Apple walks Ars through the iPad Pro’s A12X system on a chip • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple walks Ars through the iPad Pro’s A12X system on a chip

#171

Post by philwelch » Fri, Nov 09, 2018, 7:24 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #168

philwelch wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, it's (theoretically) possible to use a smartphone as a desktop PC. That's also the least popular form factor for a computing device these days. Laptops or tablets would, even on the physical level, be much harder to pull off this way.

For a laptop, all you need is a keyboard/screen clamshell unit with a docking port for the phone where a drive would be on a typical laptop. A tablet is pretty similar, but the dock needs to be behind the screen, which probably makes a thicker than average tablet. Or you just make a foldable phone which folds out to a tablet.

Even the laptop would be thicker than average unless you’re measuring by early 2000’s standards.

Re: Apple walks Ars through the iPad Pro’s A12X system on a chip

#172

Post by m_mueller » Fri, Nov 09, 2018, 9:16 AM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #166

m_mueller wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but I figure this could be scaled up with larger dies. Sure, Apple is not yet on eye level with Nvidia & AMD, but given their massive R&D budgets I don’t think that’s for long. Also, AR & VR drives demand for GPU FLOPS/Watt in a tight envelope, which has proven to scale quite well to larger chips in CPUs (see mobile ARM -> Cavium & co.).

Scaling up is one of those easier said than done things. Until Apple actually does it there's no reason to assume they could do it. Cavium is sort of your proof that scaling is hard. The 32-core ThunderX2 @ 2.2ghz with 56 PCI-E lanes has the same TDP as the 32-core AMD Epyc with 128 PCI-E lanes. And it's slower than the competition from AMD & Intel at comparable power budgets.

Sure, Cavium is not yet competitive for compute heavy workloads that make use of vectorization. For everything else, e.g. memory bandwidth bounded algos from what I gathered in benchmarks they are quite competitive. And those kind of workloads are actually quite common in HPC from my POV.

Re: Apple walks Ars through the iPad Pro’s A12X system on a chip

#173

Post by xvector » Fri, Nov 09, 2018, 9:32 PM UTC

iagooar wrote: post #142

xvector wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Cook himself flat out said they have no intention of ever merging MacOS and iOS or converging the two in any way.

Merging does not equal dual boot. They'd still be separate pieces of software, but the ability to run MacOS on iPad hardware would be huge.

I just don't see Apple ever adding a feature as convoluted as dual-boot. That's just about the least Apple software feature they could add.