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That's not "likely" at all. Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition, even though the Apple processors in question a
by Bud 9y ago
That's not "likely" at all. Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition, even though the Apple processors in question are designed for mobile devices and have much less power to work with.
Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.
- drham 9y agoFaster, probably, but 2x+ Faster like in PowerPC > Intel very unlikely. Which is why there’s much less likely to be enough performance budget for effective emulation.
- saagarjha 9y agoPresumably their "desktop-grade" A-whatever chip will have a higher TDP and clock speed than their mobile counterparts.
- gascan 9y agoIf they could just turn up the TDP and clock speed on their chips and get 2x the performance of Intel's best chips that easily- they would already own the entire desktop market.
- mozumder 9y agoAnd some of us, with actual CPU design backgrounds, have been saying that for a while now. We've been asking why Apple doesn't already do it.
- samcat116 9y agoAs someone without a CPU design backround, would something like this scale pretty linearly with added power and thermal headroom? I assume there are limit that would have to be overcome, but what would an ARM chip in the conditions of an i7 look like?
- mozumder 9y agoIt's more of a logarithmic scale. The same architecture can generally scale to 10x over a few process generations.
- arbie 9y agoThis does not hold at 10nm and below.
- bzbarsky 9y agoTDP typically scales as somewhere between the cube and fourth power of the clock speed if you're pushing the envelope (in the sense of running at frequencies where further frequency increase also needs a voltage increase). So having 10x the thermal envelope means you can probably clock about twice as fast, all else being equal.
- BillinghamJ 9y agoSeems that it’s more of a logistical and network-effect issue in getting everyone to support it, rather than a technical issue. Possibly a patent issue also
- mozumder 9y agoMy only question is if they actually use ARM for their next-generation architecture, or something completely new...
- mozumder 9y agoComputer architectures routinely see 3x performance jumps across different power budgets. This rule has held over decades. Clock speeds alone can probably increase by 30%. Caches and internal datapaths can double or more. Then you can start to add in more execution units or more expensive branch-prediciton or even new more power-hungry instructions. A 4 Watt Intel Pentium 4410Y Kaby Lake for mobile devices gets about 1800 on Geekbench, while a 115 Watt Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake for desktops gets 5600. I'm just going to say it: the Apple laptop CPU is going to get Geekbench score... above 9000! And, yes, I do have a CPU design background.
- michaelmrose 9y agoSo artificial benchmarks already do a very poor job of capturing performance. The apple laptop cpu does not exist. If it did exist it would likely suffer a very substantial performance hit if forced to emulate x86 software. So you are going to speculate on the meaningless benchmark numbers of an imaginary cpu that will take a wholly unknown hit if everyone does not rewrite everything why?
- mozumder 9y agoArtificial benchmarks do a great job of capturing performance, since they're more controlled and eliminate unnecessary variables. Once you understand this, then you can understand how CPU designers work to predict future performance. CPU designers use artificial testbenches.
- michaelmrose 9y agoYou making up numbers doesn't appear to be a useful endeavor.
- sjwright 9y agoI suspect if Apple designs a desktop CPU, performant x86 emulation will be a key design criteria. I know very little about CPU design, but I imagine it would be possible to have hardware optimisations for x86 emulation just like we have today for video codecs. Or even further they could bake a "rosetta" into the chip's microcode and have their CPU natively support the x86 instruction set along with ARM or whatever they come up with.
- megy 9y agoDo you think they will use the same chip? In 2020?
- ajross 9y agoThat's not remotely true. There is some crossover, which is notable. But that means that the fastest iPhone is faster than some of the slower desktops. Intel's current single core leader is a coffee lake running at 4.7 GHz with like 12MB of core-speed cache. Be real.
- Bud 9y agoThe current A11 chip is faster single-core than the current MacBook Pro. The Intel chip you mention isn't in any Apple machine at all. (Except maybe the iMac Pro? Is it even in that?) So you be real. I don't think you've actually looked at the benchmarks. You should do so. I think you'll be shocked at just how much overlap there is, just like I was.
- LoSboccacc 9y agothat's because apple is fixed on choosing the intel parts with the least tdp power they can get away with. it's their choice to make the mbp slow, up and including the numerous thermal issues that force the cpu out of the nominal turbo mode for the longer workloads
- Bud 9y agoThose are valid points, but it's still shocking that Apple's own CPUs can outperform Intel laptop CPUs with far higher TDP.
- walshemj 9y agoThe 8700k which the previous poster mentioned is a hex core with 12 Threads!
- asdginionio 9y ago>I don't think you've actually looked at the benchmarks. What benchmarks? Geekbench? That's the only one I've ever seen where the fight is close, and Geekbench (like everything that boils performance down to one number) is nearly completely useless. If you see a two-watt phone CPU beating a 45-watt actively-cooled laptop CPU, you can either conclude that the phone is alien technology decades ahead of anything else on the market or that the benchmark is broken. Which is more likely? https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136666 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...
- awalton 9y ago> Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "But Geekbench..." is not extraordinary evidence. Give me a board where I can do an Apple to apples comparison, booting both under the same revision of the same OS, and running industry standard benchmarks (read: plural), and then we can come to that conclusion.
- snowwrestler 9y agoNo one is stopping you from doing that experiment. > Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "Extraordinary" is in the eye of the beholder. We have some evidence; you're welcome to believe it or not, but unless you supply alternative evidence you're not really making an argument. You're just saying "it might not be true," which is something anyone can say at any time about anything.
- hcnews 9y agoNice, that was a good explanation for your stance. I am not supporting either, just liked the turnout. Obviously this isn't my usual kind of hn comment.
- ReverseCold 9y ago"booting both under the same revision of the same OS" It should be irrelevant in Apple's case anyway since they run their own OS. If their OS is faster for a certain task than some other OS then that's part of what you would define as "faster" for a user of the device. Right? Am I missing something?