hattig

"fell behind Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 (powered by an 845)" Not with that score, that must be an Exynos version with its custom Samsung Mongoose ARM core.

Apple's A series chips are made for slim mobile devices - phones and tablets. I don't see any major issue with the CPU performance versus an ultra-low-power Intel processor, were it to be used in a slim small laptop, but that's not what Apple will do IMO.

A pro laptop or desktop grade Apple chip, if they were to create one, would likely be given a new naming scheme. "X1" or "F1" or similar.

It'll be an amalgam of the latest A chip (CPU, GPU, I/O, Memory Controller), the latest T chip (security, SSD, additional internal I/O - most of this is already in the A chip TBH), additional PCIe support (x16), and an uncore suitable for desktop bandwidths and loads.

Meltdown affects all Intel x86 CPUs since the Pentium Pro, excluding Atom processors before 2013. It also apparently affects ARM Cortex A75 CPUs, but likely isn't an ISA level issue, so Apple's custom cores are possibly not affected. The solution to this affects performance badly (5-15%, peaks to 30% or more) in some circumstances (server workloads especially, and I/O heavy workloads). AMD processors are not affected. Home users, gamers, and light office users are not likely to notice but benchmarks and user experiences will come out in due course. Sceptre affects all Out of Order processors. Linux has a solution in progress that affects performance up to 1.5%, but the solution involves not just the kernel, but compilers and applications that include compilers (e.g., web browsers).

Bad luck America.

Services are going to be tiered to hell and back as soon as they can do that.

Oh, I'm sure the dross will still be available for all to see, and 'approved content' will be on the cheaper tiers as well.

But most service providers exist in localised monopolies, so without competition they will gauge you if you want streaming services they don't provide themselves, or news sources that aren't favoured, and so on. Oh, you want to do online gaming? That's only available on the $100pm tier.

sully54 said:

What happens when we hit 1 nanometer? Does chip development end there?

Well we could consider measuring in picometers instead. That's assuming that technology is developed to take processes to that level of miniaturisation.

However there's a real problem in that a silicon atom is 210pm across itself. Carbon is a bit smaller. 1nm processes will likely use graphene.

If you want to know how long process technology takes to mature, the first 5nm transistor was made by NEC in 2003, and the first 3nm transistor was made in Korea in 2006. It takes a while to be able to put billions of them together happily on a chip.

7nm A12 may have 5-7 billion transistors, 5nm A14/A15 may have 8-12 billion. 3nm A16/A17/A18 may have 15-20 billion.