Almost there, Sunday is my last day before I start my holiday off from work for a week – relaxing at home, following WWDC, doing some home cooking, maybe go for some travel such as up to Waikanae, maybe go into Wellington on a fine day for a walk along the waterfront and breath in the fresh air. I have to admit that in the past I’ve kind of wasted the time off from work by just hanging around home then looking back regretting that I could have or should have done something more productive so this time I’m not going to squander the opportunity – I may even take a few photos while I’m at it. I’ll probably have an early night on Monday so then I can get up early to watch the WWDC Keynote Live on my big screen television in the lounge – I’ll make sure I’ve got some nibbles which I’ll pick up on Monday.
Science and technology, the improvements that are constantly being made to improve every day life, the advancements that are planned. It is easy to get bogged down in negativity but one thing I’ve been keeping an eye on has been Intel but specifically the upcoming CPUs that are planned which include an interesting technology called Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) (link) which doubles the number of general purpose registers from 16 to 32 thus bringing it inline with many RISC based processes. What really stood out from the article was the following:
“Application developers can take advantage of Intel APX by simple recompilation; source code changes are not expected to be needed. Workloads written in dynamic languages will automatically benefit as soon as the underlying runtime system has been enabled.”
Most of the time when ever there is an extension or a change it requires developers to have to opt into using it resulting in many cases either the updates taking months if not years or they never come at all. If the promise that a recompile will do the job of taking advantage of APX then we may end up seeing a leap in performance for every day tasks and the gap between ARM and x86 close to the point that the choice between ARM and x86 will be personal preference rather than choosing one over another means sacrificing something in the process.
Various articles online have reported that APX and AVX10 will be coming to Panther Cove which is scheduled to be released towards the end of this year or early next year. The one thing I keep reminding people is not to count Intel out – those of us who are old enough to remember the Intel P4 and the premature reports of Intel’s demise only for Intel to bounce back with the very CPUs that Apple used in their transition from PowerPC to Intel which left the PowerPC in the dust as so far as performance per watt. We could be seeing, after a rough start, Intel getting back into closing that gap not just with AMD but also the emerging competitors such as Qualcomm with it’s entry into the laptop, desktop and potentially server market sometime in the future.
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