Power, frequency, management: how M1 E cores win

Re:Power, frequency, management: how M1 E cores win by masklinn on Monday January 03, 2022 @01:44PM (#29784537)

> Apple IS designing its own CPUs. They have been designing their own CPUs since their A4 processor.

That is not quite true, the A4 is an internal SoC design but commonly "CPU" in an SoC context will designate the cores (the µarch). A4 used a standard and pedestrian Cortex-A8 there.

The A6 is where they started designing the cores in-house (to very impressive and pretty universally praised results, especially for a first iteration), following which they straight nuked the entire field by releasing the first AArch64 core in A7.

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Re:Power, frequency, management: how M1 E cores win by kuhsaft on Monday January 03, 2022 @02:16PM (#29784998)

> A4 used a standard and pedestrian Cortex-A8 there.

My understanding was that the A4 Cortex-A8 was a modified version by Intrinsity which apple bought out, but, you’re right. Apple didn’t start actually designing their own cores until the A6 [1].

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4293287-setting-record-...

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