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Multi-Core GPUs Announced from iPhone Chip Maker
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Thank god that man was wearing a mask, gloves, hat, and extra layers of clothes!
small problem
I might have missed this from the keynote but the iPhone API does not support OpenCL and it was not announced yesterday. Why would Apple skip the new API if they are about to release a new hardware revision? I'm pretty sure that Apple will eventually release a new version of iPhone but I doubt that it'll be this summer.
I might have missed this from the keynote but the iPhone API does not support OpenCL and it was not announced yesterday. Why would Apple skip the new API if they are about to release a new hardware revision? I'm pretty sure that Apple will eventually release a new version of iPhone but I doubt that it'll be this summer.
I doubt something that's pocketable will be able to run the whole Mac OS I have coworkers who tried a MacBook Air w/ an Atom processor & said it was slow. Plus, having 2 USB ports, firewire & ethernet won't be able to fit, IMO. Besides, I think it would be too hard to navigate all the menus, icons, etc on a 3-4" display. Minimum size screen to be able to see & use everything in the full Mac OS X well enough, IMO, would be 10".
I just hope fart apps aren't the only thing we can accomplish.
The problem here is not-technical but how to pay for the development of more compex apps. A team of 10 developers can easly burn through $1.5M per year. Where does that $1.5M come from if the apps are sold at a buck per copy?
OK some companies will operate at a loss for a while to break into a new market but in the long run income and cost must balance. Apple is helping with the new in-app sales and also with providing such a great API what all the hard jobs are done by Apple engineers, leaving only the user interface design and what not to developers. This greatly lowers the effort and cost to build a new iPhone app but still, software developers make middle class incomes.
People here will pay $79 for the new iLife and $129 for the new Mac OS and $199 for Logic Express. But iPhone apps sell for 10x to 20x less.
Until they solve this economic problem you are either going to see only very simple apps that one guy can do from home in a few weeks or bigger stuff sold at a loss that is linked to some for-pay service.
This is... so mixed up.
The Air has a C2D. I was just looking one over today. If they chop off the keyboard and slide the monitor and glass down, shrank it a little since the monitor has a large frame rim, got rid of most ports and added a dock connector, the Air would be the most awesome tablet.
Utter sex for over $2000.
Oh don't forget they really should consider on adding HAC (Hearing Aid Compatibility). I know there are plenty of heard of hearing consumers that would love to see a M3/T3 or M4/T4 rating. I have tried both generations of the iPhone and both do not have any HAC. If they were to come out with a new iPhone that has this, I would be more than willing to switch carriers to get the iPhone.
that's about what i would say the tablet will actually be... 10'' touchscreen, ulv c2d, nvidia ion 2, custom flash memory (easier to fit in than usual ssds), no superdrive, 1 usb, 1 fw, maybe minidisplay port, bluetooth, wifi, done!
no arm, no atom, no netbook ...
It's not a "dual die" or even a "die", it's licensable embeddable IP. The sort of IP that PA Semi would license to put in their next generation SoC for Apple, along with a couple of ARM Cortex A8s and all the other stuff a SoC includes.
So you cut and paste the core logic up to 16 times, connect them up with however they interconnect, connect them to a memory bus or the SoC bus, and send your design off to a fab to make for you. This usually takes a year or two from date of licensable IP to finished product.
Sounds good. 10" is a good size, low power Core 2 sounds sweet. You don't need too much power but the Atom is too limited (it runs Leopard pretty well though) and there's no dual core version yet, is there? The Macbook Air's CPUs should do the trick. On the other hand, this thing shall be very thin, so putting a fan in there might be tricky and passively cooling a Core 2 in a tight package won't work that well. I agree on the custom memory (à la iPod Touch), soldered on RAM (like on the Macbook Air) and maybe one USB port to hook up an external hard drive, or keyboard, or whatever. Use the same tech as in the 17" Macbook Pro. A tablet is the ultimate mobile computer and should be able to be useful for hours on battery. The iPhone is disappointing in that aspect.
Firewire makes little sense though. Consumer electronics don't use it anymore for a while except some big hard drives (which need a power outlet, i.e. are not portable) targeted to Mac users. It would be sweet though for audio recording geeks, to have a MOTU Ultralite and the tablet resting on top of it. Then again, my Macbook's Firewire port did not have enough power on Battery to make the Ultralite work reliably with 2 Mics and phandom power. It usually just went off after some time if the Macbook was running on battery.
Yeah, if forced to surmise on the architecture, I would assume that each pipeline (of which there are 4 in a core) handles a 32-bit floating point value. Therefore 64 pipelines would be directly comparable to 64 AMD Radeon 4xxx series shader cores. Except probably slower in speed (to save power), slower per clock (to reduce complexity, thus saving die space and power), and maybe with no support for double precision floating point, but maybe the hardware binds two pipelines together for that.
What would help here would be some GPGPU GFLOPS figures
Actually this comment makes me suspect that each pipeline can handle 128 bits, or 4x as many as my guess above.
I could see the iPhone having a 2 core version, and the iTablet (with 4x as many pixels to display) having an 8 core variant, and games running on both with very little performance difference despite the extra pixels to render on the tablet.
No, it's actually imagination technologies, not ARM.
Power usage does not grow with the square of clock speed. It grows with the square of voltage, and linearly with clock speed.
The only way this could mean anything good for the iphone other than improved graphics is if there's a good opencl implementation by the time the hardware hits.
But running at a slower speed can often be done at a lower voltage. Not a massive difference if it is 1V vs 1.2V I know, but maybe enough when combined with the reduced clock speed to make a reasonable difference.
only dual core atom is the 330 desktop atom ... the desktop atoms are the only atoms supporting 64bit so far too ... would be a bit counterproductive working on 64bit snow leopard and building a device only capable of 32bit
the new mba cpu's (SL9300 and SL9400) have a TDP of 17W ... i agree they might me not like the passive cooling idea... the U2500 on the other hand works at 9W but only supports 533MHz FSB ... i'd expect intel to come up with a customized solution just in time as they did for the 1st gen mba though...
But will this meet power use requirments? They said yesterday that background apps eat battery, wouldn't a multi core CPU do the same? These things already suck down juice like it's going out of style, maybe they could just put a touch screen on the 17" MBP's battery. That would be awesome!
My Crystal Ball is working
So, before yesterday, I had the feeling that Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 would exactly include everything they've mentioned.
But, I'm sure they still have tons of tricks awaiting for the rest of the world.
Especially if they used this multi-core processor.
Consider, that according to new OS 3.0, you could do video audio streaming, which coincidentally, next Mac OS Snow Leopard, might include Quick Time Pro in it, therefore, new hardware (not yet announced) might include iChat AV Mobile, letting people use iChat AV on the go. Which I believe would kick ass, only bottle neck would be AT&T's 3G bandwidth.
With new iPhone Server push notification, I'm positive that Apple would have iWork.com ready by summer.
Why is this important, because they could include iWork for iPhone with additional iWork.com functionality. You'll be able to do work on the phone, now that has Landscape.
And why iWork.com is important because it'll allow people who are still using Windows able to access, cooperate, and share documents.
Apple mentioned Voice Recorder, probably would enhance it, and include a Video Recorder, of course, new hardware would be required, and would probably do a MPEG4 DVD quality encoding, and would able to upload back to your mac via Push Notification (protocol or MobileMe) and once you're back to your Mac, it'll be ready for iMovie '09.
I'm seeing that a year or two from now, Apple's iPhone eco-system would be fantastic.
iLife, iWork, for iPhone. Of course, these softwares might have a premium, not much but consider Apple has sold 13.7M phones, and charging like 49.99 for both iLife & iWork for iPhone, that's USD 685M income.
And consider if people like the MobileMe that's additional recurring income every year.
So, before yesterday, I had the feeling that Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 would exactly include everything they've mentioned.
But, I'm sure they still have tons of tricks awaiting for the rest of the world.
Especially if they used this multi-core processor.
Consider, that according to new OS 3.0, you could do video audio streaming, which coincidentally, next Mac OS Snow Leopard, might include Quick Time Pro in it, therefore, new hardware (not yet announced) might include iChat AV Mobile, letting people use iChat AV on the go. Which I believe would kick ass, only bottle neck would be AT&T's 3G bandwidth.
With new iPhone Server push notification, I'm positive that Apple would have iWork.com ready by summer.
Why is this important, because they could include iWork for iPhone with additional iWork.com functionality. You'll be able to do work on the phone, now that has Landscape.
And why iWork.com is important because it'll allow people who are still using Windows able to access, cooperate, and share documents.
Apple mentioned Voice Recorder, probably would enhance it, and include a Video Recorder, of course, new hardware would be required, and would probably do a MPEG4 DVD quality encoding, and would able to upload back to your mac via Push Notification (protocol or MobileMe) and once you're back to your Mac, it'll be ready for iMovie '09.
I'm seeing that a year or two from now, Apple's iPhone eco-system would be fantastic.
iLife, iWork, for iPhone. Of course, these softwares might have a premium, not much but consider Apple has sold 13.7M phones, and charging like 49.99 for both iLife & iWork for iPhone, that's USD 685M income.
And consider if people like the MobileMe that's additional recurring income every year.
To many variables to say.
For example a two core GPU might actually run cooler that the current GPU while the sixteen core variant would be hotter. This is total speculation of course as I have no data. It also doesn't take into account the possibility that Apple might go middle of the road with 4 GPU cores or use odd clock rates.
So one can not assume that the hardware will be power hungery. On the baseline iPhone Apple has a lot of incentive to actually lower power usage so I foresee chip sets that are actually cooler. What this info release does today is to indicate that it will be easy to tailor performance to a devices power profile.
[qoute]
Disclaimer: no, I have not read the PR fully.[/QUOTE]
You likely wouldn't find the definitive info there. As noted there are many factors involved.
You can't say anything for certain until you know who is doing the fabrication and on what process. Even then you need to know what the configuration is.
For example a two core GPU might actually run cooler that the current GPU while the sixteen core variant would be hotter. This is total speculation of course as I have no data. It also doesn't take into account the possibility that Apple might go middle of the road with 4 GPU cores or use odd clock rates.
So one can not assume that the hardware will be power hungery. On the baseline iPhone Apple has a lot of incentive to actually lower power usage so I foresee chip sets that are actually cooler. What this info release does today is to indicate that it will be easy to tailor performance to a devices power profile.
[qoute]
Disclaimer: no, I have not read the PR fully.[/QUOTE]
You likely wouldn't find the definitive info there. As noted there are many factors involved.
Yea your right, while there is a possibility that there won't be a new iPhone this summer it doesn't make any sense to say that there won't be for sure just because there is a major software release coming up, the software engineers don't have anything to do with the physical design and hardware of the iPhone.
I'm curious why some people gave a negative vote on multicore GPUs that can be used in cell phones ?
So, if these were announced and released today.
Lets say Apple IS using this in the next iPhone due out this June/July.
Wouldn't they need to be buying them, building them and testing them....like....NOW?!
How long does it take from production to release? Because that only leaves them, what, right around 3-4 months?
I for one, will be buying my first iPhone this summer and I'm hoping its an upgraded faster version, so, I hope its true.
Lets say Apple IS using this in the next iPhone due out this June/July.
Wouldn't they need to be buying them, building them and testing them....like....NOW?!
How long does it take from production to release? Because that only leaves them, what, right around 3-4 months?
I for one, will be buying my first iPhone this summer and I'm hoping its an upgraded faster version, so, I hope its true.