
The iPad Pro's chip is not a big deal - josephpmay
http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/14/ipad-pro-a9x-chip/
======
robgibbons
To say that Apple gains nothing by licensing and developing their own ARM
chips is disingenuous. They make some of the best, if not the best, ARM
processors for mobile/general purpose systems. Consistently great battery life
and performance packages, compared to competing ARM packages. After all, iOS
is specifically tuned for A*-chips, and vice versa.

By continuing to develop their own chips based on existing ARM specs, they can
take advantage of the rising tide while maintaining the freedom to make
changes as they want, without waiting on the industry to deliver. I doubt that
Apple has that sort of influence, if any at all, over the architectural
minutiae of Intel chips. It seems more likely they just take the latest of
whatever Intel dishes out, like virtually everyone else.

ARM may never fully compete with Intel processors, but if it ever does, Apple
will be in a great position to own its entire processor lineup. That amount of
top-to-bottom control costs money, but it gives them a greater position in the
market. It doesn't sound crazy at all to me to imagine Apple continuing to
blur the lines between their ARM and Intel systems, to the point at which
maintaining separate architectures no longer makes sense.

~~~
muddi900
Well this is Engadget. But there's a lot to be said about the articles
claiming how Apple is close to surpassing Intel, based Geekbench scores.
Geekbench payloads are different for mobile and desktop, ao there is no
comparison.

~~~
huxley
That was on old versions of Geekbench 3, on recent versions the difference
between mobile and desktop is minor according to Primate. JPoole provided an
example of Geekbench of the A9 running mobile and desktop workload sizes [1].

[1]
[http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37728909&postcoun...](http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37728909&postcount=392)

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chisleu
"ARM and x86 are simply instruction sets (RISC and CISC, respectively).
There's nothing about either set that makes one or the other more efficient."

This senior editor should go back to reporting on vaporizers and video games.

Newer Intel CPUs are even using RISC cores with wrappers for CISC functions
because it is more efficient.

~~~
Veedrac
The opposite is increasingly true, too - micro-op and macro-op fusion joins
multiple instructions into one.

There's no clear-cut line no more.

~~~
millstone
The implementations may have converged but there's still hard differences in
the ISA. RISC (including ARM) has fixed-width instructions, x86 has variable
width. RISC (including ARM again) is load-store, x86 allows memory to be
sources or destinations. So ARM can have simpler decoder logic, if nothing
else.

~~~
Veedrac
Sure, but it's not true that CISC machines are just proxies to RISC ones.

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jakobegger
What impresses me most about this years upgrade is that the graphics
performance of the iPad Pro is better than my 13" Macbook Pro in some
benchmarks. This is why they can say "desktop class performance".

Anyway, the title is misleading; the article talks only about the CPU whereas
chip implies the whole SoC. But that doesn't matter. The whole article is
written rather one sided by someone who just copied what a clueless analyst
told him.

I can't wait for Anandtech's full review on the A9X SoC. They already have a
short preview on their site: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9780/taking-notes-
with-ipad-pr...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9780/taking-notes-with-ipad-
pro/2)

------
cm2187
In all fairness, in a normal office use, the CPU is very rarely max-ed out,
and an ipad pro may be able to do the task as well as a laptop.

It matters more to users doing graphics and videos, which I think is also
probably more the target population of the ipad pro.

------
kassovic
How much did Intel pay engadget for this article?

~~~
muddi900
I mean how much does Apple pay to all tech blogs to pretend that iPad is still
relevant.

Cynicism is easy.

------
tdkl
It's specially not a big deal considering they shipped with iOS 9 who stutters
in UI operations. Hardware is nothing without software and it seems Apple is
forgetting that more and more every year in search of revenue.

~~~
billions
This. When you're making enormous margins on the hardware it's hard to
prioritize the software platform which indirectly drives the majority of long
term revenue.

