tequila bomb

This takes us to a more speculative train of thought: Moving to the ARM architecture.

When you experience the 11” MacBook Air on a relatively slow 1.4 GHz Intel processor, you can’t help but wonder how it would feel on multi-core ARM hardware. Porting an OS to a new processor is no longer rocket science, but moving third-party applications is much harder — unless they’ve been distributed and regularized in such a way that makes the transition smooth and transparent.

I don’t think it is speculation even. I’ve always seen it as a forgone conclusion.

Apple will slowly move lower end devices to ARM in the future.

I’ve ported OS X applications. And I mean fully blown desktop applications, and OpenGL engines to iOS. It really is not rocket science. And most mobile and desktop APIs of note are converging anyway.

I am sure Apple already have an ARM MacBook Air prototype, an early hybrid of OS X and iOS, and I said as much last year.

Ibiden, Tripod Technology and TTM Technologies have been named as the initial PCB suppliers for a second-generation Apple tablet PC, which is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2011.

Four more suppliers will be added to the list in February 2011, when shipments of the new iPads ramp up, according to industry sources.

The sources said Ibiden, Tripod and TTM have received certification from Apple, and will start shipping any-layer HDI boards for iPad 2 in small quantities in December[.]

Apple are pushing hard to get this iPad revision out as soon as possible.

Jean-Louis Gassée argues both for and against iOS becoming the ultimate Apple OS…

Over time, iOS version 7 or 10 will become the operating system that runs inside most Apple computing devices. As shown in the recent preview of the next OS X version, “Lion” will borrow iPad UI features such as full-screen apps hiding the windowing system, and a launchpad for Mac apps that resembles the iPad home screen. And, any day now, the iPad will get folders, not a visible file system, but a way to group apps, like today’s iPhone.

Couldn’t agree more. Apple’s current unification of iPhone OS and iOS could even be seen as a very very early study in how future unifications will go.

Ultimately, whichever way the marge goes down, we will end up with one OS. This is so obvious to me that I am surprised when people feel the need to call it speculation.

Both “Monday Notes” from Gassée are well worth the time taken to read them.

We have been told from a few Mac developers that a few days ago Apple removed all the references to printing via OS X 10.6.5 and PCs both from Readme files and other online documentation posted in the iOS developer center. It seems like all that’s now mentioned in the release notes are the aforementioned HP networked printers, as if the shared printing option never existed.

If true it kind of kills 90% of the appeal of AirPrint.

Other developers chimed in, and claimed Apple removed the feature due to its instability and incompatibilities. Others confirmed that the feature is still working on iOS 4.2 GM through the previous 10.6.5 beta posted on the iOS dev center, and it even works under the Simulator. No word about the 10.6.5 seeds Apple released in the past days. You can read the threads here and here.

AirPrint is one part of iOS 4.2 that I’ve had nothing but success with.

Obviously we won’t know for sure until OS X 10.6.5 and iOS 4.2 are released, but if Apple really removed support for AirPrint via shared printers — it’ll become a lot less useful for most users.

No shit!

Apparently Apple’s Tech Support confirmed that the feature has been “cancelled” :

Support for AirPrint on Windows and Mac has been cancelled. We will be in contact with you if another opportunity arises in the future.

The Mac authenticates with the iPhone, which contains a lot of the information the computer needs, such as bookmarks, passwords and other data. The system would essentially turn any Apple computer into your own — like you’re actually working on your own computer. Same settings, look, bookmarks, preferences. It would all be invisible. Your iPhone would be all you needed to unlock your Mac.

Address book would show their contacts, and the user would have full access to their information in the same manner they would if they were working from home. This same behavior extends to even showing the same desktop picture, mouse and keyboard settings, and would eventually extend to software licenses and passwords for websites such as Facebook.

When a person walks away with their iPhone and away from the communication link with the Mac, the original settings of the Mac would be restored. All communications and storage of passwords stays on the user’s iPhone, leaving nothing stored on the computer.

And I am sure it will all depend on MobileMe…

This functionality is extended to access a user’s home folder, which will be stored and accessed either through storage on MobileMe or by using the Back to My Mac feature to connect to the user’s home folder.

Apple’s new DataCenter(s) is/are going to be crucial to all of this. As is $100 a year.

Late’s hope that it all works a little more seemlessly than iDisk!

Even so it’s a cool feature, if Cult of Mac’s sources are reliable.

Financial wires are reporting that market speculation now claims Apple could be on the verge of acquiring Adobe Systems, Sony or even Walt Disney!

Apple are looking at buying something fairly large. But it’s not Facebook.

And I am pretty sure it’s not any of the names being bandied around so far by any of the various industry and financial news sources. It’s also not as “big” as people are suggesting.

Think about it carefully people, and it might dawn on you.

This lady is comedy gold. She should be doing Sarah Palin impressions on Saturday Night Live. Not running an ailing internet company…

Earlier this year Apple introduced its iAd service to create premium ads for marketers on the iPhone.

“That’s going to fall apart for them,” Bartz said about Apple’s iAd service. “Advertisers are not going to have that type of control over them. Apple wants total control over those ads.”

Sure advertisers don’t like it. They don’t like much. Other than sales.

Apple exerting control while they setup things, just as they did with the App Store, is not going to scare them away though. Certainly hasn’t so far. Apple still exerting control once they have authoring tools they can let advertising agencies play with isn’t gonna scare them away either.

What does scare advertisers away is when your search traffic drops. Eh, Mzzz Bartz?

The 13 per cent rise in Yahoo shares over Bartz’s tenure has lagged the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s 24 percent rise and the Nasdaq Composite’s 49 percent rise during the same period.

From Reuters.

The fact that the CPU and GPU are not only connected so closely, but also share a common L3 cache, is no doubt a major factor in Sandy Bridge’s stellar graphics performance. Some early preview numbers show that Sandy Bridge’s integrated graphics performance is very, very good compared to the other IGP options on the market. The Sandy Bridge GPU even gives some of the entry-level discrete graphics cards a run for their money.

The ability to bundle this level of graphics performance on a quad-core CPU die is, again, a major milestone for the PC, and it will significantly drive down costs and platform-level power consumption. Large IT buyers will especially love this, because they’ll finally get best-in-class IGP performance by default on all of their machines, and (eventually) for less money.

I’ll reserve judgement on this until actual silicon hits the market and has to compete with contemporary GPU offerings from other companies.

With Sandy Bridge next year you’ll get higher clock speeds, more performance per clock and reasonable integrated graphics at presumably the same prices we’re paying today. What’s even more exciting is the fact that what we’re looking at is just mainstream performance. The high end Sandy Bridge parts don’t arrive until the second half of 2011 which add more cores and more memory bandwidth.

From AnandTech.

Assuming Intel do deliver on the GPU side of things, will Apple have to wait that long to update the MacBook Air? Or have they got something else up their sleeve?

The overall position of the A15 in ARM’s lineup is as the next logical step up the ladder from the A9, so that in order of core size, complexity, performance, features, capability, and power consumption, the Cortex family goes by the numbers: A8 at the bottom, then A9, then A15 at the top. The A8 is an in-order part with a very simple architecture that’s comparable to Intel’s Atom in some key anatomical respects, but is much lower-power and more efficient than the latter. The Cortex A9 is an out-of-order part that brings the ARM line into Atom’s performance territory, and also closer to Atom in power draw (though the A9 is allegedly still much more efficient than Atom).

ARM stock has close to doubled in the last 6 months. There were rumours at one point that Apple was going to buy them. These were quickly debunked, however.

ARM also recently signed a new deal with Samsung to provide Mali GPU components for their new ARM A9 based SoC.

The A15 takes things to the next level by pairing the out-of-order nature of the A9 with the expansive feature list (virtualization support, double-precision floating point, ECC cache) that characterizes the Atom line, and that costs Atom in terms of power. In this respect, the A15 looks somewhat like AMD’s recently unveiled Bobcat core, to the point that I would be very curious to see a comparison of the transistor counts of the two cores.

The A15 is directly targeted at laptops, power tablets and the server market. Although, contrary to John’s assertions I think we may well see a variant of this in smaller mobile platforms also.

Intel are probably doing the maths right now on how they can possibly convince the powers that be that it is OK for them to buy ARM.

Designed using Samsung’s 45 nanometer low-power process technology, Orion features a pair of 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 cores, each comes with a 32KB data cache and a 32KB instruction cache. Samsung also included a 1MB L2 cache to optimize CPU processing performance and provide fast context switching in a multi-tasking environment. In addition, the memory interface and bus architecture of Orion supports data intensive multimedia applications including full HD video playback and high speed 3D action games.

With a little bit of tweaking by “PA Semi” and “Intrinsity” this is going to be the Apple A5.

Using an enhanced graphics processing unit (GPU), the new processors are capable of delivering 5 times the 3D graphics performance over the previous processor generation from Samsung.

**The GPU was supposed to be OpenGL 3.x compatible, and from PowerVR (at least in the Apple A5). But it is possible that Samsung, and therefore also Apple are considering a Mali GPU from ARM.

Orion features an onboard native triple display controller architecture that compliments multi-tasking operations in a multiple display environment. A mobile device using the Orion processor can simultaneously support two on-device display screens, while driving a third external display such as a TV or a monitor, via an on-chip HDMI 1.3a interface.

The iPad 2 & iPhone 5 are going to be rather special.

**It is worth noting that it is possible that Apple are planning an interim speed bump to the Apple A4, which may or may not be called the A5. Pushing a dual core mobile GPU to the moniker A6. In that case the A5 may well be single core and sport the PowerVR GPU.