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Apple's A6 Details and Timeline Emerge
MojoKid writes "For a CPU that hasn't seen the light of day, there's a great deal of debate surrounding Apple's A6 and the suggestion that it may not appear until later in 2012. The A6 is a complex bit of hardware. Rumors indicate that the chip is a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU built on 28nm at TSMC and utilizing 3D fabrication technology. While the Cortex-A9 is a proven design, Apple's A6 will be one of the first 28nm chips on the market. The chip will serve as a test case for TSMC's introduction of both 28nm gate-last technology and 3D chip stacking. This is actually TSMC's first effort with an Apple device. The A4 and A5 have both historically been manufactured by Samsung."
Dual core CPUs allow the OS to do one thing in the background and not bog down the device for the running application, but what on earth are you going to do with 4 CPUs when you can only interact with 1 program at a time?
You do know that iPhone apps can do quite a lot in the background, even if only one app can have focus at one time, right? Right now apps are deliberately curtailed to only certain background activities because of the limitations of the amount of cores, adding in more cores and more powerful cores will allow apps to do more in the background.
The limitation of being able to interact with one app at a time is due to UI constraints. Even on a regular computer there isn't much case for multiple programs being visible to the user at one time. For the most part a user isn't able to fully interact with multiple programs at a time, the usual case is to view a document in one app while doing work in another. A better solution to this is to allow programs to share their display engines so that a single program can run and display documents from other programs while only having one program running at a time.
The model of one application running with a few lighter weight processes doing background work makes sense for devices with tight resources and that's the model that iOS is attempting to follow.
Sapere aude!
They lost a court case in the UK over this a couple of years back - for strange historical reasons, you pay VAT on crisps, but not on cakes.
The strange historical reasons being that some bright spark thought they could be really clever by only charging VAT on "non-essential" items, thus creating endless work for lawyers and committees arguing over what was "essential".
...and as anybody who watches QI knows, the official definition is that "cakes" go hard when they are stale, whereas biscuits* go soft.
* That's biscuits as in British English, i.e. cookies or crackers - not scones (which I guess are cakes).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.