mjtomlin

bsimpsen said:

melgross said:

bsimpsen said:

I don't know the particulars of Apple's ARM architecture license, but if royalty payments for older versions decline over time, or if payments for new versions increase over time, there's financial incentive for Apple to drift away from ARM into its own custom designs. Whether the ARM design teams can keep Apple interested is an open question.

Apple doesn’t use ARM designs, so they don’t pay for them. Apple’s designs are entirely home grown. They have an architectural license which means they use the instruction set, basically.

Apple pays for the Architectural license. As instructions are added to the instruction set, I expect ARM will want compensation for them. To the extent those instructions support ancillary functions like AI, I expect Apple might not adopt them.

Huh? Apple licensed ARMv8 ISA and extended it as they needed. They don’t own ARM anything for that. Companies with an architectural license are completely free to extended the ISA as long as it remains backwards compatible - with the originally licensed version. Most of what ARMv9 offers, Apple has already implemented in their own designs, so there’s really no need to “upgrade”.

mac_dog said:

TBH, how much money does a person need? I say vote no. Tim should do the ethically right thing and turn this down. I see clients on the brink of homelessness eating moldy danishes. To me, it’s obscene. 

Tim Cook saying no is going to help them? How about Tim Cook saying Yes and donating that money to a worthy cause that might actually help people?

lmasanti said:

First of all, we need to know how frequently will Apple renew the M series-
With quite lower volume… will it make sense to a yearly release sequence? ¡
I think Apple will have like more than a 2-3 years cycle.

I think the base chips M1, M2, M3 will be a yearly upgrade (after the transition is finished) and the “pro” variants will be updated every 2 years or so.

Volume shouldn’t be as big an issue due to the fact that these chips share the same cores as the A-series.

Xed said:

cpsro said:

Sounds like AirTags won't be nearly as useful for tracking stolen items--they may announce their presence and provide their location much too quickly and readily.

That was never their intent and Apple won't offer AirTags for stolen items because you can't both not inform a thief and keep anti-stalking features enabled at the same time.

Actually you probably could by learning travel, location and proximity habits.

An AirTag without a “travel” history, that is traveling around without its registered owner could be considered a “stalking” device… any nearby devices could then be notified.

An AirTag with a history that is all of a sudden moving around without its registered owner, could be considered “stolen”… in this case nearby devices would not be notified.

lorca2770 said:

Just a question, since time makes me forget. Wasn’t Arm developed by Apple, and Steve Jobs sold the company in the times of necessity? Careful! I am not talking about the false narrative of Microsoft. Only about Arm

No. The modern ARM architecture was a joint venture between, Acorn (ISA, design), VLSI (fabrication), and Apple (money)… Apple wanted an efficient mobile chip for the Newton.

Makes you wonder why Apple didn’t just buy Acorn and use their CPUs instead of switching to PowerPC?