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Pretty sure an ARM tablet chip is not going to beat Intel, even on the low end. Otherwise we would have moved on already. Also, apple does like AMD and uses the

Pretty sure an ARM tablet chip is not going to beat Intel, even on the low end. Otherwise we would have moved on already. Also, apple does like AMD and uses their gpus because they have bad blood with nvidia. Apple primarily makes laptops and AMD has not been competitive until they developed Ryzen.

godzillabrennus 8y ago
https://9to5mac.com/2017/09/22/iphone-8-geekbench-test-scores/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/09/22/iphone-8-geekbench-test-score... The iPhone 8 CPU is competitive with a Core i5
- lagadu 8y ago
  That a myth; Geekbench results aren't comparable cross-platform.
  - tristanj 8y ago
    No, that is no longer true. Since Geekbench 3, results are comparable cross-platform.
  - drakenot 8y ago
    From the linked article: "Geekbench comparisons between phones and laptops used to be pretty meaningless, as the tests were not directly comparable, but that hasn’t been the case for some time now. Founder John Poole confirmed that it is legitimate to directly compare scores across platforms" Look at these workloads[0] and tell me what doesn't look comparable across platforms? Parsing a 1.5MB HTML page, running SQLite queries, compiling code using LLVM, running Dijkstra's algorithm on a huge graph, repeatedly rendering PDFs, etc, etc. [0] https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench4-cpu-workloads.pdf https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench4-cpu-workloads.pdf
- 21 8y ago
  That claim would be highly suspect in general, given that a desktop CPU has at least 10 times more headroom in power consumption. For such a claim to be true, you would have to expect that the phone CPU is somehow 10 times more efficient per Watt, while having the same kind of architecture (general CPU, not GPU/TPU/...).
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - MBCook 8y ago
    It’s perfectly possible that the iPhone CPU can’t run 4 hours straight due to heat issues in its enclosure while a desktop CPU can. But that could be fixed. Intel has not been optimizing for TDP/power draw as aggressively as Apple has. Apple started from that position and went up in performance. Intel started more in performance and had tried to keep TDP in check.
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    If you give the i5 it's full voltage and crank up the clock speed it'll totally beat an Apple chip. But in order to fit in a Macbook Air's power envelope you need to really throttle things back and a chip that's designed to operate in that regime has a big advantage over a chip that isn't.
  - Const-me 8y ago
    I think he might be correct. Apple A11 has 297 GFlops CPU performance. (1) That “7th gen i5” is apparently i5-7360U. 32 FLOPs/cycle/core (2) * 2 cores * 3.50 GHz (=max turbo) = 224 GFlops. > the phone CPU is somehow 10 times more efficient per Watt Not 10 times. The i5’s TDP is just 15W. I don’t know about A11 but high-end Qualcomm chips can be up to 5-6W, just 3 times difference. > while having the same kind of architecture (general CPU, not GPU/TPU). That’s a continuum. They both CPUs, they both have SIMD that’s how they achieve that high flop/cycle, but the architecture can be quite different. A11 has 6 cores. Intel spends many transistors, and therefore energy, doing very complicated things: branch prediction, indirect branch prediction, cache synchronization between cores, speculative execution… Apple has full control over OS and software, they can probably get away with not doing some of these. Intel and AMD have to maintain compatibility with all software (including single threaded), built by all compilers and languages, that’s why they have fewer tradeoffs available to them. (1) https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2021926/ https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2021926/ (2) https://stackoverflow.com/a/15657772/126995 https://stackoverflow.com/a/15657772/126995
- leni536 8y ago
  Video encoding is a pretty poor benchmark for this.
X-Istence 8y ago
I know you are wrong because Geekbench scores are showing the A-series chips to be competitive with Intel chips already.
hrktb 8y ago
Can’t they have an architecture where specialized chips deal with the most common heavy duty tasks to counteract raw CPU power ?

godzillabrennus 8y ago

https://9to5mac.com/2017/09/22/iphone-8-geekbench-test-scores/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/09/22/iphone-8-geekbench-test-score... The iPhone 8 CPU is competitive with a Core i5

lagadu 8y ago
That a myth; Geekbench results aren't comparable cross-platform.
- tristanj 8y ago
  No, that is no longer true. Since Geekbench 3, results are comparable cross-platform.
- drakenot 8y ago
  From the linked article: "Geekbench comparisons between phones and laptops used to be pretty meaningless, as the tests were not directly comparable, but that hasn’t been the case for some time now. Founder John Poole confirmed that it is legitimate to directly compare scores across platforms" Look at these workloads[0] and tell me what doesn't look comparable across platforms? Parsing a 1.5MB HTML page, running SQLite queries, compiling code using LLVM, running Dijkstra's algorithm on a huge graph, repeatedly rendering PDFs, etc, etc. [0] https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench4-cpu-workloads.pdf https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench4-cpu-workloads.pdf
21 8y ago
That claim would be highly suspect in general, given that a desktop CPU has at least 10 times more headroom in power consumption. For such a claim to be true, you would have to expect that the phone CPU is somehow 10 times more efficient per Watt, while having the same kind of architecture (general CPU, not GPU/TPU/...).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- MBCook 8y ago
  It’s perfectly possible that the iPhone CPU can’t run 4 hours straight due to heat issues in its enclosure while a desktop CPU can. But that could be fixed. Intel has not been optimizing for TDP/power draw as aggressively as Apple has. Apple started from that position and went up in performance. Intel started more in performance and had tried to keep TDP in check.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  If you give the i5 it's full voltage and crank up the clock speed it'll totally beat an Apple chip. But in order to fit in a Macbook Air's power envelope you need to really throttle things back and a chip that's designed to operate in that regime has a big advantage over a chip that isn't.
- Const-me 8y ago
  I think he might be correct. Apple A11 has 297 GFlops CPU performance. (1) That “7th gen i5” is apparently i5-7360U. 32 FLOPs/cycle/core (2) * 2 cores * 3.50 GHz (=max turbo) = 224 GFlops. > the phone CPU is somehow 10 times more efficient per Watt Not 10 times. The i5’s TDP is just 15W. I don’t know about A11 but high-end Qualcomm chips can be up to 5-6W, just 3 times difference. > while having the same kind of architecture (general CPU, not GPU/TPU). That’s a continuum. They both CPUs, they both have SIMD that’s how they achieve that high flop/cycle, but the architecture can be quite different. A11 has 6 cores. Intel spends many transistors, and therefore energy, doing very complicated things: branch prediction, indirect branch prediction, cache synchronization between cores, speculative execution… Apple has full control over OS and software, they can probably get away with not doing some of these. Intel and AMD have to maintain compatibility with all software (including single threaded), built by all compilers and languages, that’s why they have fewer tradeoffs available to them. (1) https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2021926/ https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2021926/ (2) https://stackoverflow.com/a/15657772/126995 https://stackoverflow.com/a/15657772/126995
leni536 8y ago
Video encoding is a pretty poor benchmark for this.

X-Istence 8y ago

I know you are wrong because Geekbench scores are showing the A-series chips to be competitive with Intel chips already.

hrktb 8y ago

Can’t they have an architecture where specialized chips deal with the most common heavy duty tasks to counteract raw CPU power ?