4 ms·

Is the author seriously so deep in the "Apple-is-the-world" bubble that he has not yet heard of BigLittle? In what way is the A11 different?

• wyldfire 9y ago
  Indeed, other big.LITTLE like designs are out there besides the A11. But the article isn't strictly focused on "Apple is a superior innovator." > My theory was that this should show a strongly bimodal distribution of running times on the A11. ...and then he proceeds to devise a test. This is ultimately how you might verify the functionality of the hardware and the Darwin scheduler. If it were naive, the test might not have behaved this way. BTW if anyone wants to do similar experimentation with a MUCH cheaper target, you can use the ODROID Xu4 (Exynos 5422, < 100 USD).
• haikuginger 9y ago
  I'm not familiar with the current state of bigLITTLE, but at least initially, bigLITTLE clusters weren't capable of heterogeneous compute; you could shift between cache-coherent clusters (use either all four big cores or all four LITTLE cores) or have virtual cores, each made up of one big and one LITTLE core, with the kernel managing which physical core was actually executing threads assigned to the logical core. My understanding of the A11 is that it's fully heterogeneous with the capability to run and assign code across any permutation of its physical cores.
  • zeusk 9y ago
    heterogeneous big.LITTLE implementations are in consumer android devices since late 2013s.
• ksk 9y ago
  >Is the author seriously so deep in the "Apple-is-the-world" bubble that he has not yet heard of BigLittle? Why the rude comment?
  • ajross 9y ago
    In this case it's probably genuine surprise. The ARM big.LITTLE trick (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE) been workable and shipping on real devices for half a decade now[1]. This is not particularly innovative ground, and to write a whole blog post without even mentioning the fact or doing a comparison with any of the existing devices implies that maybe the author didn't do enough research. Whether that's worth being "rude" or not is an exercise for the reader. [1] Edit to add: and producing fairly "meh" results as far as power consumption goes vs. their more conventional quad-core competitors. Honestly it's not impossible that Apple found some tricks to exploit here that the other SoC vendors haven't, but this post didn't find them.
    • ksk 9y ago
      >This is not particularly innovative ground, and to write a whole blog post without even mentioning the fact or doing a comparison with any of the existing devices implies that maybe the author didn't do enough research. The blog context is made clear in the second sentence "With the release of the iPhone X, I set out to see if I could observe these heterogeneous cores in action.". If the context was "Here is the current state of heterogeneous computing on mobile devices", you might have a point. As to whether its innovative or not, Surely, you agree that designing a chip is more than just the bumper sticker definition of "it has cores with different speeds". But maybe you're right and it isn't innovative at all. It would be interesting to find out. >This is not particularly innovative ground, and to write a whole blog post without even mentioning the fact or doing a comparison with any of the existing devices implies that maybe the author didn't do enough research. I don't think it implies that at all. If a C++ dev is excited about a new C++ feature and writes an article, it doesn't mean they're automatically ignorant about other languages that already have this feature.
    • jws 9y ago
      The article clearly begins that this is the first arrival for iOS and this is an exploration of the feature in iOS.
    • mikeash 9y ago
• purell_hack 9y ago
  I got two paragraphs in and said, out loud, "Are you kidding me" because of how masturbatory (for lack of a better term) it reads as. bigLITTLE has been _shipping_ since at least 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE#Implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE#Implementations
• wolf550e 9y ago
  Wikipedia says [1] that ARM big.LITTLE "Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP), which enables the use of all physical cores at the same time" has been "implemented in the Samsung Exynos starting with the Exynos 5 Octa series (5420, 5422, 5430)", available in Q3 2013. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE#Heterogeneous_multi-processing_.28global_task_scheduling.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE#Heterogeneous_m...
  • tasty_freeze 9y ago
    I think the original article is fine as it is and has no need to cite everything which came before. But I wanted to point out that Nvidia Tegra3 shipped with big/little in 2011: https://www.cnet.com/news/nvidias-tegra-3-cpu-increases-performance-while-saving-power/ https://www.cnet.com/news/nvidias-tegra-3-cpu-increases-perf...
• pohl 9y ago
  I couldn't find any quote in the article that supports the suggestion that the author isn't/wasn't unaware of big.LITTLE. Could you cite one that supports your snark?
• mikeash 9y ago
  It's an Apple-focused blog. The A11 may not be doing anything new when considering the wider world, but it's the first Apple CPU to have it. Do not confuse "I did not mention this other thing that is not entirely off topic" with "I was not aware of this other thing."
• valuearb 9y ago
  Well, it's benchmarks are different. It's crushing all the other mobile processors.