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two

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we need to talk there's been a lot of

positive talk about apple's m1 chip sets

lately have you got the new m1 macbook

pro yet because i've tested out it's as

fast as promised

battery life is incredible any chance

you know anybody that can buy the

5 000 maxed out 16-inch macbook pro that

i bought

a month ago because that's how good the

m1 max

are and look they've absolutely

surprised me a bit of a skeptic even

with their battery life and their

performance but i did two videos in my

real world test series i'll link those

below if you want to check that out

here i think we need to talk about the

bigger picture of what i think is

happening

and it starts with another company that

begins with a

arm first though mediatek one of the

largest arm chipset producers in the

world

with their arm chipsets in products that

you probably already own if we're honest

offered to help me make

this video and so with that said let's

talk about what arm is

and why it feels like a bunch of

companies are starting to make their

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chipsets

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okay let's first start off with who arm

is because it can get a little confusing

there's arm the company and there's arm

the processors which we'll get to

shortly the beginnings of arm the

company though

start with another company founded back

in 1983 in cambridge england called

acorn computers now at some time in the

mid 80s a team within that company was

charged with finding a suitable

processor for their next generation of

computer they went out looking but after

a while

they decided they couldn't find a

processor that fit the specs that they

needed

so over an 18 month period they ended up

designing their own fast forward to 1990

when acorn computers wasn't really doing

well financially as a computer

manufacturer

they spun out their processor designs

into a new company called advanced risk

machines limited

with apple and vlsi technology as

partners in the joint venture

apple used the new chipset in the newton

by the way then

in 1998 the company shortened its name

to arm

limited now arm doesn't actually make

chipsets they don't even have

manufacturing facilities instead they

simply own the design

of the chips and other related

intellectual property

and they license that out to other

manufacturers like say mediatek

for example but also apple samsung high

silicon which is huawei

qualcomm amazon microsoft you get the

point so that brings us to the next set

of questions we need to answer which is

what is an arm processor exactly what

makes it different

and again why is everybody seemingly

jumping on board

we have two major architectures used in

chipsets today

we have arm and then we have x86 which

is mainly used by

intel and a little bit by amd the

biggest difference between x86

and arm are the way they give

instruction sets or

it's the way that the program gives

instructions to the chipset at the

lowest level

the r in arm stands for risk which in

turn stands for

reduced instruction set computer and

while it is kind of a larger philosophy

about computing in general suffices to

say in this video

that it means that arm processors

require a much

smaller instruction set compared to x86

which can be given a much more complex

instruction set and then

use its own methods to parse everything

out and figure out how to go through it

all

think about like someone giving you a

to-do list arm would give you one task

at a time

and you would do it and come back to get

the next one task and then do that and

so on

whereas x86 would give you all of the

tasks at once and you'll go about

figuring out how to get them all done

now these two different ways of handling

instructions have their pros

and their cons on the one hand x86 and

their more complex instruction set can

handle more complex workloads

like that to-do list and figure out the

best way to handle all of the tasks

at once and it's why you still see it

being used at the highest end of

computers for the most part right now

on the other hand arm is a lot more

power efficient as it doesn't have to

use energy figuring out what to do with

the to-do list

what order to do the tasks in etc it

just gets instructions

gets it done with the energy needed and

comes back for the next one

this also means less heat is produced

which is why arm is the entire

mobile phone industry a use case that

needs better battery life and

obviously can't have a fan in it with

intel creating more efficient chipsets

lately and arm manufacturers creating

more and more powerful ones

both architectures which normally kind

of lived in their own

world are now competing for middle

ground but

there's one more big advantage to arm

processors and that's that

arm can actually license out the

architecture to manufacturers

who can then create their own custom

cores and tailor them specifically to

the use cases

that they need mediatek for example uses

this to create

chipsets that are purpose built for a

ton of custom use cases while also

keeping the cost down for manufacturers

and ultimately for consumers as well

devices like this two-in-one chromebook

uses mediatek's tablet optimize

mt-8183 chipset which has an eight-core

based cpu paired with an arm-based gpu

and has been customized for multimedia

playback

web browsing and other things you do on

a tablet

chromebook and even though it's a

chromebook with a touchscreen

that also comes included with a

detachable keyboard you can find it for

under 250 dollars brand new i'll leave

links below for anyone who's curious

about that

but also at the extremes of computing we

have the world's

smallest computer created by the

university of michigan

and is based on an arm cortex m0 plus

processor

and is smaller than a grain of rice on

the other end the world's most powerful

supercomputer as of april 2020 on the

top

500 which is a list of the 500 most

powerful computers updated twice a year

is the japanese fugaku which is also

based on the arm architecture

it hit 442 petaflops

that's 442 quadrillion floating point

operations

per second three times more than the

next

fastest computer on the list on top of

that it's also the 10th most power

efficient on that list

by performance per watt now this is the

first time that an arm processor has

ever taken the top spot on that list

but it just goes to show what a

manufacturer can do

when they're able to customize the

architecture for a very specific

task in this case trying to get the

highest benchmark score they could that

was used for the ranking

apple does this to the arm architecture

in their m1s to be more optimized at

running mac os

their own os on mac computers their own

computers

and companies like mediatek use arm

chipsets that they customize

and produce specifically for different

industries like iot and smart home

you know a lot of the amazon echo

devices that you have have their

chipsets in them

mobile phones like the lg velvet here in

the us

bluetooth speakers like this one from

jbl even chromebooks like we mentioned

earlier

and the list of things they make work

better by using customized arm

chips that's specific to their industry

and use case goes on

and on so the thing with either

processor

is that because they have different

instruction sets the ones made for one

will not work on the other instruction

set so

apps made for the vast majority of x86

programs like windows and mac

need to be reconfigured to then work on

arm processors and things on ios and

android that are on arm processors would

need to be redone to work on windows

or mac for example

now in the meantime in the computer

world where the vast majority of

processors are x86

companies like microsoft and apple have

created programs that

convert x86 code into code that the arm

processors can understand and that works

but it's

not optimal even apple lists rosetta too

their program meant to do this exact

thing as being quote

meant to ease the transition to apple

silicon giving you time to create a

universal binary for your app

it is not a substitute for creating a

native version of your app

end quote and i even did tests to show

how much of a difference a native app

has over a translated one and spoiler

it's a lot so for now this is a bit of a

downside for

arm chipsets that are being used in the

traditionally x86 space like mac

and pc but as more and more

manufacturers use arm chipsets in their

devices and then more

developers start to make their programs

optimized for

armed chipsets as there are more and

more of those devices

it'll become less and less of an issue

now even though intel is making more

efficient chipsets

it feels like to me that arm is moving

up

in performance faster than intel is

moving down in power consumption and

power efficiency and i for one am very

curious to see how intel

and amd boost their efforts to respond

to all of this

but the bigger thing for manufacturers

right now is the ability to customize

those chipsets to their specific

use cases and on top of the already

better battery life

and lower heat production so

manufacturers with the huge amount of

resources it takes to create

custom chipsets for their specific

devices

stand a benefit by getting more

performance for those devices for those

specific things that they need

to do there you go another decoder

episode

let me know what you guys think of this

video the format it did a little bit

different this time

curious what you guys think always

appreciate hearing you guys um also let

me know what you think of

arm chipsets and intel and amd and all

the other fun

fun things that are happening in the

chipset world always appreciate it

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watching