Re:Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel
by gumby on Sunday July 12, 2020 @07:57PM
(#23815776)
I assume it’s the double justification for Apple’s marketing to have chosen the phrase “Apple silicon”. One of course is to steer the discussion away from the ARM architecture itself and any sense of commoditization. This was a problem with the intel transition, though they were in a tighter situation so simply didn’t message around it ... and that was fine.
The second justification though is that the CPU architecture is less significant on the system scale. The SOC really is a ”system” (we used to predict this in the 1990s but couldn’t get there then) with a lot of other some what specialized functional units designed to work together.
In that the A series are more reminiscent of the mainframes of old, where the CPU really was merely the central processing unit and a tremendous amount of processing went on in other processing units.
The second justification though is that the CPU architecture is less significant on the system scale. The SOC really is a ”system” (we used to predict this in the 1990s but couldn’t get there then) with a lot of other some what specialized functional units designed to work together.
In that the A series are more reminiscent of the mainframes of old, where the CPU really was merely the central processing unit and a tremendous amount of processing went on in other processing units.