S|A: (rumour) Apple dumps Intel from laptop lines

[jiffylube1024]

This could be an incredible boon for their laptops - the battery life would be incredible, and it would allow much thinner, cooler running devices.

For the desktop market, other than a chic ultra slim system, this move seems utterly pointless, except to consolidate their market top-to-bottom with ARM-based systems.

 

[drizek]

Apple has supported a pretty wide array of architectures with a single piece of software before. 32bit intel, 32bit powerpc, 64 bit intel, 64bit powerpc, single core, multicore, multisocket, etc. And don't forget Mac OS 9 emulation.

I don't think that they will necessarily need to switch their desktop systems from x86.

 

[OS]

And thats my point, it doesn't. Having a low power CPU on a large device gives you much more consistent battery performance. Apple will not sell a tablet that gets 5 hours of life playing video and 10 hours reading books. Stable/consistent battery life is as big a part of the user experience as long battery life. Battery life is also "buffered" by the ambient light sensor, that keeps LCD power draw relatively consistent.

so basically you're saying apple is going to build a 15.6" ipad 2

 

[Voo]

x86 CPUs place a glass ceiling on battery life. You're not going to get more than 10 hours or so on a normal system, even if it is doing nothing and the display is turned off.

No, "current" x86 that aren't meant for such devices don't get more than.. wait 10hours doing nothing and display turned off? So the 13" macbooks and co that get 11h+ battery life while light browsing and listening to itunes are just a chimera?

So even your basic assumption doesn't hold since late 2010 anymore - and 12h for a modern low power CPU based on a new process node is easily conceivable (sorry, does already exist I mean), which should be fine for the vast majority of the notebook market (though still not interesting for smartphones).

 

[georgec84]

This could be an incredible game changer.

 

[drizek]

No, "current" x86 that aren't meant for such devices don't get more than.. wait 10hours doing nothing and display turned off? So the 13" macbooks and co that get 11h+ battery life while light browsing and listening to itunes are just a chimera?

So even your basic assumption doesn't hold since late 2010 anymore - and 12h for a modern low power CPU based on a new process node is easily conceivable (sorry, does already exist I mean), which should be fine for the vast majority of the notebook market (though still not interesting for smartphones).

I said normal system. The median laptop is not a $1300 Mac. You can get a thinkpad that does 24 hours on a charge, but that's not what we're talking about.

What I'm talking about is my Macbook Air, which can get anywhere between 7 hours on a charge in light use and under 3 hours in heavy use. ARM will change that. You will get 7 hours in heavy use and 7 hours in light use because the CPU draw will be negligible.

so basically you're saying apple is going to build a 15.6" ipad 2

I don't know if you're being sarcastic but, yes, that is exactly what Apple is going to do, eventually. We are already seeing macs become more like the iPad with the Macbook Air and OS X Lion. There have already been rumors of a 15" Air. Once they port OS X(probably OS 11 at that point) to ARM, it will be the next logical progression. Again, I mentioned before that even a 45nm Core 2 Duo is enough in an Air to deliver long battery life, but Apple wants consistency of battery life as well, and that is where ARM comes in.

 

[OS]

I said normal system. The median laptop is not a $1300 Mac. You can get a thinkpad that does 24 hours on a charge, but that's not what we're talking about.

What I'm talking about is my Macbook Air, which can get anywhere between 7 hours on a charge in light use and under 3 hours in heavy use. ARM will change that. You will get 7 hours in heavy use and 7 hours in light use because the CPU draw will be negligible.

lol do you have any idea what you are talking about

it is physically impossible to build a chip that uses the same power at idle and full load.
Regardless of instruction set. Transistor switching consumes power.

EVEN IF such a magic unicorn CPU existed, memory, hdd/sdd, wireless radio again obviously consume more power active than idle or off.

what you're claiming is impossible.

 

[drizek]

No, you're just being pedantic.

Obviously an ARM chip uses more power at load than when idle. My point is that it doesn't use so much more power that it would make a difference in battery life that can be measured in hours.

The iPad is never "off". It is always idle or in use. SSD, memory, wireless are always running. And, yes, so is the CPU.

But you'll notice that I am referring to light versus heavy use, not idle versus heavy use. My two use cases are reading a book and watching a movie. On X86, one is low stress and the other is very high stress. My Macbook Air can probably do 8 hours of book reading and 3 hours of 720p movie watching. My iPad can do 10 hours of each. In both cases, the only difference in power draw is the SOC/CPU/GPU utilization. The LCD is on, the wireless is on, etc.

Apple advertises 10 hours of use on the iPad. Most people don't want to think about whether games use more power than watching movies. They just expect to use their device for 10 hours.

 

[Chiropteran]

Apple advertises 10 hours of use on the iPad. Most people don't want to think about whether games use more power than watching movies. They just expect to use their device for 10 hours.

Your entire argument is flawed. The iPad does NOT get the same battery life for heavy and light loads. In fact, it's battery life is nearly cut in half under heavy load, exactly like the hypothetical laptop you keep bringing up.

http://gizmodo.com/5510095/ipad-test-notes-battery-life

 

[cotak13]

Your entire argument is flawed. The iPad does NOT get the same battery life for heavy and light loads. In fact, it's battery life is nearly cut in half under heavy load, exactly like the hypothetical laptop you keep bringing up.

http://gizmodo.com/5510095/ipad-test-notes-battery-life

Dude, don't you know it's magical? Fairies also will fly out of your arse (never minding why you'd want that or why they'd want to go there in the first place)when you own an ipad 2.

 

[Zen0]

Your entire argument is flawed. The iPad does NOT get the same battery life for heavy and light loads. In fact, it's battery life is nearly cut in half under heavy load, exactly like the hypothetical laptop you keep bringing up.

http://gizmodo.com/5510095/ipad-test-notes-battery-life

The awesome thing about my iPad is that it can get 10 hours of Netflix play under medium brightness with ease.

 

[Phynaz]

My two use cases are reading a book and watching a movie. On X86, one is low stress and the other is very high stress. My Macbook Air can probably do 8 hours of book reading and 3 hours of 720p movie watching. My iPad can do 10 hours of each.

Watching a video on the iPad basically is running the CPU at idle. It has dedicated fixed function hardware for video decode and display that your Macbook doesn't.

Your example doesn't hold.

 

[drizek]

Your entire argument is flawed. The iPad does NOT get the same battery life for heavy and light loads. In fact, it's battery life is nearly cut in half under heavy load, exactly like the hypothetical laptop you keep bringing up.

http://gizmodo.com/5510095/ipad-test-notes-battery-life

That wasn't a "heavy load", it was a torture test. If anything, it proves exactly what I've been saying, and the authors of the article agree.

We tried to run the iPad's battery down as fast as possible, and perhaps short of continuously spinning every spinnable element in the crazy Elements app, our tests show that you can expect to get at least 6 hours of juice no matter what you're doing. And it's likely that you'll get much more.

Watching a video on the iPad basically is running the CPU at idle. It has dedicated fixed function hardware for video decode and display that your Macbook doesn't.

Your example doesn't hold.

You'll find that it does hold, and exactly for that reason. Obviously you and I know how ARM works, but 99.9% of iPad buyers don't, and they don't care. That's why it is important for Apple to be able to deliver long battery life no matter what you're doing. They don't want people to have to think about how their hardware works, it's supposed to be magic.

 

[Chiropteran]

But you'll notice that I am referring to light versus heavy use, not idle versus heavy use. My two use cases are reading a book and watching a movie. On X86, one is low stress and the other is very high stress. My Macbook Air can probably do 8 hours of book reading and 3 hours of 720p movie watching. My iPad can do 10 hours of each. In both cases, the only difference in power draw is the SOC/CPU/GPU utilization. The LCD is on, the wireless is on, etc.

Apple advertises 10 hours of use on the iPad. Most people don't want to think about whether games use more power than watching movies. They just expect to use their device for 10 hours.

tried to run the iPad's battery down as fast as possible, and perhaps short of continuously spinning every spinnable element in the crazy Elements app, our tests show that you can expect to get at least 6 hours of juice

If anything, it proves exactly what I've been saying, and the authors of the article agree.

What kind of math do you use where 6=10? Under heavy use, the ipad2's battery life is reduced from 10 hours to 6. If people expect the ipad to always last 10 hours on a charge, as you imply, they will be sorely disappointed when they find it doesn't under heavy use.

 

[sxr7171]

I said normal system. The median laptop is not a $1300 Mac. You can get a thinkpad that does 24 hours on a charge, but that's not what we're talking about.

What I'm talking about is my Macbook Air, which can get anywhere between 7 hours on a charge in light use and under 3 hours in heavy use. ARM will change that. You will get 7 hours in heavy use and 7 hours in light use because the CPU draw will be negligible.



I don't know if you're being sarcastic but, yes, that is exactly what Apple is going to do, eventually. We are already seeing macs become more like the iPad with the Macbook Air and OS X Lion. There have already been rumors of a 15" Air. Once they port OS X(probably OS 11 at that point) to ARM, it will be the next logical progression. Again, I mentioned before that even a 45nm Core 2 Duo is enough in an Air to deliver long battery life, but Apple wants consistency of battery life as well, and that is where ARM comes in.

I like my Air too, and I wouldn't be opposed to a new Air that weighs half as much and lets me check my e-mail and browse which is 99% of what I do with a laptop these days. So yeah, maybe an 11.6" iPad with a thin folding keyboard/screen cover. But for Apple to change their entire laptop lineup to ARM wouldn't be so smart yet. Eventually we know that everything will be in the cloud including image/video processing and even gaming. It might take 10 years but hopefully our internet speeds will allow a service like Onlive to offer true HD quality and very low lag. Switching all portables to ARM now would be jumping the gun.

 

[sxr7171]

What kind of math do you use where 6=10? Under heavy use, the ipad2's battery life is reduced from 10 hours to 6. If people expect the ipad to always last 10 hours on a charge, as you imply, they will be sorely disappointed when they find it doesn't under heavy use.

I haven't tested mine that way, but the basic point is to make the CPU power use a small fraction of the overall power use of the device. So if the LCD is 4w and the CPU is 250mW then the use of the cpu itself doesn't impact the device's battery life as much as it can on today's laptops. On any laptop I can kill a 7 hour battery in 90 minutes or make it last 7 hours all depending on how careful I am with it. The iPad 2 still isn't at that point in hardware design where it can offer 10 hours +/-1 hour, but it's heading in that direction.

 

[drizek]

What kind of math do you use where 6=10? Under heavy use, the ipad2's battery life is reduced from 10 hours to 6. If people expect the ipad to always last 10 hours on a charge, as you imply, they will be sorely disappointed when they find it doesn't under heavy use.

Unlike you, I actually have an iPad, and I've had one for over a year. I have never gotten anywhere close to 6 hours of battery life. What they did was not a heavy use scenario, it was a torture test. The iPad display is extremely bright, the speaker is loud, and your arms would fall off if you played games for 6 hours straight on it. Nobody uses it like they did.

 

[cotak13]

I haven't tested mine that way, but the basic point is to make the CPU power use a small fraction of the overall power use of the device. So if the LCD is 4w and the CPU is 250mW then the use of the cpu itself doesn't impact the device's battery life as much as it can on today's laptops. On any laptop I can kill a 7 hour battery in 90 minutes or make it last 7 hours all depending on how careful I am with it. The iPad 2 still isn't at that point in hardware design where it can offer 10 hours +/-1 hour, but it's heading in that direction.

I think people will soon find that tablets will either stagnate in features and power or their battery life is going to start going towards 5 hours with light use. That or they get bigger and heavier to fit more battery. There's no magic dust that can get away from limitation of current battery technology. More powerful tablets have to burn more power.

 

[smartpatrol]

I think people will soon find that tablets will either stagnate in features and power or their battery life is going to start going towards 5 hours with light use. That or they get bigger and heavier to fit more battery. There's no magic dust that can get away from limitation of current battery technology. More powerful tablets have to burn more power.

No, not really. In tablets and smartphones, the two things that consume the most power are the radios and the screen/backlight.

Tegra 2 and Apple's A5 seem to be more power efficient, or at least equal to, any of the single-core A8-based SOCs out there. I see no reason why future ARM dual-core/quad-core SOCs wouldn't draw similar amounts of power or less.

 

[Voo]

Unlike you, I actually have an iPad, and I've had one for over a year. I have never gotten anywhere close to 6 hours of battery life. What they did was not a heavy use scenario, it was a torture test. The iPad display is extremely bright, the speaker is loud, and your arms would fall off if you played games for 6 hours straight on it. Nobody uses it like they did.

So doing anything besides browsing the internet and hearing music is a torture test for an iPad, but you don't have any problems with using a completely different suite of applications to decide that notebooks just don't have a good enough battery life? And that although there are several notebooks that will do much more heavy lifting and still get 10h+ battery life out of them.

As soon as you integrate the ARM CPUs in larger devices or really anywhere where they HAVE to do some work, suddenly the whole imaginary difference between it and other CPUs will mostly disappear - basic laws of physics apply to ARM CPUs too I've heard. Sure you may need ~5% less energy, but people are somehow all talking about hours of difference and the only way to see that is if one CPU is doing much less work than the other - and then that's a quite useless comparison.

 

[jihe]

Unlike you, I actually have an iPad, and I've had one for over a year. I have never gotten anywhere close to 6 hours of battery life. What they did was not a heavy use scenario, it was a torture test. The iPad display is extremely bright, the speaker is loud, and your arms would fall off if you played games for 6 hours straight on it. Nobody uses it like they did.

Unlike you, some people actually work on their laptop, which means large excel computations, compiling, photo editing. I like to see how the battery life goes when you use your ipad cpu to do those.

 

[OS]

does the ipad even really multitask yet?

I'm sure if you built a netbook with a tiny SSD that only ran one app at a time, with apps from basically a vendor approved list only, battery life would skyrocket.

if you've seen the ipad tear downs it is basically a screen+SOC+big battery with an OS that only does one thing at a time, there is nothing magic about it.

 

[sxr7171]

I think people will soon find that tablets will either stagnate in features and power or their battery life is going to start going towards 5 hours with light use. That or they get bigger and heavier to fit more battery. There's no magic dust that can get away from limitation of current battery technology. More powerful tablets have to burn more power.

Not really. I mean the old iPad was heavier and slower by a huge margin. This one is smaller and way faster. That's what new CPU tech does. The OS seems very efficient with fast browsing that can only better with better software optimizations. I don't see people doing real time encoding on their tablets. The purpose of a tablet is consumption not media editing/creation. More and more things will be optimized for tablets on powerful desktops. Notice when you sync photos to an iPad it causes the PC to optimize the photos for the iPad, the iPad does not have to sit and struggle with such CPU intensive tasks.

I don't know in these tech forums everyone keeps talking about power for power's sake. I used to be like that because I am a hardware enthusiast. I still am, hence the 4Ghz core i7 I keep around, but it is used about 1% of the time now. Only to encode music or video or play intensive games. Mostly I kick off a process via remote desktop and then access the resulting data through the network. Practically speaking, I spend 99% of my computing time consuming text and media. There is absolutely no need to make my tablet heavy, big, and last only 5 hours except to please a hardware enthusiast who must have the most powerful tablet on earth. That isn't the point of a tablet. It is the point of my desktop which will never be carried around until I move. Any manufacturer that builds such a tablet will sell to a few hardcore hardware enthusiasts and lose money, while companies like Apple will make billions making what people would actually use. Which would be a less than 1lb, half inch thick tablet that serves just about any function anyone would need on the go. That isn't the guy at the coffee shop with his 10lb mobile workstation attempting to edit videos while sitting not more than 6 feet from the nearest power outlet. Sure some things can be done for geek cred, but seriously who's going to buy it? People who need to show geek cred at Starbuck's? That's about 5000 people at best nationwide.

 

[drizek]

Unlike you, some people actually work on their laptop, which means large excel computations, compiling, photo editing. I like to see how the battery life goes when you use your ipad cpu to do those.

So doing anything besides browsing the internet and hearing music is a torture test for an iPad, but you don't have any problems with using a completely different suite of applications to decide that notebooks just don't have a good enough battery life? And that although there are several notebooks that will do much more heavy lifting and still get 10h+ battery life out of them.

does the ipad even really multitask yet?

I'm sure if you built a netbook with a tiny SSD that only ran one app at a time, with apps from basically a vendor approved list only, battery life would skyrocket.

if you've seen the ipad tear downs it is basically a screen+SOC+big battery with an OS that only does one thing at a time, there is nothing magic about it.

What is it about the iPad that generates such ignorance?

Why don't you people just go play with one at an apple store? You quite obviously have no idea what it does or what it is for.

I avoid using my laptop for Excel because it doesn't have a number pad. You think I'm going to be using a tablet with no keyboard at all instead?

 

[OS]

lol please tell me what is inaccurate about my post

the better question is have you ever taken a college level EE/CE class??

I do not have an ipad but i've had an iphone and i have a macbook air, there is nothing magical your precious apple products.