- I believe Jobs mentioned they did some custom hardware work. Intel seems to be involved... I am going to guess that they threw in an ARM/XScale core on a custom IC. I further bet there is also some small DSP in there to handle telecom signal processing and such. And most likely there is also an intel 3D Graphics core in there as well.
That is a guess, I have nothing to back it up with... but let's think about it, all three of these are necessary evils in this design. Clearly they need a processor that is efficient and consumes little power. The Duo Core is impressive for a laptop, but way too much for the little battery in there... so ther e is probably an ARM core in there.. it could be something else (Renesas SH familiy, PowerPC even...) but I doubt it... I'm guessing an ARM core of some sort.
There needs to be a DSP for the cellphone part of it... TI's OMAP products already mix ARMs and DSP (TI's own cores of course) so I would suspect something similar. I guess the DSP could be mixed with some other component to handle all the wireless stuff I don't now.. There is also WiFi and Bluetooth to be handled, but if Apple did a custom IC I bet they would try to throw as much as they could into a single IC.
Finally with all that Core Animation goodness, they must have at least a little graphics hardware help there. I doubt it would be efficient to do cover flow on software only ... so I am guessing something like the mac minis or the macbook (only less powerful still) something that shares main memory with the processor.
- With all this custom stuff, is this still a Mac?? well.. yeah, kind of... I bet the use the term OS X a little loosely here... by the way, Jobs only said "OS X" as far as I remember, not "Mac OS X". So probably this means Darwin kernel basically... Everything else is different... Could they allow us to target it with XCode? definetly. When will they? Who knows? (other that Jobs :-) maybe never. If they did though, there would probably be a differen AppKit, so I doubt you would simply recompile your mac apps and make them iPhone apps. But you probably could recycle ALOT of code. That is the beauty of MVC programing right? all out Core Data stuff might work, networking and such... But the GUI would probably be different... perhaps future Interface Builder will allow multiple targets... who knows...
any ways... that is my laundy list of speculations... And yes... I will buy an iPhone ASAP even if I can't program it, it has a slow EDGE data rate, and it's screen get smudged (I can't believe people really care that much). I will be nice to have a new Newto... err iPhone. (not a PDA... that would not be cool, and sytli are for geeks.... but wait.. I'M A GEEK!!)
by Jose R. Vazquez — Jan 10
- I believe Jobs mentioned they did some custom hardware work. Intel seems to be involved... I am going to guess that they threw in an ARM/XScale core on a custom IC. I further bet there is also some small DSP in there to handle telecom signal processing and such. And most likely there is also an intel 3D Graphics core in there as well.
That is a guess, I have nothing to back it up with... but let's think about it, all three of these are necessary evils in this design. Clearly they need a processor that is efficient and consumes little power. The Duo Core is impressive for a laptop, but way too much for the little battery in there... so ther e is probably an ARM core in there.. it could be something else (Renesas SH familiy, PowerPC even...) but I doubt it... I'm guessing an ARM core of some sort.
There needs to be a DSP for the cellphone part of it... TI's OMAP products already mix ARMs and DSP (TI's own cores of course) so I would suspect something similar. I guess the DSP could be mixed with some other component to handle all the wireless stuff I don't now.. There is also WiFi and Bluetooth to be handled, but if Apple did a custom IC I bet they would try to throw as much as they could into a single IC.
Finally with all that Core Animation goodness, they must have at least a little graphics hardware help there. I doubt it would be efficient to do cover flow on software only ... so I am guessing something like the mac minis or the macbook (only less powerful still) something that shares main memory with the processor.
- With all this custom stuff, is this still a Mac?? well.. yeah, kind of... I bet the use the term OS X a little loosely here... by the way, Jobs only said "OS X" as far as I remember, not "Mac OS X". So probably this means Darwin kernel basically... Everything else is different... Could they allow us to target it with XCode? definetly. When will they? Who knows? (other that Jobs :-) maybe never. If they did though, there would probably be a differen AppKit, so I doubt you would simply recompile your mac apps and make them iPhone apps. But you probably could recycle ALOT of code. That is the beauty of MVC programing right? all out Core Data stuff might work, networking and such... But the GUI would probably be different... perhaps future Interface Builder will allow multiple targets... who knows...
any ways... that is my laundy list of speculations... And yes... I will buy an iPhone ASAP even if I can't program it, it has a slow EDGE data rate, and it's screen get smudged (I can't believe people really care that much). I will be nice to have a new Newto... err iPhone. (not a PDA... that would not be cool, and sytli are for geeks.... but wait.. I'M A GEEK!!)