I still think Apples next killer app could be to use the iPhone like a portable dock able computer. Plug your iPhone into the dock and the monitor/keyboard/mounse switches from your Mac desktop to the desktop of the iPhone with full mouse and keyboard functionality. When you're done simply unplug it and nothing is left behind. The iPhone has limited access to the Mac ecosystem if at all and vise verse. The iPhone would be like a ultra-portable Mac Mini. And now with M$ Office... they could take over the world! They could sell a dock station that connects a mouse, keyboard & monitor to the iPhone. Talk about a post-PC world!!
So at this point would iOS be the inhibiting factor in unleashing the A7 power?
No. Read the article again please. It’s battery life that is inhibiting things. All that power takes a lot of power to perform.
Quote:
Originally Posted by daveinpublic
Confuscious says, the comment section is not what you think it is... It's not meant to talk about the article, but rather to respond to the first comment.
And most of us bozos don’t have a clue what we’re talking about. We just like to see ourselves pontificate in print.
This is how Apple migrates everything while keeping it secret. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time the A9 came out, it was in some lower end iMac's and MacBooks.
The A7 in the iPhone is clocked at just under 1.3 GHz, if they doubled that clock speed to what you might see in an Intel i5 (as used in the 13" MBPr I'm writing this with!) both dual-core 64 bit processors, I wonder how close in performance the two would be?
A crazy idea: A docking station with screen and keyboard, portable or desktop. The iPhone is the computer. For many people it's all the computing power they would ever need. Crazy, but well within the realm of possibility, and already predicted by others. It could even be an attractive, inexpensive option for the enterprise. Lots of docks, and everyone carries their own computer in their pocket.
A couple years ago Canonica was showing off full Ubuntu running on a smartphone that could dock into a tablet, TV, or desktop PC.
Flashback to Steve's comment after the first iPhone was announced.
" You dont want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesnt work anymore. "
I actually did that once (maybe thrice) on my jaIlbroke iPhone 3GS. We were heading up to visit my family and I had the Tom Tom app running, infinite tunes was streaming my favorite radio station to my Bluetooth headphones , and I had enabled the wifi hotspot for the wife to get online (some sort of crisis at work and she had to remotely log in). Email and all the other background processes were running normally, but even though it was plugged in it was slowly discharging the battery. I was amazed at how well that worked on my phone. Then my mom called and it crashed. Hard.
Like mothers everywhere, she does tend to have that effect on technology.
My point is that even then when everyone was saying that iOS was just a toy , I was marveling at how powerful a pocket computer it really was. Given the improvements Apple has made to the hardware since then , I suspect they could take it (iOS and the A series chips) to any form factor that they wish. Even if they don't make an air like notebook, the fact that they could, has to be making Chipzilla nervous.
Steve (PBUH) said "we don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of crap". At the time, that was true. Maybe now it's not. A lot of people use laptops just for web browsing and a few simple functions that would be covered by Apple's free apps (iLife, iWork). Apple could undoubtedly now build a netbook-like, but high-quality notebook that would be super-thin, super-light, with great battery life, and several hundred dollars cheaper with an A-series processor instead of Intel's overpriced chips.
Before the iPad came out, this would have involved them in the race to the bottom that the other computer manufacturers were involved in, desperately scrambling to cut their own throats quicker than the other guy. Now, though, the bottom of the computer market no longer exists. It's been replaced by mobile devices.
I think at $500 or $600, people would snap up an Apple-quality equivalent of a Chromebook that could browse the web and run the iLife and iWork suites (which I guarantee Apple has running on ARM already). As time went on, there could be other apps in the App Store specially written for them, as developers came on board, but really, just the basic Safari, iWork, iLife setup could handle 90% of most people's needs.
Again, before the iPad, if they had brought out something like this, it would have sucked a lot of sales from the MacBook Air and MBP. Now though, their sales are falling as people buy iPads (and iPhones) instead. The fall will stabilize since there are a certain number of people who need the greater capability. The ARM notebook would just be a new niche market for people who don't need the power of an MBA or MBP, but need a little more than a tablet. It may just be a niche, but why not control all of them?
There have been shipping smartphones running Android that docked to become tablets or "PCs". So far it hasn't been a successful product.
Yes, the ASUS Padfone devices that have never sold in NA, but Android =! Ubuntu (a desktop class OS).
While on the topic of the Padfone, AT&T will be selling the Padfone X with LTE-Advanced in the US in the coming months. This is part of ASUS' first real effort to enter the NA smartphone market.
Steve (PBUH) said "we don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of crap". At the time, that was true. Maybe now it's not. A lot of people use laptops just for web browsing and a few simple functions that would be covered by Apple's free apps (iLife, iWork). Apple could undoubtedly now build a netbook-like, but high-quality notebook that would be super-thin, super-light, with great battery life, and several hundred dollars cheaper with an A-series processor instead of Intel's overpriced chips.
Before the iPad came out, this would have involved them in the race to the bottom that the other computer manufacturers were involved in, desperately scrambling to cut their own throats quicker than the other guy. Now, though, the bottom of the computer market no longer exists. It's been replaced by mobile devices.
I think at $500 or $600, people would snap up an Apple-quality equivalent of a Chromebook that could browse the web and run the iLife and iWork suites (which I guarantee Apple has running on ARM already). As time went on, there could be other apps in the App Store specially written for them, as developers came on board, but really, just the basic Safari, iWork, iLife setup could handle 90% of most people's needs.
Again, before the iPad, if they had brought out something like this, it would have sucked a lot of sales from the MacBook Air and MBP. Now though, their sales are falling as people buy iPads (and iPhones) instead. The fall will stabilize since there are a certain number of people who need the greater capability. The ARM notebook would just be a new niche market for people who don't need the power of an MBA or MBP, but need a little more than a tablet. It may just be a niche, but why not control all of them?
Why limit themselves with an iOS/ARM device in the first place?
An Intel Airmont SoC (2x~4x the performance of Silvermont) will be low cost, high efficiency and capable of running OS X.
An independent analysis of the microarchitecture behind Apple's latest A7 processor has shown that the company was not overstating when it called the design "desktop class," with the new silicon matching up well against Intel's recent desktop components.
This required "independent analysis"? Or, you know, you can simply read the ARMv8-A reference manual for this information.
I thought that originally everyone in the smartphone industry said the whole nonsense about the A7 was just marketing BS. However, aren't Qualcomm's high-end Snapdragon chips every bit as powerful as Apple's A7? I'm guessing that all the different companies high-end processors are pretty much in the same ballpark when it comes to processing power. Usually one company never gets that much further than another because most companies are privy to the same technology. It's not like some aliens came down and gave one company some extra knowledge. Samsung's Galaxy S5 processor is basically an off the shelf processor with a slightly higher clock-speed than some competitor's offerings but it's still pretty powerful. Apart from the Galaxy S5 not having a 64-bit processor I'm sure it's up there with the A7 in processing power and graphics capabilities. I'm rather curious how they compare but Apple's A8 will probably make a big leap forward that maybe even Qualcomm or Nvidia will find it hard to keep pace with.
The A7 in the iPhone is clocked at just under 1.3 GHz, if they doubled that clock speed to what you might see in an Intel i5 (as used in the 13" MBPr I'm writing this with!) both dual-core 64 bit processors, I wonder how close in performance the two would be?
Overclocking would not help much. The A7 is not quite at par with even a Intel Core 2 Duo (and definitely nowhere near an i3). The ARM Cortex-A53 which Apple's A7 is based upon is not meant for desktop level performance. The ARM Cortex-A57 is supposed to be more comparable in which AMD is releasing a server chip (Opteron A1100) later this year based upon. Rumors are the Opteron A1100 will be priced around $100 which would be ridiculously inexpensive for a server chip. It would be interesting if Apple developed their own in-house chip based upon the Cortex-A57 for consumer-level Macs.
Why limit themselves with an iOS/ARM device in the first place?
An Intel Airmont SoC (2x~4x the performance of Silvermont) will be low cost, high efficiency and capable of running OS X.
Fine, use that in the MacBook Air. It's impossible to build anything cheaper than that if you have to pay Intel's piratical prices. This would be a new, lower price category.
Fine, use that in the MacBook Air. It's impossible to build anything cheaper than that if you have to pay Intel's piratical prices. This would be a new, lower price category.
Airmont will cost anywhere from $30~$40.
The current Haswell Core i5 in the MBA costs $315.
I thought that originally everyone in the smartphone industry said the whole nonsense about the A7 was just marketing BS. However, aren't Qualcomm's high-end Snapdragon chips every bit as powerful as Apple's A7? I'm guessing that all the different companies high-end processors are pretty much in the same ballpark when it comes to processing power. Usually one company never gets that much further than another because most companies are privy to the same technology. It's not like some aliens came down and gave one company some extra knowledge. Samsung's Galaxy S5 processor is basically an off the shelf processor with a slightly higher clock-speed than some competitor's offerings but it's still pretty powerful. Apart from the Galaxy S5 not having a 64-bit processor I'm sure it's up there with the A7 in processing power and graphics capabilities. I'm rather curious how they compare but Apple's A8 will probably make a big leap forward that maybe even Qualcomm or Nvidia will find it hard to keep pace with.
1) Not everyone, but plenty did.
2) From what I've seen they aren't. Within Anand's device testing higher-clocked devices with more core, etc. are not beating the new Apple iDevices. But I think this is all beside the point if we don't specifically talk about a performance-per-Watt when it comes to a mobile device.
3) Regarding CPU performance that has mostly been true because we're mostly comparing vendor systems that use a different vendor's CPU. With ARM there are different kinds of licenses. Apple first did what everyone did, but then slowly moved to add more and more of their own designs which became the A-chip to make an SoC that was designed to work with Apple's other HW and OS. This is key and I think Samsung is the only one vendor that could follow Apple here unless Qualcomm wants to starts releasing their own smartphones and tablets. (Anand explains this much better than I ever could… looking for article)
1) Where are the people that laughed at Apple for buying PA Semi?
2) I love how I hear everyday from people that Apple isn't innovating because they define it as releasing an entirely new product category. Now I don't expect the average person to understand how this chip is innovative and well ahead of the market but I do expect them to at least understand that unseen innovations are still innovations.
3) I don't think 2x A8's is the right way to go. Better to use more cores, or simply up the clock as Anand states these handheld devices are clocked too low to take full advantage of this "desktop class" chip.
4) I do think a small, 12", low-power notebook could happen. Between the Apple's ARM chips now being 64-bit, it's performance-per-Watt, the high cost of Intel's CULV CPUs in the MBA, the universality of web-based apps, and the Mac App Store I think it's not out of the realm of possibility that Apple could update Xcode to allow Mac apps to be compiled for x86_64 and AArch_64 for MAS. I wouldn't expect Apple to cut out the old-school download and install method but allow developers who have a viable product that will work on ARM to adjust and recompile like with the transitions from PPC. I also wouldn't expect a Rosetta-like option since the performance envelope will be going the other direction in both the chip and by not starting near the top of the performance line. This move could get Apple to make a MBA-like device that comes in several hundred less expensive than today with more than double the battery life for the current size/weight, that fits the needs of the user who isn't playing Resident Evil 5 on a 12" machine or using the Adobe Suit 6. If Chromebooks can gain some traction without MS Office and Adobe apps then so can an ARM-based Mac-like notebook.
5) QFT: "Looking at [Apple's A7 SoC] makes one thing very clear: the rest of the players in the ultra mobile CPU space didn't aim high enough. I wonder what happens next round." ~Anand Shimpi
If you take the bolded software users above out of the mix for a forward thinking computing device i.e >50% of most "desktop" user's needs, they would be more than happy with the power that a single or dual A7 or new A8 provides. Many aready are.
An iPad Pro 12"-13" with these or new A8 chips plus an "iHome Cloud Server" in adition to some changes to iCloud itself, would be a killer set up for many people.... at... get this, the same price or cheaper than a base config MBP. More margin for Apple as well.***
Retina MBPs, iMacs and MPs for everyone else that needs (or think they need) "trucks".
*** Throw in a newly designed AppleTV and the "post-PC revolution" is in full swing and sees Apple dominating the home and living room.
NOTE: I think a shout out should go to Mr. Steve Ballmer... because as silly as he looked saying these words, he was dead on, and it's what Apple has in spades these days to make this all happen.
"Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers... Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers.....(not so much as a drop of sweat later from Apple)... Developers! :smokey:
Comments
They could sell a dock station that connects a mouse, keyboard & monitor to the iPhone. Talk about a post-PC world!!
So at this point would iOS be the inhibiting factor in unleashing the A7 power?
No. Read the article again please. It’s battery life that is inhibiting things. All that power takes a lot of power to perform.
Confuscious says, the comment section is not what you think it is... It's not meant to talk about the article, but rather to respond to the first comment.
And most of us bozos don’t have a clue what we’re talking about. We just like to see ourselves pontificate in print.
Sounds like you are describing an iPad with a BT keyboard and Airplay mirroring to a big screen. Even sounds a little like Carplay.
Very similar. The difference being that the iPhone could eventually become both the desktop and portable for everyone eventually.
A crazy idea: A docking station with screen and keyboard, portable or desktop. The iPhone is the computer. For many people it's all the computing power they would ever need. Crazy, but well within the realm of possibility, and already predicted by others. It could even be an attractive, inexpensive option for the enterprise. Lots of docks, and everyone carries their own computer in their pocket.
A couple years ago Canonica was showing off full Ubuntu running on a smartphone that could dock into a tablet, TV, or desktop PC.
Not exactly crazy or new.
There have been shipping smartphones running Android that docked to become tablets or "PCs". So far it hasn't been a successful product.
I actually did that once (maybe thrice) on my jaIlbroke iPhone 3GS. We were heading up to visit my family and I had the Tom Tom app running, infinite tunes was streaming my favorite radio station to my Bluetooth headphones , and I had enabled the wifi hotspot for the wife to get online (some sort of crisis at work and she had to remotely log in). Email and all the other background processes were running normally, but even though it was plugged in it was slowly discharging the battery. I was amazed at how well that worked on my phone. Then my mom called and it crashed. Hard.
Like mothers everywhere, she does tend to have that effect on technology.
My point is that even then when everyone was saying that iOS was just a toy , I was marveling at how powerful a pocket computer it really was. Given the improvements Apple has made to the hardware since then , I suspect they could take it (iOS and the A series chips) to any form factor that they wish. Even if they don't make an air like notebook, the fact that they could, has to be making Chipzilla nervous.
Before the iPad came out, this would have involved them in the race to the bottom that the other computer manufacturers were involved in, desperately scrambling to cut their own throats quicker than the other guy. Now, though, the bottom of the computer market no longer exists. It's been replaced by mobile devices.
I think at $500 or $600, people would snap up an Apple-quality equivalent of a Chromebook that could browse the web and run the iLife and iWork suites (which I guarantee Apple has running on ARM already). As time went on, there could be other apps in the App Store specially written for them, as developers came on board, but really, just the basic Safari, iWork, iLife setup could handle 90% of most people's needs.
Again, before the iPad, if they had brought out something like this, it would have sucked a lot of sales from the MacBook Air and MBP. Now though, their sales are falling as people buy iPads (and iPhones) instead. The fall will stabilize since there are a certain number of people who need the greater capability. The ARM notebook would just be a new niche market for people who don't need the power of an MBA or MBP, but need a little more than a tablet. It may just be a niche, but why not control all of them?
There have been shipping smartphones running Android that docked to become tablets or "PCs". So far it hasn't been a successful product.
Yes, the ASUS Padfone devices that have never sold in NA, but Android =! Ubuntu (a desktop class OS).
While on the topic of the Padfone, AT&T will be selling the Padfone X with LTE-Advanced in the US in the coming months. This is part of ASUS' first real effort to enter the NA smartphone market.
Steve (PBUH) said "we don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of crap". At the time, that was true. Maybe now it's not. A lot of people use laptops just for web browsing and a few simple functions that would be covered by Apple's free apps (iLife, iWork). Apple could undoubtedly now build a netbook-like, but high-quality notebook that would be super-thin, super-light, with great battery life, and several hundred dollars cheaper with an A-series processor instead of Intel's overpriced chips.
Before the iPad came out, this would have involved them in the race to the bottom that the other computer manufacturers were involved in, desperately scrambling to cut their own throats quicker than the other guy. Now, though, the bottom of the computer market no longer exists. It's been replaced by mobile devices.
I think at $500 or $600, people would snap up an Apple-quality equivalent of a Chromebook that could browse the web and run the iLife and iWork suites (which I guarantee Apple has running on ARM already). As time went on, there could be other apps in the App Store specially written for them, as developers came on board, but really, just the basic Safari, iWork, iLife setup could handle 90% of most people's needs.
Again, before the iPad, if they had brought out something like this, it would have sucked a lot of sales from the MacBook Air and MBP. Now though, their sales are falling as people buy iPads (and iPhones) instead. The fall will stabilize since there are a certain number of people who need the greater capability. The ARM notebook would just be a new niche market for people who don't need the power of an MBA or MBP, but need a little more than a tablet. It may just be a niche, but why not control all of them?
Why limit themselves with an iOS/ARM device in the first place?
An Intel Airmont SoC (2x~4x the performance of Silvermont) will be low cost, high efficiency and capable of running OS X.
An independent analysis of the microarchitecture behind Apple's latest A7 processor has shown that the company was not overstating when it called the design "desktop class," with the new silicon matching up well against Intel's recent desktop components.
This required "independent analysis"? Or, you know, you can simply read the ARMv8-A reference manual for this information.
I thought that originally everyone in the smartphone industry said the whole nonsense about the A7 was just marketing BS. However, aren't Qualcomm's high-end Snapdragon chips every bit as powerful as Apple's A7? I'm guessing that all the different companies high-end processors are pretty much in the same ballpark when it comes to processing power. Usually one company never gets that much further than another because most companies are privy to the same technology. It's not like some aliens came down and gave one company some extra knowledge. Samsung's Galaxy S5 processor is basically an off the shelf processor with a slightly higher clock-speed than some competitor's offerings but it's still pretty powerful. Apart from the Galaxy S5 not having a 64-bit processor I'm sure it's up there with the A7 in processing power and graphics capabilities. I'm rather curious how they compare but Apple's A8 will probably make a big leap forward that maybe even Qualcomm or Nvidia will find it hard to keep pace with.
Flashback to Steve's comment after the first iPhone was announced.
Before the app store
The A7 in the iPhone is clocked at just under 1.3 GHz, if they doubled that clock speed to what you might see in an Intel i5 (as used in the 13" MBPr I'm writing this with!) both dual-core 64 bit processors, I wonder how close in performance the two would be?
Overclocking would not help much. The A7 is not quite at par with even a Intel Core 2 Duo (and definitely nowhere near an i3). The ARM Cortex-A53 which Apple's A7 is based upon is not meant for desktop level performance. The ARM Cortex-A57 is supposed to be more comparable in which AMD is releasing a server chip (Opteron A1100) later this year based upon. Rumors are the Opteron A1100 will be priced around $100 which would be ridiculously inexpensive for a server chip. It would be interesting if Apple developed their own in-house chip based upon the Cortex-A57 for consumer-level Macs.
Fine, use that in the MacBook Air. It's impossible to build anything cheaper than that if you have to pay Intel's piratical prices. This would be a new, lower price category.
Fine, use that in the MacBook Air. It's impossible to build anything cheaper than that if you have to pay Intel's piratical prices. This would be a new, lower price category.
Airmont will cost anywhere from $30~$40.
The current Haswell Core i5 in the MBA costs $315.
1) Not everyone, but plenty did.
2) From what I've seen they aren't. Within Anand's device testing higher-clocked devices with more core, etc. are not beating the new Apple iDevices. But I think this is all beside the point if we don't specifically talk about a performance-per-Watt when it comes to a mobile device.
3) Regarding CPU performance that has mostly been true because we're mostly comparing vendor systems that use a different vendor's CPU. With ARM there are different kinds of licenses. Apple first did what everyone did, but then slowly moved to add more and more of their own designs which became the A-chip to make an SoC that was designed to work with Apple's other HW and OS. This is key and I think Samsung is the only one vendor that could follow Apple here unless Qualcomm wants to starts releasing their own smartphones and tablets. (Anand explains this much better than I ever could… looking for article)
If you take the bolded software users above out of the mix for a forward thinking computing device i.e >50% of most "desktop" user's needs, they would be more than happy with the power that a single or dual A7 or new A8 provides. Many aready are.
An iPad Pro 12"-13" with these or new A8 chips plus an "iHome Cloud Server" in adition to some changes to iCloud itself, would be a killer set up for many people.... at... get this, the same price or cheaper than a base config MBP. More margin for Apple as well.***
Retina MBPs, iMacs and MPs for everyone else that needs (or think they need) "trucks".
*** Throw in a newly designed AppleTV and the "post-PC revolution" is in full swing and sees Apple dominating the home and living room.
NOTE: I think a shout out should go to Mr. Steve Ballmer... because as silly as he looked saying these words, he was dead on, and it's what Apple has in spades these days to make this all happen.
"Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers... Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers.....(not so much as a drop of sweat later from Apple)... Developers! :smokey: