Apple Continues Internal CPU Development Focus With New Acquisition

[Lucian Armasu]

Apple bought Dialog Semiconductor assets and IP worth $300 million and prepaid another $300 million for purchases from Dialog that are planned for the next three years.

Apple Continues Internal CPU Development Focus With New Acquisition : Read more

 

[mihen]

O.O wants to make their own GPU. Intel has trouble doing that without licensing patents from either nVidia or AMD. This might not bode well for Apple as they come on the receiving end of patent lawsuits they so love to give out to previous partners.

 

[sykozis]

Apple is nowhere near the single-thread performance of Intel chips. ARM benchmark results and x86 benchmark results are not directly comparable. It's like comparing Apples to Bananas. Apple's CPUs, running x86 instructions, would be considerably slower in both single-threaded and multi-threaded operations compared to Intel chips.

 

[Tuishimi]

Running x86 instructions? The idea of RISC is you would not have all the complex instructions. That would require additional instructions to accomplish some of the same things. On the other hand RISC CPUs are designed to handle more instructions more rapidly. The assembly language would have to be different, or run through a conversion of some sort, I should think. But it has been ... I feel old ... 20+ years since I worked in OS development (and on alternative hardware, not Intel-based). So maybe I am completely wrong.

 

[audiospecaccts]

Running x86 instructions? The idea of RISC is you would not have all the complex instructions. That would require additional instructions to accomplish some of the same things. On the other hand RISC CPUs are designed to handle more instructions more rapidly. The assembly language would have to be different, or run through a conversion of some sort, I should think. But it has been ... I feel old ... 20+ years since I worked in OS development (and on alternative hardware, not Intel-based). So maybe I am completely wrong.

No, not wrong at all.
Microsoft (in a passive way) killed the RISC pc market because it doesn't work with it. But yes RISC processors are 4-5 times the computing power at the same speed. However, people don't realize the clock speed on a RISC is about 1/3 of a x86 based cpu. So a 800 Mhz RISC cpu = 3 Ghz x86 cpu.

 

[antilycus]

Apple cares about it's profit margins more than it's product quality. Plus they are also screwing the U.S. over by holding 1 Trillion USD off shores because they don't want to pay U.S. taxes on it. But the sheeple will never disobey their shepherd.

 

[audiospecaccts]

Apple cares about it's profit margins more than it's product quality. But the sheeple will never disobey their shepherd.

That could be said about most corporations. Like the poor quality mass produced produce and processed foods.


People went to Apple because its the mainstream that isn't Microsoft. However, there are some consumer software and internet services that still use Microsoft products and Apple made deals for compatibility. Of course, Linux which seems to be efficient at what task its programmed to do does its job efficiently, but most don't know it runs a lot of things in the world, even internet servers. Some of the desktop distributions have evolved to be better than Apple's or Microsoft's desktop. Despite the proprietary software curve balls it gets thrown at.

Its interesting that most office environments could totally switch to Linux, but don't because the accounting computer's application (SAGE Act) is only available for Apple or Microsoft. This program is actually a simple a Python DB with an internet explorer shell. So anyone could write a php/mysql web application to do the same thing. Interesting enough is the server it connects to for updates on the database is a Linux machine at the software company.
I like the "operating system not supported" on turbo tax's online web site. But guess what, it still works because its standard code on the web and Microsoft can't make it proprietary.