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A comment on The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster and More Efficient. Parent comment

Re:The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster and More Eff... by deaddodo on Monday October 04, 2021 @03:18PM (#28750874)
> The first 64-bit ARM SOC was argued not to be revolutionary because it offered only evolutionary levels of performance comparable to previous Apple CPUs.

It sounds like you are conflating AArch64 with Apple. Apple had nothing to do with AArch64, it was developed by ARM in-house; Apple simply released the first AArch64-compatible core (outside of ARM's Cortex series).

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Re:The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster and More Eff... by monocasa on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @12:20AM (#28755464)
That's not what I've heard. The rumor is that AArch64 is as much Apple's as it is ARM's. That's why they're able to flaunt the normal restrictions of the architectural license: creating custom instructions, and not implementing parts of the ISA.
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Re:The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster and More Eff... by deaddodo on Friday October 08, 2021 @12:28AM (#28795749)
There is no rumor. AArch64 was designed by and is owned by ARM, as is all of the ARM IP.

Apple is able to do what they want because they have an architectural license; not a core license. It's the same reason Nvidia, Cavium, etc are able to design their own cores irrespective of the Cortex series. That's what an architectural license is for. While MediaTek, HiSilicon, etc are limited to using the Cortex SIP.

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Re:The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster and More Eff... by simonh on Monday October 04, 2021 @03:38PM (#28751117)
I’m fully aware of that. Apple released the first SOC implementing it.
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Re:The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster and More Eff... by deaddodo on Friday October 08, 2021 @12:34AM (#28795779)
The Cortex-A53/A57 was the first core to implement it. And a Mali+Cortex-A53 vanilla SOC is the first implementation.

Then AppliedMicro had a hardware version to demo.

Apple simply had the first to market consumer product with one. Them buying up a good chunk of the fab space needed to produce them at the time probably contributed to that.

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