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The iOS kernel is Darwin/xnu, but presumably maintained separately from the version shipped with OS X.

As for the userland, Cydia seems to mostly install GNU utilities.. I'm not really sure why the jailbreak community opted against using the source made available by Apple.

IMHO, that would have been preferable.. but it was enough of an environment for me to port over some OpenBSD stuff.

Still.. from my iPod Touch 4G (5.0.1).

$ uname -a
Darwin iPod 11.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 11.0.0: Tue Nov 1 20:33:58 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1878.4.46~1/RELEASE_ARM_S5L8930X iPod4,1 arm N81AP Darwin
$

Edited 2012-02-08 01:52 UTC

It's strange you're modded down, because you are right.

Quite simple, you can't grab an OS X dvd and install its contents on an iPhone, nor can your run iOS on a Mac.

Both are related, but iOS is a modified mini OS X.

Read the whole post again, not just what you quoted. Thom was pointing out that this guy ported Darwin, not OS/X, and iOS uses Darwin just like OS X is, so clearly a Darwin ARM port is not a new thing.

Apple's become pretty cozy with Intel in the past few years, but I'm sure that you're right. Maybe Apple will always use Intel chips for it's higher-end computers, but I'm sure how they remember how uncomfortable it was to get chained to the comparatively-stagnant PPC platform.

Intel is far from stagnant, though, and ARM is many years behind in performance. Switching to ARM right now would be like switching to Atom, i.e. relaunching the Air as a netbook. It does not quite make sense.

Here are some recent benchmarks on Linux, with Tegra 2 being not quite half as fast as a Core Duo (from 2006):
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=compulab_trimsli...

Great resource. I didn't mean to imply that Intel was stagnant, just that Apple, and other vendors, are obviously heavily invested in ARM on mobile, and that Apple in particular knows what it's like to end up with all its eggs in the wrong basket. Right now there's a clear division with ARM in the battery-efficiency column and Intel in the performance column, but that's likely to shift over time.

And the shift could certainly be that Intel makes big inroads into efficiency and erases ARM's advantage there.

Edited 2012-02-07 17:47 UTC

Intel has been claiming for many years that it is capable of reaching ARM efficiency and has consistently failed.
Their technological advance (2 years ?) is not sufficient. Actually, it is both what makes it very sucessful and a very isolated company.

In a world of SOCs, either Intel must do the whole platform optimising every single block to their "special" fabs (with different settings for power or performance), or they licence the Atom or whatever x86 to TSMC or GloFo and have no advantage anymore. A x86 has no magic appeal for phones, consoles, GPS nav, USB keys, tablets, set-top boxes, digital cameras... All these gadgets where the CPU core must cost less than 20$.

I know that the huge success of ARM is also related to the fact that, being a fabless company, they are considered as a fair and neutral player by Nvidia, TI, Qualcomm, Marvell, Freescale, Samsung... Having too close ties with one of these vendors would actually be very negative for ARM. There are hundreds of niche markets looking for bespoke devices.

When x86 will be relegated to very-high performance servers and everything else will use SOCs, Intel may need to open their fabs and licence their technology to attract fabless companies and OEMs like Apple looking for multiple sources.

Actually, this is how AMD got its x86 licence thanks to IBM...

(Sorry, I realize the rant above is quite muddy)

But you're comparing this generation of ARMv7 to Intel but skip what ARMv8 bring to the table for both 32bit and 64bit computing specifically when it comes to performance. Right now it would be suicide for them to adopt ARM but I could see in the future ARMv8 laptops, desktops, workstations etc. centred around very efficient multicore CPU's with software taking advantage through a combination of Grand Central, GPU offloading for things like video encoding/decoding. In 5 years time a lot can happen.

Edit: And the benchmarks btw say more about how optimised the software is rather than whether or not ARM lacks raw performance when all things remain constant.

Edited 2012-02-08 01:01 UTC

i may be totally wrong and i suspect i am, but looking at the patents i thought that they applied more to Apple Grand Central Dispatch concept introduced with Snow leopard, the idea of generalising computer power, be it a CPU, GPU or any other specialist chip/processor and to send the appropriate instructions to it, so for example some complex image or video processing could be sent to the GPU instead of the CPU?

I attended Illinois Wesleyan University, which only issues BAs, but has strong Biology and Computer Science programs. It can happen.

In Europe (on the continent, at least!) you need to actually write and defend a thesis to obtain a bachelor's degree.

It can be quite intense, too. My Italian friend's research kinda blew up right before her defense; she had to re-perform a large number of chemistry experiments in just a couple weeks (and rewrite her entire thesis!).

So, it's not just "plush" humanities which write theses!

I kinda doubt strictly either is typically issued by Dutch universities - the classifications across countries & educational systems don't map quite as neatly as we like to pretend, many people (Thom possibly included, certainly me) don't really "feel" the differences.