And for the sheeps who thinks a8x can match this, look st the preview on anand. This thing is on par with surface pro 3 and runs circles around any ARM device including iPads. But keep pretending to be an analyst doe.
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Intel Launches New Broadwell Core M Processors, Likely Destined for Apple's Ultra-Slim Notebook
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Why are we assuming passive cooling?
We keep assuming passive cooling just because of the term "fanless"
Apple has a patent on file that uses ionic wind generation
(see here:
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patent...-the-ionic-wind-generator-cooling-system.html )
Apple also tends to purchase at high-enough volumes that they can demand the cream of the crop when it comes to the chip supply.
Perhaps a silent air-cooled mechanism paired with top-grade chips would be the answer to keeping this sort of chip running at a higher thermal envelope for longer, with lower risk of failure.
We keep assuming passive cooling just because of the term "fanless"
Apple has a patent on file that uses ionic wind generation
(see here:
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patent...-the-ionic-wind-generator-cooling-system.html )
Apple also tends to purchase at high-enough volumes that they can demand the cream of the crop when it comes to the chip supply.
Perhaps a silent air-cooled mechanism paired with top-grade chips would be the answer to keeping this sort of chip running at a higher thermal envelope for longer, with lower risk of failure.
What is amusing here is that you think ARM hardware is in a static world where performance doesn't evolve.
As for instruction set comaptibility that is a hang over from the 1990's. IPad has shown that it simply doesn't matter any more. In fact I'd go so far as to say that having a Java VM is far more useful.
Having had a MBP since 2008 I've yet to find a need for i86 compatibility. Frankly I thought I would but the Mac supports a wide array of software and development systems, software availability is not an issue.
Frankly the only reason we have Arm in an iPhine is because it is the only play in town right now for custom SoC designs. Intel seems to be highly reluctant to enter that market and AMD is late to the party. Even then the Arm cores take up a trivial amount of space on Apples SoC highlighting just how important custom circuitry is on these chips. More than half (including the GPU and CPU and cache) of Apples A8 is unidentified in the latest chip tear downs. It is Apples ability to use half the chip for their own specialization that keeps i86 out of iPhone.
It depends upon how you Marie performance. On a performance per watt basis it is a very competitive market. In the case of Apple A8X they appear to be able to safely rise above all completion in that regard.
Oh the real work argument which of course means nothing. The fact is one can put more cores into a given ARM SoC and that works out very well for some use cases.
OS /X is UNIX and iOS is a subset of that so you blow all your arguments to hell because you effectively verified that ARM is very capable of running Unix. The fact is it runs LINUX too.
If you have enough cores it won't be a problem. Many of the program you mention are heavily threaded or make use of sub processes so performance is dependent upon having enough active cores to keep all of those threads up to date.
Maybe not. There is some speculation going around in design circles that Apple has achieved transistor densities with A8X exceeding what Intel is getting at 14 nm. I have not seen that verified but the idea that Intel has a massive lead here is asinine. Further Intel has yet to really deliver with respect to 14 nm, a trickle of processors is not a sign of a mass production ready process.
Yep engineering trade offs. No surprise there. However Intel has hurt themselves and frankly the entire i86 industry by not transitioning to a clean 64 bit platform and deleting allof the legacy hardware that support modes no one uses anymore.
Well no! You would expect power to go down with every process shrink. As for performance going up that has certainly happened but the gains in the CPU have been minor compared to the efforts they have put into the GPUs. The fact is we are seeing disminishing returns with respect to the effort required to get better IPC counts. This is in fact why we have dual and quad core CPUS and in some cases SMT. Trend highly favor the smaller cores that ARM can provide as this allows many to be placed on a single SoC.
ARM is perhaps one of the most unlimited architectures or better said ISA out there. The designers are free to produce an ARM chip that is as sophisticated as they need or are capable of producing.
As for instruction set comaptibility that is a hang over from the 1990's. IPad has shown that it simply doesn't matter any more. In fact I'd go so far as to say that having a Java VM is far more useful.
Having had a MBP since 2008 I've yet to find a need for i86 compatibility. Frankly I thought I would but the Mac supports a wide array of software and development systems, software availability is not an issue.
You think wrong. Why? Because of the fact that the SoC is where manufactures like Apple now put their innovations. The days of gluing together a few TTL chips to provide unique functionality is gone as is the design of custom LSI chips to solder onto a motherboard. You can expect to see Apple putting more and more custom functionality into their SoC, not because they want to get away from I86 but rather because they need that chip to put the custom circuitry that makes their products competitive.
Frankly the only reason we have Arm in an iPhine is because it is the only play in town right now for custom SoC designs. Intel seems to be highly reluctant to enter that market and AMD is late to the party. Even then the Arm cores take up a trivial amount of space on Apples SoC highlighting just how important custom circuitry is on these chips. More than half (including the GPU and CPU and cache) of Apples A8 is unidentified in the latest chip tear downs. It is Apples ability to use half the chip for their own specialization that keeps i86 out of iPhone.
Yeah that's what I'm interested in.
CPUs can gain 10% every generation.
But will the integrated GPUs be powerful enough to drive DOUBLE the pixels in a Retina Macbook Air?
Right... And what you put out here is an "analysis"... Because "sheep" is always used in tech reports... And not the purview of dim Scandinavian folkloric creatures pushing tiny buttons with bulbous fingers.... And missing.
Derp on my part. I read that as CPU for some dumb reason.
Though 850MHz isn't all that bad either in concerns to the GPU. In fact it's pretty middle of the road. The Geforce Maxwell series of cards are clocked anywhere between 700MHz on the low end, to 1.1GHz on the high.
Eh, Itanium didn't sell all that well. x86-64 got too popular too quickly for it to catch on. It was a clean break from x86 (to the point that it had to emulate it and THAT performance hit was massive)...
... And designing own chips allows Apple transition to 64bit-only CPUs in few years (A7 and higher are in fact nearly two CPUs in one package - difference between 32 bit ARM instruction set and 64 bit instruction set is enormous.
I think that in +- 2018 will Apple release 64bit-only ARM iDevices. It will allow to save some space on die and decrease energy consumption.
Intel has tried to make transition to 64bit architecture (if I'm not mistaken, it was called Intel Itanium) ... But it didn't succeed. AMD's i86_64 instruction set was better for transition as personal computers rely on backward compatibility much more than smartphones and tablets.
I believe benchmarks have shown them to be less powerful than the current MacBook air's hd 5000So... relatively weak (but power efficient) processors... and Retina in the new Macbook Air?
I hope those integrated Intel graphics are hella powerful.
But can Intel get enough yield on the highest end model for the Airs? Apple buys too many parts.
The new Mac-Mini shows Apple is price shopping and willing to compromise performance levels to achieve it. The good news is Apple exceeded good enough for 90% of apps 3 years ago. Now the low end models are tickling the pro space.
Rocketman
The new Mac-Mini shows Apple is price shopping and willing to compromise performance levels to achieve it. The good news is Apple exceeded good enough for 90% of apps 3 years ago. Now the low end models are tickling the pro space.
Rocketman
Why do so many try to muddy the discussion with nonsense like this? It is understanding clock speeds that has people worried about this chip in a fanless design. Especially when combined with Intels questionable use of processor power ratings.
Actually you can't rationally compare processor families with out knowing the clock rates of the chips involved and how much they get done per tick. In this case the rational comparison is between Broadwell and Haswell. If Broadwell only gets about 5% better performance over Haswell per clock you have a real possibility of a performance regression relative to shipping MBAs.
Again why muddy the water with such an asinine comment? The only comparison that makes sense in this discussion is with respect to the current MBA as this machine is apparently a replacement or upgrade for those machines. Given what is known at this point there is a real potential for a performance regression especially if one engages in more demanding work.
Is that regression a certainty - nope, however the concern is a valid one.
We aren't even sure about the GPU boost nor how sustainable GPU performance is. Granted I'm the first to knock Airs with respect to GPU performance but GPU's are very power hungry. I can easily see a GPU using up that 4.5 watt power budget all on its own.
Well certainly that makes sense. However we have seen Apple debut a number of machines with 1.4 GHz Haswell processors that leave a lot to be desired and that is a processor that is fan cooled. So I really don't think anybody has been unreasonable here when expressing concerns about this possible laptop.
It would rock if Apple announced the machine sometime this week so that a few stockings could be stuffed.
You are right. The massive amount of specialized parts in the A8X (many that we don't even know what they are!) is what caught most people by surprise and differentiates Apple more from anyone else. When they bought top notch chip design expertise, it was a crucial move for them; more than we first imagine it would be.
They also have a specialized SOC in their watch too; I wouldn't be surprised if the watch gets release off cycle from the Iphone and Ipad and they could test new processes in those lower volume SOCs.
With the on SOC GPUs and DSPs being used more and more for tasks that are able to be done in parrallel, we are at a point were the CPU is becoming less and less important in the scheme of things. In that regard, Intel is fighting a losing battle since Apple is no longer just fighting to get the CPU faster and the CPU is less and less important to them.
If Apple bought Imagination (And possibly AMD for the ATI/APU architecture which is starting to finally look interesting) and started doing custom GPU's, I think you'd really start to see Intel take notice.
As for Windows applications going to ARM. If develloppers support standard libraries like OpenCL, they mostly don't rely on the CPU to do most of the job anymore. In such a case, those companies can easily port their software to where most of the untapped market is right now : ARM.
The Europeans are to blame here for the excessive use of vowels in their languages. Sensible Americans have deleted all these extra vowels to save wear and tear on quils used for writing. The more important modern side effect is that our forefathers have reduced our bandwidth needs relative to the rest of the world. We should be thankful that we had people with such foresight.
I'm saying this as an American!######
There are actually many words where we as a nation have gotten rid of excess vowels to save precious bandwidth. Color is another word that fits the mold.
Damn... so the Retina Tax may be true.
(if they decide to pair these Core M processors with a Retina screen in future Macbook Airs... which is what everyone is clamoring for)
1) CPU will be always important... You never know what will that illogical creature, some call it 'user', want to do with your hardware. Therefore you can't make one-purpose ICs. Yes, number of them WILL increase. But there has to be something to drive them and perform tasks which can't be done with implemented with available ICs or it would take longer with them.
2) You'd have to recompile all these libraries. And professional software often has optimizations written in assembly...
Is power consumption really such a big deal on the Mac Mini? Or did you wanted slimmer Mac Minis?
Metoo,i definitly wait for skylake, cause it willbe the real new era of computing and maybe gpu wont be necessary till then
More battery life and so on.
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OK. I'm seriously beginning to believe the rumor about Apple switching to ARM / AMD.
Apple wouldn't seriously put the 800MHz processor onto a MacBook Air. Intel was once king of processors, now I'm not so sure.
Apple wouldn't seriously put the 800MHz processor onto a MacBook Air. Intel was once king of processors, now I'm not so sure.
Many of those software and libraries are being ported to more open standards, less dependent on architecture and recompiled already. If the money is there and they got tools to make this easier, most of them will end up on ARM in the next 2-5 years.
Apple has been very good at providing tools for cross platform development. If they spend money on that, and then can, the transition would be painless.
I didn't say it wasn't important, but how is it important to 95% of tasks is what determines its true usefullness. The CPU's job will be more and more as some kind of high end traffic analysist that identifies/structures and directs traffic to the appropriate resource and while "bored" does all the rest of the general tasks required on the system ;-).
Optimisation done in assembly will be less and less usefull as processing is paralelized to the GPU, DSP's and other specialized processors.
Its obvious from Apple that being liberal with gates is the way to go for overall performance in the future. The SOC has in fact become the motherboard!!
I would have even 1 Hz processor in my computer, if they somehow managed it to be faster than my current processor.
It's still harder to make CPUs faster and transistors smaller. Intel still has the best CPUs available... And when they finally solve issues with 14 nm man. process, they'll be again ahead of everyone else - others will have to solve same problems...
I use to be on the other side of the fence here but now lean towards externals as a smarter choice in some situations. Given that here are a few good reasons to want to do an internal upgrade.
One is laptops where carrying around an external drive just sucks. You really can't have an internal laptop drive that is too big these days! Believe me I currently lug an external around with me constantly and it sucks.
Reliability! Seriously I've have had far fewer problems with internal drives relative to external drives. It certainly eliminates cabling issues.
Port congestion. This is a big issue on laptops which I again have experience with. The fact is carrying around a port multiplier or hub is as much of a problem as is that external disk.
Well even on the desktop I can see good reasons for internal storage. One is that it can free up ports especially considering that most chip sets come with several SATA ports. If you need lots of storage and I/O it makes sense to leverage what the chip set supplies. Of course Apple has nothing for these markets so that won't impact their customers.
It may not be a consumer need but internal storage is a huge factor in business applications. Say you have a PC hooked up as a vision system that snaps a picture every second or so, that can be a lot of data to store and you could conceivably have much of the External I/O channels tied up on the PC.
There are actually other examples that one can cover but the point is internal storage expansion isn't a completely dead idea. It might not make sense for consumers but can make or break a machine in a technical application.
One is laptops where carrying around an external drive just sucks. You really can't have an internal laptop drive that is too big these days! Believe me I currently lug an external around with me constantly and it sucks.
Reliability! Seriously I've have had far fewer problems with internal drives relative to external drives. It certainly eliminates cabling issues.
Port congestion. This is a big issue on laptops which I again have experience with. The fact is carrying around a port multiplier or hub is as much of a problem as is that external disk.
USB or TB drives certainly make more sense with respect to the desktop. This is actually a flip in my opinion from a year or so ago. In this sense I'm talking about bulk storage, you still need enough internal storage to run all of your apps properly. It is the advent of TB and USB 3 that makes external storage in all its varieties acceptable. Without those standards I couldn't support the use of external storage on the desktop.
Well even on the desktop I can see good reasons for internal storage. One is that it can free up ports especially considering that most chip sets come with several SATA ports. If you need lots of storage and I/O it makes sense to leverage what the chip set supplies. Of course Apple has nothing for these markets so that won't impact their customers.
It may not be a consumer need but internal storage is a huge factor in business applications. Say you have a PC hooked up as a vision system that snaps a picture every second or so, that can be a lot of data to store and you could conceivably have much of the External I/O channels tied up on the PC.
There are actually other examples that one can cover but the point is internal storage expansion isn't a completely dead idea. It might not make sense for consumers but can make or break a machine in a technical application.
Transition to ARM would cause that virtualization would be much slower (you would need emulate x86 instructions) ... Wine wouldn't work too... It's still too early to make transition to ARM, IMHO. Gain isn't worth the lost. And for Apple, unfortunately ... No x86 Windows on Mac.