
Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones - rbanffy
https://www.macworld.com/article/3275567/iphone-ipad/apple-7nm-a12-chip-iphone.html
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jandrese
I wish Apple would make a sort of Raspberry Pi like board with an A series
chip, ethernet, HDMI, GPIO, SD Card, etc... for $50-$100 that runs Linux.

I would also like a flying unicorn.

Seriously, a high power SBC at a reasonable price point would be insanely
useful for projects like portable MAME cabinets, video transcoders, scene
displays, etc... I love the Pi but it's so old tech, especially the video
cores, that it's annoyingly limited for some applications. Worse, the
competitors with faster cpus often have worse video acceleration support,
making them worse for this than the underpowered Pi.

~~~
tambourine_man
Not a flying unicorn, but still a winged equine: the Mac Nano.

A tiny white puck with a single usb-c plug for power and data. Inside, an A12
running OS X.

Education and “enthusiast” market. GPIO as a dongle, of course.

They can release the A13 version in colors the next year :)

~~~
fastball
I'm confused as to how you have a computer with only a single port... what do
you imagine plugging the one port into?

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protomyth
For most of the day my Macbook Pro is basically a computer with one port
plugged into a dock with its case shut since I like using my LG 21x9 screen
more than the built in screen.

~~~
pdimitar
Do you have a link to a good guide on how you can use a MacBook Pro with the
lid closed all the time? (Obviously with external display[s].)

I tried 2 times -- granted they weren't very honest attempts, I hoped to have
it done in 5 minutes, but failed.

I am looking for a no-BS quick guide if you have one lying around.

~~~
rangibaby
1\. Make sure an external keyboard and mouse are available, wired or wireless
is fine

2\. Make sure your MacBook is plugged into power and an external display

3\. Close lid

4\. Your main desktop should show up on the external display. If your computer
goes to sleep you can wake it up by clicking the mouse or typing on the
keyboard.

~~~
pdimitar
Thanks.

Will that wake the internal display though? That would warm it up and that can
be pretty bad when the lid is closed.

~~~
rangibaby
If the external display wakes up as your main display with the same desktop
picture and icons as your laptop it means the internal display is asleep.

If your mouse is laggy and display looks fuzzy it means your external is
mirroring your internal display and that your internal display is on. Turn
mirroring off if that happens.

If you’re worried about heat (lid shut mode blocks the vent that runs the
width of the keyboard) you can leave your lid open and use your external
display normally.

I have not noticed a heat problem using my 2013 MBP Retina in lid shut mode
after my two year old threw a phone at the screen (kids! Lol)

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vbezhenar
I'm not really impressed by this article. I don't see much of a performance
improvements in desktop CPUs, so I don't expect them in mobile CPUs as well.
They were catching desktop CPUs until recently, but now they are playing on
even field, so I doubt that it would be 25% in single-thread. Sure, they could
drop more cores, but that's it and only for specific workloads. Also I'm not
even sure that I need that performance in my phone, I don't play games or run
Idea there. Battery life speculations are very unconvincing as well. CPU is
only part of battery drain, another parts are display and, most importantly,
radio chips. So if my CPU eats 10% of my battery, those 25% improvements will
be 2.5% which is not that impressive. They have terrible batter anyway, I have
no idea how they managed to make a phone which turns off at -30C. How am I
supposed to use it at winter?

~~~
jey
Yeah. All I really want is more RAM so that I can tab between Safari and
Facebook without one of them getting unloaded and losing my place.

~~~
sho
Which model do you have? No way this should be happening on a recent one just
between two applications.

On the X (3GB) this doesn't seem to be an issue for me at all.

~~~
freshyill
I'm really impressed by how long apps remain in RAM on my 8 Plus. I'll play a
game before bed and find it still where I left off during my commute the next
morning, and that's with some browsing/podcasts in between.

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Finch2192
Can someone explain to me why this matters?

It feels like CPU advancements in recent memory have brought nothing at all.
It used to be, in the early days of smartphones, every generation brought
something very new, something that can truly be considered an improvement. I
remember the first dual core phone, the first quad core, etc. Nowadays, there
is no noticeable difference at all.

Even now, where phones have indeed caught up to computer CPUs in speed, we
have yet to see a phone really do anything more with that speed. The one thing
I want to see, but nobody seems to be doing it, is a phone that converts into
a desktop. Your laptop doesn't have to be separate from your phone. Your
laptop could be a dock for your super-fast phone that converts to a desktop
operating system. Of course, there have been a few products on the market that
have attempted this, but none that lasted.

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amelius
Why would Apple cannibalize their desktop products?

Apple wants to sell more devices, not less. And it also helps their iCloud
business (which wouldn't exist if everybody had only one device).

~~~
Finch2192
I guess I'm not really talking about it from a business-centric perspective,
but rather one of progress. This is where I feel the next step in mobile
computing lies, given these advancements in mobile CPU. But you're right,
perhaps it does not make business sense, and that's why we're not seeing it.

~~~
amelius
I guess that too little competition means that progress has to give in to the
business side of things.

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GeekyBear
According to the public information from TSMC on the new process node, it
looks like we're in for significant power draw savings.

>Compared to its 10nm FinFET process, TSMC's 7nm FinFET features 1.6X logic
density, ~20% speed improvement, and ~40% power reduction.

[http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/7nm....](http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/7nm.htm)

Also, any speed increases due to redesign of the cores would be on top of the
~20% speed bump from the process node change.

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guelo
7nm is not going to be unique to Apple. TSMC has said that they have 50
customers using their new 7nm tech this year. That most likely includes
Qualcomm whose Snapdragon chips power most Android phones.

~~~
MBCook
It only seems to be unique in that apple may be the first there.

Obviously everyone is going to move to it as it’s availability increases.

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ianamartin
The dearth of WWDC rumors this year is really amazing to me. Apple really is
taking leaks very seriously. We're 10 days away from the keynote, and
absolutely nothing is getting out.

This speculation is the best that Macworld can do? No offense to them, but I
mean, the rumors are slim pickings.

I really hope that Apple fixes its laptop lineup at WWDC. It's a complete and
total shitshow right now. And that's coming from a huge Apple fan.

Even before you factor in the keyboard issues, it's a mess. The Air line maxes
at 8gigs of ram, but you can configure for a better core i7 proc than the
MacBooks. Of course the screen is awful.

The actual MacBook line has an anemic processor, but you can get 16gigs of ram
and a decent screen. But by that time, you're paying MacBook pro money. Which
at 13-inches, you can't get the top specs without the touchbar, and the
midrange specs on the non-touchbar are stupidly overpriced even for someone
like me who's willing to pay a premium for Apple kit. And still capped at
16gigs ram.

15-inch model suffers from the same problems as the 13-inch: You can only get
the maxed specs with the touch bar and the mid-range specs are a joke for the
price.

The only pro laptop worth buying right now is a 3-year-old mid-2015 MacBook
pro. I was in the market for a new Mac a couple of months ago and literally
could not find anything worth spending money to upgrade on from Apple. I
picked up two 11-inch macbook airs for cheap on eBay because I adore that tiny
form factor and use them as mostly dumb terminals for remote stuff. They are
surprisingly useful and have great battery life.

Apple really needs to fix the laptops and give up the goods on the Mac Pro
machine. I don't care if it's throwing a bevy of these chips in an ultra thin
MacBook Pro-Air X Plus or what. But this situation is embarrassing. Reminds me
of the mid-90s, when there were a ton of options if you wanted a mac, but
nothing really worth buying.

My work ThinkPad is an ugly brick that gets the job fucking done. I'm about to
buy one for my home if I don't just stockpile all the 11" macbook airs I can
find and build a home lab cluster to remote into for doing real work instead.

~~~
BryantD
You're right -- this has been a very rumorless year. Interesting given how
many leaks we've seen over the last couple of years; I guess someone got
serious about tightening up. Or, of course, there's nothing much coming.

You're dead right on the laptop lineup. Touchbar, whatever, I don't think
that's an enormous issue one way or the other -- but the incoherency of the
tech specs matters a bunch.

~~~
ianamartin
They did tighten up leaks. There was a big internal meeting about how Apple is
actually not only firing people but also prosecuting them--which was promptly
leaked.

And yeah, it's also possible that there's nothing really exciting coming
that's worth leaking.

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duxup
This article can be summed up as "a lot of things could be way better...
maybe".

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dman
I hope at some point these chips make their way into an Apple laptop.

~~~
roryisok
I think its only a matter of time before apple unveils what's basically high
spec clamshell iPad pro and stops making new macbooks.

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jimmy1
I disagree, I think they are doing a full about-face with these latest
generation of garbage MBPs and I am hopeful for the refreshes. A lesson many
will learn the hard way, eventually, is you don't scorn your power users
because they are an endless source of evangelism and free marketing for your
product.

~~~
monocasa
Also, they're literally the developers for the mobile platform. iOS has a very
long way to go before you can develop on it.

~~~
lnanek2
iOS is not particularly different from OSX. That's why Apple developers get to
use a super fast simulator instead of the dog slow emulator we Android
developers are stuck with.

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Reason077
Similarities between iOS and macOS don't have much to do with it.

The reason the Android emulator is slow is that it is actually _emulating_ an
ARM CPU.

The iOS simulator, on the other hand, is running an iOS natively built for
x86, and Xcode targets the x86 architecture when you build your app for the
simulator.

~~~
kitsunesoba
It certainly doesn’t hurt that the simulator only needs to run the iOS front
end on top of macOS Darwin instead of a full copy of iOS, though.

Couldn’t something similar be done with Android on Linux, running x86 Android
and using the host system’s kernel?

~~~
saagarjha
> It certainly doesn’t hurt that the simulator only needs to run the iOS front
> end on top of macOS Darwin instead of a full copy of iOS, though.

Uh, no. The simulator literally boots an entire copy of iOS, with its own
libraries, frameworks, and utilities, that's entirely separate from the host
OS.

~~~
Reason077
That is incorrect. The iOS simulator is not a virtualized environment. It's
not running it's own kernel etc, rather it's just a set of iOS libraries and
frameworks built for x86 and a thin compatibility layer so that they run on
macOS.

You can actually see your running iOS applications, and all of the iOS daemons
etc show up as first class processes on you Mac if you run "ps".

iOS apps running in the simulator are not separate from the host OS at all -
they're running _on_ the host OS, just like any other process. Try killing
"Springboard" from your Mac command line and watch what happens inside the
simulator...

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dep_b
Perhaps Apple could introduce a Mac Mini with an iPad-class version of the A12
for all people that need to develop for iOS but don't want to spend a ton on
hardware. The basic tools like Xcode and some Apple productivity software
could already be ported, most developer toolchains would follow. The Simulator
would have realistic CPU characteristics. And Apple would ease in on the
transition to macOS-ARM.

~~~
ianai
If they did that it would need to have the profit margin of an iPhone or iPad,
at least. But frankly, I don’t know why they seem to hate the traditional form
factors so much. The last time they upgraded the Mac Pro they said “we’ll
totally never make you wait this long for a Mac Pro upgrade again.” Yet here
we are.

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jcfrei
In previous discussions about sub 10nm chips I kept reading that the only
company which is close to achieving this feature size is Intel - and for all
other companies it's just a marketing term. Does this still hold?

~~~
wmf
No. Intel is still on 14 nm [1] while TSMC/Samsung/GloFo "7 nm" should be
roughly equivalent to Intel 10 nm.

[1] Don't believe the hype.

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MrUnderhill
What are the chances the next gen iPhone gets a L1/L5-capable GNSS chip?
That'd arguably be one of the better features too. There's some speculation
that Pixel 3 will get it (BCM47755).

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sveme
OT, but with the whole GDPR drama, this website has made a better effort than
most to comply. However, I doubt that all the default opt-ins would be ruled
GDPR-compliant.

~~~
Dunedan
I got pretty confused by their popup, because there are three options:

\- "Update Privacy Settings"

\- "Sounds Good, Thanks"

\- "Not Now"

Apparently "Sounds Good, Thanks" is their wording for expressing consent,
which is already odd, but what does "Not Now" mean? Does it mean no consent,
so no tracking for now? In any case, pretty poor wording as well.

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ratsimihah
Have chips ever been critical features? I mean the ones that add features like
NFC ok, but doesn't every chip make phones "faster"?

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jwcooper
They used to be critical features, but I just don't think the incremental
improvements are as noticeable anymore. My iPhone 6s feels quite snappy yet.

The iPhone 3G to the 3Gs was an amazing leap in usability though. Everything
just worked so much better, mostly just due to faster chips as far as I'm
aware.

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TylerE
It's very noticeable on an iPad, where it has a lot more pixels to draw.

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erikpukinskis
High quality 6dof tracking please!! With leap motion-style hand tracking in
the front facing camera! This is all we need for AR to take off!

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jbob2000
Dont' waste your time, this article is rife with speculation, all based off of
a rumor that the new chip will be 7nm.

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rbanffy
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-23/apple-
par...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-23/apple-partner-tsmc-
is-said-to-start-making-chips-for-new-iphones)

~~~
jbob2000
A much more informative article, thank you for sharing!

