5 ms·

The author is way off base carping about the CPU. It's the fastest CPU on a mobile device because it's likely a 3-issue ARM11-derived CPU with out-of-order exe

The author is way off base carping about the CPU. It's the fastest CPU on a mobile device because it's likely a 3-issue ARM11-derived CPU with out-of-order execution: that means PA Semi (now part of Apple) has designed a chip based on the Cortex A9 or started with an ARM11 and tacked on similar features, like Qualcomm did with the Snapdragon (in the Nexus One) instead of opting for an Cortex A8-derived core. When the Tegra2 and OMAP4 (Cortex-A9 derived ARM CPUs)start shipping in bulk the playing field is going to be leveled: now everyones got access to a 3-issue OOOE ARM11. Only these will (optionally) be multi-core, something Apple probably isn't interested in as it's not doing multitasking.

jodrellblank 17y ago
When XYZ is released the playing field is going to be leveled When manufacturers start taking notice that unresponsive, laggy, slow devices are unpleasant to use, the playing field can start levelling. Until then everyone else is doing a Wintel - hardware many times faster, normal activities just as slow as ever. It's not hardware, it's software that matters, it's design. I've been humming and hawing about whether this will be worth a look given the obvious things to gripe about. I heard on one of the post-announcement streams that the first impressions were roughly "heavier than expected, unbelievably responsive". This quote from DF "if I had to sum up the device with one word, that word would be “fast”." really pushes me strongly in favour. I'm interested. If nobody else is going to push for responsive software and Apple are, then I'm going to lean more in Apple's direction.
- barrkel 17y ago
  I would rather put it the other way around: one of the most noticeable things about the iPhone / iPod touch is its slowness, the little glitches in the animations where the rendering drops a few frames, the pauses before there's a response to pressing the big button. Wintel very much isn't "slow as ever", in my experience. Desktop machines are another class of hardware altogether; I have 12GB of memory, an SSD, 8 logical cores and 2 monitors on my desktop - nothing slow, laggy or unresponsive about it.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    The iPhone has the feel of a device where they care about responsiveness but the hardware isn't up to it. Every Windows mobile phone I've seen has the feel that the software is built badly and nothing the hardware can do will help. Wintel very much isn't "slow as ever" You are right, I'm spoiled by fast hardware, compared to the machines of yesteryear my desktop is a joy. But a processor capable of tens of billions of operations per second compared to my human senses - nothing should take long enough that I can notice it. When using Visio and accidentally mousing over the My Shapes menu the whole program locks up for about 10 seconds while it finds zero shapes from a network drive and then doesn't cache the result. While using VMWare vSphere client, almost every click, view change, menu popup, any action at all takes a blinking and a flickering and a delay. Explorer happily does slow folder and drive refreshes and ignores right click popup menu requests on many occasions. IE 8 opening a new tab is a laggy occasion. SQL Server Management Studio 2008 is a blinkenflicker fest all over. Here and there, slow calls are in UI threads, network requests are blocking, network requests are slow out of all proportion with the amount of data that needs to be transferred due to odd protocols and many layers, crunching data is not offloaded onto other cores, frequent results aren't cached, the spinny circle cursor and the "program is not responding whoops it's back now" affair happen all too often. I can see two reasons. A) it's hard. B) It's not a priority. I can forgive the iPhone because it mostly works well. I can forgive small companies writing desktop software. I can't forgive the likes of Microsoft and VMWare, because they have masses of cash and eat hard problems for breakfast, so the only conclusion is that they don't care that I get a twinge of reluctance to use their software, a frowny lemon eating face when I wade through it, when I'm drumming my fingers and using the free time to grumble about their software to my colleagues. Fast responsive small simple software is a joy to use, I am cheered by PuTTY, Paint.NET, 7-zip, VirtualBox, VLC, AnyClient, Vim. Even Adobe deserve praise for the improvements in startup time from Adobe Reader 6 and the plugin fiasco. VMWare vSphere client, as it fires up the coal boilers and defrosts the Java VM, whips at the tired donkey graph drawing libraries and runs all it's server queries through a dialup connection simulator, oh no. No no no. If Apple are going to focus on speed, I'm going to focus on giving them my cash. I can feel my mental liking of the iPad converging, decision weightings on it's faults are weakening and it's pros are strengthening, a preliminary RDF field is forming to buffer my perception of the change in my bank account, the justifications are coming more and more easily to the fore. I will only end up disappointed, apps will chug, serious web pages will lag and layout will take ages, iPhoto will arbitrarily slow while scrolling ... but by then it will be far far too late. :/
- pyre 17y ago
  > It's not hardware, it's software that matters, it's design. Well, we are discussing the Daring Fireball post, and Gruber does mention in multiple places 'setting the software aside.' So bringing the software into the discussion is kind of side-stepping a discussion of the actual article. If anything you should be calling Gruber out for ignoring the software, rather than jumping all over the parent poster.
tptacek 17y ago
It's not true that Apple isn't doing multitasking. They do plenty of multitasking. They just don't expose it to third party applications.
macrael 17y ago
Multi-core processors are plenty useful in a non-multitasking environment. A single process with many threads is sped up by having multiple cores. Apple is definitely interested in multi-core processors, look at Grand Central on OS X. I would argue that it is one of the most interesting approaches to multi threaded/multi core programs in recent OS history.
- catch23 17y ago
  multi-core is also easier to scale on power efficiency -- turning off cores when speed isn't needed.

jodrellblank 17y ago

When XYZ is released the playing field is going to be leveled When manufacturers start taking notice that unresponsive, laggy, slow devices are unpleasant to use, the playing field can start levelling. Until then everyone else is doing a Wintel - hardware many times faster, normal activities just as slow as ever. It's not hardware, it's software that matters, it's design. I've been humming and hawing about whether this will be worth a look given the obvious things to gripe about. I heard on one of the post-announcement streams that the first impressions were roughly "heavier than expected, unbelievably responsive". This quote from DF "if I had to sum up the device with one word, that word would be “fast”." really pushes me strongly in favour. I'm interested. If nobody else is going to push for responsive software and Apple are, then I'm going to lean more in Apple's direction.

barrkel 17y ago
I would rather put it the other way around: one of the most noticeable things about the iPhone / iPod touch is its slowness, the little glitches in the animations where the rendering drops a few frames, the pauses before there's a response to pressing the big button. Wintel very much isn't "slow as ever", in my experience. Desktop machines are another class of hardware altogether; I have 12GB of memory, an SSD, 8 logical cores and 2 monitors on my desktop - nothing slow, laggy or unresponsive about it.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  The iPhone has the feel of a device where they care about responsiveness but the hardware isn't up to it. Every Windows mobile phone I've seen has the feel that the software is built badly and nothing the hardware can do will help. Wintel very much isn't "slow as ever" You are right, I'm spoiled by fast hardware, compared to the machines of yesteryear my desktop is a joy. But a processor capable of tens of billions of operations per second compared to my human senses - nothing should take long enough that I can notice it. When using Visio and accidentally mousing over the My Shapes menu the whole program locks up for about 10 seconds while it finds zero shapes from a network drive and then doesn't cache the result. While using VMWare vSphere client, almost every click, view change, menu popup, any action at all takes a blinking and a flickering and a delay. Explorer happily does slow folder and drive refreshes and ignores right click popup menu requests on many occasions. IE 8 opening a new tab is a laggy occasion. SQL Server Management Studio 2008 is a blinkenflicker fest all over. Here and there, slow calls are in UI threads, network requests are blocking, network requests are slow out of all proportion with the amount of data that needs to be transferred due to odd protocols and many layers, crunching data is not offloaded onto other cores, frequent results aren't cached, the spinny circle cursor and the "program is not responding whoops it's back now" affair happen all too often. I can see two reasons. A) it's hard. B) It's not a priority. I can forgive the iPhone because it mostly works well. I can forgive small companies writing desktop software. I can't forgive the likes of Microsoft and VMWare, because they have masses of cash and eat hard problems for breakfast, so the only conclusion is that they don't care that I get a twinge of reluctance to use their software, a frowny lemon eating face when I wade through it, when I'm drumming my fingers and using the free time to grumble about their software to my colleagues. Fast responsive small simple software is a joy to use, I am cheered by PuTTY, Paint.NET, 7-zip, VirtualBox, VLC, AnyClient, Vim. Even Adobe deserve praise for the improvements in startup time from Adobe Reader 6 and the plugin fiasco. VMWare vSphere client, as it fires up the coal boilers and defrosts the Java VM, whips at the tired donkey graph drawing libraries and runs all it's server queries through a dialup connection simulator, oh no. No no no. If Apple are going to focus on speed, I'm going to focus on giving them my cash. I can feel my mental liking of the iPad converging, decision weightings on it's faults are weakening and it's pros are strengthening, a preliminary RDF field is forming to buffer my perception of the change in my bank account, the justifications are coming more and more easily to the fore. I will only end up disappointed, apps will chug, serious web pages will lag and layout will take ages, iPhoto will arbitrarily slow while scrolling ... but by then it will be far far too late. :/
pyre 17y ago
> It's not hardware, it's software that matters, it's design. Well, we are discussing the Daring Fireball post, and Gruber does mention in multiple places 'setting the software aside.' So bringing the software into the discussion is kind of side-stepping a discussion of the actual article. If anything you should be calling Gruber out for ignoring the software, rather than jumping all over the parent poster.

tptacek 17y ago

It's not true that Apple isn't doing multitasking. They do plenty of multitasking. They just don't expose it to third party applications.

macrael 17y ago

Multi-core processors are plenty useful in a non-multitasking environment. A single process with many threads is sped up by having multiple cores. Apple is definitely interested in multi-core processors, look at Grand Central on OS X. I would argue that it is one of the most interesting approaches to multi threaded/multi core programs in recent OS history.

catch23 17y ago
multi-core is also easier to scale on power efficiency -- turning off cores when speed isn't needed.