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Apple just demonstrated with the A5x that this was something they were willing to do. Is that right? I thought the two license types were for the full core des
by twoodfin 14y ago
Apple just demonstrated with the A5x that this was something they were willing to do.
Is that right? I thought the two license types were for the full core designs (for those who just want to stamp out a pre-designed core) and an ISA license (for those who want to craft their own implementation). I was unaware having an ISA license entitled Apple to introduce new instructions, nor that they had added new instructions to the A6. (The A5x, AFAIK, is just a Cortex A9 at heart).
- ChuckMcM 14y agoWas referring to news we read about the iPhone 5 like this coverage : http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/apple-using-custom-arm-core-for-a6-to-balance-performancewatt/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/apple-using-custom-arm-... which discussed changes Apple made to the architecture of their ARM SoC to achieve their goals. These are not changes they could have made to an Intel SoC. They could have asked for them, but if they got them then so would everyone else.
- bradleyjg 14y agoIt looks like the instruction set they implemented was ARMv7s which is notable for its support of VFPv4 (hardware fused multiply add and better support for single precision vector floating point arithmetic.) While Apple may certainly have been involved as far as I know, these are ARM technologies. In general if you want a new instruction I'd think you are better off going to a CISC vendor than a RISC one.
- wmf 14y agoPutting Apple aside, an ISA license does allow adding instructions; see XScale's WMMX (even though it failed in the market).