Even though I am no longer an Apple Fan I was surprised at the sentiment on A15 after the Keynote and Reviews.<p>Do people really expect revolutionary improvement every single year? ~20% Improvement YoY within the same power envelop is god damn impressive. And if this is not good enough? This is just layering ground work for next year's 3nm and LPDDR5. ( Or 4nm depending on circumstances )<p>The E Core are interesting because they are a preview of what to expect in next generation Apple Watch.<p>I was hoping there is some investigation on new Display Engine and Video Encoder / Decoder. Especially on power usage. But looks like these kind of interest are in the minority.
People love to ding Tim Cook for Apple's lack of innovation but the I'd argue the M1 is a revolutionary product on the same level as the first iPhone. Of course, it's not as sexy and in your face as the first iPhone but people in the industry and consumers immediately felt the impact of the shock wave.<p>When you think about it, the M1 perfectly encapsulates Apple under Tim Cook. It didn't come out of nowhere. They have slowly improved on their A-series in the iPhones the last decade and it accumulated into the M1. That's exactly how Apple is run today. Inch by inch.
While seeing these deep dives on A series processors is fascinating I find how powerful they are to be highly disappointing.<p>Here you have undoubtedly some of the finest processor technology available, manufactured in the hundreds of millions, wasted by the constraints of its platform. If the Pi foundation had access to cores, processes, and even pieces of this level of technology the overall computing world would be so much more capable.<p>Even beyond that, the iPhones themselves? Severely limited by the I/O they possess. As these devices age they could have several recycled general computing purposes but they're constrained by the single lighting port. iPhone use NVMe storage, they have PCIe lanes!<p>All this work, effort and engineering for a platform who simply seeks to make more off of the revenue of whales in their app stores.<p>Edit: I think my comment around Pis is a little misleading. What I meant is the general educational Linux community. Not specifically the Pi foundation. If after X years Apple unlocked the bootloader and you could install other operating systems to better leverage the hardware I'd feel better about the state of it.
This denotes how important TSMC and having the fabrication node advantage is for Apple. The A15 seems to be an all-around good chip, just not the magnitude of performance jumps (20%+) Apple has shown since the A7. For reference, this chip is on an improved TSMC 5nm (N5P) node but still 5nm nonetheless like last year's A14.<p>Last year's M1/A14 cores had performance gains due to the combined architecture improvement and the shifting from TSMC 7nm to 5nm fabrication. At the time it was difficult to determine the % of gains attributable to either, so now it seems we have a better idea that node advantage could be the majority.<p>It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the next M-series chip announcement, e.g. M1X or M2. I still think it's plausible Apple switches the M-series chips to 3nm first in order to cement their superiority over Intel. That said, porting architectures across nodes is no small feat (as we saw in Intel's Rocket Lake, though that was small -> big).
ARM SoC developed for Android devices, on the other hand, are consistently way behind in performance and are nearly all based on ARM designs.<p>I've been waiting for years for someone other than Apple to make a fully custom ARM SoC that can compete with Apple.<p>I suspect there isn't a lot of incentive for Qualcomm to do it as they as nearly a monopoly in the Android space.<p>I've been hoping that AMD or Intel would step up and make an ARM core that crushes Qualcomm.<p>I just got a used iPhone 7 for my so and despite being 5 years old is still really smooth running the latest iOS 15. It's the only iPhone I own (the rest are Android) and I'm a bit jealous.
I wonder if there are any reviews that measures their progress on the camera ISP, which occupies large amount of real estate on these smartphone SoCs. Clearly Apple invests a lot on the area, and it shows on their presos, yet almost no review mentions about how it progresses over time.<p>Same for media codecs, and lesser extent, NPU kind of stuff.
Interesting SPEC 2017 performance figures for the A15 performance cores vs x86 that the story's author posted in the story comments:<p>>Comparative subsets would 5950X 7.29 int / 9.79 fp, 11900K 6.61 int / 9.58 fp. versus 7.28 / 10.15 on A15
Those efficiency cores are something to behold. They positively blow away the A55.<p>A510 is the next best thing. Like bulldozer, it will have two integer units sharing a single floating point unit. I doubt companies will ship 8 A510 cores which means that overall little core performance will likely not be improving a huge amount.<p>In fact, it's looking to me like A79 is going to be the "little" core while X2 will be the big core and a couple A510s will be strictly limited to secure low-level processes.
I get that these Apple chips are fast but has anyone spent anytime comparing how fast the Operating System is to other OS?<p>macOS/iOS vs Windows or Linux.<p>Usain Bolt is the fastest person on earth. But if he’s wearing 5 kilogram shoes, he’s not going to be any faster than a normal person.
Intel and AMD should consider how much goodwill they may gain by just removing IME and PSP. The framework and librem laptops show that there is a market of people willing to pay for upgradable devices which are independent from makers and free from out-of-the-box backdoors.