it's slow because of the laws of physics. c.f. L3 memory is made of the same stuff as registers but takes about 30 times longer to access. 2. No, adding lots of dumb cores makes no sense. 3. GPUs are useful because many tasks are embarrassingly parallel. Many more are not. 4. 'If we wrote better software' adding many more cor…
> Memory isn't just slow because they went for capacity
> not performance (except vacuously), it's slow because
> of the laws of physics.
> There's a reason why the iPhone and iPad only have two
> cores - it's not worth their while adding more but does
> add lots of cost and complexity.