An Apple "iPhone16,1" was put through the Geekbench 6.2 gauntlet earlier this week—according to database info this pre-release sample was running a build of iOS 17.0 (currently in preview) and its logic board goes under the "D83AP" moniker. It is interesting to see a 16-series unit hitting the test phase only a day after the unveiling of Apple's iPhone 15 Pro and Max models—the freshly benched candidate seems to house an A17 Pro SoC as well. The American tech giant has set lofty goals for said flagship chip, since it is "the industry's first 3-nanometer chip. Continuing Apple's leadership in smartphone silicon, A17 Pro brings improvements to the entire chip, including the biggest GPU redesign in Apple's history. The new CPU is up to 10 percent faster with microarchitectural and design improvements, and the Neural Engine is now up to 2x faster."
hell, even intel tried to get away from x86 with itanium but failed miserably... and they screwed themselves again by recently dumping the RISC-V pathfinding a year after initiation. i worry about the future of Arc, but maybe they'll pull their head out of their ass on that one if we're lucky.
Funny thing is the 8086 was only supposed to be a stopgap. Their next big thing ended up being a miserable flop, but the 8086 took off and the rest is history.
Well, it's one of those if it ain't broke, don't fix it things. Like QWERTY keyboard layouts.
The alternatives kind of need to support ACPI, or some similar standard
DeviceTree works for embedded devices, but it’s not great for end users who are trying to get interoperability between suppliers