9 ms·
Performance comparison between 2017 iPad Pro and 2012 iMac
- robin_reala 9y agoRight, but that’s a 5 year old machine they’re comparing against. Still impressive, but not what the title implies.
- my123 9y agoThat's a quad-core desktop Core i7 with 4 cores and 8 threads, and clocked much higher than the Apple A10X.
- frou_dh 9y agoAlso notably one is actively cooled and one isn't. I love that these beastly SoCs are peaceful little chips sitting silently.
- onli 9y agoIt's still old. There was the 4770, 4790, 6700 and now the 7700 after it. Each version was only a bit better than its predecessor, but 4 times a small bump results in a big bump. It is not slow, but it is not as fast as a modern machine. Maybe impressive, but not parity.
- hvidgaard 9y agothe i7-7700 is around 20-25% faster. An ultra low power chip only 20-25% behind current high power desktop chips is quite impressive.
- onli 9y agoNot in geekbench though, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505189. That's 20k multi thread score vs 9k. That benchmark might be a bit flawed.
- hvidgaard 9y agoSomething does not add up here. Taking that benchmark and compare it to the other, we get http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/231758?baseline=3039096 http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/231758?baseline=... The i7-7700K is not twice as fast.
- verytrivial 9y agoAgreed, title might better be: "iPad performance now where iMacs were five years ago." Still interesting (says someone using an iMac from 2008).
- taspeotis 9y agoI found an i7-7700K benchmark to compare it to [1]. Hopefully it's an apples-to-apples comparison... [1] http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline=3039096 http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline...
- samfisher83 9y agoThat is a 90 watt part compared to a 5 or 10 watt part. The performance/watt of A10x is amazing.
- revelation 9y agoWell, for about 10 minutes or so it takes to run the benchmark. Then it's straight into thermal throttling. That 90 watt part meanwhile is designed to put out that performance all day long. (You might think that makes the iPad performance all the more impressive but that kind of throttling is nowadays built into the chip itself, it's not just limited thermal design. They are peddling this as a pro device and I would like my pro device to keep up that performance level for the entire time it takes to build my C++ project or run my deep learning kernel)
- HappyTypist 9y agoiPad doesn't thermal throttle.
- spronkey 9y agoCPU performance doesn't scale linearly with TDP at all. Even Intel's own lower power offerings look insanely awesome when you consider performance per watt vs their higher end parts.
- epmaybe 9y agoWouldn't it make sense to try and compare it to one of Intel's more recent lower spec offerings anyways? Something that compares in terms of price and form factor.
- my123 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505243 Well, it performs well against them too.
- Quequau 9y agoMakes me wonder when we'll see a MacBook Air with an ARM SoC.
- digi_owl 9y agoSlap a keyboard case on the new ipad pro and you are a long way there once iOS 11 ships...
- melling 9y agoMy two decades old dream is to simply slide a wireless mouse, keyboard, and monitor next to my phone then I'd have a desktop computer. Sooner or later our mobile devices will morph into our desktops?
- hvidgaard 9y agoMicrosoft kinda did that with Continuum for Win10 phones. For the majority of PCs it's more than fast enough. It's a shame it didn't take off.
- digi_owl 9y agoI think the basic problem there is the few devices that support it, and their price.
- threeseed 9y agoMicrosoft just debuted their new shell which apparently makes Continuum a lot better. So it's still part of their future strategy: https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-cshell https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-cshell
- hvidgaard 9y agoInteresting. Wonder if they will try to reboot the W10 mobile at some point.
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- lorenzhs 9y agoArchive link for those having trouble loading the site: http://archive.is/V4K0P http://archive.is/V4K0P
- eb0la 9y agoLooks like processor architecture really matters. Btw - is LLVM still faster on a 5-year-old machine than on an iPad? I am seeing well, right?
- andrepd 9y agoWell, you're comparing against a 5 year old machine. What point does this make? It's about as meaningful as saying my smartphone has reached parity with a Cray supercomputer (but a 20 year old one).
- thesephist 9y agoI would say an important point of note is that a lot of people who would consider themselves power users still use Intel chips from the early 2010's. Coming from someone who's using a Sandy Bridge i7.
- qubex 9y agoLike you I'm using a quand-core 'Server' Mac Mini from 2012 with a Sandy Bridge processor. What exactly do you make of this? That we are not power users? (Not being sarcastic or anything like that, I've been thinking along these same lines for a while, but I cannot quite put my finger on it.)
- ido 9y agoThat desktop CPU performance gains have slowed.
- blackflame7000 9y agoWell the power wall has kind of set an upper bound on clock speed. (although kaby lakes can do 5GHz no problem which is pretty impressive) So until a fundamental breakthrough in heat extraction happens, were kinda left with only power efficiency and parallelism as ways to increase performance (which desktops have done). Mores law has still more or less held true thus far. I think ARM just had a long way to catch up but it will eventually hit physical barriers at some point and performance increases will slow.
- IBM 9y agoYou don't think it's a little impressive that a mobile SoC in a tablet (that is constrained by power and physical space) is matching the performance of an i7 in an iMac that has the benefits of sitting on your desk plugged into power all day, isn't constrained by size, and has significant active cooling?
- lorenzhs 9y agoIt might make more sense to compare to a current-gen laptop, not a Desktop machine from five years ago: http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline=3041332 http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline... (archive: http://archive.is/EVcuE http://archive.is/EVcuE)
- asendra 9y agoI think this is a better comparison, as both have same TDP and fanless. (That Intel is a Kaby Lake Y Core i5 1.2Ghz/3.2Ghz Boost cpu) Edit for perspective: Thats the same cpu in the just upgraded MacBooks. http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline=2922710 http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline...
- m_mueller 9y agoThat's... incredible.
- zrm 9y agoBoth of those are comparing a 3-core iPad with a 2-core Intel CPU. And parity at the same TDP is unsurprising. The trouble is that the i5-7Y57 is quite slow by desktop standards and there is currently no ARM equivalent to 4+ core 45+ watt Intel processors at any TDP.
- asendra 9y agoUnsurprising? So it is an easy thing to do to at least equal Intel with their vast experience after only a few years, when no one else is able to do it? By the way if you have a problem with the number of cores just compare the single core score. I don't see a problem though, it they can cram one more core in same tdp then it's fair. The jury is still out wether Apple could compete with Intel at those higher TDPs (15w-28w-45w)
- zrm 9y ago> By the way if you have a problem with the number of cores just compare the single core score. Then the Intel processor comes out ahead despite the iPad having a higher clock speed. > I don't see a problem though, it they can cram one more core in same tdp then it's fair. The quad core i5-7442EQ will destroy the dual core i5-7267U at anything threaded even though it has a lower TDP. Having more cores is an asymmetric advantage in threaded benchmarks.
- manmal 9y agoThe thing standing out to me is the almost-twice-as-good LLVM performance of the iPad. It might make for a good iOS dev machine, after all. I still don't think it would be pleasant without a touchpad, but I also haven't tried it yet. Also, using it all day would be very hard on the arms/shoulders, I think.
- wand3r 9y agoThis is a big deal but a terrible way to point it out. I had that iMac until recently and it rips, that's a big boost for a tablet. That said it's like saying, iPhone has more computing power than NASA...In 1963.
- du_bing 9y agoSo, in the near future, we will have more companies that are able to make fast-enough CPUs for consumption other than Intel and AMD. I think this is a good thing. Traditionally, the technology of CPU seems so complex that few can handle that. But now Apple, Google and some other manufactures will compete in this field. This will lower the cost of massive computing.
- digi_owl 9y agoFrankly it has been the case for years already. We keep coming up with ever more exotic reasons for not retiring the x86 hegemony for home computing, but the core one that we are loath to acknowledge is legacy software. WinTel sticks around because anything else means a wholesale replacement of every program ever bought. Even Intel failed against that beast when they tried to push Itanium, and it was not even a desktop product. Similarly FOSS have a hard time getting a foothold because devs keep breaking backwards compatibility on a whim (and no, Flatpak et al is not a solution. It is lipstick on a pig).
- jug 9y agoYou mean like ARM? Microsoft builds Windows for ARM these days, full fledged Windows this time unlike Windows RT. Photoshop has been demo'ed on a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU running Windows 10 and devices are expected to be released later this year. And maybe the end game for Apple's A series of CPU's is to get them at least into Macbook and Macbook Air if not Macbook Pro, to begin with. They'd get a whole other kind of control over that supply chain and not having to stall releases based on Intel schedules. I wouldn't be surprised if they have a version of macOS already compiling.
- du_bing 9y agoThe macOS compiling on ARM you mentioned is very interesting. I guess probably Apple or other big manufactures may be already able to make CPU of X86_64 or other architectures.
- ferongr 9y agoFor how long? Sustained performance of SOCs in tablets and smartphones is way lower than what measured by benchmarks. Edit: Furthermore, something looks fishy with the Intel results. Desktop Intel CPUs definitely have a multiprocess score ratios near their physical core counts (increased by 10-30% for HT-capable ones) yet Geekbench only seems to achieve an MP ratio a bit above 2.
- numerlo 9y agoStill, if performance is actually comparable (for which I have my doubts) that means we could get ARM laptops which could easily sustain it.
- userbinator 9y agoThere is an... interesting post by Linus Torvalds about GeekBench: http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136666 http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curposti... In other words, Linus claims it's mainly testing the speed of specialised instructions implemented in hardware, and not general-purpose computing. For a similar analogy, compare the speed of a Bitcoin mining ASIC vs. a GPU or even a CPU. At the same clock speed, dedicated hardware will vastly outperform the software implementation. I think it's somewhat ironic then, that the "RISC" CPU is getting higher scores due to the presence of such CISC-y instructions.
- my123 9y agoI would argue that the LLVM test isn't skewed with specialized instructions, and the iPad wins it regardless.
- arghwhat 9y agoI don't think a lot of these tests are that "CISC-y". They're just incredibly synthetic. Both CPU's are entirely CISC. The Intel CPU just have way more of... well, everything. That's the primary reason for the TDP gap. It's really hard to say anything about the benchmarks without the assembly for both architectures, though. Is the Intel memory copy a simple "rep mov", or a mov using all xmm registers? Is the ARM AES benchmark using AES extensions?
- DrNuke 9y agoThe US went to the moon and back with relying on hand calculations, it has to be put in the perspective, innit?
- vacri 9y agoHand calculations and 4% of GDP :)
- DrNuke 9y agoStill hand calculations, a brain and two hands are not gdp (or cpu)-dependent. Engineering works are. My point is Apple is cretinising the world and its brightest minds, neither a novel nor a popular point, I know, but more and more poignant.
- tgb 9y agoI think you might be confusing GDP with something else. Apollo spending peaked in 1966 at just shy of $3 billion [1] while US GDP was 815 billion [2] for about 0.3% percent of the GDP. On the other hand, [3] shows US federal outlays at $17.2 billion, so Apollo would have been 17% of the total budget. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=gdp+of+us https://www.google.com/search?q=gdp+of+us [3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals
- vacri 9y agoHrm, I read it stated that way somewhere, but looking at this link, it was more like 4% of the federal budget. Still an incredible outlay of money. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/feb/01/nasa-budgets-us-spending-space-travel https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/feb/01/nasa-b...
- satai 9y agoWhat does it say? Is it "A10X is awesome" or is it "geekbench sucks"?
- xylon 9y agolol the mac is 5 year old
- saturdaysaint 9y agoWow, I have that i7 3770 in my tower at home (now paired with a Geforce 1070) and it still feels delightfully overpowered. If I could run Ableton Live or Reason on this, or even if Apple simply had a canonical, first-rate controller that encouraged interesting Switch-like games, this would be tempting. As it is, I can't think of a single thing I could do with this that I couldn't do with the iPad Air 2 that mostly sits unused on our coffee table.
- bluehazed 9y agoTitle should probably mention the "Intel platform" is 5 years old.
- snovv_crash 9y agoAre they really saying that the iPad has 30% more memory bandwidth?
- throw2016 9y agoArm socs throttle aggressively and reaching x86 level of sustained performance will lead to more power consumption so the geekbench scores can be misleading. Having said that the performance of some of the newer Arm socs are encouraging. For instance you can now get a tiny 4k htpc for as little as $50-80 making the use of expensive and power hungry x86 parts redundant. Gigabit routers, nas, htpc devices and even some chromebooks now perform adequately with arm socs while sipping power.
- asendra 9y agoiPads/iPhones, the last few generations don't throttle, at least not in 30m-1h of continuous usage, compared to Android devices. Check Anandtech reviews if you don’t believe it.
- ungzd 9y agoAnd despite of this, lots of things that you could do on Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum you (almost) can't do on iPad: text editing, programming.
- threeseed 9y agoOf course you can edit text on an iPad. That's ridiculous. There are hundreds and hundreds of apps. I would start with something like Coda: https://panic.com/coda-ios/ https://panic.com/coda-ios/ As for programming well it depends on the language. You can code Python: http://omz-software.com/pythonista/ http://omz-software.com/pythonista/
- marvel_boy 9y agoARM chips are awesome! I'm sorry I can not buy ARM shares. Next generation of Macs will probably have ARM chips.
- spronkey 9y agoWhoever posted this took a very, very pessimistic 3770. Here's a much more representative result: http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline=3035146 http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline... I also have strong suspicions that real world workloads that aren't so cache-optimised would swing massively in favour of the 3770 as well. The best benchmarks we have of that unfortunately are things like 3DMark physics bench (the old A9X was half as fast as even an M-5Y71 in that benchmark). It's also worth noting that for TDP comparisons, even Intel's own 35w and 45w parts compare favourably to the desktop parts, and newer generations increase this gap substantially. Some multi-core geekbench scores per watt (higher is better): 77w i7-3770: 162 - 45w i7-3770T: 255 - 45w i7-3632QM: 257 - 17w i7-3687U: 315 3.5w - 7w i7-7Y75? 900 - 1800. A10X, assuming it's 5W TDP? 1800.
- bo1024 9y agoSomething fishy is going on here. I don't have a ton of experience with hardware, but enough to be pretty sure that the 2012 iMac is under-performing its specs here. (edit) For example, if you just look at CPU benchmarks, the processor in the iMac is not far off the i7 7700k that someone posted a benchmark for elsewhere in the thread, yet the 7700k supposedly thrashes the iPad while the iMac doesn't. Maybe both the iMac and iPad have thermal issues that a standard PC desktop would not.
- jumpkickhit 9y agoWow, ARM has blown up due to cellphones. It's starting to compare to x86 in performance to a degree. Wonder how long people are going to keep buying thousand-dollar cellphones each year that's fueling this.