5 ms·
> They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4 ...but A series chips were never in
by objclxt 4y ago
> They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4
...but A series chips were never intended for laptops or desktops? And by all accounts, the A series nearly always out-competed comparable QC Snapdragon chips.
- nicoburns 4y agoThey weren't... but evidence is that that's only because they didn't have competitive performance for those applications. Once the performance caught up they did choose to put them in laptops and desktops.
- cma 4y agoA chips had more relaxed memory ordering that couldn't work well for emulating x64. M chips can toggle the memory ordering guarantees.
- nicoburns 4y agoI mean that's true. But that doesn't prevent comparing performance of natively compiled ARM binaries in A chips vs natively compiled x64 binaries on x64 chips.
- qwytw 4y agoI think A chips were quite considerably ahead of low-power Intel chips (e.g. the i7 in MBA) several years before M1 was released. But I guess they didn't believe they could scale it up to compete with higher power i7/i9s shipped in pro macbooks.
- nicoburns 4y agoI suspect it just took them several years to do it. It's no small task!