Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#61

Post by roryisok » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

bonestamp2 wrote: post #22

jimmy1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I think they are doing a full about-face with these latest generation of garbage MBPs and I am hopeful for the refreshes. A lesson many will learn the hard way, eventually, is you don't scorn your power users because they are an endless source of evangelism and free marketing for your product.

I think he/she was suggesting macbooks would move to iOS/ARM and macbook pros would stay macOS/Intel, at least in the near future.

Yes, pretty much that.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#62

Post by jandrese » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

dmayle wrote: post #45

jandrese wrote: post #17

I wish Apple would make a sort of Raspberry Pi like board with an A series chip, ethernet, HDMI, GPIO, SD Card, etc... for $50-$100 that runs Linux. I would also like a flying unicorn. Seriously, a high power SBC at a reasonable price point would be insanely useful for projects like portable MAME cabinets, video transcoders, scene displays, etc... I love the Pi but it's so old tech, especially the video cores, that i…

The rock64 and variants should do what you're looking for.

I said I wanted a working GPU.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#63

Post by vbezhenar » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:19 PM UTC

I'm not really impressed by this article. I don't see much of a performance improvements in desktop CPUs, so I don't expect them in mobile CPUs as well. They were catching desktop CPUs until recently, but now they are playing on even field, so I doubt that it would be 25% in single-thread. Sure, they could drop more cores, but that's it and only for specific workloads. Also I'm not even sure that I need that performance in my phone, I don't play games or run Idea there. Battery life speculations are very unconvincing as well. CPU is only part of battery drain, another parts are display and, most importantly, radio chips. So if my CPU eats 10% of my battery, those 25% improvements will be 2.5% which is not that impressive. They have terrible batter anyway, I have no idea how they managed to make a phone which turns off at -30C. How am I supposed to use it at winter?

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#64

Post by Reason077 » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

lnanek2 wrote: post #35

monocasa wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, they're literally the developers for the mobile platform. iOS has a very long way to go before you can develop on it.

iOS is not particularly different from OSX. That's why Apple developers get to use a super fast simulator instead of the dog slow emulator we Android developers are stuck with.

Similarities between iOS and macOS don't have much to do with it.

The reason the Android emulator is slow is that it is actually emulating an ARM CPU.

The iOS simulator, on the other hand, is running an iOS natively built for x86, and Xcode targets the x86 architecture when you build your app for the simulator.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#65

Post by ratsimihah » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

Have chips ever been critical features? I mean the ones that add features like NFC ok, but doesn't every chip make phones "faster"?

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#66

Post by stefan_ » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

craftyguy wrote: post #57

stefan_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. But they contain non-zero amounts of information on the chip so you can do a proper implementation or, much less ambitious, update it for newer kernel versions.

Not in my experience. The code in the kernel is usually just a shim for loading the blobs that do the real work.

All the reverse-engineered GPU drivers we have now (freedreno, etnaviv, nouveau, lima) started out with intercepting kernel ioctls, being able to observe the blobs at work. Many of them at one point ran with the vendor kernel interface but open-source userspace.

In many ways the kernel part of a GPU is arguably the least important part and it's the userland where the shader compiler sits and produces the magic, but if you start from nothing it's very useful to have a working kernel interface that initializes the hardware and accepts command streams to run.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#67

Post by jandrese » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

H1Supreme wrote: post #27

jandrese wrote: post #17

I wish Apple would make a sort of Raspberry Pi like board with an A series chip, ethernet, HDMI, GPIO, SD Card, etc... for $50-$100 that runs Linux. I would also like a flying unicorn. Seriously, a high power SBC at a reasonable price point would be insanely useful for projects like portable MAME cabinets, video transcoders, scene displays, etc... I love the Pi but it's so old tech, especially the video cores, that i…

Surely there's got to be something like that available already. I'm mostly dealing with low powered M0/M4 boards, but the selection in this range is massive.

There's an absolute ocean of old obsolete ARM cores clocked slowly. The difference in performance is so vast it would be hard to compare with an A11 chip, especially once you include graphics acceleration in the mix.

Apple has been doubling down every year on the "we can make it go faster", and the rest of the ARM chip makers have responded with a "meh". It's so bad that people get really excited for a Samsung chip that is no slower than a two generation old A series chip.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#68

Post by reaperducer » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

ianamartin wrote: post #28

The dearth of WWDC rumors this year is really amazing to me. Apple really is taking leaks very seriously. We're 10 days away from the keynote, and absolutely nothing is getting out. This speculation is the best that Macworld can do? No offense to them, but I mean, the rumors are slim pickings. I really hope that Apple fixes its laptop lineup at WWDC. It's a complete and total shitshow right now. And that's coming fro…

>We're 10 days away from the keynote, and absolutely nothing is getting out.

I'm OK with this. I'm not so locked into a feedback loop that I need to know every little thing happening at Apple before it actually happens. I think the death of Think Secret did that for me.

The downside is that all of the Apple fansites (9to5Mac, MacRumors, etc...) are all full of crap "wish list", "deals" and contests disguised as articles because they have to fill their quotas.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#69

Post by dfrey » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #17

I wish Apple would make a sort of Raspberry Pi like board with an A series chip, ethernet, HDMI, GPIO, SD Card, etc... for $50-$100 that runs Linux. I would also like a flying unicorn. Seriously, a high power SBC at a reasonable price point would be insanely useful for projects like portable MAME cabinets, video transcoders, scene displays, etc... I love the Pi but it's so old tech, especially the video cores, that i…

Apple is so in love with walled gardens. I can't imagine them ever making truly open hardware. Perhaps they are uniquely qualified to make something open because of the amount of effort they have put into making things that are closed.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#70

Post by MrUnderhill » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:34 PM UTC

What are the chances the next gen iPhone gets a L1/L5-capable GNSS chip? That'd arguably be one of the better features too. There's some speculation that Pixel 3 will get it (BCM47755).