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Apple Developing Custom ARM-Based Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role (bloomberg.com)
According to Bloomberg, Apple is designing a new chip for future Mac laptops that would take on more of the functionality currently handled by Intel processors. The chip is a variant of the T1 SoC Apple used in the latest MacBook Pro to power the keyboard's Touch Bar feature. The updated part, internally codenamed T310, is built using ARM technology and would reportedly handle some of the computer's low-power mode functionality. From the report: The development of a more advanced Apple-designed chipset for use within Mac laptops is another step in the company's long-term exploration of becoming independent of Intel for its Mac processors. Apple has used its own A-Series processors inside iPhones and iPads since 2010, and its chip business has become one of the Cupertino, California-based company's most critical long-term investments. Apple engineers are planning to offload the Mac's low-power mode, a feature marketed as "Power Nap," to the next-generation ARM-based chip. This function allows Mac laptops to retrieve e-mails, install software updates, and synchronize calendar appointments with the display shut and not in use. The feature currently uses little battery life while run on the Intel chip, but the move to ARM would conserve even more power, according to one of the people. The current ARM-based chip for Macs is independent from the computer's other components, focusing on the Touch Bar's functionality itself. The new version in development would go further by connecting to other parts of a Mac's system, including storage and wireless components, in order to take on the additional responsibilities. Given that a low-power mode already exists, Apple may choose to not highlight the advancement, much like it has not marketed the significance of its current Mac chip, one of the people said. Building its own chips allows Apple to more tightly integrate its hardware and software functions. It also, crucially, allows it more of a say in the cost of components for its devices. However, Apple has no near-term plans to completely abandon Intel chips for use in its laptops and desktops, the people said.
Apple has more cash on hand than all Intel stock is worth. They could divest Intel of its side businesses and focus on building high performance, low power chips at lower cost.
app store only will kill apple and kill pro use as there is no way autocad, adobe, quark, others is going to give apple it's 30% + have there apps sandboxes to run in the store. And say good buy to steam and being able to run windows (maybe or maybe with an slow vm) or boot windows.
m.2 pci-e storage? and not that apple only stuff?
go AMD more pci-e then intel desktop chips and the hope that servers blow them away.
ARM has only been doing 64-bit out-of-order execution and branch prediction for two generations, the first of which (A57) seemingly had worse IPC than Intel's Netburst architecture. They may catch up one day but for now they are no closer to besting Intel than Transmeta was back in the days of Crusoe. Let's just hope their revenue stream lasts long enough for that to happen.
no one has good proven commercial grade software for arm, and its even a grey area for mac
x86 has been competing with the power and power of arm for a bit now, and when it comes down to it what am I supposta use? hacked up libre office offered by zen ding dong jacnoff for arm that needs root access and web add's or a a 80$ copy of MS office on X86 that majority of the universe uses at this point
im not writing a church newsletter on my jackoff pad, im writing a 400 page techinical report
My understanding is a significant percentage of Intel dies are supporting ancient x86 instructions.
Apple doesn't care about backward compatibility If they can deliver a next gen chip with zero support of existing apps, they may have the money to pull it off.
If Intel could write off the x86 instruction set I'm guessing it's benchmarks would at least double. .
Sounds like a great way to lock OS X, or macOS or whatever they call it these days, solidly back to Apple hardware and preclude any possibility of running on stock x86 hardware. Though there's less and less reason to run a hacintosh all the time (it was always a maintenance nightmare). Though virtualization might be a way of getting around that. I've often thought Apple should sell a complete OS X (excuse me, macOS) vm for Windows users as it would provide an easy way to woo users to the platform. However the VM on your average Windows machine would probably outperform the Mac Pro, given Apple's commitment to high end users these days.
to stop making such garbage chips. At work, our Intel MacBooks average less than a week between crashes. My PowerPC PowerBook only crashed once in over four years of use. Intel makes absolute garbage processors that no thinking person wants. Apple needs to move to ones that work like they had before.
Is there any serious advantage to buying Mac at this point except looking hip ?
I can't imagine ARM will perform as well as an Intel CPU at rendering and editing video. Especially when higher end editing rigs are dual-Xeon affairs.
The only laptops/desktops ARM should power are Chromebook/box-type computers. They're fine for what they are, but they are no replacement for a true desktop or workstation.
If Tim Cook is that stupid, Apple will lose its entire laptop and desktop market.
Windows is terrible because it's Windows.
Linux is a great server/workstation OS--but it's a pain on a consumer device. I'm long past the point in my life when I'm okay with recompiling a kernel to fix my sound. My intra-family IT work has gone down by about 95% since I've moved family members over to Macs.
So, yeah, if you want to use an un-terrible OS where everything basically works--then OSX is a pretty good choice. If you'd rather spend your life reading stackoverflow to figure out how to print to a wireless printer--then please feel free to use Linux. And if what makes you happiest is installing anti-virus software while Microsoft logs your every keystroke--then please, by all means, install Windows 10. Actually--just leave your Windows 8 computer plugged in and Microsoft will install it for you.
They moved to Intel because the Mac doesn't have enough sales volume to drive its own CPU R&D. The Macs started on Motorola, but switched to PowerPC when they started to fall behind Intel. Unfortunately the Macs (home and office PCs) accounted for something like 1% of PowerPC sales, so IBM didn't give a damn what Apple wanted. Their meat and potatoes was in the server market so that's what they tuned the PowerPC CPUs for, when the PC market was clearly moving towards low-power consumption laptops. That's what drove Apple to Intel in the first place.
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs, while revenue from phone, tablet, and other small device sales (e.g. Apple TV) will be enough to sustain R&D to keep it progressing as rapidly as Intel CPUs. That could happen, but I'm not convinced it will. The tablet market is already floundering after reaching saturation. I'm guessing phones will soon join them once 5G arrives (5G data will be fast enough there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your phone for 5-10 years). In a saturated marketplace, the Mac commands so little of the PC market it wasn't able to keep Motorola competitive nor sway IBM. And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
Intel (and Microsoft) is successful because they managed to find a market with consistently large annual sales (and profit margins) even after reaching saturation. So far Apple has been riding a growing mobile market to success - basically coasting downhill. It remains to be seen whether they can continue that momentum once the hill levels out, people stop upgrading every 2 years, and they're forced to really, truly innovate to create demand to sustain their sales.
Look. A 4 year old HP has awesome battery life with an I5. Cook does not have a big picture view of the market or product demand, which is easily seen in all product design decisions seen after Jobs' death. Investing in ARM development is not a sound investment, but they can probably weather the loss.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the headline. There is absolutely no lessening of Intel here. This is shit journalism.
Apple is just making a CPU to offload tasks. It's a coprocessor. This isn't even news. It's about as important as saying "Apple will use a new sound chip in the next model"
ONLY apps can app apps, NOT LUDDITE software!
Apps!
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs, while revenue from phone, tablet, and other small device sales (e.g. Apple TV) will be enough to sustain R&D to keep it progressing as rapidly as Intel CPUs.
It won't happen, and mainly for the exact reasons you stated. Phones and tablets have already taken over the "I don't do much other than browse the internet/watch youtube/update facebook/snapchat/twitter/email" jobs that low performance CPUs can handle. The only reason someone has a need to purchase a real computer now is because they have a real need for processing power (gaming, photo/video editing, developing software, running simulations). Everything else is already being done by the lightweight CPUs.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Posting as AC for a damned good reason.
Apple already has several ARM powered laptops drifting around internally. I've seen several of them with my own eyes. There's at least five different prototypes, all constructed in plastic cases with varying degrees of complexity (some are literally just a clear acrylic box, others look more like 3D printed or milled parts designed to look like a chunky MBA or iBook). There's a few that literally recycled the chassis and case from an MBA, just with a different logic board (which was coloured red for some reason), and others sporting a radically different design than anything Apple currently sells (not going anywhere near the details on those because of NDA).
All of them boot encrypted and signed OS images, which are fully recoverable over the internet so long as you've got WiFi access (similar to how their Intel powered systems do it). You cannot chose a version of the OS to load, you get whatever the latest greatest one is and that's it. They've completely ported OS X to ARM (including all of Cocoa and Aqua), however a ton of utilities that normally come with OS X are missing (there's no Disk Utility, Terminal, ColorSync, Grapher, X11, Audio/MIDI setup, etc). A lot of that functionality has been merged into a new app called "Settings" (presumably to match the iOS counterpart), which takes the place of System Preferences.
Likewise, App Store distribution appeared to be mandatory. I didn't see any mention of Gatekeeper or any way to side load (unsigned) binaries, presumably because Gatekeeper is simply part of the system now. The systems I saw could all access an internal version of the MAS that was specifically designed for the ARM systems (and under heavy WIP, judging by the broken page formatting and placeholder elements). The filesystem seemed a bit... peculiar, to say the least. Everything was stored in the root of the disk drive- that is to say, the OS didn't support multiple users at all, and everything that you'd normally see in your home directory was presented as / instead. I don't think the physical filesystem was actually laid out like this, it's just that the Finder and everything else had been modified to make you believe that's the way the computer worked. There was no /Applications folder anymore, your only option for launching and deleting apps was through Launchpad. Drivers (now called "System Extensions") were handled 100% automatically by the OS. If you plugged anything into the computer that it didn't support, it would automatically launch the MAS and take you to a page where you could download and install the relevant stuff. Those things would show up in Settings.app where you could manage them by way of customized preference panels or uninstall them completely. The rest of it more or less looked like a modern day version of 10.12 without some of the historical features accumulated over the years (for example, Dashboard was nowhere to be found).
From what I was told, there's a huge push to get this stuff out the door as soon as they think the market will accept it. That might be in a year, or two years, or three or four, but that's where Apple is inevitably heading. Custom hardware, custom software, total vendor and user lock in. They want to own everything, everywhere, at all times, and ARM is going to let them do exactly that. They're not stupid though and they're not going to commit suicide by releasing this stuff tomorrow, but they will sometime in the future. I guess in that regard the summary is correct- they don't have any "near term" plans to abandon Apple, but they've sure as shit got some long term ones, and I'm assuming Intel knows about it since a lot of the chips on the transparent prototypes had Intel marketings on them.
It might happen, and if it does it will be the end of anything "Pro" at Apple, which they seem to be determined to do anyway.
With the new MacBook Pro using the ARM-Based Mac Chip, it will new a new touch input, new screen and a new macOS. We might as well rename it as well!
Let's see. I know! We'll call it the IPad Pro! Oh wait...
And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
It wasn't really a battle of RISC vs CISC. It was a battle between incumbents and upstarts.
In the workstation arena, the CISC incumbent was Motorola with they 68k series. Despite being better CISC architecture than Intel, 68k lost to the RISC upstarts. Motorola had more resources than MIPS and Sun but not enough more and their customers were nimble enough to take advantage of the performance advantages the RISC upstarts offered.
Intel's had a much larger customer base and those customers were much more dependent on binary compatibility. It took a little while. Neither the 386 or 486 were a match for their RISC competitors. But Intel was able to outspend their RISC competitors on R&D, holding their ground until chips became complex enough that process and ISA independent features dominated. If Intel's architecture were also RISC, they would still have won, even sooner if the upstarts were CISC. Actually, with Intel RISC and CISC upstarts. there would not even have been a battle. Without a short term advantage to exploit, the upstarts would have not have gotten off the ground.
I can't see an Apple only processor wining over Intel, either. At minimum, Intel's process advantage would have to be nullified and I can't see that happening until scaling comes to a full stop.
Are you a communist or luddite? You are supposed to buy a new Apple computer when your disk fills up. And with new model you also get opportunity to pay extra for Apple branded storage and also it now has a separate built in computer for spying on you and selling your information for Apples corporate customers.
Yeah I am not sure why people think ARM has any chance to replace Intel in anything. ARM chips just aren't capable scaled up to desktop and laptop size and Intel is rapidly working its way down to phones and tablets and that will be the end of ARM altogether except for budget devices that don't want to pay the Intel tax.
Only thing Apple is doing here is adding a low power tablet mode to future laptops. There is 0 evidence they are dumb enough to try and make an ARM the only CPU on these things.
Does Apple really care about performance? If they can already sell obsolete laptops at premium price, what prevents them for adopting slightly slower CPU architecture? After all, the ARM CPU price is much lower than Intel one, so they can pimp up their insane profit margins even more. A typical macbook user, ie. a hipster and/or teenager does not know what a CPU is, and as long as the laptop has proper logo and it can browse facebook and instagram they are happy.
Device makers choosing to roll their own chips is a direct effect of the end of Moore's law. If Intel could keep up with their original promise of doubling transistor count (or performance, or power savings, or whatever metric) every 18 months, then Apple would not need to invest in their own chips. I fear that for Intel, the death of Moore's law means the death of independent chip makers, and to get the most performance, you'll have to go the custom ASIC route.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
"Their meat and potatoes was in the server market"
I'm actually curious to what degree IBM's PowerPC engineering focus is/was on the server market, even at the time. Clearly the custom embedded stuff accounts for a lot more shipped units these days. With that said, I really have no idea who is using IBM PowerPC workstations/servers or for what or what so it's hard to guess what portion of the dollars are involved. IBM always seems to have a bunch of capacity-on-demand type offerings available and doing almost all of the design in-house is a way to make those cost-effective to provide.
The real problem is Windows support. Apple sales doubled once they switched to Intel, once you could have full performance Windows and macOS on the same machine. Once you no longer had to choose Mac or Windows but could have both.
Emulation works well today since they don't have to emulate an instruction set architecture. Recompilation of the binary from one ISA to another could help but may still feel sluggish, its not quite the same as starting from the source code. And of course there is Boot Camp which would no longer be an option, a current option that lets Windows run directly on the hardware for maximum performance and compatibility.
When you own Intellectual Property that others depend upon, you're enjoying a sunny day. When you depend upon someone else's IP, you worry. Those with an abundance of Intellectual Property can bargain with their peers and exclude certain potential competitors.
Our world is interdependent in amazingly complex ways. You and I are at the mercy of the producers of the software and operating systems we use, and the evolving hardware platforms. Even mighty Apple is at the mercy of Intel and many other unique suppliers of hardware and software. Qualcomm is a prime example for cellphone tech, but others include the makers of Gorilla Glass and many more.
It makes excellent sense for all of us to be aware of and where possible to avoid excessive dependency on key suppliers.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I'd think 4G LTE is already fast enough, it's faster than my cable which is llenty fast for two people (can both stream Netflix and futz about on the internet).
I can't be the only one constantly breaking phones though (fortunately, budget is good enough already for a phone).
5-10 years for a phone seems unlikely to me, especially with non user replaceable batteries.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
"Their meat and potatoes was in the server market"
I'm actually curious to what degree IBM's PowerPC engineering focus is/was on the server market, even at the time. Clearly the custom embedded stuff accounts for a lot more shipped units these days. With that said, I really have no idea who is using IBM PowerPC workstations/servers or for what or what so it's hard to guess what portion of the dollars are involved. IBM always seems to have a bunch of capacity-on-demand type offerings available and doing almost all of the design in-house is a way to make those cost-effective to provide.
I think it is more fair to say that IBM's meat and potatoes was not the laptop market. Apple was getting killed in the laptop market. They needed lower power processors but no one else was making PowerPC laptops and IBM was not inclined to make a special low power processor just for Apple. I think even embedded PowerPC's were generally hooked up to main power, not batteries. (Bear in mind that this was before power and heat became a significant problem for desktop PC's and servers)
The updated part, internally codenamed T310, is built using ARM technology ...
They are dangerously close to T800.
This article seems to miss the point that it seems that the additional ARM-core based chip is not replacing the main processor. It sounds very similar to the functionality that the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), which have existed on server-grade machines for a long time. It seems that apple is looking at bringing some of that functionality to their products.
Macs aren't real computers though.
Intel working its way down? Care to give an example? Intel has been attempting it even before ARM ruled the market and did not succeed. I am pretty sure it is more than just a technological issue; something at Intel (either the culture or the licensing scheme or whatever) just does not work in mobile.
But Intel was able to outspend their RISC competitors on R&D, holding their ground until chips became complex enough that process and ISA independent features dominated.
Don't forget getting DEC Alpha at bargain bin discount prices.
They moved to Intel because the Mac doesn't have enough sales volume to drive its own CPU R&D.
Back then though a leading edge CPU required a leading edge chip fab, which is a huge (majority?) part of the cost. That's not the case these days.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Apple has had low power support processors in their computers for as long as they've had portables. Even the first Powerbooks in 1990 used 65x02 processors for power management.
While I honestly would like to see more of these comparisons (and the A9X IS a beast, esp. re. IPC and Perf/W) - could everyone please stop using Geekbench scores for cross-arch comparisons, especially 3 or older.
The codepaths and compilation flags are wildly arbitrary and the author has shown time and again his lack of understanding of cross-platform benchmark caveats and pitfalls. Especially GB3 has been shown as useless for that regard, among others by Linus Torvalds himself no less. (just look up his forum conversations on RWT with the author)
Don't forget getting DEC Alpha at bargain bin discount prices.
Well, at least AMD got Dirk Meyer. :)
CISC sort of won, but it also didn't - but anyway that's another story.
Each Apple generation must be faster than the last. Thanks to Moore's law etc, a new CPU design today will be faster than an Intel from 7-10 years ago. Especially since Intel has spent the last few years scaling down the power usage rather than upping the speed.
So wait a couple of years... and switch to your new CPU design. Your new machine is faster than your old Intel-based one. So you've got your speed bump that the customer's expect and you've moved off Intel.
Your customers don't care as the machine does that they want - and anyway if they need whalloping processing power you don't get that from a CPU these days. You get it from a GPU, or a rack of them.
As your post is riddled with inaccuracies and factual errors I feel the need to correct them.
Today- Apple have their own CPU R They did not in the past- but they did however make pretty much design all bridge chips and glue logic in the past.
Motorola, Apple and IBM made the PowerPC- they didn't switch from "motorola" to "powerpc", Motorola manufactured the PowerPCs, eventually the relationship started getting sour as Motorola focused more on the embedded industry and paid less attention to the desktop class, that's when Apple begun switching to IBM as a provider of PowerPCs and IBMs PowerPC 970 was the last of the series Apple used before switching to Intel- and while the PowerPC 970 was a decent desktop chipset it was not a good chip for a portable.
Why do you bring RISC vs CISC into this? the x86 instruction set got it's traction because it was first, and when there is an established market it's hard if not impossible to win over that market. That's why the x86 survived at all, Intel even tried to move away from it with it's itanium but failed. This has absolutely nothing to do with x86 being CISC however.
Is there a story actually confirming this (whatever it is) from an outlet that we can be a little more certain has reporters that know the difference between a chipset and a cpu?
Much like a GPU, the Intel CPU will be a co-processor that will run resource intensive tasks.
Macs will basically be ipads, but with an Intel CPU to aid it for complex calculations.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
What really screwed RISC was that CISC processors stole all their great ideas anyway. x86 is basically an intermediate language at this stage, with modern x86 CPUs being RISC internally and translating x86 CISC instructions as part of the execution pipeline.
For performance applications that works really well, because the CPU designer can optimize higher level instructions to each CPU's specific architecture in a way that RISC makes more difficult because RISC instructions are much more atomic.
For example, Intel CPUs will take an instruction like "xor r, r" (clear register r) that would normally take one instruction cycle to execute, and optimize it to zero cycles with register renaming. The XOR isn't even dispatched to the ALU, the register is just renamed to an internal zero register at some earlier stage in the pipeline which results in zero ALU cycles used.
Where RISC win is for low power and cost. All the clever stuff that high performance x86 does comes at a cost in terms of transistor count, energy consumption and resulting higher TCO.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
> when the rest of the world (Linux and Windows) is still on x86?
Linux has supported ARM since 1994. Today, the vast majority of Linux kernels running are running on ARM processors.
m.2 pci-e storage? and not that apple only stuff?
You seem to misunderstand the direction Apple is going in.
They want to give you less options, not more of them. Because thinking is hard. Solder all the things to the mainboard.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs,
Actually this is a move to eliminate OS X and Macs. They've been moving towards this for years.
Given that the overwhelming majority Mac users only use Mac's as web and email machines, ARM SoC's are powerful enough to handle it. Apple's problem is converting users to the same closed ecosystem and non-user managed systems. Granted, this is harder to do than develop a SoC (which is something they just outsourced to the likes of Qualcomm) but its not like Apple users have not accepted this kind of thing before.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Well I am not knocking Apple's success of ARM based chips in its iPhone and iPads. But in Mac's that's really a step down unless Apple can somehow improve their speed and graphical power. Especially if your going to charge what Apple does for Mac's.
I can't see an Apple only processor wining over Intel, either. At minimum, Intel's process advantage would have to be nullified and I can't see that happening until scaling comes to a full stop.
The point isn't to win over Intel, the point is to gain more control over their users and suppliers.
Apple only went from PowerPC to Intel because IBM told them to naff off when they wanted more control. IBM didn't need tthem as they were producing chips for the Wii, Xbox and PS at the time. Apple was a tiny fish pretending it was a shark. No skin off IBM's nose.
Now Apple are moving hardware vendors again to gain more control, I suspect it was because Intel moves too fast for them to keep their lines up to date.
Now for the users, we've long since known that Apple wanted to kill their general purpose computers and force their users into the same controlled environment as phones and tablets. They haven't been trying to pretend it's a "post-PC" era for nothing you know. Right now, it's far too easy for a Mac users to switch to any other brand of PC, Mac's simply aren't restrictive enough, giving users access to their own data to manipulate as they see fit makes it impossible to make it painful for users to leave their ecosystem.
OS X is effectively dying.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Or they are business people who want to answer email and create other content using a real keyboard. Those users don't need an incredible amount of CPU power, but the laptop form factor is pretty ideal. 2 in 1s are good in economy class, but if you fly in business class, a real laptop is much nicer on the plane. A low power mode used to be really good on a long flight although most long-haul flights have power outlets now so it's less of an issue. Admittedly the new MacBooks with the touch bar are supposedly pretty crappy keyboards but they are very fashionable.
My last couple of work computers have been Macs because I'm a technical person, someone who likes Linux/Unix, working in an organization that uses Active Directory and other "Windows" stuff. Mac bridges those two.
MacOS plays nicely with Active Directory and all the other corporate stuff, runs Microsoft Office, etc. It's a perfectly good company computer.
Also, it's certified Unix, and runs all the open source applications used on Linux. It's a good OS for technical people. You can pretty much open a terminal and pretend it's Linux, there are few differences for day-to-day work.
For years, there was a shift towards avoiding expensive coprocessors and related by having more and more work done by the CPU. The massive growth in single core speeds in e.g. Intel chips made this sensible. Now that single core speeds are not getting faster, and we are having to go multi-core, and now that power consumption is becoming more of an issue, rethinking is becoming more pertinent. Way back when, mainframes would have things like I/O done by independent hardware subsystems, to avoid using expensive time on the main CPUs, and now it seems this is being rediscovered.
Firstly, especially in something like MacOS, there has been progress towards offloading more and more of Quartz to the GPU. Many GUI things could quite happily be handled by a low-power ARM chip on the GPU itself. Already with programmable shaders, and now Vulkan, we are getting to the place where, for graphics, things are accomplished by sending programs, request and data buffers over a high speed interconnect (usually the PCIe bus). To some degree, network transparent graphics are being reinvented, though here the 'network' is the PCIe bus, rather than 10baseT. Having something like an ARM core, with a few specialised bits, for most drawing operations, and having much of the windowing and drawing existing largely at the GPU end of the bus, is one step towards are more efficient architecture: for most of what your PC does, using an Intel Core for it is overkill and wasteful of power. Getting to a point where the main CPUs can be switched off when idling will save a lot of power. In addition, one can look to mainframe architecture of old for inspiration.
Another part of that inspiration is to do similar with I/O. Moving mounting/unmounting and filesystems off to another subsystem run by a small ARM (or similar) core, makes a lot of sense. To the main CPU you have the appearance of a programmable DMA system, to which you merely need to send requests. The small I/O core doing this could be little different to the kind of few-dollar chip SoC we find in cheap smartphones. Moreover, it does not need the capacity for running arbitrary software (not should it have: since its job is more limited, it is more straightforward to lock it down).
This puts you at a point where, especially if you do the 'big-core/little-core' thing with the GPU architecture itself, the system can start up to the point where there is a useable GUI and command line interface before the 'main processors' have even booted up. Essentially you have something a bit like a Chromebook with the traditional 'Central Processing Unit' becoming a coprocessor for handling user tasks.
I'd also go so far to suggest that moving what are traditionally the kernel's duties 'out-of-band', namely on a multi-core CPU, have a small RISC core handling kernel duties, and so far as hyperthreading is concerned, having this 'out of band kernel' able to save/load state from the inactive thread on a hyperthreading core. (Essentially if you have a 2-thread core, the chip then has a state-cache for these threads, where it can move them, and from there save/load thread state to main memory: importantly, much of the CPU overhead for a context switch is removed.)
John_Chalisque
It might be a road that Apple chooses, to fix the stalling Intel performance gains.
This new chip-line, could be to the CPU's as MMX, SSE2, SSE3 etc. were for the i86 (32 or 64).
back then, software had to take advantage of MMX to offload the CPU for decoding video and audio, so when we get to more powerful Apple-ARM-Co-Processors, and Mac/Apple Software is recompiled for those chips/macosx, then, who knows what's possible; maybe you can run in super-eco-mode, view a webpage, listen to some tunes and NOT using the CPU/GPU... and when you wand, full power and Final Cut Pro on a dual 4K...??
maybe I'm just dreaming... :)
I'm guessing phones will soon join them once 5G arrives (5G data will be fast enough there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your phone for 5-10 years).
No, that's easy. RAM will get cheaper, too. So you just add more ram, make iOS more memory hungry, update the API so that some new apps won't run on the old iOS, and bingo! Everyone upgrades whether they need a new phone or not. And this ain't a conspiracy theory, this is exactly what Apple has done so far, consistently. I say this because it is not what Google has done; several releases of Android have actually improved performance on older devices. The problem there is whether the vendor will bother to do a backport at all, so people buy new phones to get a new version of Android.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If Intel's architecture were also RISC, they would still have won, even sooner if the upstarts were CISC.
Intel has been internally RISC since the Pentium (and AMD since the Am586). They didn't go to a RISC instruction set because there are actually numerous advantages to the x86 set once you work around its worst deficiency (that the x86 ISA has only one general purpose register since all the other ones are used for specific things) with register renaming.
Actually, with Intel RISC and CISC upstarts. there would not even have been a battle.
In short, you are wrong. Intel tried to make a full-risc chip and failed. Well, they didn't fail to make one, but they did fail to sell them. That's not their first RISC processor, but it is the first one they tried to sell into other than embedded markets. They failed, and now it's gone, and all we have left to show the legacy is from Microsoft: The "NT" on the end of the name "Windows NT".
Intel did participate in the battle for RISC, and lost horribly. So your basic premise is incorrect.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Don't forget getting DEC Alpha at bargain bin discount prices.
You mean, once it was shown that there was no more headroom in it and it wouldn't scale past about 400 MHz? What a bargain! Meanwhile, AMD also got the only interesting part of Alpha, the bus. That was almost as good a buy as when Intel bought an ARM core (XScale) and then ironically couldn't get it to "scale" down; it was the fastest ARM core, but it was also the most power-hungry by far.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Apple only went from PowerPC to Intel because IBM told them to naff off when they wanted more control.
That is bollocks.
Intel could not and did not want to provide the mobile PowerPCs in quantities Apple demanded and did not really put R&D into mobile PowerPCs.
IBM didn't need tthem as they were producing chips for the Wii, Xbox and PS at the time. Apple was a tiny fish pretending it was a shark. No skin off IBM's nose. This are all desktop/workstation PowerPCs ...
Now Apple are moving hardware vendors again to gain more control ... you are just spreading FUD.
Sorry, bollocks again. Apple is doing noting and never did anything that gave them some "particular control"
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You are both wrong.
There never was a battle.
Like there never was a battle between gasoline and diesel engines or fuel.
It is just two different approaches for designing CPU instructions sets and hence designing the CPU.
Why people now try to call research and development "a battle between" is beyond me.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There's a different, more interesting avenue this could take--an extension of reconfigurable computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconfigurable_computing). Reconfigurable computing, in an oversimplified context, allows one to have a FPGA alongside a general purpose CPU. The FPGA can be reprogrammed on the fly to become a hardware engine for crytography, compression, signal processing, etc. It is entirely possible that it could be used to be a lower power CPU for the purposes of power saving via depowering the main CPU core(s). This then also opens up the possibility of using the FPGA for the other items listed above when not in a low power state (which could also save power over having the CPU do coding/decoding, compression, etc. in software).
Erm ... new IOS versions happily run on old devices.
My iPhone 4S is minimum 5 years old, btw.
People upgrade because they find the new phone more shiny. There is rarely a "software compatibility" reason.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Erm ... new IOS versions happily run on old devices.
Everyone but you has complained about the performance impact of new iOS on old iDevices. I don't think that you're a genius and they're all idiots.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There never was a battle.
I disagree. I think there really was a battle between CISC and RISC, with the last real competitors being the 486 and... I forget, honestly, exactly what the competition was. I want to say at that time it was SuperSPARC on Sun's side, HP actually had their own architecture still, and IBM was just inventing POWER for RS6ks. (Wikipedia... yep, and Ross HyperSPARC, too. We had a SS10 quad-HyperSPARC at SEI, IIRC. Or maybe we had a dual-HyperSPARC SS10 and a quad SS20. That was a while back.) The end result is that instead of one or the other winning, we got three things instead of two; we got CISC, RISC, and CISC which is internally RISCy. And the whole argument begat VLIW as well, so arguably we got four things, though it's not clear what the fourth one is good for :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Bloomberg article sounds like a reporter ran into some Apple guys in a bar. Full of speculation. Offloading simple low power stuff to an arm chip like they already have in tablets is hardly a plan to ditch intel. One of the best things Apple did was use Intel. Their leadership may be asinine enough to actually give a split a try but I doubt it. I REALLY doubt it.
Using already existing tech to run already existing apps on a little arm chip makes sense and is hardly some plan to take over all functions with arm. I think the reporter was drunk when he wrote this article. "The people?" WTF
The real goal of switching to ARM is to restrict all software to being sold through the Mac App Store. They want to lock-down the desktop platform the same as they have their mobile platform. Soon it will be impossible to run 3rd party apps unless they are published through Apple.
It's not quite that clear cut. The big win for RISC was that the decoder was a lot smaller (and didn't rely on microcode). That gave them a lot more area to add ALUs for the same transistor budget. As chip sizes increased, the decoder area went from being a dominant part of the core to a fairly small one, and a denser CISC instruction encoding meant that the extra i-cache that RISC chips needed used more area overall. Add to that, CISC had more headroom for microarchitectural improvements. For example, early RISC designs didn't have hardware division, so you implemented it as a sequence of simpler ops because you couldn't do it in a single cycle. With longer pipelines and better implementation techniques, CISC chips added hardware division without needing to change the ISA, RISC chips needed you to recompile your software to take advantage of it.
The flip side of this is power consumption. A modern RISC ISA, such as ARMv8, has very similar instruction density to x86 and still has a much simpler decoder. It's a richer instruction set (things like complex addressing modes, which provide a big performance win and were omitted from early RISC designs) are there, as are things like crypto acceleration and SIMD. At the high end, there isn't much difference, but in low power modes that complex decoder and microcode engine on x86 chips adds a noticeable amount to power consumption.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I read your entire post and not once did you explain how it is all the white man's fault. I am disappoint.
[asshole alert: I am making fun of your simple, understandable brainfart.]
Yeah, last I heard, Intel still hasn't produced their first one. Somewhere along the way, they got all distracted by their existing and future x86 products.
It seems like this incompetence and lack of commitment has infected all sorts of industries. Ford still can't deliver enough Accords and Camrys, people have been waiting forever for Porsche's Camero (I think they're having supply trouble with the Rich Corinthian Leather), and when I asked for a Big Mac at Burger King, they rang up the wrong burger.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
John Carmack pushed the idea of developing WINE as less work than porting all those games to Linux. Carmack also likes Direct3D more than OpenGL. Microsoft has put a lot of working into making a good API. Why not mostly copy it? Write an application using DirectX 9? Run it in Linux by using WINE.
My understanding is a significant percentage of Intel dies are supporting ancient x86 instructions. Apple doesn't care about backward compatibility If they can deliver a next gen chip with zero support of existing apps, they may have the money to pull it off. If Intel could write off the x86 instruction set I'm guessing it's benchmarks would at least double. .
Last point first - Intel made THREE attempts to write off the x86 instruction set - the i960, the i860 and finally, the Itanium. While the first 2 found use in embedded devices and some high performance computing, the last one ended up as a fiasco: you know it's bad when even Linux and BSD don't wanna support it. Also, the point you made about a significant part of the die supporting x86 microcode is dated: that percentage has fallen significantly in the core architecture
But the other point I was wondering was - why doesn't Apple just reuse the A10 and the chipset around it? Where's the compelling need to reinvent this wheel? As it is, they have been making OS X increasingly like iOS: it's nothing like NEXTSTEP, which is what it derived from. It also would help them drive up volumes for this, and enable them to sink more cash into future generations of such CPUs.
They moved to Intel because the Mac doesn't have enough sales volume to drive its own CPU R&D. The Macs started on Motorola, but switched to PowerPC when they started to fall behind Intel. Unfortunately the Macs (home and office PCs) accounted for something like 1% of PowerPC sales, so IBM didn't give a damn what Apple wanted. Their meat and potatoes was in the server market so that's what they tuned the PowerPC CPUs for, when the PC market was clearly moving towards low-power consumption laptops. That's what drove Apple to Intel in the first place.
That was THEN - before even the iPod era, let alone iPad or iPhone. Apple was floundering and didn't have the volumes to justify Motorola or IBM rigging the tweaks they needed to improve power consumption. Since then, Apple acquired PA-Semi, a chipmaker who then went on to create the A series of microprocessors - all based on ARM. Today, the sheer volume of iPhones is enough to justify that line, and once you toss in iPads and iPod touches, that makes it even better. If Apple can get that on the Macs, then they have their entire ecosystem built around their own CPUs
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs, while revenue from phone, tablet, and other small device sales (e.g. Apple TV) will be enough to sustain R&D to keep it progressing as rapidly as Intel CPUs. That could happen, but I'm not convinced it will. The tablet market is already floundering after reaching saturation. I'm guessing phones will soon join them once 5G arrives (5G data will be fast enough there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your phone for 5-10 years). In a saturated marketplace, the Mac commands so little of the PC market it wasn't able to keep Motorola competitive nor sway IBM. And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
I'm not convinced that ARM itself would be a magic bullet, so Apple may need to explore another CPU - maybe based on Power, maybe based on RISC V or something else, that can scale to Xeon levels that power Mac Pros, for instance. You are right - that iPad sales have slowed down, and iPhones could well be next: there is little reason to go from iPhone 6 to 7, and since the iPhone 7 I got has 128GB of storage in it, I'm not gonna need another phone, unless this one dies on me, or gets stolen, and even then, it'll more likely be a replacement than an upgrade. However, it remains more popular than the most popular Android, and so the A series CPUs which it's based on will likely be the platform on which to build the Macs
On the CISC vs RISC wars, the advantage Intel had in the past was its volumes. While that's not gone away, the RISC side of the market has pretty much consolidated behind ARM in general, and Qualcomm in particular. And in this battle, Intel has not been winning: it pretty much had to abandon plans to make the Atom their flagship in the cellphone market. And while Windows may be locked to the Intel platform, other OSs are not, since they either don't have a legacy base like Wintel, or when they do, they are FOSS. The market is a lot more open for any alternative CPU architectures today than it ever was, given the penetration of Linux or BSD based OSs
Intel (and Microsoft) is successful because they managed to find a market with consistently large annual sales (and profit margins) even after reaching saturation. So far Apple has been riding a growing mobile market to success - basically coasting downhill. It remains to be seen whether they can continue that momentum once the hill levels out, people stop upgrading every 2 years, and they're forced to really, truly innovate to create demand to sustain their sales.
Both Intel and Microsoft have been stagnating, which is why Intel had their layoffs, and Microsoft has been reducing a lot
> that the x86 ISA has only one general purpose register since all the other ones are used for specific things
AX, BX, CX, and DX are all pretty much general purpose for most opcodes, and have been since the 8086. In 64 bit land, there's a bunch more registers past rdi- r8 through r15- that are general purpose.
Almost everything being written now on Windows 10 works fine on Windows 7, there's like what, two new APIs?
Plus the entirety of Universal Windows Platform, for which all applications must be rewritten if they're expected to work on Windows 10 Cloud (aka Crush Steam Edition), which is rumored to be the new name for Windows RT.
The only reason someone has a need to purchase a real computer now is because they have a real need for processing power (gaming, photo/video editing, developing software, running simulations).
Or they are business people who want to answer email and create other content using a real keyboard. Those users don't need an incredible amount of CPU power, but the laptop form factor is pretty ideal.
Why can't they use, say, an iPad with a keyboard cover?
Is this not the job of the SMC? Last I checked, Intel didn't manufacture those, only the CPU and the PCH (and more modern Intels don't even need a PCH as they moved the goods into the CPU).
[Anus alert II: I'm nitpicking your nitpick.]
and when I asked for a Big Mac at Burger King, they rang up the wrong burger
Go into BK and ask for a Big King.
You mean, once it was shown that there was no more headroom in it and it wouldn't scale past about 400 MHz? What a bargain! Meanwhile, AMD also got the only interesting part of Alpha, the bus. That was almost as good a buy as when Intel bought an ARM core (XScale) and then ironically couldn't get it to "scale" down; it was the fastest ARM core, but it was also the most power-hungry by far.
Not sure where you're going with that. The EV9 was (Well would have been) 2Ghz IIRC, the EV6 was 1Ghz, and it was the first past the 1Ghz finish line. But I wasn't alluding to the Alpha itself, but the patent portfolio that came with it, for example, the bits of the EV8 that made it into Intel's 64-bit processor design.
Apple doesn't really want to eliminate macOS until it announces Xcode for iPad. Compare the Surface Pro and Surface 3, which can run Visual Studio.
Likewise, App Store distribution appeared to be mandatory. I didn't see any mention of Gatekeeper or any way to side load (unsigned) binaries
Then how does Xcode run on this ARM MacBook? Does it connect to the Internet every time the linker runs to submit a copy of the executable to Apple's robo-signing server? That could run up a data bill.
This very much harkens back to the way Jobs felt when IBM wasn't keeping their promise to deliver a 3 GHz PPC, and a "mobile" version of the G5.
Apple feels very much constrained by Intel's slow drip of progress with their CPUs, and VERY pissed-off about them blowing the timeline for the quad core Kaby Lakes for mobile use.
I personally hope that it is either just sabre-rattling on Apple's part, or at least that Apple will build an x86 emulation mode into the CPU. If they don't, that would be very stupid strategically; because having code-compatibility with Intel is essential at this point.
But buying Intel and turning them into a Mac-only vendor would be fun to watch...
Plus the entirety of Universal Windows Platform, for which all applications must be rewritten if they're expected to work on Windows 10 Cloud (aka Crush Steam Edition), which is rumored to be the new name for Windows RT.
Yes, at that point the whole thing will go off the rails and crash and who knows what the hell the computing industry will look like afterwards, but it'll be the absolute end of Microsoft dominance. The rats will flee, including me. I'm not even going to Windows 10. I've been using Linux alongside Windows all along, but I just can't stomach Win10. I can maybe see having a Win8.1 gaming box at some point, if I really have to, but really DX12 is irrelevant to my life and the only thing I feel I'm missing is the desktop duplication API.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh, the complaint was about speed? No idea, I usually don't upgrade to new iOS versions, they are simply to ugly.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This is nevertheless not a battle.
It is just technology and competition at the market. And the market shifted in certain directions because of Windows, not because of any particular benefit or lack there of of CISC or RISC.
There is no one on the planet who made a buying decision based on RISC or CISC, they buy because of price versus performance and OS!. E.g. Oracle only runs on certain OSes ... same for SAP.
If there was a battle then clearly RISC won, btw.
SunOS and Solaris moved from 68k to SPARC, basically all Unix vendors went for RISC, the predominant embedded systems that need more power than a 8bit MC/CPU run on ARM, basically all Android devices run on ARMs, so does iOS.
Regarding PowerPC is btw. considered RISC, too. Except for DSPs I guess only the x86 is left as a kind of CISC processor, and as you and others pointed out: it translates internal to RISC.
So how anyone can claim: ;D
a) there was a battle
b) CISC won
is beyond me
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh, I typed Intel when I wanted to type IBM ... no idea what you wanted to say with your rant, though :D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I can't see an Apple only processor wining over Intel, either. At minimum, Intel's process advantage would have to be nullified and I can't see that happening until scaling comes to a full stop.
Well Intel has been very tight lipped about die sizes lately but the 14nm Broadwell-U has 1.3 billion transistors in 82 mm^2 and 1.9 billion transistors in 133 mm^2 so 15-16 million transistors/mm^2, same with the Xeon E5-2600 v4 it's 7.2 billion in 456 mm^2 so 16 million/mm^2 too and they haven't had a die shrink since. Apple's 16nm A10 that's in the latest iPhones have 3.3 billion transistors in 125 mm^2 die size so 26 million transistors/mm^2, it might not be an apples to apples comparison but seems to me like Apple is already ahead in density. It's probably easier on a low-power chip, but really I don't think Intel is ahead anymore.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
> > And if what makes you happiest is installing anti-virus software while Microsoft logs your every keystroke--then please, by all means, install Windows 10. Actually--just leave your Windows 8 computer plugged in and Microsoft will install it for you
Nuke Cupertino!
Hahahahahahahah
I'm guessing phones will soon join them once 5G arrives (5G data will be fast enough there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your phone for 5-10 years).
Why 5G? 4G LTE is already at that point. Why would you upgrade your 150 Mbps LTE phone for a 300 Mbps one? That won't make any difference for sending emails or browsing facebook. Even for music/video streaming, it's more than fast enough to bust your cap in minutes.
A recent smartphone can last at least 5 years, as long as you can change the battery and do not break the display.
Speed of the cellular connection is now like speed of the Ethernet card on a PC. Most people don't care and won't even notice their brand new PC only has a 100 Mbps Ethernet. And for the few who do care, 1 Gbps is fast enough.
Today, the vast majority of Linux kernels running are running on ARM processors.
And on MIPS.
a.k.a. "That other CPU that you'll also find in router and other embed devices, beside ARMs".
But yeah, the typical household of some "only having a couple of laptops, all running Windows" family,
actually has way much more instance of Linux running unnoticed on the ARM & MIPS embedded in various small gadget that nobody pays attention to,
in addition to maybe a few distant cousins of BSD (any Apple iDevice, and Sony Playstations) :
- routers, smartphones, tablets, smart-appliance (smart TVs), etc.
Forget about the "Year of Linux on the Desktop".
The "Year of Linux on anything else beside the Desktop" has been achieved a long time ago.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
How about concentrating on actually making some computers instead? Especially the desktops. It won't matter what the chip does if a lot of your customers feel forced to go to another vendor because you don't have a product available that meets their needs because you worked on a co-processor instead of releasing new computers.
But Intel was able to outspend their RISC competitors on R&D, holding their ground until chips became complex enough that process and ISA independent features dominated.
Don't forget getting DEC Alpha at bargain bin discount prices.
It was not that Intel was about to outspend their RISC competitors on R&D but that they were able to outspend all of their RISC competitors combined by an order of magnitude. By the time Intel bought Alpha, which had its own litany of mistakes, they had already won.
For performance applications that works really well, because the CPU designer can optimize higher level instructions to each CPU's specific architecture in a way that RISC makes more difficult because RISC instructions are much more atomic.
For example, Intel CPUs will take an instruction like "xor r, r" (clear register r) that would normally take one instruction cycle to execute, and optimize it to zero cycles with register renaming.
Congratulations. You have optimized away the NOP the programmer added to waste some cycles to attain a goal (like break a race condition), and broke his program. Clever things like that will always go around to bite you in the ass. Anybody remember Windows 95 breaking because the AMD K6-2 optimized the loop opcode (the very definition of a CISC operation) so that on faster CPUs a div-by-0 resulted in a driver's timing loop? No? Then you are doomed to make the same mistake. Microsoft fixed the timing loop and AMD actually made the loop slower again in the Athlon to make sure this never happens again.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Sane CPU designs don't rely on NOPs to work, and neither do sane architectures these days. After all, a NOP on a 3.2GHz core that can execute 4 instructions per cycle takes a very different amount of time than a NOP on a 1GHz in-order CPU. In fact the former might even be slower, if it causes a particularly nasty cache stall, and the delay will vary constantly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Apple has decided that it will not include a floating-point unit within the chip set because, well you know, courage.
Users will either need to buy a proprietary floating point add-on card or implement all floating point calculations in software.
"Oh, I typed something that's completely ridiculous but I wanted to type something else. Why are you replying to what I typed and not what I wanted to type?"
He was saying that what you actually typed, only a fucking retard would type, and he made fun of you for it. What's more funny is you didn't understand that, actually making you the fucking retard and not just a guy not paying attention.
OK, I want to follow up on this part of your post.
In the early days of multi-core, I was a big supporter of homogeneous cores. I felt that these designs would boost parallel processing and the overall viability and impact of coding for parallel. I still feel this way BTW, for the most part.
However. I think that ARM's big.LITTLE design, which I was a big skeptic of, actually showed real value and a viable use case. To review (sorry, lots of readers will already know this), it allows for low power processing in devices that are in some sort of standby mode.
So here's my argument and question. Why doesn't Intel do something like this? It's probably better for laptop and low power designs but I could even imagine viable use cases in the desktop chips.
The essential idea is that your chip primarily consists of high power cores, so it's mostly homogeneous. However you add one or two low power cores, for those standby type uses. As long as the low power cores are instruction set compatible, the main remaining challenge is to add the OS support for task allocation to the relevant cores. I suspect this is a very achievable thing, somewhat comparable to NUMA support or core affinity support.
Now here's the kicker. Intel already has the low power cores! They have Atom, Pentium-M, Celeron-M, or whatever they call them these days. Yeah, I know that Atom has been discontinued, that's not terribly relevant. What is relevant is that Intel has a lot of the design experience, the IP, and the history of making low power procs. And I'm not talking about a dedicated low power processor for mobile devices. I'm talking about a low power core for more conventional computing devices (desktop PCs, laptops and tablets).
There's more too. Intel has already been doing this, but for a very different purpose. I'm not a specialist, not by a long shot, so forgive any inaccuracies in the following.
Intel has a technology called Active Management Technology (AMT). It's meant primarily for servers and allows out of band management of those Intel based servers. One of the key services in AMT is a mini-core in Intel's vPro processors.
It's not the same thing, clearly, and I'm not suggesting that the AMT core is even suitable for low power processing. I'm just saying, Intel has some experience with heterogeneous CPU designs.
This could be a whole different way of achieving power efficiency, beyond what Intel is already doing.