The iPhone 3G and original iPhone both had Android ports. Back then the (internal) hardware was mostly off the shelf, so it was easier. Still, this is neat.
The iPad one has a period CPU that, unfortunately, would not run any modern android build with any level of performance that would be considered usable.
It's ewaste, or at least, an interesting artifact in computer design history.
Also Android has much higher memory requirements than iOS due to the Java implementation, that’s why Android phones have typically had a lot more RAM than iPhones. That may not be an issue depending what you need to do with it.
Darwin source was release for a long time, with no restrictions on running it on Apple hardware. I’m not sure of the status of that now. They’re under no obligation to do so as it’s BSD licensed.
How are we defining SoC era? Maybe before SoC's were accessible in the consumer market but the first ARM based SoC, the ARM250, dates back to 1992. Plus I'm pretty sure there are SoC's based on other architectures older than that.
Yeah, mobile CPUs were always called SoC since at least flip phones era. Absurd some Apple fanboys think they made it mainstream or even invented it. Those are entirely false.
System on Chip are called System on Chip because they don’t expose I/O ports(like PORTA through PORTD on AVR) to the pins thus can’t interface RAM or ROM or other peripherals natively, but only over narrower buses through internal interface chips/logics.
In my rule of thumb, every surface mounted “CPU” between 80 to 200MHz across industries were called SoC from 2003 through 2010s.
Those CPUs/MPUs that do expose I/O directly to be interfaced to SDRAM, LCD or equivalents of North Bridge chip on PC were usually called either MPU or CPU, often MPU for they integrate some peripherals. Those were roughly 200MHz and above, including PowerPC for NAS or x86 for PC for which heat or footprint were not concerns.
Those under 80-120MHz were often called Microcontrollers(uC). They were also often self contained like SoC but didn’t count, also got a lot higher clocked recently but still don’t.
Intel and AMD refer to their systems as SoC since Apple started doing custom SoC, and that might give you an impression that it’s new and better. That’s not true.
SoC means CPU’s main I/O ports are not exposed to pins.
> Intel and AMD refer to their systems as SoC since Apple started doing custom SoC
Intel and AMD refer to their systems as SoC since they integrated the north bridge (which includes the memory controller) into the chip, has nothing to do with Apple.
> CPU’s main I/O ports
That's a weird definition. Most architectures don't have "I/O ports" and use memory-mapped I/O exclusively. And even if we read that as "any kind of I/O pins" and go back to the
> can’t interface RAM or ROM or other peripherals natively
part: the vast majority of mobile SoCs in the 2010s use external RAM (and storage). The memory controller is onboard and the external connection is directly to DDR3/4/.. chips.
> System on Chip are called System on Chip because they don’t expose I/O ports(like PORTA through PORTD on AVR) to the pins thus can’t interface RAM or ROM or other peripherals natively, but only over narrower buses through internal interface chips/logics.
What does IO port multiplexing of the AVR have to do with the definition of SoC?
> In my rule of thumb, every surface mounted “CPU” between 80 to 200MHz across industries were called SoC from 2003 through 2010s.
No. I dont see how the physical mounting of the package changes anything. Most processors are surface mount, even some bga x86 chips.
> Those CPUs/MPUs that do expose I/O directly to be interfaced to SDRAM, LCD or equivalents of North Bridge chip on PC were usually called either MPU or CPU, often MPU for they integrate some peripherals.
No. MPU = MicroProcessor Unit.
> Those under 80-120MHz were often called Microcontrollers(uC). They were also often self contained like SoC but didn’t count, also got a lot higher clocked recently but still don’t.
So modern highly integrated microcontrollers, an effective system on a chip with 300+MHz core speed, sram, flash, eeprom, can, uarts, ethernet, pwm, counters, dac's, adc's, arent system on chips?
> SoC means CPU’s main I/O ports are not exposed to pins.
Indeed most handsets including the old iPhones and all pre iPhone pocketpc used SoCs of some sort. In fact the original iPhone had a part with stacked SDRAM. ARM and MIPS SoCs have been a staple of consumer devices for at least 20 years.
You’re already headed in the right direction by being aware of it. I don’t have any specific advice (my own natural know-it-all-ness started to fade when I was 30 or so) but being specifically aware of it is definitely a benefit; it at least allows me to pause and notice it and adjust.
Before Apple bought PA Semi and started working on their own A series of System on a Chip (SoC) processors. They were using ARM reference designs before.
Then what are they talking about with the Symbian phones?
And Apple didn't use ARM reference designs in early iPhones; they were using Samsung SoCs. Pretty much nobody uses the ARM reference designs except as an early prototyping target.
> Pretty much nobody uses the ARM reference designs except as an early prototyping target.
This isn't true. The majority of ARM based SoCs today use the Cortex or Neoverse reference designs from ARM. Today there are only a few handful of vendors who fully develop their own core, such as Cavium, Apple, and Ampere.
There's a difference between ARM reference designs for SoCs (the topic in question) and ARM's designs for their CPU cores.
In the context of reference designs, you see stuff like the ARM Juno designs. I've seen people (very very rarely) just drop those whole designs into their boards. But, like I said, almost nobody uses them except as a prototyping target.
I think grandparent comment was referring to the CPU part not whole SoC. Arm has never sold entire SoC beyond a limited number of test chips. Juno is a test/evaluation chip only.
This is really cool! I hope they get the GPU running. I would _love_ to run Ubuntu Touch or something on an iPhone. I wonder how much of the responsiveness of iOS is due to the hardware.
Had an Ubuntu touch phone. It was ok as a GuI for an OS but the lamest thing was they locked down the package manager so u could only install stuff from their App Store with like nothing in or you escalated privileges and any customization u made (apt-get packages, system changes) got wiped with each update.
They seriously failed to support a real Linux OS for mobile.
I am genuinely interested in an answer to this question, even tho it will sound like a troll.
If people want to sideload apps and such, which explicitly hacks around the system designed by Apple, why are they using Apple devices (which are notoriously locked down and restricted to "Apple's way") in the first place? Why not use Android or something else where that sort of thing is designed for?
Same kind of question for jailbreakers. Isn't the desire to jail break indicative that you want a more flexible platform? Why wouldn't you use something else besides Apple?
I did buy an iPad 2 back when it was current. I needed something like a tablet for an extended trip where a laptop would have been too much to carry around and the only real competition at the time was the disappointing Motorola Xoom so I bought an iPad.
I ended up "jailbreaking" it because there were just so many things I wanted it to do that weren't possible with the stock OS and approved applications (adblocking, better keyboard layout, file system access, and mouse support among other things). Many of these have eventually been implemented to some extent or another, but at the time they were unavailable via the App Store but easily done via the Cydia store.
Since then, the iPad 2 aged out of usefulness and my need for a tablet has mostly dried up. Likewise, options for other higher-powered, well built, and lightweight laptops/tablets have expanded so I've not purchased any more Apple stuff for the reasons you point out. I basically "jailbroke" because it was the only way to get my device to do what I wanted it to do. Now that they exist, I just use other devices that don't require me to jump through those hoops.
Still, I wish there was a way to install some sort of lightweight OS on that iPad 2 (which is now sitting in a box somewhere).
My experience is that a good chunk of that comes from the limit on background processes.
At least in Android devices changing that parameter made them much snappier, although some apps would work, because they absolutely required more than one background process.
Why would you want this? The iPhone 7 has a broken bootloader, which is what makes this possible in the first place. It's impossible to be sure of the integrity of the device when you can just get root over USB. It's likely to require tethering to boot every single time, so you have a functionally useless device.
One reason one might want this is because of the hacker spirit. It seems more interesting and impressive to do what something was deliberately designed to not do.
Another reason is that Apple’s hardware tend to be very high quality. For example, on JavaScript benchmarks (which you may or may not consider to be a good proxy for general/single threaded performance), an iPhone7 performs comparably to the current latest Android phones. Also spare parts or replacements are easy to come by.
I’m quite unconvinced that the boot loader exploit demonstrates that the platform is so insecure that you shouldn’t use it. If you want to run a different operating system on a typical android device you would either not need to circumvent such security measures (which doesn’t mean that they exist or work) or you would use some exploit that didn’t get such wide press.
"Ahead" isn't quite the right word. Making a large die area high performance ARM isn't hard. Its just very expensive, and only Apple has both the volume and margins to justify it.
> The commenter unironically using Orwellian phrasing like "be sure of the integrity of the device" shows how far we've come.
You don't want to know that your phone hasn't had a rootkit installed on it by someone who borrowed it off your desk while you were in the office kitchen?
I'd rather suffer the possibility of being pwnt than have devices that come pwnt out of the box. Manufacturers could develop systems that removed themselves from the trust chain, but unfortunately more control is beneficial in their view.
A better analogy is Microsoft word. The original source code was lost. It’s now relying on a reverse engineered code base from someone outside of Microsoft.
How often do you boot your phone? My current phone gets a lot of booting because it doesn't always come back from sleeping, but a phone working properly maybe needs a reboot once a month? That would be less convenient if it needs to be tethered, but not that bad.
I have an iPhone and I don't think I've purposefully rebooted it in months. I think the only time i see the boot logo is if the battery completely dies, or iOS updates.
I guess an os thats not really supposed to be running might be less stable, but I would hope most OSes are stable enough to essentially never require reboots. (aside from power loss + updates)
To play with. I think I'd enjoy that. Also, the iPhones are cool hardware!
And I've used unlocked bootloader devices before. My threat model allows for that exploit to be performed on me should someone desire it. The utility I gain exceeds the risk = f(likelihood, loss).
Right but there’s a lot of people who don’t trust that that’s actually true, either thinking Apple is lying or thinking third party bad actors can probably hack the software and firmware to get that data. At least that’s my guess based on what I know of the typical HN crowd.
This technical achievement is awesome as is postmarketOS, but ... I can get that on an arguably better device. Has there been success getting iOS running on other hardware?
Still less than 20% of the market. And I feel like the main reason they're even usable as a desktop OS is because 99% of most people's computer activity takes place in a web browser and not because OSX has a particularly special native app collection. Hell it seems like the only time I fire up my mac is because I need to build an iDevice app and nearly every "native" mac app I run is really Electron based.
>1997: Microsoft rescues one-time and future nemesis Apple with a $150 million investment that breathes new life into a struggling Silicon Alley icon.
https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/
Is it really a "smartphone" yet if it can't make phone calls or use the cell modem? Not discounting the work that's been done, but the title feels a little premature.
