Posted by Stuart Brown
- November 21, 2021, 23:08:19
The competition goes on, I got great price performance, with an iPad mini 6, trade in on my iPad mini 5, A15 pro, 16 trillion operations per second machine learning at 5nm. But here we see, with Apple having supply problems too, a 4nm chip, with some architectural improvements, yet Apples own work, is similar. Google's Tensor and Qualcomm's snapdragon, these chips bring in 5G, WiFi 6 bandwidth, I know I was pleased, when I got my new iPad, that a hundred apps and a 350 MB update loaded in half an hour, part of that is good cloud backup.
Linking up with my iPhone, but factory reset is fast, connecting with other devices and companies like Xbox, Apple TV, Mac M1, Google YouTube, Gmail, chrome, with it's cloud services, Zoom. As bandwidth becomes more available, I get 750 MB/s, on fibre to the home Wi-Fi 6, so much goes wrong every day, but sometimes it's a breeze. That's due to system on a chip architectures, power efficiency, memory pipelining, for instance, when I use a PCIe4 fan cooled USB C, thunderbolt stick, for backing up my Mac M1, I often get 3GB/s transfer rates.
But there are limitations, I'm surprised they don't simply put more RAM, flash into cheaper systems, a Snapdragon 600, with 12GB's of RAM, 128 GB's of flash and not necessarily the fastest memory. Just the availability improves the performance, my Mac M1, for all it's SOC, power efficiency, RAM on the chip die. Factory resets on the operating system slowly, probably because it only has 8GB of RAM and it's flash at 245GB, isn't all that great either. The Apple memory penalty, somewhat made up for by software tailoring, for known hardware, but the Mac M1 takes longer to factory reset, even with a thunderbolt backup stick, than a AMD Ryzen 5, with plenty of RAM, 16GB, plenty of Flash 500GB.
The lack of RAM throttles it. I know I've rambled on about side issues, but the whole is only the sum of it's weakest link, more PCIe 5, LPDDR5, bandwidth utilisation, by the server and data centres, faster software downloads, will obviously be necessary, to exploit these systems potential.