Apple is catching up, and fast. They’re near laptop Skylake performance in phone TDPs. That’s impressive, and I wonder how well it could scale. Apple with an x86 license should absolutely scare Intel if it were to happen. Intel and the other ARM vendors need to get their shit together.
FPGAs becoming more common? Making custom ASICs is easy if you’re Google or Facebook, not so much anyone else. GPGPU could also become more common in the consumer realm as well.
I’ve heard of problems with Intel management and leadership. Could this be crippling their ability to iterate?
Software has been getting more and more efficient. Since Windows 7, the implied system requirements have been dropping, and Windows 8.1.1 even lowered them. macOS 10.11 fixed many longstanding issues with memory that have been plaguing it since Tiger.
Apple with an x86 license should absolutely scare Intel if it were to happen.
Why use an x86? Given that iOS is on ARM already, I can imagine a future where Apple just puts ARM on their desktops and laptops and drops Intel altogether. They would then merge iOS/OS X into the other, possibly supplying something like Rosetta in the transition period (Which would probably be longer than the PPC->x86 transition period).
Macs without having to rely on emulation. Apple’s cores are good, but not “beat the previous architecture’s cores in emulation” good. Core 2 Duo was beating G4s in emulation, after all.
Apple sees iOS and macOS as separate spheres with different needs.
When they switched, the older CPUs were on the end of their roadmap (Apple could go 68060, but it’s not much left there, and Motorola was switching to PPC as 88k turned out to be a bust, and IBM and Freescale had little interest in desktop-class POWER) and were easily emulatable by the successor.
Good! And soon we will start programming organisms. Now only for the society to catch up and stop using both for petty hedonism. I want a stable environment here on Earth and a colony on Mars!
Random thinkies before I sleep:
Apple is catching up, and fast. They’re near laptop Skylake performance in phone TDPs. That’s impressive, and I wonder how well it could scale. Apple with an x86 license should absolutely scare Intel if it were to happen. Intel and the other ARM vendors need to get their shit together.
FPGAs becoming more common? Making custom ASICs is easy if you’re Google or Facebook, not so much anyone else. GPGPU could also become more common in the consumer realm as well.
I’ve heard of problems with Intel management and leadership. Could this be crippling their ability to iterate?
Software has been getting more and more efficient. Since Windows 7, the implied system requirements have been dropping, and Windows 8.1.1 even lowered them. macOS 10.11 fixed many longstanding issues with memory that have been plaguing it since Tiger.
While we’re into random thinkies…
Curiously enough Intel bought out one of the biggest FPGA manufacturers (Altera), can’t say I have seen them do terribly much with it.
Moore’s law for compiler optimization Proebstrings law is something like 18 years.
Why use an x86? Given that iOS is on ARM already, I can imagine a future where Apple just puts ARM on their desktops and laptops and drops Intel altogether. They would then merge iOS/OS X into the other, possibly supplying something like Rosetta in the transition period (Which would probably be longer than the PPC->x86 transition period).
Macs without having to rely on emulation. Apple’s cores are good, but not “beat the previous architecture’s cores in emulation” good. Core 2 Duo was beating G4s in emulation, after all.
Apple sees iOS and macOS as separate spheres with different needs.
They’ve already transitioned CPU architectures twice (68008 to PPC to Intel). Why not another time, if the CPUs allow for it?
When they switched, the older CPUs were on the end of their roadmap (Apple could go 68060, but it’s not much left there, and Motorola was switching to PPC as 88k turned out to be a bust, and IBM and Freescale had little interest in desktop-class POWER) and were easily emulatable by the successor.
Good! And soon we will start programming organisms. Now only for the society to catch up and stop using both for petty hedonism. I want a stable environment here on Earth and a colony on Mars!