The Genius In Apple's Vertical Platform 432
Precision found a nice little piece of speculation on the real reason behind Apple's recent efforts to restrict app development to XCode. While the standard given reason is to kill competition from Flash and other stacks, this story speculates that the real reason has to do with the unusually large die size of the A4 processor inside the iPads. Worth a quick read.
FTFA (Score:2, Funny)
Another Apple worship piece (Score:5, Insightful)
If this is indeed the case, then iPhone OS 4.0 would bring incredible speed improvements to the iPad, since it would no longer run applications on an ARM processor emulator. Can you imagine if OS 4.0 improved the iPad’s speed by 50% on day 1? Apple would be heralded as a software God. But in order for these speed improvements to be realized, apps would need to be written in objective C—which is exactly what Apple is now telling developers to do.
The writer doesn't realize that Adobe/MonoTouch were making a cross compiler from ActionScript/C# to Objective-C. So any improvements made to XCode will be available to those Apps too and if regular Apps are speeded up by 50%, so would the CS5 and MonoTouch Apps.
Posters below have already explained what a bunch of crock the speculation that the processor is actually a Power CPU is. Anyway what can you expect from a blind fanboy who writes stuff like:
Apple's DNA in this area is untouchable, helping it to innovate at the confluence of software and hardware.
I find it fascinating that Apple has been so good at diverting attention to the Flash argument, that people don’t see the true genius behind Steve Job’s vision and moves. Apple is setting the stage to become one of the biggest winners in the storied history of vertically integrated companies.
Huh? Wtf?
Why is this crap posted on Slashdot anyway?
Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the article doesn't make sense at all. Why assume the A4 is a dual-core PowerPC when it's built for an OS that restricts the use of multitasking? It's almost like suggesting using four wheel drive on a motorcycle. This writer is just a total and utter wanker, predicting 50% speed increases for reasons founded in pure fantasy. Bullshit story.
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Maybe they made the A4 with the knowledge that they were going to enable more multitasking in the next release of the OS (which they are). Sometimes companies actually plan ahead on these kinds of things.
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at a "small" premium and a visit from a IBM representative to move a "magic" jumper.
one thing the A4 speculation fails to take into account is that iphone os 4 is also to be used on existing iphone and ipod touch devices, and those clearly do not have a A4 under the hood. Now if the iphone os 4 was only to be found on new iphones and ipad, the speculation may have more merit. As it stands, any architecture change is more likely to happen at a later date; once more products with the A4 inside have been launc
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:4, Informative)
It didn't make sense and it still doesn't. It's an Antifeature [fsf.org].
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Naa, Apple would make you pay for that kind of upgrade in the future.
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:4, Informative)
They are. Major software upgrades for the iPad are probably not going to be free (except maybe the first one).
Its always done multitasking (Score:3, Informative)
Its just the GUI apps that it suspends, all the backend stuff still works fine otherwise as soon as you ssh'd into a jailbroken iphone everything else would hang while ssh ran.
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If background task would slow down a video playback, that would be a real problem.
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It always runs Mail and usually Safari and the iPod bits in the background. Have you noticed your video slowing down every five minutes when Mail checks for new messages?
Re:Its always done multitasking (Score:4, Insightful)
Its essentially OS/X under the hood - ie unix. However apple have deliberately set it up so GUI apps are suspended when minimised (or whatever you want to call it). So its not a case of how well the OS does multitasking , its a case of how well apple have made it look like it can't.
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I don't think it makes sense not to allow code translation to Obj-C though. I don't know how they can really enforce that anyway
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the iPad has 10-12 hours of on in heavy use time. Everything else is an epic fail in comparison. I'd gladly give up features to get that kind of battery life from a windows tablet or a netbook.
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:4, Interesting)
My Asus 1005HA can manage 9 hours of battery life. The newer, Pineview based 1005PE does even better.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/21/asus-eee-pc-1005pe-review/ [engadget.com]
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:5, Interesting)
Giant 15.4" old-school dual-core Thinkpad: Battery time: infinite..
Reason: Exchangable batteries ;) No apple product will ever come anywhere close, because they are intentionally cripled.
PS. With traveling battery: 8hours of heavy use, this is added to the standard 4.5h on the standard battery.
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That's not a solution for those of use who don't want to be constantly carrying around, swapping, recharging, and paying for spare batteries.
It's a shame that nobody even seems to want to compete with Apple in terms of battery life.
Like the GP mentioned -- it's hard to take any non-Apple laptops seriously these days, given just how superior their hardware is. Even if you can't easily swap the batteries, it doesn't really matter, because they already last more than twice as long as the competition.
The non-r
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You mean all other devices are crippled by an unnecessary replaceable battery. By forgoing removability you double the battery size and lose no functionality. There is no need to remove a battery to enable another to be added. There are plenty of external battery packs available for Mac laptops and iPod/iPhones and they are easier to carry the a spare battery. They don't require you to shut down you laptop and turn it upside down. They can be used with multiple devices and multiple models of laptops. And t
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:5, Insightful)
the iPad has 10-12 hours of on in heavy use time. Everything else is an epic fail in comparison. I'd gladly give up features to get that kind of battery life from a windows tablet or a netbook.
Asus netbooks have 10+ hours of battery life doing the things that are "heavy use" on the iPad (which are very light use on the netbook's scale).
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I hated the way I could only run one application at a time on my Pentium 3 desktop.
Seriously now, we've been multitasking for a very long time with /single core CPUs. It's a pretty poor excuse to say .we're taking out time to do it right'
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iPhone OS has supported multitasking since day one. The issue is finding a solution that prevents developers from doing stupid things, with respect to battery life, with their new-found multitasking abilities.
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You must have an amazing Palm Pre to not get the "No additional cards can be opened at this time" error message that pops up when I try to get the 7th or 8th card open. The Palm Pre is the best illustration yet for why blind, pre-emptive multitasking in a phone OS is a bad idea.
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Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. That was the most gentile Godwin-ing of a discussion I've ever seen. :)
Interesting choice of words [slashdot.org]. ;-)
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So what? Is using words now a crime? Well, not a crime, but immoral?
Do nazis have a copyright on that phrase? We used "final solution" alot in my math classes. Does that make my teacher a nazi?
Get a grip man. We have to learn from the past, but leave aside stupidity and ideology in history where it belongs.
"WTF" moment (Score:5, Informative)
"WTF" quote of the day. What does dual-core have to do with multitasking??????????????? Windows did multitasking long before dual core chips existed.
On a related note, the iPhone DOES multitasking; it just doesn't let the USER multitask. How do you suppose an incoming call gets through while you´re listening to music?
Re:"WTF" moment (Score:5, Funny)
> Why assume the A4 is a dual-core PowerPC when it's built for an OS that restricts the use of multitasking?
"WTF" quote of the day. What does dual-core have to do with multitasking??????????????? Windows did multitasking long before dual core chips existed.
On a related note, the iPhone DOES multitasking; it just doesn't let the USER multitask. How do you suppose an incoming call gets through while you´re listening to music?
And MacOS did multitasking before Windows!
(Yay, the mid-90s flamewar subjects are back!)
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Given that iPhone OS 4 was well into development when the iPad was released (since it went into developer beta literally days later), and was almost certainly in the planning stages while the hardware of the iPad was being chosen; and given that iPhone OS 4 support multitasking.... Your argument make no sense at all. Not that I don't agree that the writer is quite likely wrong, but your reasoning is completely flawed.
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No, the article doesn't make sense at all. Why assume the A4 is a dual-core PowerPC when it's built for an OS that restricts the use of multitasking? It's almost like suggesting using four wheel drive on a motorcycle. This writer is just a total and utter wanker, predicting 50% speed increases for reasons founded in pure fantasy. Bullshit story.
Multitasking != multithreading.
And iPhone OS 4.0 is around the corner.
For the rest of your comments, "glass house" and "stone" and "throwing" come to mind.
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This writer is just a total and utter wanker
Mod parent +1 insightful (not sarcastic) - All you have to do is read the comments on his post so far and they tell you that -
1. That he is rehashing someone else's ideas from a day earlier:
http://sachin.posterous.com/ie6-caused-the-web-to-mature-slower-than-it-w [posterous.com]
2. That his central point is moot:
"They are not telling people to use Xcode, they are telling people they can only publish application 'originally written' in Objective C. This is quite different."
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:4, Informative)
The article is dreamy bullshit, but not for what you write about multitasking (especially since OS4 will provide for it, and designing hardware to cope with future demands is sensible).
The performance analysis shows the product's CPU power matches a 1GHz Cortex A8, compared with scaling up from the 600MHz A8 in the 3GS.
The article links to the Chipworks A4 die dissection, and the product code which is just a higher version of the 3GS product code. That certainly doesn't fit in with putting in a PowerPC core instead of the ARM core in the previous product, never mind fitting the PowerPC core to the ARM-specific internal bus and peripherals. The code name would be completely different. If there's anything that can be guaranteed, it is that the A4 utilised an ARM core.
The Apple A4 is a 45nm version of the 3GS Samsung CPU, rebranded by Apple (because they bought Intrinsity, who developed/enhanced/tweaked the Samsung product originally). The extra transistors are accounted for by having a wider memory bus, probably more L2 cache, and maybe higher performance graphics.
Also the guy assumed perfect transistor scaling, which doesn't happen.
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:5, Interesting)
The guy who wrote the article is clueless.
These ridiculous claims remind me of that "tapionvslink" guy who swears that the Wii has a GPGPU with programmable shaders and twice the RAM and all sorts of things that the homebrew community knows are bullshit, just because he did some broken math on die sizes. He still maintains that we're all ignorant and just haven't figured out what real Wii games are doing with the GPU. Riiight.
Seriously, if the iPad were PowerPC, don't you think we'd know by now, considering it's been jailbroken? Chipworks also tore down the chip and found nothing unusual; it's just another mobile ARM. Also, no one in their right mind would ever use a CPU emulator on a mobile platform OS. It's one of the best ways to completely nuke your battery life, not to mention performance. It's a cute theory, but it's so thoroughly impossible it's not even funny.
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree the article writer is a moron. I thought you might appreciate this though. I have a newer HP calculator. Since HP years ago laid-off all of the calculator division, no one was left when they made the HP50. An outside group put that one together. It has an ARM and uses an emulator to run much of the old Saturn software from the HP48. It seems to run just as long on a set of batteries as my 48S and 48G did, and it is incredibly faster running the old stuff.
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However, the performance difference between the old Saturn chips and the current ARMs is tremendous. The Saturn was outdated when I bought a 48G, 12 years ago. Emulating that Saturn on a current ARM is as hard as emulating a Z80; it puts almost no strain on the system.
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no one in their right mind would ever use a CPU emulator on a mobile platform OS. It's one of the best ways to completely nuke your battery life, not to mention performance.
Like, er, Transmeta?
Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score:4, Funny)
no one in their right mind would ever use a CPU emulator on a mobile platform OS. It's one of the best ways to completely nuke your battery life, not to mention performance.
Like, er, Transmeta?
It seems that he accounted for that.
It's all about platform lock in. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does everyone think this has anything to do with technical issues? This is all about lock in, 100% pure business move.
Apple doesn't want cross compilers because that makes the iPhone just another smartphone because everyone and their dogs will be writing code for smartphones, not iPhones exclusively. Apple has to maintain the image of the iPhone to be unique, not just the 'PC' of smartphones. If cross compiling is allowed, and a person is fed up with the iPhone, nothing stops him/her/it to switch to a WM7, RIM or Android phone. Why? Because the software is probably available on those systems. Now, if some developers will stay iPhone exclusive because of the hassle of maintaining two codebases (One CS5 cross compilable and one Apple approved), people will have harder time to migrate to other platforms because their precious software only runs on iPhone OS. Why don't people switch to Linux en masse? MS Office + DirectX. Apple wants the exact same platform lock in for smarphones as the one Microsoft has achieved for PCs.
Führer Jobs is shit scared of Android, that's why the new draconian developer restrictions (and HTC patent suits), not because some [insert technical excuse here]. Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your point of view) Adobe is going to be collateral damage unless Flash on Android/ChromeOS takes off heavily. Jobs wants to stop the Android momentum at all cost, because if he doesn't, iPhone will be the 'Mac' and Android will be the 'PC'.
Disclosure: I have an iPhone 3GS.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's all about platform lock in. (Score:5, Insightful)
I just blew coffee out of my nose when you said Jobs is shit-scared of Android. First of all, I don't think Jobs is shit-scared of anything. Secondly, Android will never have more than 30% of the market, it's just going to be too fragmented of an offering with too many different hardware specs and too much control ceded to the carriers over os updates and app stores.
But the main point is that Apple does not want to fill their platform up with mediocre apps written to support the lowest common denominator feature set and UI conventions. Apple users have put up with shit software for years from the likes of Adobe and other vendors who wished the Mac would just go away while they concentrated on Windows. Jobs is demanding excellent software for an excellent device - one that is programmed and compiled in a way that utilizes the OS frameworks to their fullest.
And, more importantly, while the author's facts are wrong, the idea of the post is correct. If jobs allows another company to control the development trajectories of, say, even 10% of the apps on the store, Apple can no longer plan their product change and enhancement cycles around their own timeline - they will have to wait until companies like Adobe are ready to change their tools - and, history has proven that it can be a very long wait.
Can a non fanboy re-write that? (Score:3, Interesting)
Up until the "porn store" comment I would have agreed that Jobs is not that scared of Android but when he goes out of his way to bash it in an unrelated keynote in such a childish manner, that's fear talking.
But dr. Evil, that has already happened.
Apple effectively prohibits
article smells like bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple cannot make money by first deploying the A4 processor then switching away after another chip beats it, they'd lose that massive investment in chip development.
Apple might've noticed different constraints for the iPad and iPhone, deploying their own chip for the iPad while using other ARM chips for iPhones. Yes, maybe that's true, but agility doesn't matter there, correct forecasting matters.
Apple's most likely benefits from the A4 are :
(1) processor related intellectual property gives them an advanta
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Not exactly. The SDK agreement places no restrictions on the language or processes used to generate libraries for your application. The core of your application, the one that links against documented APIs, must conform to those terms, but there is no reason why that core cannot make calls out to those libraries written in Flash, for example.
Interesting, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:5, Informative)
What bothers me, is that people who don't know any better will read this article and think "Woah, cool! They are doing something smart!" when it's all really unjustified based on his reasoning (I'm not going to comment on if it really is smart or not)...
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right, "die too big" could also mean they used a cheaper older fab technology with lower resolution.
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It would be trivial to have developers compile to some large universal binary that basically contained binaries for each supported architecture and then on App Store submission, simply strip out each version and deliver the correct one to each individual device. In fact, I would wager they are doing that now already so that when an iPhone user downloads a Universal iPad/iPhone app they don't have to get al
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WTF on you on about? Did you plan on writing assembly code for this thing? There is no reason to have to know exactly what the processor is, and all of its specs otherwise.
There's a reason for the SDK. If you write in one of the supported languages, using the supplied API's everything should work out just fine.
Hell, you can even test your work using the emulator. Although that never seems to be 100% accurate WRT accelerometer functions, it'll give you an indication that the interface is OK.
So in this cas
Steve Jobs is worse than Hitler! (Score:5, Funny)
I don't care if Apple has reasons for this or not. I don't like Apple, so that means they're a monopoly just like Microsoft, and should be required to do whatever any other company wants cause it's in the constitution.
Also, there's a company in Germany that's gonna make a competing product that will blow the iPad out of the water cause it'll be open and run Flash and OpenOffice and has higher ghz on the processor and more memory and it's the hardware specs that make the difference, and I know everything, and the market should decide everything and Apple doesn't have the right to do anything to try to protect their investment in the iPhone OS as a platform cause I say so.
Did I mention they're an evil monopoly? And that Steve Jobs is worse than Hitler, cause he's got a reality distortion field and makes people pay the Apple tax?
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It's a shame you can't recognize an obvious parody hen you see one. Your ignorance is pretty astounding, but typical.
Re:Steve Jobs is worse than Hitler! (Score:4, Informative)
monopoly
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Exactly what does Apple hold a monopoly over? Mac OS X? Apple iPods? Or maybe machines based on the A4 processor? Even in areas that Apple is one of the strongest, such as music sales, portable music players, or smartphones (even though that is just a subset of the cell phone market), there is still plenty of healthy and growing competition.
Re:Steve Jobs is worse than Hitler! (Score:5, Informative)
Not only is there plenty of competition in the smartphone market, but RIM is still the undisputed leader in the US by about 16 percent. Google more than doubled its small installed base (from 2.5% to 5.2%) between September and December. The analysis firm comScore has a press release [comscore.com] covering third-quarter 2009 cell phone growth patterns.
Worldwide, Symbian kicks everyone's ass at 47% for the year of 2009 [techcrunch.com] (as a platform), but Nokia "only" sold 39% in the third quarter [appleinsider.com] (as a hardware solution.
The handset data vs. platform data is interesting, especially considering that by listing handset manufacturers Apple news sites completely avoid mentioning Google and Android. Some of the HTC, Samsung, and "others" would be listed as Windows Mobile and some would be Android or Maemo/Meego, obviously.
Despite all the hype about the iPhone, it's still only a quarter of the US market and 16% of the worldwide market from the latest data I could find.
First post! (Score:5, Informative)
I think the article is absolute nonsense. The A4 has been "disassembled" and it is consistent with an ARM single core.
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Yes, well it also mentions that they might possibly do an architecture switch in the near future. This could be to a 32nm Atom based chip next year or who knows what. By forcing these requirements, they make the process of changing architectures seamless to the users and easy for the developers.
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The article mainly hinges on the possibility that the iPad isn't using ARM to be wild speculation instead of merely completely insane speculation. The fact that this is already known to be false is a pretty major blow to it. And the fact that this policy affects things that produce code in approved languages and even things that produce Xcode projects to go with it pretty much completely destroys the argument that it's some wise and enlightened choice they have made for the good of developers and not just a
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that would be a step backwards. I'm betting a dual core of the current A4 design.... why? to keep the near magical battery life they have.
Honestly that is the single thing that will bit the butt of every other tablet that comes out. I dont care if it has X,Y and Z.. if I cant leave it on, screen on full bright, and using all the processor to decode a video for 10 hours straight... then it's a piece of junk. Atom right now drinks power... it needs a ton of refining to get it to sip that power a whole
Re:First post! (Score:4, Funny)
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Actually, thats NOT conclusive. If anything, its the opposite. There is no layout photograph, as everything is obscured by the area pins.
It identifies the process, and identifies a in-mask part #, but it does nothing to tell you about processor family, functional units, etc.
Why can't MS do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the vertical integration, but the simple "Ok you're Applications are compatible now"
Apple has moved from 68k to PPC to OS X to Intel to ARM to (proposed) POWER) for both 32/64 bit and all it took in those last steps was flag in the compiler.
68k emulation in PPC was decent. Classic mode worked for most applications and Rosetta was as seamless as it gets. I understand that Microsoft has a ton of backwards compatibility they need to maintain, but if a company the fraction of your size can do it, why can't you?
Yes "FAT" Binaries are larger, but given how cheap HD space is, it's not too much of a concern of mine. (I gained more space deleting other languages). But to have a single, double clickable .app that runs on 4 platforms (PPC, Intel / 32, 64bit), naively.
Side note, and legitimate question, does Linux do fat binaries? Can I compile something that runs on my AMD64 and ARM machines and put it on a thumb drive?
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They can't /because/ they're big. Sure they can do a lot of things from a resource perspective. But inertia is holding them back. Organizational constraints. More people have to want change and agree to change than a small, agile company.
It's all about inertia.
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yep, binaries (fat or not) take up very little space; Its the resource files that make applications large for the most part.
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er... so these periodic compatibility updates I see for Windows aren't related to backwards compatibility? Including the Windows 7 one back in February that fixed Warcraft 3's video playback (that's the only fix I noticed for stuff I had)?
Y
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Actually, Snow Leopard does include Rosetta, but does not install it by default.
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Yes "FAT" Binaries are larger, but given how cheap HD space is
Mobile bandwidth (3G) and rural bandwidth (satellite) are still expensive, as is SSD space.
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"Fat binaries" are just a tar-like file with binaries of several architectures. It's not rocket science. Apple needs such things because of the way they make their machines, but Linux has supported multiple architectures for a long time, and has fixed it in the package manager.
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I understand that Microsoft has a ton of backwards compatibility they need to maintain, but if a company the fraction of your size can do it, why can't you?
Because they only have a fraction of the software?
Because Apple always has been in the position to NOT care about hardware compatibility issues?
It's ARM, not PowerPC. (Score:2, Informative)
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The article is saying the ipad is running an emulator for ARM and that at some time in the future, apps (requiring xcode) will be compiled for PowerPC rather than ARM, skipping the emulator and running at higher performance. Wouldn't one expect debugging under this scenario to give ARM code?
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The article is missing a big point: it IS ARM. Just debugging the code shows it is ARM, not PPC.
I think you missed the point entirely. His speculation is that because the chip is so big, he thinks the extra space on the chip might actually be a native Power processor, and that the CPU is currently running the code in an hardware-based ARM emulator, rather than executing on-die ARM instructions.
Then, when OS XI comes out for the iPad, it'll be written in native Power instructions and the chip will execute new apps twice as fast.
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Caveat: I don't believe this crazy conspiracy crap either. My understanding is that people who've analyzed the chip say the extra real estate is occupied by more primary cache, not by more ALU circuitry.
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Sorry, but I rather doubt that an embedded power pc chip is really much faster than
a cortex A9.
Doesn't hold up, they already x-rayed the A4 (Score:2, Informative)
The die size is due to putting memory chips on die for lower latency.
It doesn't contain magical other processors.
But this guy has a pet theory about Apple and damned if he's gonna let facts get in the way of his idea!
Apple Fanbois (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclosure: I'm writing this from a Mac. I like my Macs. I like Apple. I'm not delusional like this guy.
If you didn't RTFA, there's no need. It's just some Apple fanboi trying to find genius and conspiracy where there isn't any.
Are you serious? Constricting developers because you're going to change the platform? Really? I wonder if the article author even believes this crap.
Emulating a cpu you could just as easily install for real? Never mind going back to an architecture (POWER) that you've already EOL and that is wholly unsuited for the platform (high power consumption, high heat output).
He's right that Apple is a story in vertical integration. They're doing it the same way Rockefeller did. They want to control the entire platform.
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I agree with most of your comments, but Power CPU architecture is still widely used in a wide range of shipping products.
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On the embedded device, however, I can see that certain further restriction might be necessary to allow the software to be more or less independent of hardware. To go back the commonly presumed impetus for this discussion, Flash does not seem to be hardware independent by any stre
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"Constricting developers because you're going to change the platform? Really?"
That's actually not such a bad speculation. Apple HAS switched platforms before, and a key to that capability is having the apps written in XCode. It's not unlikely at all that they want to maintain the ability to switch the processor in the iPhone/iPad line, and they won't have to bother writing emulators if they can just tell all the app developers to recompile.
Where the article goes off the rails is when he starts speculating
doesn't consider translation; argument is invalid (Score:4, Insightful)
The article is interesting, but incorrect.
Converting from to objective-C is fine for the purposes he's talking about (allowing the compiler to build to 'native', where 'native' can change over time.) If you have a language that is 1:1 with C/ObjC and easily translated (there are many), then this argument is entirely moot.
(Further, its not just Flash we're talkin gabout.. BASIC, assembler, python, etc, are all impacted and outlawed (again.)) Heck, numerous games use ARM asm, which is now outlawed .. the ASM is to provide superior performance, as Xcode (gcc) is decent compiler, but no match for hand tooled assembly in 'just the right places'. (Don't argue this; compiles are great, but talk to emulation authors for ARM devices about dropping in a few lines of ASM :)
So no, its not really about native compilation speed. Its about blocking non-Apple tools, with the pretend reason that Apple makes the best tools.
sustainable growth (Score:2)
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You can't keep doing that because technology does not evolve at the pace people want new gadgets. So, people get disillusioned, you push out new products in hopes of quelling the whining and your products can't live up to their reputation. Maybe jobs is just planning on being relevant for 10 years, dunno.
This reminds me of the joke of the two campers who are surprised at night by a bear. The first camper calmly begins putting on his shoes while the second one freaks out and begins to run screaming "those shoes won't help you outrun the bear." The first camper answers "I don't have to outrun the bear."
Your statement is probably true. But if Apple is successful in vertical integration they can stay ahead of their competition in offering new and compelling devices, even if not quite up to consumer expect
Re: (Score:2)
Do not forget Apple loves to make new hardware incompatible with older hardware. My Mac Pro can not run newer video cards. My only thinking at the time, is that GPU's become too slow over the long term, CPU is just fine still. We'll they prevented me from using the new cards even though they'd run fine in Windows on the same hardware.
So I went out and built a more powerful machine than my Mac Pro, and I dont have to buy shiny new video cards, I just go SLI with a second one of the type I bought with the
Why hobble a new product? (Score:2)
TFA just doesn't read right -- if the iPads have dual Power CPUs, why hobble the machine with emulation that is later removed to give the fantastic jump? New products don't succeed that way.
If the iPads have dual PPCs, then their OS & some key apps would be written for it. Along with an emulator for the [many] iPhone Apps which would probably run noticably slower than on iPhone/iTouch. A dual CPU is _not_ going to cover for ~10x emulation slowdown.
The standard Practice (Score:2)
1. Make a core that's too big to fuel speculation /.
2. Seed the press with rumors of this from bloggers that get on
3. ????
4. PROFIT
They've X-Rayed and Dissected the Freaking Chip... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple-A4-Teardown/2204/1 [ifixit.com]
It's not a "dual core Power Architecture."
According to the teardown, the chip is "quite similar to the Samsung processor Apple uses in the iPhone."
iFixit concluded that it was a Cortex A8 in there and I've seen nothing to contradict that.
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Summary slightly wrong (Score:2)
This isn't a great summary. To quote the article:
My God, when will it end??? (Score:4, Funny)
people don’t see the true genius behind Steve Job’s vision and moves.
Another day, another worship piece for Jobs. Could he be the Maitreya after all? http://www.share-international.org/maitreya/Ma_main.htm [share-international.org]
More than processor independant (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe this guy is onto something. However, I don't think he's gone far enough in his projections.
Here's what I think. Apple realizes that processors are commodities. They have a tool chain that makes nicely optimized compiled code from multiple processors.
Apple realizes that it cannot compete with WinTel, but even more than that, doesn't even want to. Wintel is strapped to ancient technologies and trying to break free from those techs (x86) has proven to be nearly impossible for all (Intel, Microsoft, AMD). They HAVE to keep backwards compatibility.
Apple is going further towards abstraction away from the hardware for all things that don't need to depend on hardware, which will allow them to continue to move from platform to platform as one platform stagnates (Power) to one that is improving(x86). Now that x86 is stuck in between 32 and 64bit HELL, Apple is poised to move to a new platform architecture that isn't limited by 30+ years of legacy holding it back.
In the end, Apple will be able to build or order chips from the people showing the best capabilities, no matter what they are. It is actually something that makes a lot more sense than holding onto 30 year old technology just for the sake of holding onto 30 year old technology.
This is not a bad thing. This will break the WinTel monopoly. I believe Apple knows the endgame for this is here. Wintel used to be the commodity item, now it is a single vendor solution, and Apple is providing a better product that "Just Works" (tm), one that people are willing to pay a small premium for.
This is why people like Taco make "lame" comments, because it isn't about Ghz, Giga, Tera or anything else, it is about being useful without being hassled. My wife doesn't care about specs, she cares about doing stuff, and it being easy.
Would you buy a toaster based on wattage used, types of heater elements, what kind of processor is used for the timing mechanism? Or do you buy a toaster to make toast? Apple is making toasters; sealed appliances. And abstracting the function away from the hardware makes perfect sense, then the hardware matters less than functionality.
Re:More than processor independant (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem here is that the guy's (and yours) assumptions are irrelevant, in that everything you wrote is not an explanation for why Apple banned code translators from other languages to Objective-C. Those things just aren't affected by architecture changes.
And the guy in TFA uses that ban as a starting point for his speculation...
Re: (Score:2)
This whole "preserve the experience" nonsense only makes sense if they started out this way.
Except they didn't start out this way. They started out pandering to the developers. They
seemingly did everything they could do to encourage others to help build their platform for
them.
Now that it seems that they are on top, Apple wants to change the rules.
They want to change the rules and dispose of many of the developers that got them into the
position they are today.
Re: (Score:2)
Apple isn't a monopoly
How many times do we need to go through this? A monopoly is not required for an anti-trust violation.