Posted by tosh 11 hours ago
But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?
This was done in a cold room. It seems more like a proof of concept for what they could do than something that could actually ship in a phone and sustain those numbers.
> The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).
This is where the magic is happening (I believe). They have these ultra cores with additional extensions which they are pinning the benchmarks to.
Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.
I agree that if each core doesn't "support" the full ISA it's a huge pain (the one generation of Intel AVX-512-but-not parts were incredible), but that hasn't been common in years. Usually (and in this case, according to my reading) the small cores get a horrible slow/decoder-emulated implementation of every instruction, so that if you schedule on the "wrong" core you don't trap but just run really slowly instead.
Otherwise, heterogeneous architectures are the present and future of mobile and consumer desktops and have been for years. Desktop OSes are getting better and mobile OSes are just fine at scheduling across different core families (the higher level of abstraction everyone complains about in mobile apps actually helps a lot here).
It is still not a bad results though. And we are about to see MediaTek Dimensity 9600 based on ARM C2-Ultra.
From what I recall reading, the impressive performance of Apple mobile CPUs is partly attributable to throwing more silicon area at the problem while not being as cost sensitive (no need to share margin with SoC vendor)
1) Pick a historically extremely innovative and disciplined culture which also happens to have massive human capital
2) Please arbitrary artificial ill-thought-out economic constraints on them
3) wait a while
4) get a bunch of magnificent spanking in return (AI, chips, etc...)
I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.
It doesn't exist. MacBook's simply have the best hardware, but terrible software/philosophy of software.
So I'd say their moat is hardware in general. Performance, yes to an extent, but it's performance vs heat vs energy vs battery life and all their peripherals.
This is Zenbook A16 right now, with recent patches posted to Linux ARM mailing list that support it in full.
Ghastly was macOS on an Intel MacBook Air.
But they have stopped making premium laptop since then.
the a20pro and what not will match or beat it and the cycle will continue.
if this chip turns into a decent desktop chip then arm linux laptops might be very nice.