An Apple “iPhone16,1” was put through the Geekbench 6.2 gauntlet earlier this week—according to database info this pre-release sample was running a build of iOS 17.0 (currently in preview) and its logic board goes under the “D83AP” moniker. It is interesting to see a 16-series unit hitting the test phase only a day after the unveiling of Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro and Max models—the freshly benched candidate seems to house an A17 Pro SoC as well. The American tech giant has set lofty goals for said flagship chip, since it is “the industry’s first 3-nanometer chip. Continuing Apple’s leadership in smartphone silicon, A17 Pro brings improvements to the entire chip, including the biggest GPU redesign in Apple’s history. The new CPU is up to 10 percent faster with microarchitectural and design improvements, and the Neural Engine is now up to 2x faster.”
x86 has been the standard for waaayyyyyy too long
Others have come out but they never grab a foothold because you literally have to recompile everything. Some companies have even included their own compilers and optimizers but then you run into other packages and binaries that don’t work on anything but x86. One company literally wanted to give us a new 256-core system they were prototyping for a large scale web farm, but we ran into too many package issues that we couldn’t convert over to their architecture. And that was with Linux.
Apple succeeded at switching over to ARM though, they’re thriving.
Apple definitely has a way of doing what is right sometimes, and forcing the industry’s hand to move forward.
… Sometimes. Sometimes this definitely backfires, but not this time.
They have more direct control over their software ecosystem though
Absolutely, an iron fist. But that worked out well in this case.