Brian and I are going to be trying something somewhat new tomorrow evening. We find ourselves in a rare situation where both of us are at home with no immediate plans to fly anywhere for a press event or other meeting. Add in the fact that there's a lot to talk about and we've got a recipe for a pretty cool (and long overdue discussion).

Rather than doing a traditional podcast we're going to be trying something we sort of kicked off at IDF: a video show. We'll be using Google's Hangouts on Air to livestream the discussion. I'll do another post tomorrow with a video embed for anyone who wants to watch it live. On the topic list for tomorrow:

The iPad Air
Investigations into Apple's A7 and Cyclone CPU Architecture
ASUS Transformer Book T100 & Retail Bay Trail
A Discussion of 64-bit in Mobile
The Haswell MacBook Pros
HTC's One Max
Brian's Initial Thoughts on Google's Nexus 5

On at least a couple of these topics we'll be disclosing details for the first time before ever appearing in written content on the site. This is a new format for us, but if we can get enough support both from you all and potential sponsors it won't be the last.

While I expect the outline above to keep us pretty busy the entire time, if there's anything you guys want to see us touch on post about it in the comments and we'll see about including it. The show will begin tomorrow November 5th at 7PM ET. The show will post to our YouTube channel for those who miss the live stream.

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  • pattycake0147 - Monday, November 4, 2013 - link

    Could you please post it for viewing at a later time for those of us unable to watch live.
  • Rishi100 - Monday, November 4, 2013 - link

    Please include bits on Geforce 780Ti. What is expected speed of this card in modern games? When do you expect availability of Cards capable of 3840X2160 gaming without combining the two of them?
  • kyuu - Monday, November 4, 2013 - link

    I think you missed the title: Anandtech *Mobile* Show. Desktop GPUs aren't likely to be included in the discussion.
  • Homeles - Monday, November 4, 2013 - link

    They're mobile when thrown.
  • Kevin G - Monday, November 4, 2013 - link

    Actually can you confirm that the Haswell MacbookPro's with Iris graphics use the 128 MB of eDRAM? I finally got some time with one and I can't reference to that L4 cache anywhere in the system under OS X 10.9. Generally something like this can still be referenced even though you're not directly using it like addressable memory (see that the L1, L2 and L3 caches are reported).

    Also where would you put the actual performance per watt of Cyclone in reference to Intel CPU's? It is fast for mobile but if you drop the voltages and clock on an x86 chip, what would the best comparison be to equalize performance?

    And for the reverse, if Apple wanted to go full tilt and scale clock/voltages upward while adding more cores, cache and memory controllers, where do you think it would land in terms of both performance, power consumption and the obvious performance per watt metric? And of course compare it to Intel. Was Apple's claim of the A7 being desktop class performance a thinly veiled threat to Intel of what they're actually capable of?

    While this a mobile centric show, I was still hoping to hear some discussion of AMD's R9 290x video card and nVidia's G-Sync technology. I'd throw Mantle into that mix though other than its announcement, most of its disclosure is going to happen at a developer conference soon and thus a postponed timeliness. These new technologies have gotten me excited as if we're about to enter a new golden age of PC enthusiasm. With the PC market shrinking and gamers being a remaining stronghold, it is nice to see some well deserved focus again.
  • shameermulji - Monday, November 4, 2013 - link

    "Actually can you confirm that the Haswell MacbookPro's with Iris graphics use the 128 MB of eDRAM"

    The 13" rMBP does not use the Iris Pro graphics with the eDRAM. It uses the standard Iris graphics GPU. The 15" rMPB, on the other hand, does have the Iris Pro graphics with the eDRAM.

    "Was Apple's claim of the A7 being desktop class performance a thinly veiled threat to Intel of what they're actually capable of?"

    For a mobile processor, they're pretty fast. As per Gruber's review, the A7 SoC in the iPad Air is faster in Geekbench 3 and Sunspider than the 2010 MB Air. The iPad Air was running iOS 7.03 and the MB Air was running OSX Mavericks with Safari 7.0. You can read it here;

    http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/the_ipad_air
  • teiglin - Monday, November 4, 2013 - link

    While Geekbench cross-platform results aren't meaningful at all, it isn't surprising that the iPad is outperforming an Core 2 Duo MBA in javascript benchmarks. Given that Cyclone performs (very roughly) on par with Silvermont, and Intel said Bay Trail performs on par with ULV Penryn--i.e. the chip in the 2010 MBA--it is the expected result that the iPad Air should have roughly the same performance as the 2010 MBA.

    If you were really blown away, bear in mind that the 2010 MBA is using a five year old, 10W CPU--if you actually were expecting "desktop class" performance, you're going to have to go back quite a bit further in time to climb back up the TDP train. So what we really have, is that over the last five years, 10W performance has been squeezed down to a 2-4W package. That's certainly an accomplishment, but I doubt anyone will be really blown away if you put it to them like that, rather than saying "I have a three year old Mac that is outperformed by my iPad!"
  • Krysto - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link

    I think even Nvidia said their Cortex A15-based Tegra 4 beats Core 2 Duo - so yeah. Not a huge surprise. Plus, next year we'll see GPU's that will perform better than PS3 and Xbox360's GPU's (although it might be a while before we see many games taking advantage of them - but we'll probably still see something like Battlefield 3 on them).
  • Kevin G - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link

    I was thinking of scaling the A7 to run at 10W or higher to see where it would compete in Intel's line up. That 2010 MBA with a 10W CPU has a total 21.5W system power consumption under load* vs. ~11W for the iPad Air. A direct CPU comparison can be estimated at 10W vs. ~4W max, widening the difference.

    One thing is clear, Apple's A7 has an IPC that is equal or better than the Nehalem/Westermere generations of chips. This is Apple's second CPU architecture and the first 64 bit ARM architecture in the public space. They're certainly aiming higher for the A8. More than likely there is room for further IPC gains but Apple may not adopt them in ultra mobile chips due to power overhead. If Apple were to move to OS X and Mac Books to ARM though, these platforms would be able to accept a higher power load to further increase performance.

    *Source: http://anandtech.com/show/4528/the-2011-macbook-ai...
  • Krysto - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link

    Sunspider sucks. But yes, these mobile chips are getting more than fast enough for most people, and next year we'll even see Android devices with 4 GB of RAM in them, and with KitKat they will run faster with ARM than Windows ever could on Intel's Core i7, so they're clearly getting "desktop-class".

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