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They could have both ARM and x86 chips in their laptops and only spend the extra energy powering on the x86 chip when x86 compatibility is required. They alrea
by JimDabell 10y ago
They could have both ARM and x86 chips in their laptops and only spend the extra energy powering on the x86 chip when x86 compatibility is required. They already do this with GPUs in their laptops and they do a similar thing for their CPUs in iPhone 7.
They'd get a big battery life improvement for the typical case once people migrate away from x86-only software, and developers would have an incentive to port to ARM, while people who absolutely need x86 software won't get left behind.
- trelliscoded 10y agoAn interesting idea. I know that most of the apps I use on my mac are Apple's, so if they ran on a low power arm cord while everything else was on an x86 core I imagine I'd have significant power savings. Apple would have to get the GPU vendors to write drivers for their processors though, which would be a tremendous engineering effort. Intel would likely resist any such proposal for their Iris GPUs though, they're having enough of an existential crisis as it is without worrying about one of their largest customers moving away from their main product.
- masklinn 10y ago> They already do this with GPUs in their laptops and they do a similar thing for their CPUs in iPhone 7. They do very different things on those. Both GPUs "speak" opengl/metal/whatever, and both core types of the iPhone 7 speak ARMv8. Handling concurrent ISA in the same machine is a very different problem (early PS3 did it to retain PS2 compatibility, they actually embedded PS2 hardware directly).