141–150 of 263 posts
(Sh|C)ould this be a concern for Intel?
Interesting. The article says that Apple is considering an ARM co -processor, not a replacement for the Intel CPU. I have no doubts at all that Apple have at least had extensive internal discussion and testing about this. In fact, I believe they've probably done extensive internal discussion and testing about replacing the Intel one altogether, but can't get there yet. It'd give Apple more control over their device d…
Saying that - and I hope someone corrects me here if I'm wrong, I was under the impression that Apple & Intel jointly created Thunderbolt (or perhaps it is an Intel only tech), which means Apple may have some sway here.
Just thinking about it more - Thunderbolt is just a protocol driven over USB-C now, so I'm fairly certain USB (3/C) might eventually be able to cover everything Thunderbolt does, or apple takes their "lightning" protocol to replace Thunderbolt, and use that over USB instead of Thunderbolt over USB.
Just musing but it is a very under appreciated aspect to all of this as well!
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I don't think that's true. Arm chips just don't clock as high as intels can, and no one* cares about clock speed any more. That ship has sailed. Multiprocess web browsers will drive the sales of massively multicore arms (with tons of ram!), and intel will be sunk.
It's not just about clock speed. While Intel Core CPUs don't scale down to power budgets as low as ARM cores, they are impressively efficient on a perf/watt basis. Smart phones achieve high battery life mostly by being very aggressive about reducing CPU load in software (see iOS killing apps the moment they go into the background). General purpose operating systems don't work like that so there's more reliance on the…
Is that true? I thought people were trying out ARM rack servers because of the power efficiency vs perf.
It has been interesting to watch the ARM ecosystem unfold. Sort of like seeing a levy breach where just a trickle of water starts flowing over it and then more and more and more. Apple has the resources and the motivation to build a "desktop" 64 bit ARM processor. The history here is also interesting. After debuting the Macintosh in 1984, and getting into fights with Motorola over what should be in the next generatio…
It's really interesting how the historical strengths of companies can persist even after decades of evolution. If the people are coming and going, how is this institutionalized success being cultivated and maintained?
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/-inside-apples...
http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/08/codifying-asymmetry-how-app...
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It's not just about clock speed. While Intel Core CPUs don't scale down to power budgets as low as ARM cores, they are impressively efficient on a perf/watt basis. Smart phones achieve high battery life mostly by being very aggressive about reducing CPU load in software (see iOS killing apps the moment they go into the background). General purpose operating systems don't work like that so there's more reliance on the…
they are impressively efficient on a perf/watt basis Is that true? I thought people were trying out ARM rack servers because of the power efficiency vs perf.
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You're correct. Here's AMD's statement: >Advanced Micro Devices has clarified terms of the cross-license agreement with Intel Corp. on Thursday. As it appears, if either AMD or Intel change their control (i.e., gets acquired), the cross-license agreement between the two companies is automatically terminated for both parties. Since AMD invented x64 this would leave Intel in quite a bind and the only solution would be…
Yeah, that would be a really, really dangerous agreement for Intel given the market cap of AMD and how it would gut Intel's CPU lineup. I would assume their would be one damn quick agreement after the fact.
Anyone knows how far is Apple from getting the following desktop system as one SoC? - 4GHz 12-core 64-bit ARM OooE with 256KiB L2 cache per core - 12MiB of L3 cache - Integrated graphics with 128MB eDRAM - PCI-Express buses - 35 GB/s DDR4 memory controller - 5-65W power usage
Hurricane could probably run at 3GHz but to get to 4GHz might require serious work. Apple hasn't used eDRAM but in theory they could adopt it. The rest looks like no big deal.
>Is it IBM compatible though? Man, I hated hearing that question. It was so utterly retarded, but trying to explain to the person who asked why it was a retarded thing to say always came off as damage control. >Yep, not IBM compatible. Not interested. Maybe Apple can get away with their own chips now. It sounds like they just want to take more R&D away from Mac though. "Just stick an A10 in it."
iOS applications are now compiled to an intermediate representation which is then translated to the target CPU instruction at install time. macOS applications could similarly be built to run on multiple instruction sets with basically no effort from the developers. Perhaps initially it might be restricted to first-party apps, or maybe AppStore apps, but having fat binaries is something macOS developers are used to do…
Interesting. The article says that Apple is considering an ARM co -processor, not a replacement for the Intel CPU. I have no doubts at all that Apple have at least had extensive internal discussion and testing about this. In fact, I believe they've probably done extensive internal discussion and testing about replacing the Intel one altogether, but can't get there yet. It'd give Apple more control over their device d…
It's finally happening! The increase in competition in both the foundry and architectural spaces is exactly what we need to push us past this stagnation of Moore's Law. Intel needs to sacrifice Microsoft and make x86 a legacy architecture. There are huge parts of their processor designs that no one at the company modifies (or even understands) from one generation to the next, but which they cannot remove for backward…
> It's time to start fresh with a new architecture if they want to maintain their reputation of having the most powerful technology. They tried that, though. It was called Itanium and it went nowhere. Now, Itanium had all kinds of other problems and I wouldn't call its failure incontrovertible evidence against "Intel should make a new architecture", but I can understand why the company isn't eager to try that again.…
Either way, it's been 20+ years they could try again.