64-bit ARM chips in iPhone 5S serve up taste of Intel-free future for Apple

http://www.zdnet.com/2015-64-bit-arm-chips-in-iphone-5s-serve-up-taste-of-intel-free-future-for-apple-7000020524/

by boh • 13 years ago

34 58 13 years ago

minikites• 13 years ago

Because both Mac OS X and iOS are now 64-bit, it will be easier to port the more demanding (but fewer in number) Mac apps to a single, converged future-state Apple device OS.

It seems like Microsoft has shown that strategy to be a dud. Touch interfaces are awkward with a mouse and mouse interfaces are too fiddly to touch.

dljsjr2• 13 years ago

If your business logic (Models/Controllers) are strongly decoupled from your Views, you still maintain a pretty large amount of code that becomes easier to port.

mikeash7• 13 years ago

It really doesn't, though. The 32/64-bit divide is not all that consequential for this.

untog• 13 years ago

And the 32bit/64bit thing seems to be largely irrelevant, too. You just set 64bit or 32bit flags when compiling the vast majority of projects. There's no discernable difference.

Aloha• 13 years ago

I think this is spot on, if you're buying 2 million units of X its nearly always cheaper per unit than buying 1 million. That said, I dont expect to see a total platform convergence, I see a future where you have iOS and OSX, and where you could for example run iOS apps on OSX, I dont see them following the same route Microsoft did with Windows 8.

danbruc2• 13 years ago

Albeit the about box says the author has more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry, at no point does the article convince me that the author understands the difference between a 32 bit and 64 bit processor.

mikeash7• 13 years ago

The amount of misinformation on the 5S's 64-bitness is hilarious. I've yet to see a single person get it right aside from people I know personally.

jsf• 13 years ago

Care to share? I haven't heard a good explanation of what it's good for.

twoodfin2• 13 years ago

Disagree. Intel looks to be getting better at low power faster than ARM and partners are getting better at perf/watt.

The ARM universe has a flexibility advantage, but Apple might not care, since Intel will surely make them the SoC they want if it means a spot in the iPad.

I don't think the outcome here is ordained, nor would Apple want it to be: Competition for supplying them fast, efficient CPUs is exactly what they didn't have in the PowerPC days, and it nearly killed them.

joezydeco• 13 years ago

Intel looks to be getting better at low power faster than ARM and partners are getting better at perf/watt.

Citation, please?

vicaya2• 13 years ago

Google atom silvermont

twoodfin2• 13 years ago

This is the kind of thing I have in mind:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7117/haswell-ult-investigation

Even their "ultrabook"-class Haswell parts are becoming power competitive with ARM tablet chips. The Y series should get even closer to parity. Broadwell is, in theory, right around the corner, with Intel claiming another 30% power improvement in the 14nm process.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7318/intel-demos-14nm-broadwel...

Intel will have a significant process advantage over the ARM partners for at least another couple of years, and possibly longer. I would be surprised if they failed to overcome the engineering challenges required to exploit that process advantage in mobile.

My point isn't that I'm sure who's going to win, but rather that Apple is not inextricably tied to ARM.

grecy• 13 years ago

I don't buy that Apple will merge iOS and OS X.

At the last All Things D that Steve appeared at (9? 10?), he talked at length about this, and said they'd thought about it and worked on it for a very long time. In the end, they figured that phones and Mac Pros are too different to share the same OS, and it just doesn't make sense.

chiph• 13 years ago

Agreed. The tablet-like features that got added into the recent versions of OS X are something I don't particularly care for. If I'm on a desktop/laptop, I want a desktop-like experience. If I'm on a mobile device, the paradigm is sufficiently different that it justifies having a different OS.

Good example: the default scroll direction got changed in OS X to operate like a touch device. Hated it with a passion. First thing I changed back.

Zr40• 13 years ago

Some people like moving the scroll bar (which seems to be your preference). Other people like moving the document (which is my preference).

There's no right or wrong choice here. The current default logically makes sense -- your cursor is located at a document, and when you're moving your fingers upward, the document also moves upward.

But like any changed default, there are people who liked the previous setting. And there are of course people who want to use (or have to use) other OSes where this setting can't easily be changed. Those people can change the OS X setting at will.

georgemcbay• 13 years ago

This was true then and it is still pretty true, but it will not be true forever. It isn't difficult for me to imagine the Ubuntu strategy of having a phone which runs an OS which can be used as a phone as usual or a desktop/laptop if placed in an appropriate shell (perhaps turning the phone part into a graphical touchpad) becoming a pretty common hybrid solution.

Having said this, I still think there are some practical problems with Apple switching to non-Intel in the near term. Quite a lot of people I know who are diehard MacBook users use Boot Camp often, and some actually use their Macs as dedicated Windows boxes. I work at a place that is about 90% Mac laptop users but about half of them wouldn't be able to use Mac laptops for work if not for the ease of running Windows on their MacBooks.

lucian19002• 13 years ago

There's a pretty fundamental reason why they can't merge them: OS X is their development platform. iOS has no hope to self-host, especially with the paranoia it suffers from right now (only running App Store apps).

yuhong2• 13 years ago

Nor would it be sensible even on Android or any other mobile platform, which is a big reason I believe PCs will not completely die.

hahainternet• 13 years ago

Steve is dead. His visions no longer mean much. I don't know if the two will merge, but they certainly seem to be converging.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

Well, depends on how they do it. Obviously the Win8 approach of GUI unification is right out, but I could see support for iOS apps in MacOS. Ubuntu's idea of showing the phone-apps in a slide-out sidebar is nifty, for example.

Steko• 13 years ago

Steve said a lot of things. He couldn't figure out what tablets were good for other than reading on the toilet ... as he was furiously working on a tablet. And he said 7" wasn't a great size for tablets ... as he was excitedly exchanging internal memos about making a 7" tablet. Phones and Mac Pros are very different but 10" iPads and MBAs not so much and are only getting closer. And the Mac Pro can't be more than 5% of their OS X business.

revelation• 13 years ago

Just because Apple says the processor is "desktop-class", does not make it so. If it consumes 5W, you are only going to get 5W worth of perfomance. Any half-recent Intel processor will easily blow this out of the water.

mikeash7• 13 years ago

Of course it's desktop-class! If your desktop was built in 2005....

reeses• 13 years ago

Or the early 1990s if you were unfortunate enough to have an Indigo. Mid-1990s if you were really unfortunate and had an Indy, or were fortunate enough to have an Indigo2 with decent gfx.

About the same amount of RAM then, too. :-)

lttlrck• 13 years ago

What was wrong with the desktop in 2005?

zanny• 13 years ago

Or if you just bought a mid range chip from 08 - 10. Comparing the 150w behemoths of 2005 to the 5w parts of today is kind of unfair, when we have always had 65 - 110w parts acting as the mainstream.

In that realm, this next generation of 5 - 30w parts from ARM and Intel is performing equivalent to the last generation of core 2 quad processors at 120w. And people did some serious professional work on those kinds of chips.

coldtea3• 13 years ago

You mean around the same time (give or take 1-2 years) that common people found out that their machines were perfectly good for most of the uses they had in mind, and started feeling the need to constantly upgrade them much less?

jrockway• 13 years ago

Switching from Intel to ARM for their "real" computers sounds like a decision that Apple's current leadership would make.

ryanobjc• 13 years ago

Apple did a bang up job accelerating their deployment of ARMv8 and A7.

The question is, what now Intel? On one hand Intel did a huge mis-step and is missing out, on the other hand at the time "low cost ARM cpus" probably didn't seem like a good market for a company that has typically sold premium high end CPUs.

One thing is for certain, Apple is unwilling to let Intel or anyone else dictate features via CPU roadmap.

Did anyone else notice that the A7 has 1 billion transistors? That's on the scale of a desktop/mobile CPU - the latest intels have about 1.4b or so. That's a big deal. And don't give me the CPU vs GPU, because intel ships with a GPU on die.

zaroth• 13 years ago

Place your iPhone 8S next to your Thunderbolt display, and you have full blown OSX appear on the screen, and you use keyboard/mouse as usual.

OSX and iOS will be running concurrently on the same hardware, when it gets fast enough. Of course as soon as you "undock" your phone (which doesn't actually involve a cable, or any physical connection), the OSX "VM" is instantly suspended.

By the way, you could do the same thing with a MacBook Air type device which is nothing more than monitor, keyboard, trackpad, and battery. Phone stays in your pocket. Open the lid, and boom, there your desktop OS is. Except it's actually being served over AirPlay from your "phone". Maybe an early iteration would require connecting the phone to the shell with Thunderbolt.

Although I think it's fundamentally two different OSs, I think the line will blur to the point where it's a meaningless distinction. For example, apps which support both modalities will install with a single click in both places.

Sami_Lehtinen• 13 years ago

Sounds silly to have two separate operating systems. Sure they're going to converge those?

What about Chrome OS and Android?

mortenjorck• 13 years ago

At least Microsoft has shown the market how not to do it.

Long-term, a converged, unified OS makes sense, but a lot more work is going to have to go into making a truly context-responsive UI system.

randyrand• 13 years ago

It doesn't seem like th author has a very clear grasp of what 64-bit word sizes actually allow over 32 bit. Here's a hint - not much. Sure, eventually more ram and more registers (which is very important but not really inherent to 64 bit as far as I know). It seems like the author thinks 64 bit magically makes things run faster or easier to develop for - neither of these are true except in the very small minority of circumstances.

I'll leave with this: Nintendo came out with a 64 bit game console ~15 years ago at half the cost of the iPhone. This is not ground breaking stuff.

wtallis• 13 years ago

The "more registers" bit doesn't require going 64-bit, but it does require changing the instruction format, at which point it would be foolish not to take the opportunity to go 64-bit.

drill_sarge• 13 years ago

I am having nightmares if the future is hundreds of arm cores on workstation class systems. I'd rather have a couple big x86_64 cores which are "just there and work" without having to deal with all kinds of scary things.

Also I think it's funny how people fall for this 64bit marketing bs. It's like back in the days of AMD Athlon64 when people though everything it's faster just because of 64 bits.

I am interested in the new Atom generation too, which seems really promising.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

This is an interesting article for the theme, but not the content :-). Intel and ARM are on a collision course. What is interesting to me is that the previous two trains on these tracks were Intel and the bespoke computer makers.

Some folks here will recall the great microprocessor wars for the general purpose computer. Starting with the Z80, 8080, 6502, and 6809, moving to the 80286/386, 68000/68020, and SPARC/MIPS/PA-RISC/POWERPC.

Intel pretty much won that war by coming up from the bottom, powering 'toy' computers (IBM PC) running a 'toy' operating system 'MS-DOS' with 'toy' peripherals (640 x 480 graphics). They came up and ate workstations, and then they ate servers.

And here is the salient fact for me, they could do that because while the market for workstations might be 1 million/year, the market for PCs was 1 million a month (or more at its peak). So while a PC couldn't do what a workstation could early on, the PC market was generating a ton of cash which was going into improving the PC, much more cash and investment than was going into improving the Workstation. One by one the Workstation vendors dropped out of the market or replaced their offering with a "high end" PC.

ARM set up the same scenario today, although this time it was portable devices that were the 'toys' and clever and useful but not nearly as powerful as PCs were so hardly a threat, but for every million PCs sold there were 5-10 million phones sold. And all that money and all that investment goes into making the chips that power these phones better and better, and the PC king is sitting on there trying to make a more powerful PC when what people are buying are more powerful phones.

At IDF (in 2010 if memory serves) Intel noted that they were going to move into the embedded space more aggressively but it didn't actually follow through too well focusing in multi-chip solutions which didn't work well in space constrained phones. Meanwhile ARM was getting design win after design win with their SOC partners.

So last year Intel started going all out on making a lower power version of the x86 architecture which could compete with ARM and this years IDF they took aim at the SOC business. All in an effort to pull enough oxygen out of the ecosystem to slow ARM down. After all, if today you could choose between two chips, one ARM and one x86-64, with the same cost and power curve, you'd probably go with the x86-64 for the assurance that software support would be easier. But once software support isn't an issue it gets to be more of a horse race, and ARM has notably had much better licensing terms than Intel has after being nearly usurped by AMD the first time they tried it.

If ARM can get to 64 bits and I/O channel bandwidth faster than Intel can get to ARM's power envelope and cost, it will be a very interesting fight indeed.

Touche• 13 years ago

Intel getting to ARM's power envelope and cost won't help them though. They already did the Razr i which I think shows people won't buy something just because it's Intel. Once Intel scales down to match ARM it has lost all of the things that make it "Intel", and so what's the point? If they compete directly with ARM they're going to lose because they have more to lose.

sciwiz• 13 years ago

"They already did the Razr i which I think shows people won't buy something just because it's Intel."

Pretty sure it's because it was made by Motorola and for sale only in Europe, where they have no mindshare.

fieldforceapp• 13 years ago

Nice summary, and I agree with the view but good to remember Intel has a two-pronged battle they're fighting now -- ARM's partners (QCOM, Samsung) and the Foundries (TSMC, Samsung, GF, IBM) -- much different than the discrete merchant competitors they faced in the past. Intel therefore has to get to deeper process nodes faster (14nm and below) while also trying to create an embedded x86 ecosystem. I've never seen them more motivated to compete on both fronts.

For what it's worth, here's what Intel's key execs presented to address those challenges at this year's IDF: http://www.legitreviews.com/intel-confims-mobile-focus-shift...

kabdib• 13 years ago

Current ARM memory systems are terrible compared to what you find on even medium scale x86 chips. There's going to have to be a LOT of investment here before you'll see ARM approach the scale of large (or even medium) iron.

vicaya2• 13 years ago

It'll be an interesting fight with Intel's Silvermont Atom, which finally gets out of order execution.

Intel claims that dual-core Silvermont chips can outperform quad-core ARM chips by a factor of 1.6 when power draw is similar. Intel also says Silvermont can draw 2.4 times less power when delivering similar performance as the quad-core, ARM-based competition.

64-bit ARM chips in iPhone 5S serve up taste of Intel-free future for Apple

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