Apple A5X quad-core confusion, explained

Re:Apple A5X quad-core confusion, explained by pohl on Thursday March 08, 2012 @04:00PM (#3681606)

"Core" is a very well established term in the GPU market as well. I thought the way the spoke of it in their presentation was pretty clear.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

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Re:Apple A5X quad-core confusion, explained by ajross on Thursday March 08, 2012 @04:20PM (#3681704)

No, it's really not. Neither NVIDIA nor AMD use it in their own marketing, nor does Intel for its Graphics parts. The tech press does, but (and this is important) only as a means to explanation via reference to the term from the CPU world. And even when they do, they have to throw in a ton of caveats about how "cores" don't match up between the very different architectures, etc...

Apple's use of the term "Quad-Core" in that slide is confusing. I don't see that there's any meaningful doubt about that. The more interesting thing is whether it was deliberately confusing.

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Re:Apple A5X quad-core confusion, explained by Symmetry on Thursday March 08, 2012 @04:41PM (#3681805)

"Core" isn't even really that well defined for CPUs, look at the controversy over whether AMD's new architecture is 4 clusters with 8 cores, or if you should really count the the clusters as cores but with two threads each.

A good way to do it might be to count the number of structures that can independently schedule memory operations, in which case AMD is correct to call their chips 8 core, but if you use that definition then the "512 core" GPUs are suddenly only 32 cores. Or you could count independent execution units so that the GPU is still 512 cores, but then your "4 core" CPU is now suddenly 12 cores.

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Re:Apple A5X quad-core confusion, explained by rsynnott on Thursday March 08, 2012 @06:41PM (#3682268)

> Neither NVIDIA nor AMD use it in their own marketing, nor does Intel for its Graphics parts.

Imagination Technology (the makers of the SGX 543MPWhatever), though, _does_. A particularly confusing usage; in this context it means 16 SIMDs. NVidia occasionally also refers to the Tegra 3's GPU as being 12 core; _they_ mean that it has 12 SIMD units.

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Re:Apple A5X quad-core confusion, explained by rayiner on Thursday March 08, 2012 @05:17PM (#3681952)

"Core" is used in the context of the PowerVR SGXMP chipset in the iPad 3. See this Engadget article from January: http://egglets.com/news/2011/01/28/id-51851/sony-ngp-gpu-sgx...

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Re:Apple A5X quad-core confusion, explained by pohl on Thursday March 08, 2012 @10:52PM (#3682826)

Neither NVIDIA nor AMD use it in their own marketing, nor does Intel for its Graphics parts.

Well, that doesn't appear to be factual.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

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