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Speculation on Real Reasons Behind Apple Switch

Posted by Hemos on from the the-true-switch-campaign dept.

/ASCII writes "There is an article over at Ars Technica with some insider information about the reasons behind Apples x86 switch, given that the new IBM processors seem to be a perfect fit for Apple. The article claims that Apple hopes to power its entire line, from Servers to desktops to iPods and other gadgets with Intel CPUs, and that by doing so, they will gain the same kinds of discounts that Dell get."

4 of 659 comments (clear)

  1. Compile flags by pp · · Score: 5, Informative

    They claim -Os is to remove bloat, not increase performance :-) Thing is, for kernel type code the resulting code is actually _faster_ than with gcc -O2, since there is a lot less cache pressure.

    The Fedora kernel people have benchmarked this quite a bit (and now compile kernels with -Os too), the difference is quite measurable, 5%:ish in some benchmarks.

  2. -Os by wowbagger · · Score: 4, Informative

    Compiling with "-Os" (optimize for smaller code size) is not always at odds with speed, as is implied in the article.

    While for some trivial benchmark code -O4 may generate faster code, for real-world applications keeping your code in cache is worth more than loop unrolling - so in real-world stuff often -Os is better than -O[2345].

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    www.eFax.com are spammers
  3. Re:ARM = lots of things by Wdomburg · · Score: 4, Informative

    ARM (the company) collaborated on desgin of the StrongARM, but it was DEC, and later Intel, who did the actual production. Even with their fully in-house designs, they've been produced by third party companies; e.g. VLSI was responsible for the ARM2 and ARM3.

  4. Re:Apple v. Dell?1 by Txiasaeia · · Score: 4, Informative
    Nice troll. On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html), encoding lame mp3, the P4 came out on top of the A64 FX-67. On five others, encoding mpeg1 to mpeg2, mpeg2 to divx, mpeg2 to xvid, encoding to ogg, and normalisation of a 700MB wav file in cooledit, the A64 came out on top. In fact, in the ogg and normalisation tests, an A64 3800+ (2.4GHz) beat out a P4 660 at 3.6GHz.

    So what's this about "any" P4 vs A64 tests that show that P4s are superior in audio & video compression?

    --
    Condemnant quod non intellegunt.