7 ms·
Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread
- gallerdude 10y agoThis shows both the amazing progress of iPhone and disheartening progress of the Mac line simultaneously.
- cloudjacker 10y agoYeah, Macbook air really feels abandoned Would love a 16GB model. For the last 4 years of me saying that, everyone and their brother, and the Apple reps all say "oh you can configure that on the site", because they have have access to the parallel darknet version of the Apple site where Macbook airs ship with 16gb RAM I really like the air, but I can like the Macbook Pro its not really a big deal. JUST WISH THEY WOULD YA KNOW
- zyxley 10y ago> Yeah, Macbook air really feels abandoned The Macbook-with-no-suffix line is the implicit replacement for the Air anyway.
- wyager 10y agoLighter, better screen, cheaper. I'm not sure why you'd buy an Air these days.
- snovv_crash 10y agoTo avoid dongle hell.
- WiseWeasel 10y agoOne man's dongle hell is another's unplug-one-thing-and-go heaven.
- swift 10y agoi'd be on board with two ports, i think, but one is a hard sell. i regularly want to plug things into my laptop while charging it. it's a shame, because they've almost sold me on the thing.
- majewsky 10y agoA second port wouldn't break your usecase.
- WiseWeasel 10y agoI've noticed that having no choice in the matter makes it significantly more likely to be the case. After making the switch, I do feel that my experience is nicer for it. Expansion lives on the outside, tailored to the environment in which it resides, and the battery lasts long enough that I can spend most of my day without the power adapter connected.
- visarga 10y agoKeyboard doesn't feel like a keyboard, trackpad is fake, speed is that of a tablet, and has almost no ports. I wanted the 11'' MBA with retina and an updated CPU, not a bastardized laptop. I want to feel keys pressing.
- hrrsn 10y ago>Keyboard doesn't feel like a keyboard, trackpad is fake, speed is that of a tablet, and has almost no ports. All valid points, bar the trackpad. The force touch trackpad is a pleasure to use and I much prefer it to previous Apple trackpads (which are still excellent).
- camhenlin 10y agoDisagree, I use one of these machines on a daily basis (as well as one of the newer bluetooth keyboards with the same keys), and they are fantastic keyboards once you get used to them. The trackpad is fantastic as well
- thirdsun 10y agoCheaper? Not at all. While I agree that the MacBook 12" is the new Air and the better purchase, it's rather expensive and currently the sole purpose of the original MacBook Air is covering the price range around 1000 €. Until the MacBook gets there.
- csydas 10y agoRight now the display port and the two USB ports for the Air feel just about right for me, and it seems like the ideal "minimalist" laptop. Performance wise I hear that both are comparable and you'll get similar battery life on both, but for me the Macbook_Raw barely crosses the line of "too minimalist". Though honestly, even a second USBC port would probably change my mind on it. I also really like the feel of the 13" screen - it seems just right, but I suppose I could get used to the 12". Also don't really wanna go back to a Bluetooth Mouse again, but this is ultimately a minor quibble that I could get over pretty easily.
- zeckalpha 10y agoBattery.
- intoverflow2 10y agoBecause the Macbook runs slower the more you throw at it
- enraged_camel 10y ago>>Yeah, Macbook air really feels abandoned That's because it is. What's interesting however is that my 2011 Macbook Air still works like a champ. It has a 1.7 Ghz Intel i5 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD. And, amazingly enough, the battery still lasts for 3-4 hours, even after five years of heavy usage. Macbook Pro is too heavy for me, and I don't like the lack of ports in the newer "Macbook" line, so I've held out. At this point the only thing I wish I had was a retina display, honestly.
- cloudjacker 10y agoI have the 2012 Macbook Air 8gb RAM and 512 GB SSD Still perfect for me, I do casual video editing and some compositing in 1080p and rendering time is still great, I compile large programming projects and it is comparable to all the spiffy new macbook pros companies want to set me up with I did replace the battery for around $100 It has all the right ports at the right speeds, multiple usb 3.0, sdxc card slot with sdxc speeds, thunderbolt at thunderbolt speeds The user experience still beats out all the sub $1000 laptops because the target audience accepts a lot of compromises and their budget is $400 (okay, I haven't looked at the market, just see what I see. a lot of people switched to tablets) So I just wish they'd release the 1 TB version with 16gb RAM The macbook air 2012 is the machine I always wanted to exist for half a decade, and it is still great. Not the model before, or the model before that.
- flamedoge 10y agoThe day that apple flips switch in opt and ships OS X in Arms means Intel could be in trouble. They did it before with PowerPC->Intel.
- camhenlin 10y agoI think this becomes more and more viable with every Apple A-series release and that this is the year where if they were to release the right machine, I probably wouldn't flinch switching to an ARM "daily driver" computer
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- megablast 10y agoIntel will be ok, Apple don't sell that many chips. And it is not going to affect anyone else. And Intel are looking at helping Apple out with the next versions of their chips, possibly fabbing them.
- mungoman2 10y agoIt would be a powerful statement that Intel is not the given choice for the CPU in a "real" computers (as opposed to smartphone/tablet) anymore.
- iMark 10y agoIt would send a signal that Intel isn't the given choice if you've made a vast investment developing your own CPU line over the years.
- makapuf 10y agoNo, you can already use other vendors chips. What it would say for consumer products is that it isn't the given choice provided you developed and ported your own OS (or -ha- use linux).
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- jaxn 10y agoDoes this have implications for game consoles too? Is the iPhone the most powerful gaming device?
- flukus 10y agoThat usually depends more on the graphics card than the processor.
- phire 10y agoIt's quite possibly faster in the CPU department than the PS4/Xbox One, though those both have 8 (slower) cores. But the PS4, Xbox One and possibly even the Wii U will have much faster GPUs.
- 13of40 10y agoThe PS4 and XBox One also have four times as much RAM as the iPhone 7. In fact I was kind of shocked when they announced it would only have 2GB, considering you can get a Nexus or OnePlus with 6GB this year.
- riotdash 10y agoWell that's the difference between optimized iOS and resource hungry Android.
- t0mislav 10y agoProbably iPhone will be faster in every day usage with 2GB of RAM then these 2 phones with 6 GB.
- swift 10y agoyep. the fact that iOS apps typically don't use GC and that multitasking is much more restricted both reduce the amount of memory that iOS needs. (though more is always better!)
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- frik 10y agoI imagine in near future, we will use smartphones as our personal computer in every situation. In the office, one can then interact with a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse/touch pad and use a big monitor. Probably, one of the next iOS will come with a macOS UI as well (under the hood the iOS is based on macOS anyway) - so if you connect it to a huge monitor, you have the desktop UI of macOS, and otherwise the iOS UI. The same will happen with Android/ChromeOS/Google Fuchsia, Ubuntu and MS has some ideas too (but they cannot execute it, forcing mobile UI on desktop failed big, now they bet on Win32 again to fill their empty AppStore).
- ben_jones 10y agoMy phone catches on fire whenever I open up chrome. How will it handle multiple IDEs? Would be interested to hear from a hardware person if cooling is a hard or soft bottleneck for something like this...
- exmuslim 10y agoYou have major phone producers removing 3.5mm jacks to save space, by the aame attitude I think it's safe to assume no one will add a "thick" cooling system.
- huuu 10y agoAs far as I know Ubuntu and Windows are already doing this. But as you said without much luck. I also think this is the future. But not only for the switch to desktop. Also as car console, key store, tv remote, synthesizer (just put it in a midi device) and so on. You personal key to everything. And your single attack vector...
- krastanov 10y agoThe Andromium guys are trying to do that right now. They had a Kickstarter for a dock for your phone that does this for you, but it failed a few years ago. Just a month ago they tried the same thing with a very streamlined "laptop-like shell", and that Kickstarter[2] succeeded. I am one of the backers and I am quite excited about it. [2] Non-referral link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook-turn-your-smartphone-into-a-laptop-f https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...
- cwyers 10y agoPerhaps relevant. Linus Torvalds' opinion on GeekBench: http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136666 http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curposti... > So basically a quarter to a third of the "integer" workloads are just utter BS. They are not comparable across architectures due to the crypto units, and even within one architecture the numbers just don't mean much of anything. >And quite frankly, it's not even just the crypto ones. Looking at the other GB3 "benchmarks", they are mainly small kernels: not really much different from dhrystone. I suspect most of them have a code footprint that basically fits in a L1I cache. It's a few years out of date, and maybe Geekbench has improved since then, but I wouldn't put a lot of stock into these kinds of numbers until I knew that those kinds of issues had been addressed.
- riotdash 10y agoConsidering how many times before Tolvards has just been full of shit with his "opinions", I wouldn't pay too much attention to this... ...and especially since the whole post is 3 years old and currently the world's top engineering university and major chip makers such as AMD, ARM and MediaTek rely on Geekbench.
- mappu 10y agoGB3 -> GB4 removed some sha1(?) tests for which Snapdragon introduced fixed-function hardware.
- imtringued 10y agoIf these phone processors are that amazing why don't we see them being used outside phones and tablets? I mean take the A10 Fusion give it four cores instead of two and put it on a server mainboard with all the usual things like PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet and SATA. Basically do what AMD did with their A1100 except with a good processors and actually sell more than a dev kit. The lack of total raw processing power per server could be easily offset by the density and lower price of the ARM server. Why isn't this happening? I don't think lack of software is an explanation for that. Things like AWS Lambda could probably be immediately ported to run on ARM servers.
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- plantain 10y agoIt's just a matter of time before we see ARM's in Macbooks. I wonder if we'll see Rosetta make an appearance for binary backward-compatibility again.
- jowiar 10y agoI'm thinking it's more likely that MacBooks (and probably Macs) are killed off altogether (or merged into iPads). I think we're about 2 iOS iterations away from the iPad being a complete Macbook replacement (and we're there for a vast majority of consumers right now). I'm assuming Xcode for iOS arriving next year, along with loosening the restrictions on running locally-developed code. Then one more year to clean things up. Couple that with a few little hiccups in iOS self-sufficiency (read: System restores, another year for the software ecosystem to fill out), and we're there.
- _ph_ 10y agoAs much as I like iOS for my iPhone, for replacing a "Computer" Apple would need to introduce some kind of file system, where data can be shared between apps, and lift most restrictions about what apps can do. A linux VM running on an iPad would be a game-changer for me.
- jowiar 10y agoIt's getting there, with the evolution of sharesheets + iCloud Drive. I've been meaning to play around with a 4g iPad + cloud boxes for webdev and analytics workflow.
- _ph_ 10y agoRosetta worked, because the Intel chips were much faster than the PowerPcs back then. I doubt that the ARMs would have a sufficient large lead in performance. And there are plenty of reasons to run x86 code on Macs, be it older programs which might not be ported to ARM, or all the Windows and Linux stuff running in VMs. As much as I would like an ARM based laptop, it would be much less practical than an x86 one.
- mappu 10y agoAlmost every mobile Ax SoC has pushed the contemporary boundaries of per-core performance. But Apple won't sell these amazing chips to other manufacturers. For now, i think the openness of the Android ecosystem is still worth more than extra CPU performance.
- thrden 10y agothe source also claims that the iPhone 7 is of a comparable speed to the macbook pro 13-inch from 2013, which is a computer I use daily for my programming. I'd love to see a way of using an iphone as highly mobile work station.
- captainmuon 10y agoCool, does that mean we can scale down the processor performance by half and still have a phone that is competitive, but has twice the battery life? OK, I know speed and power consumption are not linear. I'd really love if one phone would skip a year of increasing CPU speed and thinness, but would keep the advances in battery tech.
- andruby 10y agoNo. CPU's in a phone are probably idling 99% of the time. The power usage for the full-performance and half-performance cpu when idling will be close to equal. The full-performance phone might even have better battery life because it can finish cpu intensive tasks twice as fast, returning to idle power draw faster than the half-performance phone.
- adambrenecki 10y agoApparently the A10 chip has two high-perf cores and two low-power cores, sort of like what ARM call "big.LITTLE". So yes, sort of.
- ksec 10y agoUnless you are playing games with it all day, Otherwise you want the Baseband Modem to be super energy efficient, or may be you some how mangically get the best reception signal everywhere. And the Connection is only 2nd energy drain, the first being Display. I am not even sure if MicroLED could improve much at all. But any energy saving in Display Tech would be huge.