211–220 of 342 posts
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The 64bit Aarch64 ISA has very little in common with the original ISA from '85.
I gather that it's true that ARM hasn't been as good about backwards compatibility as some of its competitors, but was ARMv8 really so much of a jump from ARMv7 that one can't count it as part of the same line of processors anymore?
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"Optimized" in this sense meant that animated gifs can have a frame reference only three pixels of the original image. So an image of 300K with only small movement (think cinemagraphs) wouldn't be much larger. This is a given for movie formats, but at the time the animated GIF came up it was revolutionary. I think the proper phrase should be "animated GIFs can be pretty optimized, taking into account how inefficient…
That's "compressed," not "optimized".
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We're getting open source RISC-V wich seems more promising long term than ARM.
We'll see. ARM architecture is now about 36 years old. I believe RISC V originated about 10 years ago. I think MIPS started about 40 years ago, but I believe it has finally ground to a stop.
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This is the first I have heard of Apple doing this, and I feel like, in my position, I would have heard of this... I have just spent some time searching around myself trying to find any such reference and the closest I could find was the opposite: an article from Electrical Engineering Journal that said that Apple could have, but stated they didn't need to and pretty strongly implied they didn't, even going so far as…
https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/01/15/the-secret-apple-m1-amx... The rumor I've heard is that Apple is keeping their custom extensions to the ISA undocumented in deference to ARM's desire not to have the instruction set just completely fragment into a bunch of mutually incompatible company-specific dialects. It's worth noting that the article you link predates the public release of the M1 by a good 10 months. Given ho…
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I gather that it's true that ARM hasn't been as good about backwards compatibility as some of its competitors, but was ARMv8 really so much of a jump from ARMv7 that one can't count it as part of the same line of processors anymore?
The v7->v8 jump was the biggest one in the history of ARM, it's totally redesigned, they only kept the name.
So one could be forgiven, I should think, for thinking the shift was more comparable to x86 -> amd64 than it was to x86 -> ia64.
Who else is excited that we are might revive the 80s Cambrian explosion of different system system and architectures? Back then there were so many options.
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> Apple is pretty good at the planned obsolescence game Nah, they suck at it. My GF is just finishing her bachelors thesis in the living room on my 2013 MBP with 4 GB RAM. First battery, updated all the way from Mavericks to Big Sur. Still supported, still useful and prettier than 80 % machines out there.
You're right. Macs have excellent build quality and are durable as hell. Planned obsolescence with Apple is seen more with iPhones. There was the recent story about Apple slowing down older iPhones via software updates [1] [1]: [ https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 ]
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The 64bit Aarch64 ISA has very little in common with the original ISA from '85.
I gather that it's true that ARM hasn't been as good about backwards compatibility as some of its competitors, but was ARMv8 really so much of a jump from ARMv7 that one can't count it as part of the same line of processors anymore?
AMD didn't have to extend x86 the way they did, but without buy in from intel there was no way forward unless they went the route they did. Because unless both had agreed to shift to UEFI at the same time and agreed on an ISA it wasn't going to happen. This is why even a modern x86-64 processor has to boot up in real mode... because there was no guarantee that the x64 extensions were going to take off, so AMD had to maintain that strict compatibility to be competitive.
AArch64 had no prohibition, because there is no universal boot protocol for ARM. Insofar as the UEFI or loader sets the CPU in a state the OS can use then it's fine. The fact that there is one IP holder helped as well.
That said could AMD make a x86-64 processor without real mode or compatibility mode support? Yes they can. In fact I would hope that the processors they ship to console manufacturers fit that bill. There is a lot they could strip out if they only intend to support x86-64.
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And this kids, is why we have key and delta frames. We should drop gif support.
i'm pretty surprised apng hasn't really displaced gif, at least not completely. a lot of people don't seem to even be aware pngs are animatable these days
Another matter is compatibility. IE11 is a no-go which even after the recent announcement will kill APNG for some. And while Edge now supports it this has only been the case since the switch to being Chromium based (so the beginning of last year).
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Hmmm... the chances for that are pretty slim I'm afraid. "Apple Silicon" is not a new system, it's just one of the large incumbents switching to another architecture (which is also not a first, this now being their fourth architecture, after 680x0, PowerPC and x86). In the desktop/notebook market, Wintel and Apple are firmly entrenched, with only ChromeOS and Linux challenging them - plus a few less significant OSes…
The original Apple I / II before the Macintosh used the MOS 6502 processor.