Meanwhile, Intel's x86-64 Bay Trail (22nm Silvermont + Ivy Bridge GPU) is already on the market. In 2014 Intel is planning their tick-tock with Cherry Trail (14nm Airmont + Broadwell GPU) and Willow Trail (14nm Goldmont + Skylake GPU). Intel will also be launching a successor to their current LTE chip with LTE-Advanced in 2014.
If you bothered to read the link I provided, you would know what I'm talking about. Above is the quote from the link I posted. Many others on Apple's forum and I have similar issues with iOS 7. If it is an issue caused by third party app, then I would have this same issue with iOS 6 installed on my old iPad, which is not the case. Unfortunately, my new iPad Air crashes at least every other day.
This is a pretty unspecific issue more related to iOS 7 than the new A7, I've been using iOS since the iPhone 3G, I've always seen some apps crashing, most of those apps got updated or disappear after time, I have now a iPhone 5S and a iPad Air, I can't say there is a really issue here, I still got some apps crashing some times, but most of the time it affect older pre-iOS 7 third party apps that needed to be updated. I haven't found any instability yet using built-in apps.
When you ask a company to fan a chip do they know what the chip does? I'd think it would be Apple's engineers that do most of the setup and testing with Samsung just making and stamping the wafers to Apple's specifications.
Yup. People hanging on to the idea that since Samsung Semi fabbed Apple's SoCs, it was really Samsung who "built" the chip, and therefore can easily ramp up a 64-bit SoC on their own are pretty desperate for it to be true. It's like saying since Foxconn manufactures the iPhone, Foxconn will be able to ship their own iPhone in 6 months. The business relationships and the manufacturing process just don't work that way.
To make a poor analogy, it's like saying the workers of the local KFC franchise can make great fried chicken (go with me here) because they make KFC fried chicken all day. They obviously can't as they "supposedly" know nothing about KFC's secret recipe and all they are doing is following a simplistic cooking recipe with KFC provided ingredients from the KFC trucks. And by ingredients, I mean "chicken", "seasoning", not 5 TSP of salt, 3 TSP of pepper, etc.
These SoCs have 1+ billion transistors. My bet is Samsung isn't seeing any detailed circuit designs whatsoever. Apple is giving them the masks to fab the chips. Maybe there is some corporate espionage going where Samsung "borrows" a finished wafer and puts it under the microscrope to see what's going on. That's rather tough going when you have 1 billion transistors and multiple wiring layers to look at. They wouldn't be able to replicate the Cyclone or Swift CPU designs at all.
The Cyclone and Swift CPU designs are entirely Apple's and neither ARM Holdings nor Samsung have any real knowledge of them.
A whole lot of celebrating over spec-whoring. Presently, it's nothing more. As a non-fan of either side, I find it funny that the two biggest mobile OS rivals are switching roles in some ways.
iOS has become less stable and their fans are all of the sudden concerned about specs (quad core processors don't mean shit, right?), even when there isn't a significant real world performance boost.
Truthfully, the majority of iPhone owners do not have a clue that their new phone has a 64 bit chip, nor do they care. The move by Apple was forward thinking. It is the path both camps will follow.
More C level Execs at companies have lose there Jobs over what Apple is doing
Here is another
Quote:
Less than a week later, Qualcomm clarified its stance on the issue and called Chandrasekher's comments "inaccurate." The ex-CMO was ultimately removed from his post and reassigned.
Motorola CTO was fire after she came out and said there was nothing innovating or unique Apple as was doing when they introduced the iphone, she now works for Cisco.
Meanwhile, Intel's x86-64 Bay Trail (22nm Silvermont + Ivy Bridge GPU) is already on the market. In 2014 Intel is planning their tick-tock with Cherry Trail (14nm Airmont + Broadwell GPU) and Willow Trail (14nm Goldmont + Skylake GPU). Intel will also be launching a successor to their current LTE chip with LTE-Advanced in 2014.
Ok.... What is you point? No intel CPU can reach smartphone TDP levels offer by ARM SoC
When you ask a company to fan a chip do they know what the chip does? I'd think it would be Apple's engineers that do most of the setup and testing with Samsung just making and stamping the wafers to Apple's specifications.
Remember when Chipworks "examined" the A7 die to get an idea how it works? I guarantee you Samsung would know a lot more than Chipworks would since they make the processor. They might not know how it would perform or how many instructions it can do per clock (6, BTW), but they'd definitely know it was 64 bit along with how much cache it had and many other details.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jm6032
I disagree a bit with the notion Samsung did not know. I mean, "Build me 1000 samples of this" is way different than, "Build me 10,000,000" of these...
That's not what I said. I said they could be sampling the processors and then asked Samsung to ramp up to production. This would take a few months, so Samsung would know Apple is going to be using this processor in an upcoming device very soon. But they could have been sampling parts 6, 9 or 12 months earlier, making it very difficult for Samsung to tell when the processor might make the switch from sample to production.
My point? Intel is about to dominate tablet hardware SoCs in the 7 inch and up segment.
Merrifield (22nm Silvermont + PowerVR 6 GPU) and Moorefield (14nm Airmont + Broadwell GPU) are coming for smartphones in 2014 (Q1 and Q3).
I will not hold my breath on this one.... Historically, the pentium architecture as been notoriously big and power hungry, over time Intel as working hard to lower its CPU power consumption by stripping features out, lower the clock frequency and lower the fab process. In another hand, the ARM processor has been created with the absolute opposite in mind, a small CPU built for power efficiency at first and been augmented overtime. So ARM SoC still have a lot of headroom for further enhancement, the A7 is still an 28nm SoC and can gain the same advantage from going to 22nm or 14nm has Intel is planning for their future anemic CPUs.
Excuse my ignorance but what real world benefits will consumers see in the future when the iPhone and iPad start really taking advantage of these chips? I'm glad Apple decided to make the move. I assume they'll have a smoother transition while the competition scrambles to catch up.
Remember when Chipworks "examined" the A7 die to get an idea how it works? I guarantee you Samsung would know a lot more than Chipworks would since they make the processor. They might not know how it would perform or how many instructions it can do per clock (6, BTW), but they'd definitely know it was 64 bit along with how much cache it had and many other details.
I'll take you on that bet. I'll bet that Samsung basically knew no more than Chipworks did. They didn't know it was 64-bit, and they didn't know any details of the CPU. They only thing they could really know was the generic type things Chipworks could identify. Things like "this looks like the GPU, this is where the CPU is, this looks like L1 cache, this looks like the memory bus" yes, but zilch on any architecture details.
We only know scant architecture details from Anandtech running software on it. Odds that Apple let Samsung run software on their new SoC? I bet it is pretty close to zero.
Excuse my ignorance but what real world benefits will consumers see in the future when the iPhone and iPad start really taking advantage of these chips? I'm glad Apple decided to make the move. I assume they'll have a smoother transition while the competition scrambles to catch up.
The real world benefit of the A7 is for Apple been able to offer a faster and better CPU than the last year one with more or less the same thermal design power of the last years design. There is no way any other competitor can achieve this without a better ARM core than current ARMv7 design, multiplicating cores leads to greater power consumption with smaller performance boost than having bigger enhanced cores.
Intel is indeed a dangerous competitor, and could come up with quite a few wins for Merrifield in 1H 14. But what you list isn't proof. These are all tablets with 4 to 8 W TDP. Smartphones will be in 2 to 4 W TDP levels. Wait and see on whether Merrifield can compete with Snapdragon 805 next year.
It need a battery twice has big than the iPhone 5S to achieve 8.5 hours on a looping video with full hardware acceleration, no sound and 50% brightness, which you can't compare with a web browsing test.
Not only that this crashing issue is more related to (the new) iOS 7 than the new A7, which brings back to my point that transitioning 64 bit is not a mere hardware design race, but also the 64-bit builds of the iOS still seem to run into stability issues more frequently than their 32-bit counterparts. The bottom line is that the OS needs to run smoothly with whatever 64-bit CPU, which is not really the case for iOS 7 + A7.
My iOS 7 on my old iPad has far lesser crashes than my new iPad Air. In case if you haven't got what I'm say, what I mean by crash is that the iOS 7 on my new iPad Air crashes and REBOOTS itself AT LEAST every other day. I'm not the only one who has this issue out there and good for you if you haven't had this experience. It's not just some third party app crashing, which I could care less.
If a third party app could bring down the whole iOS 7, which I don't think should happen at normal circumstances, I'm not sure if Apple could just sit back and point finger to third party app developer.
I've been using iPhone / iOS since the original iPhone in case if you are wondering and I can't remember when was the last time my iOS 6 crashed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BigMac2
This is a pretty unspecific issue more related to iOS 7 than the new A7, I've been using iOS since the iPhone 3G, I've always seen some apps crashing, most of those apps got updated or disappear after time, I have now a iPhone 5S and a iPad Air, I can't say there is a really issue here, I still got some apps crashing some times, but most of the time it affect older pre-iOS 7 third party apps that needed to be updated. I haven't found any instability yet using built-in apps.
Intel is indeed a dangerous competitor, and could come up with quite a few wins for Merrifield in 1H 14. But what you list isn't proof. These are all tablets with 4 to 8 W TDP. Smartphones will be in 2 to 4 W TDP levels. Wait and see on whether Merrifield can compete with Snapdragon 805 next year.
Apple SoC TDP is working around half of that, around 1W for smartphone and 2W for tablet.
Excuse my ignorance but what real world benefits will consumers see in the future when the iPhone and iPad start really taking advantage of these chips? I'm glad Apple decided to make the move. I assume they'll have a smoother transition while the competition scrambles to catch up.
My take on benefits of 64-bit is that it's a holistic one for the consumer. The big benefit will be for developers (Apple software included) and customers get a downstream effect of better software.
Virtual address space goes to whatever terabyte or exabyte levels it will be, instead of the 4 GB it is today. This will make it easier for them to make more complex software. So, for obvious things like video, 3D, big computation applications, developers can get going designing their software now. It'll allow for desktop level implementations of web browsers, which is likely the largest user-facing, highest usage application on computers today.
Then, for hardware, it opens the door for Apple to using their ARM SoC in "bigger" hardware, like the supposed 13" iPad or a new 12" laptop. If Apple keeps going at the pace of SoC development where CPU and GPU performance is doubling year over year, they can used it for Macintoshes in a year or so. iMacs have a curvy bulge in the back about 1.5" thick or more. With an 5 Watt TDP SoC, an iMac could be 0.5" thin. With 5 Watt TDP, instead of the 7.7" x 7.7" Mac mini, it'll be like the Apple TV or Airport Express, just 4" x 4" and 0.75" high. Lastly, the laptops can get thinner and lighter. Instead of a 3 lb 0.68" thick 13" MBA, it'll be 2 lb and 0.5" thick instead.
My iOS 7 on my old iPad has far lesser crashes than my new iPad Air. In case if you haven't got what I'm say, what I mean by crash is that the iOS 7 on my new iPad Air crashes and REBOOTS itself AT LEAST every other day. I'm not the only one who has this issue out there and good for you if you haven't had this experience. It's not just some third party app crashing, which I could care less.
You should check and keep an eye on what you have installed and use on your iPad, because Apple has currently sold more iOS7 + A7 devices than any other iOS devices in the past. If there was a really issue here, be assured the media, fandroids and every competitor would knock on every nails against Apple they can found.
Apple SoC TDP is working around half of that, around 1W for smartphone and 2W for tablet.
Maybe. I use 2 to 4 Watt to be safer, and it just feels more than 1 or 2 Watt based on the battery tests I've seen. I'm relatively certain you can burn down an iPad Air battery in 6 to 7 hours by turning the screen brightness down to the lowest setting (probably 1 to 2 Watts) and running a complex game or application. So, the SoC is probably hitting somewhere between 2 to 4 Watts.
Lastly, 4 Watt TDP for the tablet is likely the limit due to skin temperatures, and it's doubtful to me that Apple won't try to use every bit of that. And I feel 2 Watt TDP is likely the limit for smartphones and skin temperatures.
Comments
Meanwhile, Intel's x86-64 Bay Trail (22nm Silvermont + Ivy Bridge GPU) is already on the market. In 2014 Intel is planning their tick-tock with Cherry Trail (14nm Airmont + Broadwell GPU) and Willow Trail (14nm Goldmont + Skylake GPU). Intel will also be launching a successor to their current LTE chip with LTE-Advanced in 2014.
If you bothered to read the link I provided, you would know what I'm talking about. Above is the quote from the link I posted. Many others on Apple's forum and I have similar issues with iOS 7. If it is an issue caused by third party app, then I would have this same issue with iOS 6 installed on my old iPad, which is not the case. Unfortunately, my new iPad Air crashes at least every other day.
This is a pretty unspecific issue more related to iOS 7 than the new A7, I've been using iOS since the iPhone 3G, I've always seen some apps crashing, most of those apps got updated or disappear after time, I have now a iPhone 5S and a iPad Air, I can't say there is a really issue here, I still got some apps crashing some times, but most of the time it affect older pre-iOS 7 third party apps that needed to be updated. I haven't found any instability yet using built-in apps.
When you ask a company to fan a chip do they know what the chip does? I'd think it would be Apple's engineers that do most of the setup and testing with Samsung just making and stamping the wafers to Apple's specifications.
Yup. People hanging on to the idea that since Samsung Semi fabbed Apple's SoCs, it was really Samsung who "built" the chip, and therefore can easily ramp up a 64-bit SoC on their own are pretty desperate for it to be true. It's like saying since Foxconn manufactures the iPhone, Foxconn will be able to ship their own iPhone in 6 months. The business relationships and the manufacturing process just don't work that way.
To make a poor analogy, it's like saying the workers of the local KFC franchise can make great fried chicken (go with me here) because they make KFC fried chicken all day. They obviously can't as they "supposedly" know nothing about KFC's secret recipe and all they are doing is following a simplistic cooking recipe with KFC provided ingredients from the KFC trucks. And by ingredients, I mean "chicken", "seasoning", not 5 TSP of salt, 3 TSP of pepper, etc.
These SoCs have 1+ billion transistors. My bet is Samsung isn't seeing any detailed circuit designs whatsoever. Apple is giving them the masks to fab the chips. Maybe there is some corporate espionage going where Samsung "borrows" a finished wafer and puts it under the microscrope to see what's going on. That's rather tough going when you have 1 billion transistors and multiple wiring layers to look at. They wouldn't be able to replicate the Cyclone or Swift CPU designs at all.
The Cyclone and Swift CPU designs are entirely Apple's and neither ARM Holdings nor Samsung have any real knowledge of them.
iOS has become less stable and their fans are all of the sudden concerned about specs (quad core processors don't mean shit, right?), even when there isn't a significant real world performance boost.
Truthfully, the majority of iPhone owners do not have a clue that their new phone has a 64 bit chip, nor do they care. The move by Apple was forward thinking. It is the path both camps will follow.
More C level Execs at companies have lose there Jobs over what Apple is doing
Here is another
Motorola CTO was fire after she came out and said there was nothing innovating or unique Apple as was doing when they introduced the iphone, she now works for Cisco.
Meanwhile, Intel's x86-64 Bay Trail (22nm Silvermont + Ivy Bridge GPU) is already on the market. In 2014 Intel is planning their tick-tock with Cherry Trail (14nm Airmont + Broadwell GPU) and Willow Trail (14nm Goldmont + Skylake GPU). Intel will also be launching a successor to their current LTE chip with LTE-Advanced in 2014.
Ok.... What is you point? No intel CPU can reach smartphone TDP levels offer by ARM SoC
Ok.... What is you point? No intel CPU can reach smartphone TDP levels offer by ARM SoC
My point? Intel is about to dominate tablet hardware SoCs in the 7 inch and up segment.
Merrifield (22nm Silvermont + PowerVR 6 GPU) and Moorefield (14nm Airmont + Broadwell GPU) are coming for smartphones in 2014 (Q1 and Q3).
When you ask a company to fan a chip do they know what the chip does? I'd think it would be Apple's engineers that do most of the setup and testing with Samsung just making and stamping the wafers to Apple's specifications.
Remember when Chipworks "examined" the A7 die to get an idea how it works? I guarantee you Samsung would know a lot more than Chipworks would since they make the processor. They might not know how it would perform or how many instructions it can do per clock (6, BTW), but they'd definitely know it was 64 bit along with how much cache it had and many other details.
I disagree a bit with the notion Samsung did not know. I mean, "Build me 1000 samples of this" is way different than, "Build me 10,000,000" of these...
That's not what I said. I said they could be sampling the processors and then asked Samsung to ramp up to production. This would take a few months, so Samsung would know Apple is going to be using this processor in an upcoming device very soon. But they could have been sampling parts 6, 9 or 12 months earlier, making it very difficult for Samsung to tell when the processor might make the switch from sample to production.
My point? Intel is about to dominate tablet hardware SoCs in the 7 inch and up segment.
Merrifield (22nm Silvermont + PowerVR 6 GPU) and Moorefield (14nm Airmont + Broadwell GPU) are coming for smartphones in 2014 (Q1 and Q3).
I will not hold my breath on this one.... Historically, the pentium architecture as been notoriously big and power hungry, over time Intel as working hard to lower its CPU power consumption by stripping features out, lower the clock frequency and lower the fab process. In another hand, the ARM processor has been created with the absolute opposite in mind, a small CPU built for power efficiency at first and been augmented overtime. So ARM SoC still have a lot of headroom for further enhancement, the A7 is still an 28nm SoC and can gain the same advantage from going to 22nm or 14nm has Intel is planning for their future anemic CPUs.
Intel can compete in both tablet and phone category.
http://www.yugatech.com/mobile/lenovo-k900-review/
Remember when Chipworks "examined" the A7 die to get an idea how it works? I guarantee you Samsung would know a lot more than Chipworks would since they make the processor. They might not know how it would perform or how many instructions it can do per clock (6, BTW), but they'd definitely know it was 64 bit along with how much cache it had and many other details.
I'll take you on that bet. I'll bet that Samsung basically knew no more than Chipworks did. They didn't know it was 64-bit, and they didn't know any details of the CPU. They only thing they could really know was the generic type things Chipworks could identify. Things like "this looks like the GPU, this is where the CPU is, this looks like L1 cache, this looks like the memory bus" yes, but zilch on any architecture details.
We only know scant architecture details from Anandtech running software on it. Odds that Apple let Samsung run software on their new SoC? I bet it is pretty close to zero.
Excuse my ignorance but what real world benefits will consumers see in the future when the iPhone and iPad start really taking advantage of these chips? I'm glad Apple decided to make the move. I assume they'll have a smoother transition while the competition scrambles to catch up.
The real world benefit of the A7 is for Apple been able to offer a faster and better CPU than the last year one with more or less the same thermal design power of the last years design. There is no way any other competitor can achieve this without a better ARM core than current ARMv7 design, multiplicating cores leads to greater power consumption with smaller performance boost than having bigger enhanced cores.
Intel is indeed a dangerous competitor, and could come up with quite a few wins for Merrifield in 1H 14. But what you list isn't proof. These are all tablets with 4 to 8 W TDP. Smartphones will be in 2 to 4 W TDP levels. Wait and see on whether Merrifield can compete with Snapdragon 805 next year.
Intel can compete in both tablet and phone category.
http://www.yugatech.com/mobile/lenovo-k900-review/
It need a battery twice has big than the iPhone 5S to achieve 8.5 hours on a looping video with full hardware acceleration, no sound and 50% brightness, which you can't compare with a web browsing test.
Not only that this crashing issue is more related to (the new) iOS 7 than the new A7, which brings back to my point that transitioning 64 bit is not a mere hardware design race, but also the 64-bit builds of the iOS still seem to run into stability issues more frequently than their 32-bit counterparts. The bottom line is that the OS needs to run smoothly with whatever 64-bit CPU, which is not really the case for iOS 7 + A7.
My iOS 7 on my old iPad has far lesser crashes than my new iPad Air. In case if you haven't got what I'm say, what I mean by crash is that the iOS 7 on my new iPad Air crashes and REBOOTS itself AT LEAST every other day. I'm not the only one who has this issue out there and good for you if you haven't had this experience. It's not just some third party app crashing, which I could care less.
If a third party app could bring down the whole iOS 7, which I don't think should happen at normal circumstances, I'm not sure if Apple could just sit back and point finger to third party app developer.
I've been using iPhone / iOS since the original iPhone in case if you are wondering and I can't remember when was the last time my iOS 6 crashed.
Quote:
This is a pretty unspecific issue more related to iOS 7 than the new A7, I've been using iOS since the iPhone 3G, I've always seen some apps crashing, most of those apps got updated or disappear after time, I have now a iPhone 5S and a iPad Air, I can't say there is a really issue here, I still got some apps crashing some times, but most of the time it affect older pre-iOS 7 third party apps that needed to be updated. I haven't found any instability yet using built-in apps.
Intel is indeed a dangerous competitor, and could come up with quite a few wins for Merrifield in 1H 14. But what you list isn't proof. These are all tablets with 4 to 8 W TDP. Smartphones will be in 2 to 4 W TDP levels. Wait and see on whether Merrifield can compete with Snapdragon 805 next year.
Apple SoC TDP is working around half of that, around 1W for smartphone and 2W for tablet.
Excuse my ignorance but what real world benefits will consumers see in the future when the iPhone and iPad start really taking advantage of these chips? I'm glad Apple decided to make the move. I assume they'll have a smoother transition while the competition scrambles to catch up.
My take on benefits of 64-bit is that it's a holistic one for the consumer. The big benefit will be for developers (Apple software included) and customers get a downstream effect of better software.
Virtual address space goes to whatever terabyte or exabyte levels it will be, instead of the 4 GB it is today. This will make it easier for them to make more complex software. So, for obvious things like video, 3D, big computation applications, developers can get going designing their software now. It'll allow for desktop level implementations of web browsers, which is likely the largest user-facing, highest usage application on computers today.
Then, for hardware, it opens the door for Apple to using their ARM SoC in "bigger" hardware, like the supposed 13" iPad or a new 12" laptop. If Apple keeps going at the pace of SoC development where CPU and GPU performance is doubling year over year, they can used it for Macintoshes in a year or so. iMacs have a curvy bulge in the back about 1.5" thick or more. With an 5 Watt TDP SoC, an iMac could be 0.5" thin. With 5 Watt TDP, instead of the 7.7" x 7.7" Mac mini, it'll be like the Apple TV or Airport Express, just 4" x 4" and 0.75" high. Lastly, the laptops can get thinner and lighter. Instead of a 3 lb 0.68" thick 13" MBA, it'll be 2 lb and 0.5" thick instead.
My iOS 7 on my old iPad has far lesser crashes than my new iPad Air. In case if you haven't got what I'm say, what I mean by crash is that the iOS 7 on my new iPad Air crashes and REBOOTS itself AT LEAST every other day. I'm not the only one who has this issue out there and good for you if you haven't had this experience. It's not just some third party app crashing, which I could care less.
You should check and keep an eye on what you have installed and use on your iPad, because Apple has currently sold more iOS7 + A7 devices than any other iOS devices in the past. If there was a really issue here, be assured the media, fandroids and every competitor would knock on every nails against Apple they can found.
Apple SoC TDP is working around half of that, around 1W for smartphone and 2W for tablet.
Maybe. I use 2 to 4 Watt to be safer, and it just feels more than 1 or 2 Watt based on the battery tests I've seen. I'm relatively certain you can burn down an iPad Air battery in 6 to 7 hours by turning the screen brightness down to the lowest setting (probably 1 to 2 Watts) and running a complex game or application. So, the SoC is probably hitting somewhere between 2 to 4 Watts.
Lastly, 4 Watt TDP for the tablet is likely the limit due to skin temperatures, and it's doubtful to me that Apple won't try to use every bit of that. And I feel 2 Watt TDP is likely the limit for smartphones and skin temperatures.