Cue the AI experts telling Apple it needs more RAM ....
Not my area of knowledge at all, but can someone explain if these babies are even close to being able to run OS X?
Nope! Not even close. I've been pointing out what Apple needs to do in order to accomplish that, and this isn't it. The truth is that the chip isn't a "massive" improvement in compute that the article states. Considering that the past two chips had double the performance of the one before, and the chip before that was 50% higher than the one before, with almost 100% higher in graphics (A5 for iPhone, with A5x for iPad), this jump is positively measly.
What Apple seems to have done this year, according to their own statements during the introduction, is to have used the smaller process technology for efficiency gains more so than for compute gains. But they also doubled the number of transistors to two billion, so something else is obviously going on here.
But in order to use this for say, a Macbook Air, they need to quadruple the compute capability. And that would just work well for the OS and Apple's apps that were written for ARM. Third parties would still se the usual tradeoffs in speed due to the chip emulation that would be needed. Traditionally, it's considered that in order to emulate another chip family, the chip on which the emulation is being done needs to be about five times as powerful as the one being emulated. We saw that with emulation earlier, where software ran at 10-20% of the speed as on a comparable Windows machine.
But, Apple could work this out, which is why I wonder at all those extra transistors. There are things they are using some of them for, such as a dedicated camera module in the chip, etc. but still, double? It's been understood that there are just a relatively few instructions that need to be emulated that use most of the processing time. If Apple put those instructions into their ARM chips, so that the OS called them only when needed for emulation, then Apple could cut emulation speed by 80%. This could work.
But, it still requires an ARM chip to equal the power of whatever x86 chip Apple is using, and the lowest chip Apple uses for the Macbook Air is an Ultra Low Power i5. If the A8 was double the power, and using two cores, could be mated with another, then Apple could have a chip that comes at around the power of that low end i5. That could do it for rewritten apps, and if the instructions for x86 were included, this would be viable for a low end, less expensive, lighter, and longer battery life machine.
But, as you can see that's a lot of steps needed, and it doesn't look as though the power of the processor is enough, unless there's something that Apple has done that they aren't talking about. Perhaps they can raise the clock on a device with less of a battery and cooling issue. But Apple's design is wide and low clock, so it's hard to say how much they could raise it.
Some have said that third parties could always recompile their software for OS X over ARM, but as usual, that's just a pipe dream, and XCode would need to support that. Small, simple, apps can often be run through, and will work with little work afterwards. But major apps will take months to fix up, and the question is how many developers will want to make another change.
Some of that additional billion transistors had to go to a hardware block for H.265 encode / decode. There is no way they are doing that in software with an A8.
With the most powerful mobile processor on the market, they might be able to run Android. I remember installing 1.6 on my first gen iPhone. Even with the best hardware on the market and the most accurate touchscreen, it lagged like nobody’s business and my Q and P keys couldn’t be touched.
You should remember that Apple makes both the hardware and the operating system. This is why iOS has always been optimized to run on Apple's processors and other components in Apple's iOS devices. This is also why the iPhone might have less RAM and lower GHz than other processors, but will beat the pants off them in benchmarks (especially for graphics intensive apps).
Trying to run another operating system like Android or Windows Phone on an iPhone is always going to be a dog (if it runs at all). Don't be surprised that Android runs slowly on the iPhone hardware.
I would bet, that if you tried to run iOS 8 on an Android phone, you would find the same slowness (if it will run at all on another smartphone).
You do realize that it takes 50% power WHILE being 25% faster without throtling (that's what Apple said)... Also, its single core performance is incredible (they didn't increase the number of cores to get this 25%). Everyone else throtles right now since they're close to the top of their power enveloppe.
If they didn't care about power, cores or throtling, they could have created a 4 core beast which would kill everyone by a mile in benchmarks and be of little use in the real world. Isn't what others specialize in?
It seemingly only impacts Safari in a significant way, which is seemingly a memory hog when opening multiple tabs (though I myself rarely open more than a few tabs so its no problem to me); maybe they fixed that in IOS 8.
Was running Firefox on a 512 MB machine with a slow disk last year and had no problem running 10+ tabs. So, I have trouble believe you need that much memory to manage a few web pages.
Cue the AI experts telling Apple it needs more RAM ....
You don't need to be an expert to realize that more RAM is very important in the iOS environment, especially in an iPad.
Not my area of knowledge at all, but can someone explain if these babies are even close to being able to run OS X?
IOS is OS/X with a different UI so the answer there is yes, I'm surprised that this is even a question anymore. The only thing that becomes an issue is the ultimate performance of the processor in a desktop/laptop implementation. We don't really know what the ultimate performance would be.
Not my area of knowledge at all, but can someone explain if these babies are even close to being able to run OS X?
I remember a rumor/report a few years ago, I think, that Apple had tested ARM MacBook configurations internally, and that they worked better than one would have expected. Think about what full fledged RAM could do. RAM is probably a bottle neck for phone use, and wisely so, but would probably put multitasking to new levels if it had 16GB in a MacBook configuration. I made several great animated movies on a G4 PowerBook 12". Running both after effects, Final Cut Pro, photoshop.. This chip is much more advanced and capable than the G4.
Apple is supporting the iPhone 4s in iOS 8 - the iPhone 4s was introduced all most three (3) years ago (IIRC October 2011) - so I do not think it would be unreasonable to expect that the iPhone 6/6 + would be supported in 2017.
I don't follow the Android reference as that is also a mobile OS, I was asking about OS X. Obviously I am wondering how far off a MacBook Air type machine running OS X without an Intel Chip might be.
Apple could produce a Mac with A7 if they wanted too. It is simply a matter of being able to price the machine at a point consistent with its performance. An A7 would put the machine around Core Duo performance. Not bad at all really if the price is right.
Here is the real unknown though, what is the performance of the chip clock rate wise? That is how fast can Apple clock the A8, This is the big mystery of Apples line up as similar cores can often go beyond 2GHZ so that extra performance can go a long ways to making a Mac viable. Beyond all of that there are other things that Apple can do to improve performance of the chip. One thing is to add a wider, higher performance RAM interface. Another is to increase on chip caches and buffering. All of these things would lead to higher performance with little changes to other parts of the chip.
Perhaps Apple have another chip under development that isn't a mobile version ....
Possibly. The smart approach would be for them to develope a chip that can supports different RAM interfaces for different performance levels out of the chip. A few other ports (USB & TB) would also be useful. Doing so the chip wouldn't be vastly different in the mobile and laptop/desktop versions.
Apple could go a lot farther in the optimization, to support more powerful machines but then you have to question the value to them of running multiple SoC development programs. The one thing that is obvious here is that Cyclone has huge potential that is untapped in current implementations. The boost they are claiming with only a 100MHz clock boost is very significant but we still don't know where the chip tops out at. This is why i Believe Apple could build Macs on this architecture with no problem at all if they really wanted too.
With the iPhone 6 Plus out, Apple is going to have to do something about increasing the desirability of the iPad mini, which many will see as a redundant device.
The iPhone 6 Plus is considerably more expensive than the iPad mini. Apple wins if people move from the tablet to the phablet.
What part of dramatic increases without a RAM increase, and that additional RAM would be a significant hit to battery life do you not understand? Let's all work on improving our comprehension skills.
Both the monetary and battery hit from the extra RAM is completely trivial. It'd be less than $10 (way overwhelmed by the huge profit margin on the device), and far less significant to the battery than the screen. If they had kept the phone the same thickness as the previous generation, that would have allowed extra battery life such as would be many, many times greater than that lost to the extra RAM, and it would have also allowed the camera housing to remain flush with the body instead of protruding.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hypercommunist
Safari reloading webpages when it runs out of RAM is obvious and annoying.
This, and more. The extra RAM is important, not just because of tabs in Safari and not just because the larger screen resolution in itself means less things can fit into memory, but because that limits the forward compatibility of the device. Each version of iOS takes more RAM to run than the version before it. There's no way I'm buying another Android, but I think I might have to sit out for the S version next year if these reports are accurate.
I don't follow the Android reference as that is also a mobile OS, I was asking about OS X. Obviously I am wondering how far off a MacBook Air type machine running OS X without an Intel Chip might be. Perhaps Apple have another chip under development that isn't a mobile version ....
You do remember the A7 was introduced as a mobile chip with desktop class performance...?
Nope! Not even close. I've been pointing out what Apple needs to do in order to accomplish that, and this isn't it. The truth is that the chip isn't a "massive" improvement in compute that the article states. Considering that the past two chips had double the performance of the one before, and the chip before that was 50% higher than the one before, with almost 100% higher in graphics (A5 for iPhone, with A5x for iPad), this jump is positively measly.
They barely budged the clock rate and are getting 25%, if you believe Apples numbers that is pretty damn good.
What Apple seems to have done this year, according to their own statements during the introduction, is to have used the smaller process technology for efficiency gains more so than for compute gains. But they also doubled the number of transistors to two billion, so something else is obviously going on here.
A focus on power reduction was rumored to be the primary focus for a good part of 2014. It is a good move by Apple frankly as it looks like it allowed them to drastically improve GPU performance with little if any hit to the power profile.
But in order to use this for say, a Macbook Air, they need to quadruple the compute capability.
Which might be easy. The key point here being that we don't know what the maximum clock rate is on these chips. Based on other similar hardware I suspect Apple could take this chip well past 2GHZ. I wouldn't be surprised to see double the performance as an easy target for Apple.
And that would just work well for the OS and Apple's apps that were written for ARM. Third parties would still se the usual tradeoffs in speed due to the chip emulation that would be needed. Traditionally, it's considered that in order to emulate another chip family, the chip on which the emulation is being done needs to be about five times as powerful as the one being emulated. We saw that with emulation earlier, where software ran at 10-20% of the speed as on a comparable Windows machine.
Or Apple could say no emulation here and support running iOS apps in a Window to cover themselves for the switch over period. IPAd clearly has proved that most of Apples customers have no need at all for emulation.
But, Apple could work this out, which is why I wonder at all those extra transistors. There are things they are using some of them for, such as a dedicated camera module in the chip, etc. but still, double? It's been understood that there are just a relatively few instructions that need to be emulated that use most of the processing time. If Apple put those instructions into their ARM chips, so that the OS called them only when needed for emulation, then Apple could cut emulation speed by 80%. This could work.
It certainly could work but I don't see Apple wasting time on such emulation hardware.
But, it still requires an ARM chip to equal the power of whatever x86 chip Apple is using, and the lowest chip Apple uses for the Macbook Air is an Ultra Low Power i5. If the A8 was double the power, and using two cores, could be mated with another, then Apple could have a chip that comes at around the power of that low end i5. That could do it for rewritten apps, and if the instructions for x86 were included, this would be viable for a low end, less expensive, lighter, and longer battery life machine.
You are assuming here that i86 is a big deal for the majority of Apple users, it isn't. Mind you I'm one that has to have Windows machines at work because of software and hardware ties. That isn't the majority of Apple users however.
But, as you can see that's a lot of steps needed, and it doesn't look as though the power of the processor is enough, unless there's something that Apple has done that they aren't talking about. Perhaps they can raise the clock on a device with less of a battery and cooling issue. But Apple's design is wide and low clock, so it's hard to say how much they could raise it.
How much they can raise the clock rate is unknown but we can take guesses at what might be possible. I would suggest that based on similar hardware 2GHZ would be easy. How much faster beyond 2GHz remains unknown. If Apple can realistically double clock rate to something like 2.8 GHZ and not sustain huge performance issues then you have double your performance right there.
However clock rate isn't everythig, by far the biggest throttle with respect to performance on APUS type chips is the interface to RAM. Apple has several options there to improve RAM performance.
Some have said that third parties could always recompile their software for OS X over ARM, but as usual, that's just a pipe dream,
It isn't a pipe dream, Apple could simply demand that apps support both architectures for continued inclusion in the App Store. That right there is a powerful incentive.
and XCode would need to support that.
XCode already supports cross compiling so that is not a problem.
Small, simple, apps can often be run through, and will work with little work afterwards. But major apps will take months to fix up, and the question is how many developers will want to make another change.
If the vast majority of Apps follow Apple guidelines running on ARM will not be a problem. Sure some debugging will take place, but if the apps use Apples APIs as recommended that will be a minor issue. We nay need to look at the various attempts to get apps to run on ARM based Linux systems as a hint as to how serious that app situation will be. For the most part apps aren't a problem. Getting the OS and libraries working is though but that would all be on Apple.
In the end the big question about A8 in a Mac comes down to performance, in this respect we don't really know how the chip will perform at laptop power levels. I wouldn't count it out though as Apple could triple wattage and still have a very viable laptop chip. I'm guessing triple the wattage here would result in a 15 watt max chip.
By the way they don't need to exceed i5 performance levels for this to work. All they need to be able to do is to offer a machine that comes close and is $300 cheaper.
I've seen it described as a "tick", as in Intel fashion, but I'm not sure. The question is when the Apple will be able to go to 16nm next year, or whether they will stay with 20nm one more year.
It looks like more than a tick. Of course with Apples secrecy it is hard to tell. However you don't double transistors on a tick. Beyond that the A series highlights the importance of specialized execution units in modern SoC design. Performance is no longer measured by simply profiling the CPU. Even with Intelsat hardware, the die space dedicated to the CPUs is rather tiny these days.
Honestly I'm sometimes more excited to wait for the tear downs than the actual device. It will be very interesting to see where all of those extra transistors go to.
Of course, it's always possible that Apple has a parallel chip development program for OS X. Cook just said that Apple has products in development that no one knows anything about, so who knows?
This is possible. For example a quad core chip should be fairly easy with this architecture, they could deliver such a chip for a laptop on this years process and shrink it next year for tablets and phones. The COURT cores themselves wouldn't add a lot to the power profile of the chip but supporting them might. In the end a lot of power is dissipated in the RAM interfaces and caches keeping lots of cores running. I don't think this reality is lost at Apple.
If so, are you saying that Apple should forgo a potential 200M USD this quarter (based on your cost of 10 USD x 20M phones sold in the quarter - high range of estimates) just because you think the iPhone 6 should have 2GB system RAM?
Can you answer the question on whether there are enough 2GB modules available to Apple so the iPhone 6 can have 2GB system RAM and still introduce in Sept 2014?
Perhaps there are not enough at a reasonable cost/production rate for Apple to use?
If there were not enough, are you saying that Apple should have waited to introduce the iPhone 6 until a 2GB module is available at a reasonable cost/production rate?
It is measly when compared to,what came before with the past three generations. And yes, I stated that Apple used a lot of the shrink for efficiency. I'm talking about capabilities, not efficiency. We're talking about the possibility of OS X, and that's why the increase in power is measly.
When was the last time Intel delivered 25%?
This year we'll see other chip makers catching up much more easily than before, where the A7 still beats most of the new chips in most performance areas. I hope that Apple isn't doing what it usually does, which is to get a lead, and then become complacent, allowing others to trample,them.
Melgross, I'm shocked that you are taking this attitude and are so focused on CPU performance. For one there is a substantial increase in GPU performance with this chip. We are getting a new camera processor and apparently new encode and decode hardware for video. It actually looks like an entirely new chip.
Now I'm not saying that CPU performance isn't important in a Mac OS device. The problem is that isn't the whole equation these days. The initial feel here is that this chip would deliver video conferencing capabilities well beyond what the CPU numbers might imply. Maybe it isn't a usage you have but this chip ought to be able to provide video conferencing support that would be hard to approach on a quad core if you didn't have the dedicated hardware. In effect the chip can deliver better than quad core performance in some of today's more popular uses.
They did that with iPhone screen size. The only phones to have larger, and sometimes, higher Rez screens were the old Win Mobile phones, where they really needed it because of the supposed Windows UI. When the iPhone first came out, therefor, the screen was being described as large, and high resolution. But we see what happened. Others got same size and Rez screens, and then went larger and higher Rez. Apple finally made the screen slightly larger, but now they've been trailing. It's cost them sales, make no mistake about that, which is why they have them now. I'm just hoping they don't allow their lead in SoC's die too.
Apple has the hottest selling cell phone made, they have lost very little. This time next year will provide us with real data about the sustainability of the large cell phone market. I really don't think it is as hot as some imply. If the 6+ becomes a huge hit we are wrong, but I don't see the majority of people wanting to carry around these huge cell phones all the time. A years worth of sales figures ought to highlight if 6+ sized phones have a long term future.
By the way I approve of Apples largeish cell phone as some people can justify the big devoce. I just don't see it as a major portion of Apples long term sales. I can also see people dumping the 6+ after realizing that it is more of a problem to carry around than it is worth. In the end I do wonder why it took Apple so long to offer up a real line up of phones and I'm frustrated that an updated iPhone 4 sized device hasn't arrived. Size isn't Apples problem it is rather the lack of effort to maintain a portfolio of high performance phones.
Comments
Cue the AI experts telling Apple it needs more RAM ....
Not my area of knowledge at all, but can someone explain if these babies are even close to being able to run OS X?
Nope! Not even close. I've been pointing out what Apple needs to do in order to accomplish that, and this isn't it. The truth is that the chip isn't a "massive" improvement in compute that the article states. Considering that the past two chips had double the performance of the one before, and the chip before that was 50% higher than the one before, with almost 100% higher in graphics (A5 for iPhone, with A5x for iPad), this jump is positively measly.
What Apple seems to have done this year, according to their own statements during the introduction, is to have used the smaller process technology for efficiency gains more so than for compute gains. But they also doubled the number of transistors to two billion, so something else is obviously going on here.
But in order to use this for say, a Macbook Air, they need to quadruple the compute capability. And that would just work well for the OS and Apple's apps that were written for ARM. Third parties would still se the usual tradeoffs in speed due to the chip emulation that would be needed. Traditionally, it's considered that in order to emulate another chip family, the chip on which the emulation is being done needs to be about five times as powerful as the one being emulated. We saw that with emulation earlier, where software ran at 10-20% of the speed as on a comparable Windows machine.
But, Apple could work this out, which is why I wonder at all those extra transistors. There are things they are using some of them for, such as a dedicated camera module in the chip, etc. but still, double? It's been understood that there are just a relatively few instructions that need to be emulated that use most of the processing time. If Apple put those instructions into their ARM chips, so that the OS called them only when needed for emulation, then Apple could cut emulation speed by 80%. This could work.
But, it still requires an ARM chip to equal the power of whatever x86 chip Apple is using, and the lowest chip Apple uses for the Macbook Air is an Ultra Low Power i5. If the A8 was double the power, and using two cores, could be mated with another, then Apple could have a chip that comes at around the power of that low end i5. That could do it for rewritten apps, and if the instructions for x86 were included, this would be viable for a low end, less expensive, lighter, and longer battery life machine.
But, as you can see that's a lot of steps needed, and it doesn't look as though the power of the processor is enough, unless there's something that Apple has done that they aren't talking about. Perhaps they can raise the clock on a device with less of a battery and cooling issue. But Apple's design is wide and low clock, so it's hard to say how much they could raise it.
Some have said that third parties could always recompile their software for OS X over ARM, but as usual, that's just a pipe dream, and XCode would need to support that. Small, simple, apps can often be run through, and will work with little work afterwards. But major apps will take months to fix up, and the question is how many developers will want to make another change.
Some of that additional billion transistors had to go to a hardware block for H.265 encode / decode. There is no way they are doing that in software with an A8.
With the most powerful mobile processor on the market, they might be able to run Android. I remember installing 1.6 on my first gen iPhone. Even with the best hardware on the market and the most accurate touchscreen, it lagged like nobody’s business and my Q and P keys couldn’t be touched.
You should remember that Apple makes both the hardware and the operating system. This is why iOS has always been optimized to run on Apple's processors and other components in Apple's iOS devices. This is also why the iPhone might have less RAM and lower GHz than other processors, but will beat the pants off them in benchmarks (especially for graphics intensive apps).
Trying to run another operating system like Android or Windows Phone on an iPhone is always going to be a dog (if it runs at all). Don't be surprised that Android runs slowly on the iPhone hardware.
I would bet, that if you tried to run iOS 8 on an Android phone, you would find the same slowness (if it will run at all on another smartphone).
You do realize that it takes 50% power WHILE being 25% faster without throtling (that's what Apple said)... Also, its single core performance is incredible (they didn't increase the number of cores to get this 25%). Everyone else throtles right now since they're close to the top of their power enveloppe.
If they didn't care about power, cores or throtling, they could have created a 4 core beast which would kill everyone by a mile in benchmarks and be of little use in the real world. Isn't what others specialize in?
GPU is always the bottleneck, I am glad to see Apple made it a priority over CPU performance.
I was looking at the game demo at the keynotes, put the A8 into an AppleTV and you have yourself a game console for a fraction of the price.
It seemingly only impacts Safari in a significant way, which is seemingly a memory hog when opening multiple tabs (though I myself rarely open more than a few tabs so its no problem to me); maybe they fixed that in IOS 8.
Was running Firefox on a 512 MB machine with a slow disk last year and had no problem running 10+ tabs. So, I have trouble believe you need that much memory to manage a few web pages.
IOS is OS/X with a different UI so the answer there is yes, I'm surprised that this is even a question anymore. The only thing that becomes an issue is the ultimate performance of the processor in a desktop/laptop implementation. We don't really know what the ultimate performance would be.
Apple is supporting the iPhone 4s in iOS 8 - the iPhone 4s was introduced all most three (3) years ago (IIRC October 2011) - so I do not think it would be unreasonable to expect that the iPhone 6/6 + would be supported in 2017.
Here is the real unknown though, what is the performance of the chip clock rate wise? That is how fast can Apple clock the A8, This is the big mystery of Apples line up as similar cores can often go beyond 2GHZ so that extra performance can go a long ways to making a Mac viable. Beyond all of that there are other things that Apple can do to improve performance of the chip. One thing is to add a wider, higher performance RAM interface. Another is to increase on chip caches and buffering. All of these things would lead to higher performance with little changes to other parts of the chip.
Possibly. The smart approach would be for them to develope a chip that can supports different RAM interfaces for different performance levels out of the chip. A few other ports (USB & TB) would also be useful. Doing so the chip wouldn't be vastly different in the mobile and laptop/desktop versions.
Apple could go a lot farther in the optimization, to support more powerful machines but then you have to question the value to them of running multiple SoC development programs. The one thing that is obvious here is that Cyclone has huge potential that is untapped in current implementations. The boost they are claiming with only a 100MHz clock boost is very significant but we still don't know where the chip tops out at. This is why i Believe Apple could build Macs on this architecture with no problem at all if they really wanted too.
With the iPhone 6 Plus out, Apple is going to have to do something about increasing the desirability of the iPad mini, which many will see as a redundant device.
The iPhone 6 Plus is considerably more expensive than the iPad mini. Apple wins if people move from the tablet to the phablet.
99% of iPhone owners don't know or care how much RAM it has.
Safari reloading webpages when it runs out of RAM is obvious and annoying.
What part of dramatic increases without a RAM increase, and that additional RAM would be a significant hit to battery life do you not understand? Let's all work on improving our comprehension skills.
Both the monetary and battery hit from the extra RAM is completely trivial. It'd be less than $10 (way overwhelmed by the huge profit margin on the device), and far less significant to the battery than the screen. If they had kept the phone the same thickness as the previous generation, that would have allowed extra battery life such as would be many, many times greater than that lost to the extra RAM, and it would have also allowed the camera housing to remain flush with the body instead of protruding.
Safari reloading webpages when it runs out of RAM is obvious and annoying.
This, and more. The extra RAM is important, not just because of tabs in Safari and not just because the larger screen resolution in itself means less things can fit into memory, but because that limits the forward compatibility of the device. Each version of iOS takes more RAM to run than the version before it. There's no way I'm buying another Android, but I think I might have to sit out for the S version next year if these reports are accurate.
I couldn't agree more
True, but I'd be happier with the same thickness as the iPhone 5S with a bigger battery and 2gb+ or Ram.
I love Mr Ive's designs, but he frequently seems to choose form over function when it comes to the thickness of a device.
[/quote]
I don't follow the Android reference as that is also a mobile OS, I was asking about OS X. Obviously I am wondering how far off a MacBook Air type machine running OS X without an Intel Chip might be. Perhaps Apple have another chip under development that isn't a mobile version ....
You do remember the A7 was introduced as a mobile chip with desktop class performance...?
They barely budged the clock rate and are getting 25%, if you believe Apples numbers that is pretty damn good. A focus on power reduction was rumored to be the primary focus for a good part of 2014. It is a good move by Apple frankly as it looks like it allowed them to drastically improve GPU performance with little if any hit to the power profile. Which might be easy. The key point here being that we don't know what the maximum clock rate is on these chips. Based on other similar hardware I suspect Apple could take this chip well past 2GHZ. I wouldn't be surprised to see double the performance as an easy target for Apple. Or Apple could say no emulation here and support running iOS apps in a Window to cover themselves for the switch over period. IPAd clearly has proved that most of Apples customers have no need at all for emulation. It certainly could work but I don't see Apple wasting time on such emulation hardware. You are assuming here that i86 is a big deal for the majority of Apple users, it isn't. Mind you I'm one that has to have Windows machines at work because of software and hardware ties. That isn't the majority of Apple users however. How much they can raise the clock rate is unknown but we can take guesses at what might be possible. I would suggest that based on similar hardware 2GHZ would be easy. How much faster beyond 2GHz remains unknown. If Apple can realistically double clock rate to something like 2.8 GHZ and not sustain huge performance issues then you have double your performance right there.
However clock rate isn't everythig, by far the biggest throttle with respect to performance on APUS type chips is the interface to RAM. Apple has several options there to improve RAM performance. It isn't a pipe dream, Apple could simply demand that apps support both architectures for continued inclusion in the App Store. That right there is a powerful incentive. XCode already supports cross compiling so that is not a problem.
If the vast majority of Apps follow Apple guidelines running on ARM will not be a problem. Sure some debugging will take place, but if the apps use Apples APIs as recommended that will be a minor issue. We nay need to look at the various attempts to get apps to run on ARM based Linux systems as a hint as to how serious that app situation will be. For the most part apps aren't a problem. Getting the OS and libraries working is though but that would all be on Apple.
In the end the big question about A8 in a Mac comes down to performance, in this respect we don't really know how the chip will perform at laptop power levels. I wouldn't count it out though as Apple could triple wattage and still have a very viable laptop chip. I'm guessing triple the wattage here would result in a 15 watt max chip.
By the way they don't need to exceed i5 performance levels for this to work. All they need to be able to do is to offer a machine that comes close and is $300 cheaper.
Honestly I'm sometimes more excited to wait for the tear downs than the actual device. It will be very interesting to see where all of those extra transistors go to.
This is possible. For example a quad core chip should be fairly easy with this architecture, they could deliver such a chip for a laptop on this years process and shrink it next year for tablets and phones. The COURT cores themselves wouldn't add a lot to the power profile of the chip but supporting them might. In the end a lot of power is dissipated in the RAM interfaces and caches keeping lots of cores running. I don't think this reality is lost at Apple.
99% of iPhone owners don't know or care how much RAM it has.
Yet they care a LOT when Safari keeps reloading their tabs for no apparent reason.
Fuzzypaws:
Are you an Apple Stockholder?
If so, are you saying that Apple should forgo a potential 200M USD this quarter (based on your cost of 10 USD x 20M phones sold in the quarter - high range of estimates) just because you think the iPhone 6 should have 2GB system RAM?
Can you answer the question on whether there are enough 2GB modules available to Apple so the iPhone 6 can have 2GB system RAM and still introduce in Sept 2014?
Perhaps there are not enough at a reasonable cost/production rate for Apple to use?
If there were not enough, are you saying that Apple should have waited to introduce the iPhone 6 until a 2GB module is available at a reasonable cost/production rate?
Now I'm not saying that CPU performance isn't important in a Mac OS device. The problem is that isn't the whole equation these days. The initial feel here is that this chip would deliver video conferencing capabilities well beyond what the CPU numbers might imply. Maybe it isn't a usage you have but this chip ought to be able to provide video conferencing support that would be hard to approach on a quad core if you didn't have the dedicated hardware. In effect the chip can deliver better than quad core performance in some of today's more popular uses.
Apple has the hottest selling cell phone made, they have lost very little. This time next year will provide us with real data about the sustainability of the large cell phone market. I really don't think it is as hot as some imply. If the 6+ becomes a huge hit we are wrong, but I don't see the majority of people wanting to carry around these huge cell phones all the time. A years worth of sales figures ought to highlight if 6+ sized phones have a long term future.
By the way I approve of Apples largeish cell phone as some people can justify the big devoce. I just don't see it as a major portion of Apples long term sales. I can also see people dumping the 6+ after realizing that it is more of a problem to carry around than it is worth. In the end I do wonder why it took Apple so long to offer up a real line up of phones and I'm frustrated that an updated iPhone 4 sized device hasn't arrived. Size isn't Apples problem it is rather the lack of effort to maintain a portfolio of high performance phones.