Why do you think he won? One mouse out of, what, a thousand (model wise) does not have buttons. I am not sure this qualifies as a win
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Possible Details on Apple's ARM-based 'A4' Chip?
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Why do you think he won? One mouse out of, what, a thousand (model wise) does not have buttons. I am not sure this qualifies as a win
iPhone 3GSS!! Where SS Stands for Super Speed
My God, you are a mindreader! You stole my thought!
Great chip - how about using it in something else
So we're all anxious to see this A4 chip in the next iphone and itouch. Obviously this will happen soon, probably this calendar year. What I'd like to see and maybe this creature exists in a back room laboratory at One Infinite Loop, is this chip powering a next-gen powerbook.. If this chip is as power thrifty as suggested, then perhaps a powerbook air 15 or 17 isn't out of the question running on the a4 chip, using the advanced batteries in the macbook 15, and lasting more than 10 hours on a charge. (and of course running all that ppc code that is still in the reference kernel of 10.5 leopard).
So we're all anxious to see this A4 chip in the next iphone and itouch. Obviously this will happen soon, probably this calendar year. What I'd like to see and maybe this creature exists in a back room laboratory at One Infinite Loop, is this chip powering a next-gen powerbook.. If this chip is as power thrifty as suggested, then perhaps a powerbook air 15 or 17 isn't out of the question running on the a4 chip, using the advanced batteries in the macbook 15, and lasting more than 10 hours on a charge. (and of course running all that ppc code that is still in the reference kernel of 10.5 leopard).
I am assuming then that you have never seen a jailbroken iPhone then. One of the first things people do when they jailbreak their iPhone is to install one of many free apps that allows you to have true multi-tasking. All these apps do is turn the multi-tasking "on." As anyone knows, the iPhone AND the iPhone OS CAN multi-task (just look and several of Apple's own iPhone apps such as Phone and Email for example that CAN run at the same time). Apple just chose not to allow this for third-party apps so that it will not bog down the system, drain the heck out of the battery and jeopardize necessary functions. At which point people would end up saying, "See, we told you this iPhone is junk" at the same time while having 14 apps running at once.
"Daniel W. Dobberpuhl (M974-S'76-M'77) was born in Streator, IL, in March, 1945"
While I admire Daniel, I doubt he is doing any design work anymore.
I guess that name should have changed seeing Leopard was certified Unix.
X was not Unix but now is XWNUNI?
FFS folks... iPhone OS fully supports multi-threading and multiple processes (it is rather close to Mac OS X).
This is purely operational mode decision on Apple's part and not in any way a limit of the OS or hardware (other then power/cpu/memory limits of the device).
Apple has a select set of applications that are optimized to run concurrently with other application (phone app, ipod app, etc.). These application have been specially designed and tested to ensure they are miserly in their power usage and that they don't disrupt the responsiveness of the device when running in the background. I fully expect Apple to allow 3rd party applications to become equally "privileged" but only after going thru a more rigorous approval process (at least applications that need to run in the background, for example chat clients, etc.).
For example on my phone at the moment which is in Facebook I see the following processes running (you will find many of the same processes running on a Mac OS X system)...
Attachments
No the name doesn't need to change. The kernel is not UNIX but Intel based Mac OS did receive Unix 03 certification due to the systems on top of the microkernel... such as the shell, compiler, C APIs, etc. Basically the main reason for the certification is that Unix software is capable of running on the system.
So iPad is the ultimate "thin client"?
It has something like 3 real buttons and hundreds of "virtual buttons", BTW.
Rocketman
so is there a chance that these processors can be used in notebooks? let's say in a macbook air or a MBP? just up the GHz a bit and slap in 4 of them? no heat and epic battery life. the ipad has a 10w power connector compared to the 65w for MBP's.
What happened was that IBM exited the embedded PowerPC business in 2004/5 --- Qualcomm hired a big portion of that embedded PowerPC design team and created a 50 person CPU team. Then Qualcomm got themselves the ARM architecture license to create their clean room implementation of the ARMv7-A architecture.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10123149-64.html
It has been RUMORED that Apple took the same route --- getting a ARM architecture license. Apple didn't have the opportunity to poach CPU designers, so they bought PA Semi (and its 150 engineer team).
http://www.eetimes.com/209900392
ARM has their reference implementations of their ARMv7-A architecture (Cortex A8 and A9 cores). Qualcomm has their clean room implementation of the ARMv7-A architecture (Snapdragon chip with Scorpion core). Apple LIKELY RUMORED to have their own clean room implementation of the ARMv7-A architecture (A4).
The difference is manpower --- Qualcomm's 50 person team needed 4 years to create Snapdragon and Apple's 150 person team needed only 2 years to create the A4.
No. They don't run the x64 instruction set - so they can't run OSX 10.6 or *any* Apple OSX applications on the market.
That fact would probably hurt sales.
If Apple wanted to create a notebook with an ARM processor, I don't think it would be too difficult to recompile the whole of MacOS X and all the Apple applications for ARM. Third party applications would take a while.
I don't think the power savings from an ARM chip alone would be enough to justify this.
You're making alot of assumptions there... first of all I think we can safely assume the GPU is a PowerVR chip... how else would you be able to download iPhone Apps directly? It's not like it's fast enough for an emulator or anything. We saw non ported OpenGL games running. Yes, it is OpenGL so it could be chip independent, but why go to all the trouble for a supposedly inferior chip? ( which obviously it isn't since it's driving the display @ 1024x768 with high frame rates and cpu to spare )
My guess is that this is a dual core A9 + powerVR chip SGX 5 series chip, possibly even multicore for the video chipset as well.
Anyone looked in the SDK to see if there are clues?
Apple doesn't need to buy 150 CPU engineers just to make a franken-chip from existing parts.
I'm fairly familiar with it... I'm part of the Qualcomm team. I think you underestimate Qualcomm.
Sorry, as nice it would be but an ARM will not natively run PowerPC instructions. But i am sure Apple can use some custom silicon to make the boards in MacBooks smaller, and more efficient if they decide to do so.
Wait! iPhone OS is Cocoa touch OSX. All they would need is x86 Emulation/Rosetta and that exists.
Rocketman