KITA

tmay said:

GeorgeBMac said:

scatz said:

I'm going with low end laptops for Arm processors. Bring back the "Affordable" iBook name. Price around the same as iPads.

You prefer a tablet, iPad is for you. Prefer a laptop, then pick an iBook, maybe have a bunch of colour choices.....

6 months ago that was true.  But now, with the Magic Keyboard, the iPad makes a pretty fair laptop too.

Since both will have variations of the same processor, excellent screens and audio, this will be interesting!

My speculation is that Apple will engineer much more thermal headroom, and a larger die, into an ARM Book than there is in an iPad, so I would expect a notable performance differential between the two.

From a marketing standpoint, Apple would want to do that to set themselves up as superior to Qualcomm's notebook SOC's that have been released, or are planned.

Meanwhile the Cortex-X1 is a big change for Arm. And that change has less to do with the technology of the cores, and more with the business decisions that it now opens up for the company, although both are intertwined. For years many people were wondering why the company didn't design a core that could more closely compete with what Apple had built. In my view, one of the reasons for that was that Arm has always been constrained by the need to create a “one core fits all” design that could fit all of their customers’ needs – and not just the few flagship SoC designs.

The Cortex-X program here effectively unshackles Arm from these business limitations, and it allows the company to provide the best of both worlds. As a result, the A78 continues the company’s bread & butter design philosophy of power-performance-area leadership, whilst the X1 and its successors can now aim for the stars in terms of performance, without such strict area usage or power consumption limitations.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15813/arm-cortex-a78-cortex-x1-cpu-ip-diverging

Mike Wuerthele said:

foregoneconclusion said:

Mike Wuerthele said: While I understand where you're coming from, legacy apps are called legacy for a reason, and aren't primary use cases.

If you're talking about professional software that people typically use on a laptop, the vast majority qualifies as legacy. For example, Photoshop is a legacy app. The annual focus is primarily on added features, not overhauling the code for greater efficiency. Occasionally that will happen, but it's not something anyone banks on year to year. That's the reason brute force for hardware gets so much attention: people know the software lags way behind. In this comparison, there isn't really a big enough brute force difference to think legacy apps are going to be that different of an experience. 

What? I agree that Adobe isn't that interested in efficiency, but Photoshop absolutely benefits from more powerful hardware.

Something that only utilizes a single core won't have seen much, if any, speed increase in the last six years, but Photoshop certainly doesn't qualify as that.

Photoshop is an interesting application to look at since in most cases, it does not take advantage of CPUs that have a large number of cores. That means that the 28 cores in the Mac Pro are not being used to its full potential, but neither are the 18, 32, or 64 cores that are found in some of our PC configurations.

Here, it is all about the per-core performance of the system which is determined largely by the maximum Turbo frequency as well as the processor's architecture. In the end, the result is that the $20k Mac Pro with 20 cores performs on par with the much less expensive 14-core iMac Pro. Many of the PC configurations are within a few percent of this result as well, although the Intel Core i9 9900K, AMD Threadripper 3960X/3970X, and AMD Ryzen 3900X/3950X CPUs are all around 10% faster than the Mac Pro.

Since we are specifically looking at video cards in this post, we are going to mostly examine the "GPU Score (16 Bits/Channel)" result. If you scroll to the next chart to look at the "Overall Score", you will notice that there isn't much of a difference between each GPU when looking at Photoshop performance from an overall perspective. In fact, in that case even the NVIDIA Titan RTX is only ~5% faster than the integrated graphics on the Core i9 9900K. However, if we look at just the tasks that actually benefit from using a discrete GPU, we at least get enough of a separation between the different models to pull out some useful information.

...

Photoshop is not exactly a GPU powerhouse. There isn't much reason to use a higher-end NVIDIA GPU, and even if we only look at the tasks that utilize the GPU, there is only about a 10% advantage at most for using NVIDIA over AMD. This isn't nothing, but it also isn't likely to be a deal breaker for many users.

coolfactor said:

matteblack13 said:

“The display on the Google Pixel 4a is expected to be a 5.81-inch LCD screen” it will also be 1080p instead of the 750p found on the iPhone. 

Haven’t seen a leak yet that says the Pixel 4a will have a LCD screen—everybody has said OLED

Can they afford to put OLED into their entry-level phone? I doubt it.