Potentially the longest thread in history...

[Oreo]

I just learnt something really surprising and really interesting.

At first, people thought the A6 SoC in the IP5 was going to be ARM A9 quad based. Then the keynote came around, and apples lack of any mention of quad core, yet still boasting better battery life and double performance led to many beleiving it was the A15, even the experts like Anand beleived this. But now Anand has revealed that actually, it is a custom Apple designed processor. It is based off the ARM instruction set, but that is all - other than that, it is entirely Apple designed.


Didn't think Apple would ever actually do this.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

I just learnt something really surprising and really interesting.

At first, people thought the A6 SoC in the IP5 was going to be ARM A9 quad based. Then the keynote came around, and apples lack of any mention of quad core, yet still boasting better battery life and double performance led to many beleiving it was the A15, even the experts like Anand beleived this. But now Anand has revealed that actually, it is a custom Apple designed processor. It is based off the ARM instruction set, but that is all - other than that, it is entirely Apple designed.


Didn't think Apple would ever actually do this.

I'm guessing they did it so they wouldn't be tied to ARMs roadmap for future devices. Although until we see more specs and performance it's hard to tell how successful they have been, it appears to be quite a bit slower than Krait which is Qualcomm's custom ARM design but without knowing the core count of A6 it's hard to say how significant that is.

Given the pile of cash they are sitting on they could have just bought AMD and Global Foundries if they wanted to go the 100% in house route.

 

[Yami]

My friend's usage on his Virgin Media account

 

[hikaricloud]

Relevant:

Thank you. Most people these days don't understand how many proprietary charging ports there really were until smartphones started to become the norm. Samsung, LG, Pantech, Nokia, Sony...ALL the big names in cell phones had different chargers for different phones at the same time. I mentioned in another thread, there were times when we [I worked for AT&T] would need to keep 8-10 [minimum] different official AT&T chargers for a single brand at any given time. Sure, a couple of those were for some slightly older phones that we had just stopped selling recently, but most of those were for what we had on sale at that time. Was the same for Verizon as well when I worked there.

I certainly remember it was neigh impossible (and expensive) to get anything USB on those phones, since it had to be a specific proprietary charger port to USB adapter...if you changed phones, even within the same brand, that expensive cable could be worthless.

EDIT: Looking at that kit, it's only for all GSM phones, too...

 

[Fat.Clown]

My friend's usage on his Virgin Media account

I wish i got his upload speeds.
my week long freeleech results

 

[hikaricloud]

Wow, this is kinda crazy.

 

[Yami]

I just anonygasmed.

 

[hikaricloud]

I just anonygasmed.

Kinda crazy, but interesting concept.

Uros' Goodspeed hotspot packs 10 SIM cards, says roaming is for chumps -- Engadget

 

[PP Mguire]

Eh, I have had smartphones for 4 years now and have only had 2 different ports.

 

[hikaricloud]

Eh, I have had smartphones for 4 years now and have only had 2 different ports.

Right, once smartphones started becoming the norm after the iPhone launch, methinks the big companies finally started to understand that proprietary stinks, especially with phones that have higher capabilities to their flip predecessors. More people would be needing USB cables for them as opposed to flip phones, so switching from proprietary to mini USB variations made sense. HTC was one of the only ones I can name with certainty that still had proprietary charger ports on smartphones up to late 2009/early 2010 like my HTC Hero CDMA version...you could still fit a mini-USB cable in there even though it wasn't made for it, which is nice.