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Comment by aquamo | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for this - with the release of the A12X Bionic, I've wanted to do something similar - i.e. build some specialized tools to leverage that CPU for atypical / non-mobile use cases.

I wish Apple would get on with it and include Terminal.App and the FreeBSD user land and Xcode for iOS so we can start running a shell and doing interesting things with this new hardware :-)

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Yes, as a previous-gen iPad Pro owner, the biggest regret with it is, that I cannot run even some very basic Unix programs on this great hardware. A more open iPad - even if the whole Unix userland would be contained to a sandbox - would be a dream.

It seems Apple has some really good profit margins on it's hardware. So, in theory nothing is stopping System76 or a new competitor from introducing high quality iPad-like Unix systems.

...Except lack of design team to do all the custom design work that Apple does. The systems you talk about are assembled from off the shelf parts.

Except that System76 or who ever would need to be capable of building iPad-like hardware. I really don‘t see that, at least not a a competitive price point.

If you're on a jailbreakable iOS version you can do this

The common refrain I hear from hardware guys is that the uncore is the hardest part by far. The bulk of design time is spent connecting multiple cores together. Great single thread perf doesn't imply an easy path to multicore.

Still, the A-series multicore benchmarks have been pretty impressive as well.

The problems arise when you start getting into double digit core counts. At 4 you can make pretty reasonable MUXes still. Above that you need to start making serious trade-offs to either Fmax or latency.

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