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Showing entries tagged "hardware". Full blog index.
Friday Q&A 2017-11-10: Observing the A11's Heterogenous Cores
at 2017-11-10 12:41
Apple's newest mobile CPU, the A11, brings a new level of heterogeneous computing to iOS, with both high and low performance cores that are always on. With the release of the iPhone X, I set out to see if I could observe these heterogeneous cores in action.
Friday Q&A 2013-10-11: Why Registers Are Fast and RAM Is Slow
at 2013-10-11 14:14
In the previous article on ARM64, I mentioned that one advantage of the new architecture is the fact that it has twice as many registers, allowing code load data from RAM less often, which is much slower. Reader Daniel Hooper asks the natural question: just why is RAM so much slower than registers?
Friday Q&A 2013-09-27: ARM64 and You
at 2013-09-27 13:31
Ever since the iPhone 5S was announced a couple of weeks ago, the world of tech journalism has been filled with massive quantities of misinformation. Unfortunately, good information takes time, and the world of tech journalism is more about speed than accuracy. Today, as suggested by a variety of readers, I'm going to give the rundown of just what 64-bit ARM in the iPhone 5S means for you, in terms of performance, capabilities, and development.
Friday Q&A 2012-12-28: What Happens When You Load a Byte of Memory
at 2012-12-28 14:45
The hardware and software that our apps run on is almost frighteningly complicated, and there's no better place to see that than in the contortions that the system goes through when we load data from memory. What exactly happens when we load a byte of memory? Reader and friend of the blog Guy English suggested I dedicate an article to answering that question.