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Old 02-07-2020, 20:10   #23
Kushan
FORMER Virgin Media Staff
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Warrington
Posts: 4,737
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Re: Apple to transition Macs to their own chipset

Yeah I remember reading that article a few days ago. It's certainly looking like Rosetta is at least decent at what it does, but there's so many caveats and questions it's hard to really draw many conclusions.

I'm going to try anyway, though!

Assuming that it's legitimate and somewhat indicative of performance, assuming overhead for the Rosetta2 implementation, etc. I still think it's in line with what I'm saying - these processors aren't going to be faster than x86, apples to apples. The single-threaded performance is a dead giveaway, even accounting for the Rosetta overhead. If it was emulation we were talking about then that would be one thing, but recompiled code shouldn't be 30% slower.

I do wonder why they've disabled 4 of the 8 cores of the A12, presumably the disabled cores are the little low-power cores, maybe they just don't have a fully working OSX scheduler that can handle big.LITTLE CPU's so it's easier to just fudge a homogenous chip for now.

You could have 8 beefy full cores instead, plus with general manufacturing process improvements, etc. that could be quite the beefy chip when all is said and done, but again even accounting for all that, there's nothing that suggests Apple has suddenly beaten the likes of Intel and AMD at things like IPC. Core to Core, I just don't see Apple beating big blue or AMD any time soon.

The only thing that could possibly swing it is accounting for Rosetta's overhead (Which as I said, I doubt is that big), or Apple going for multithreaded performance with a 12 or 16 core SoC - but even still, Intel and AMD especially have gone there and beyond and I would expect 8 core CPUs to be pretty mainstream in 2 years time so again, it's not really an area I see Apple competing in.

I genuinely believe Apple is doing this to give themselves more control over their ecosystem. They'll be able to make thinner, lighter devices with better battery life than the competition, they'll be able to push a universal app ecosystem that more easily allows developers to develop native apps for iOS and desktop with the same codebase (Something that others have tried and so far failed to do well), that will perform well enough but isn't going to be the top performer out there - and it doesn't need to be.
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