Is the author seriously so deep in the "Apple-is-the-world" bubble that he has not yet heard of BigLittle?
In what way is the A11 different?
In what way is the A11 different?
> My theory was that this should show a strongly bimodal distribution of running times on the A11.
...and then he proceeds to devise a test. This is ultimately how you might verify the functionality of the hardware and the Darwin scheduler. If it were naive, the test might not have behaved this way.
BTW if anyone wants to do similar experimentation with a MUCH cheaper target, you can use the ODROID Xu4 (Exynos 5422, < 100 USD).
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE#Heterogeneous_m...
https://www.cnet.com/news/nvidias-tegra-3-cpu-increases-perf...
Why the rude comment?
Whether that's worth being "rude" or not is an exercise for the reader.
[1] Edit to add: and producing fairly "meh" results as far as power consumption goes vs. their more conventional quad-core competitors. Honestly it's not impossible that Apple found some tricks to exploit here that the other SoC vendors haven't, but this post didn't find them.
The blog context is made clear in the second sentence "With the release of the iPhone X, I set out to see if I could observe these heterogeneous cores in action.". If the context was "Here is the current state of heterogeneous computing on mobile devices", you might have a point.
As to whether its innovative or not, Surely, you agree that designing a chip is more than just the bumper sticker definition of "it has cores with different speeds". But maybe you're right and it isn't innovative at all. It would be interesting to find out.
>This is not particularly innovative ground, and to write a whole blog post without even mentioning the fact or doing a comparison with any of the existing devices implies that maybe the author didn't do enough research.
I don't think it implies that at all. If a C++ dev is excited about a new C++ feature and writes an article, it doesn't mean they're automatically ignorant about other languages that already have this feature.
You're actually part of the problem by being more concerned about me stepping on toes than the actual issue at hand. Funny how I never see mods like you step in when other inflammatory bait is posted though such as the threads on women in tech. Turns out its okay to barf out any garbage you like as long as you mask your tone well enough and it doesn't offend the reactionaries.
Don't blame me, I'm only reacting to low-effort commentary in turn. Quality discourse begets quality discourse, not the opposite. If you ban me, it'll only vindicate my belief that HN is more concerned about being an echo chamber for techbros and is diametrically opposed to any dissent.
If mods like you did their jobs, low-effort crap would be hidden and the users chided, but instead you shoot the messengers who try to preserve some semblance of quality. I'm usually a civil contributor which is obvious from my post history, but I won't just sit by while the culture of HN deteriorates and others tolerate it because somehow low-effort commentary is equivalent to every other type. Sorry I didn't coddle those users when I pointed out the circlejerk :(.
If the HN you want to create is one where people just mindlessly regurgitate the latest tech meme and make low-effort pop culture references, more power to you.
On the other hand, he had enough time to go on a history lesson about multicore for PowerPC first introduced for Macs, which I found considerably less relevant, technically.
Would you mind reading https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and following those rules when commenting here, even when someone hasn't mentioned a relevant technology in their article?
My understanding of the A11 is that it's fully heterogeneous with the capability to run and assign code across any permutation of its physical cores.
Do not confuse "I did not mention this other thing that is not entirely off topic" with "I was not aware of this other thing."
Could you cite one that supports your snark?