14 ms·

iPhone 11 has the fastest single-core performance of any Apple computer

128 points by tambourine_man 7y ago

mlacks 7y ago
I can imagine Apple saw this coming a while back and decided to go all in on iOS while maintaining MacOS on the back burner. It must be difficult to be in a management position where you obviously see the industry is moving towards ARM, but you need to orchestrate a plan in motion to correctly time when the customer/ developer is ready to make the switch.
- crb002 7y ago
  Apple is removing Python etc for more than one reason. Curious if Apple does an ARM Mac Mini first as a canary.
  - GrayShade 7y ago
    CPython works on ARM, doesn't it?
    - marmaduke 7y ago
      Yes there's even iOS app like Pythonista which provide Python and n IDE.
  - lasagnaphil 7y ago
    If Apple does any Mac with a ARM processor, I think it will absolutely be the Macbook Air (or the recently discontinued Macbook). Those ARM processors will be so power-efficient that they will be able to market their laptops as "lasting for several days", which a lot of consumers will absolutely crave.
    - ComputerGuru 7y ago
      They can’t even get their phone batteries to last a full day because they’ll continue to prioritize form over function. I had several smartphones I didn’t need to charge more than every other day or even every three days if I wasn’t using them nonstop. Apple could do that today.
      - pcr910303 7y ago
        > They can’t even get their phone batteries to last a full day because they’ll continue to prioritize form over function. Well, to be fair, smartphones have much, much smaller bodies to carry around a battery. If Apple makes a notebook with the same A13 processor I’m pretty sure it will last more than two or three days. BTW, one of smartphone’s function is that it’s portable. You really can’t blame it being form over function when talking about battery life; there are many, many people who want light phones. If you need longer battery life by sacrificing weight, you can get yourself a backup battery (or a battery case) > I had several smartphones I didn’t need to charge more than every other day or even every three days if I wasn’t using them nonstop. Apple could do that today. My experience is that my iPhone XS survives a day and a half without any charging. YMMV, of course, but for me that’s enough.
      - 00deadbeef 7y ago
        The new iPhone 11 is slightly larger and thicker with a much bigger battery and an ugly camera array. Function seems to have been prioritised.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    The current Mac mini is an awesome machine and in top spec has some impressive performance. Given that a key strength of ARM is its power efficiency, it would seem more logical to start with something that has a battery. That way any performance hits can be seen as a trade off for longer battery life. I say this knowing full well than in any battery life versus thinness tradeoff, Apple has picked thinner just about every time.
- paulmd 7y ago
  > It must be difficult to be in a management position where you obviously see the industry is moving towards ARM, but you need to orchestrate a plan in motion to correctly time when the customer/ developer is ready to make the switch. Apple is in a unique position to make this happen though. And they have done it before with the PowerPC->x86 switchover. Their solution has previously been to have fat binaries with both versions compiled alongside. They control the toolchain and the app store so this is not that difficult to enforce.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    Box86 exists though. They don’t need fat binaries, they only need x86 emulation. Many x86 patents have also expired or will expire soon, so the set of instructions that need to be emulated is reduced.
    - toast0 7y ago
      Emulation works as a transition layer, and they've done it before (see Rosetta from ppc->x86 and the 68k emulator from when they switched to ppc), but native binaries will be significantly faster and more energy efficient.
      - ryacko 7y ago
        Native binaries using the latest stable libraries with the latest compiler optimizations will always be faster and more energy efficient. Even the Xbox had backwards compatibility across ISAs. Somehow I doubt people will care that much about efficiency.
        Narishma 7y ago
        They will care on a laptop with a battery.
  - Tinfoilhat666 7y ago
    Instead of switching macOS to arm, they could promote iPadOS to laptops. They already added a file manager and advanced windowing to it.
- _trampeltier 7y ago
  I wonder, why Apple has nothing like Samsung DEX. But also I wonder why Samsung and Google don't push this feature not more. I almost bought one of the last Windows phone, the HP Z3, because it could be use as base for a small notebook (they had just a "dumb" notebook for it, just the screen and a keyboard, all the processing was over air or cable from the phone). Even the new Linux phone (Librem 5) comes with a feature to connect the phone to a monitor and keyboard etc. Apple has never showed any of this concepts even a tiny bit.
saagarjha 7y ago
For those interested in comparing, note that Geekbench has updated their baseline recently. Make sure to use Geekbench 5 in your tests!
GrayShade 7y ago
So an i3-8100 has a single score of 1000, and the highest PC score they have is 1371? These Geekbench comparisons keep showing phone CPUs being faster than server ones, but I question their validity.
- jdc 7y ago
  Here's an iMac (i9 9900K) result of 1402: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/172942 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/172942
- Veedrac 7y ago
  The A12 has better single-threaded SPECint2006 scores than EPYC7742 almost across the board. It's about 10% worse than the 3900X, and 20% worse than the i9-9900K, so if the 20% uplift holds true for SPECint scores then the A13 should be pretty much par with the i9-9900K. ikr https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re... https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-gen/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-gen/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14664/testing-intel-ice-lake-10nm/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14664/testing-intel-ice-lake-...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- audunw 7y ago
  Why? Remember that we're talking about single-thread performance. There's no big reason why servers should be more optimised for single-thread performance than mobile ones. It's more useful to use the extra die area for more cores, or other features. They have the same fundamental limitations that makes it hard to scale to higher single-thread performance (remember that CPU processors also have to minimise power consumption, even if they use a lot more power in total). They're both using cutting edge processes, and they both have more than enough die area to make a single core perform as well as is physically possible. I really do think this indicates that Apple/ARM has caught up to Intel when it comes to architecture and we already know TSMC has surpassed them in process technology.
belltaco 7y ago
Does that include the new Mac Pro? If so does that mean PC games would theoretically run faster on an iPhone 11 than on desktop PCs (ignoring GPU speeds)?
- toast0 7y ago
  Most modern games are able to use four or more fast cpu cores, and even a budget desktop can afford a quad core cpu for less than $100 these days: intel i3-9100F (no graphics, coffee lake), or amd ryzen 5 3200g (graphics, zen+) are likely much better for multithreaded experiences. Plus heat dissipation, optionally more ram, and i/o abilities. If you're willing to spend $200 on a cpu, you can get faster or more cores.
- kyriakos 7y ago
  playing games means sustaining stable high performance for long periods. gaming PCs have active cooling which helps. i doubt a phone can do that without hitting thermal issues.
- Narishma 7y ago
  Probably for a few seconds before it starts throttling.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  The Mac Pro is actually a poor comparison here. Mac Pros run Xeon processors that prioritize having many cores. Their single core performance is very good, but worse than Intel's top mainstream chips, like the 9900K.
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
There's no doubt that Apple is currently making the best SOCs for the consumer smartphones. But, we should also be careful when comparing it with Apple Computers as some of them are underpowered e.g. Core M3 in Mid 2017 MacBook is same as the that found in intel based SBCs such as LattePanda Alpha. It would be interesting to see the single thread performance of intel Xeon W-3275M CPU from the Mac Pro 2019. The Cascade Lake architecture supposedly increases single thread performance by decreasing the base frequency of certain cores while increasing other cores as part of its Speed Select Technology (SST). Of course this depends on the power configuration set by Apple, I wonder whether they would voluntarily keep it under max performance in order to project the single thread superiority of their AX chips.
altmind 7y ago
... according to geekbench that was always favoring iphone cpus.
harrygeez 7y ago
Sorry if this sounds stupid, but I've always wondered: is 1 point in Geekbench for ARM really equivalent to 1 point for x64? Are they really comparable in the first place? If yes, how is it that the ARM SOC can beat an i5 while consuming so much less power? And why is ARM outstripping x64 in terms of single core speed? It just doesn't add up.
- for_xyz 7y ago
  Linus called Geekbench as useless few years ago since it uses hardware implementations of crypto algorithms on some architectures and not on others. [1] https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136666 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...
  - ksec 7y ago
    This keeps getting posted and it was on Geekbench 3. He is OK with Geekbench 4 [1]. [1] https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=159853&curpostid=159860 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=159853&curpost...
- NathanOsullivan 7y ago
  I don't know the answer to your question, but as a moderately frequent geekbench user I do know that even within x86 the Linux version outscores the windows version. On this basis alone I would be extremely dubious comparing between platforms
speedplane 7y ago
Comparing modern hardware like this is fine, but kind of pointless. The sad truth is that processing speed improvements have slowed down to a crawl. The exponential predicted by Moore's law looks more like a shallow linear progression today. Computers are not improving nearly as quickly as they once were. Weirdly, no one is talking about this. If computers stop improving, efficiency will stop improving, which will ultimately mean that standards of living will stop improving. If standards of living stop improving, i.e., the pie stops growing, there could be a whole variety of horrible social and political repercussions as everyone fights for their finite slice.
- Veedrac 7y ago
  This is actually pretty interesting. The statistic most people noticed is frequency, which climbed exponentially between 1995-2003 and came to a dead stop a year later. https://i.imgur.com/QAEqcie.png https://i.imgur.com/QAEqcie.png However, almost immediately afterwards, IPC, which had been stagnant over that whole time period, started itself steadily climbing exponentially, with the rate falling only fairly slowly. https://i.imgur.com/KiUqMhl.png https://i.imgur.com/KiUqMhl.png The overall result is exponential growth in ST performance that far outlived frequency growth, and which has only truly tapered recently... though it's likely AMD's recent reentry to the market starts to recover trends somewhat. https://i.imgur.com/h2jN9RK.png https://i.imgur.com/h2jN9RK.png But now that IPC is starting to struggle (though not falter), core counts are finally taking off. We haven't hit the end yet.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > But now that IPC is starting to struggle (though not falter), core counts are finally taking off. We haven't hit the end yet. The fact that the industry is now relying on these tricks are actually good evidence that performance is hitting a wall. In the past, if you wanted to 2X boost in performance, you could just wait a year. Now waiting doesn't work. You need to build your own ASIC or move things to the cloud where you can rely on big-tech's economies of scale. We have hit an end, and the performance boosts we see today are one trick ponies. After you build your ASIC, you can't get much faster. After you move to the cloud and reduce processing power costs, you can't reduce further. These tricks have slowed the "perceived" deterioration of Moore's law, but they are acts of desperation, not real progress.
aloknnikhil 7y ago
It makes zero sense to compare like this. Geekbench is closed source. So, there is no way of knowing what they're even running on ARM v/s x86. But, no way is my MacBook Pro slower than my iPad Pro This Geekbench comparison, on the other hand, tells me they're on par (both single and multi-core scores) https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/140913?baseline=201758 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/140913?baseline... I'd take this claim with a massive boulder of salt, if you consider it at all that is.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Well, memory aside (the iPad Pro having less) and perhaps SSD performance, how is the iPad Pro slower? What have you tried? It can run at least some code (the Geekbench) equally well. So what other programs could it run equally well?
  - aloknnikhil 7y ago
    Video encoding. The iPad pro is significantly slower at encoding 4k video compared to my MacBook Pro.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - holstvoogd 7y ago
      That makes sense, you're MBP has a pretty decent GPU to do that.
      - Youden 7y ago
        The quality of the GPU usually has no impact on video encoding. At best, you can use a hardware encoder that happens to come with the GPU but usually you won't want that because it comes with a compression hit compared to software.
        7y ago
veselin 7y ago
I question all these scores. The reason is that the Apple chip also has pretty low frequency and not so fast memory. This would mean that there is a lot of IPC opportunity left in comparison to the top x86 chips. This is the range of 2x in comparison to Skylake. This is a crazy wide core. What kinds of reorder buffers are required for this? Just 2x more execution units won't be enough.
_ph_ 7y ago
With all the discussions on how realistic the geekbench results are, why isn't there an open source benchmark suite which can be run as an app on iOS devices which would give a more thorough comparison between different architectures?
wayneftw 7y ago
Gee, that’s great! It’s just too bad that you don’t really have any ownership or control over what that CPU runs, despite having paid for it in full.
tambourine_man 7y ago
Geekbench’s usefulness aside, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the A series has surpassed x86 for the ultraportable laptop chip. An ARM MacBook would be a kickass machine. I actually hope they don’t release some sort of emulation layer like they did in the previous transitions. We don’t want to be spending battery with that when the tooling these days is much more homogeneous and high level. It’s also very tempting to speculate what they would be able to do with a larger, 40 something watt budget.
thesquib 7y ago
I just want a phone with a battery that lasts a few days, what about a week? I will never edit video on my phone

I can imagine Apple saw this coming a while back and decided to go all in on iOS while maintaining MacOS on the back burner. It must be difficult to be in a management position where you obviously see the industry is moving towards ARM, but you need to orchestrate a plan in motion to correctly time when the customer/ developer is ready to make the switch.

crb002 7y ago
Apple is removing Python etc for more than one reason. Curious if Apple does an ARM Mac Mini first as a canary.
- GrayShade 7y ago
  CPython works on ARM, doesn't it?
  - marmaduke 7y ago
    Yes there's even iOS app like Pythonista which provide Python and n IDE.
- lasagnaphil 7y ago
  If Apple does any Mac with a ARM processor, I think it will absolutely be the Macbook Air (or the recently discontinued Macbook). Those ARM processors will be so power-efficient that they will be able to market their laptops as "lasting for several days", which a lot of consumers will absolutely crave.
  - ComputerGuru 7y ago
    They can’t even get their phone batteries to last a full day because they’ll continue to prioritize form over function. I had several smartphones I didn’t need to charge more than every other day or even every three days if I wasn’t using them nonstop. Apple could do that today.
    - pcr910303 7y ago
      > They can’t even get their phone batteries to last a full day because they’ll continue to prioritize form over function. Well, to be fair, smartphones have much, much smaller bodies to carry around a battery. If Apple makes a notebook with the same A13 processor I’m pretty sure it will last more than two or three days. BTW, one of smartphone’s function is that it’s portable. You really can’t blame it being form over function when talking about battery life; there are many, many people who want light phones. If you need longer battery life by sacrificing weight, you can get yourself a backup battery (or a battery case) > I had several smartphones I didn’t need to charge more than every other day or even every three days if I wasn’t using them nonstop. Apple could do that today. My experience is that my iPhone XS survives a day and a half without any charging. YMMV, of course, but for me that’s enough.
    - 00deadbeef 7y ago
      The new iPhone 11 is slightly larger and thicker with a much bigger battery and an ugly camera array. Function seems to have been prioritised.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  The current Mac mini is an awesome machine and in top spec has some impressive performance. Given that a key strength of ARM is its power efficiency, it would seem more logical to start with something that has a battery. That way any performance hits can be seen as a trade off for longer battery life. I say this knowing full well than in any battery life versus thinness tradeoff, Apple has picked thinner just about every time.
paulmd 7y ago
> It must be difficult to be in a management position where you obviously see the industry is moving towards ARM, but you need to orchestrate a plan in motion to correctly time when the customer/ developer is ready to make the switch. Apple is in a unique position to make this happen though. And they have done it before with the PowerPC->x86 switchover. Their solution has previously been to have fat binaries with both versions compiled alongside. They control the toolchain and the app store so this is not that difficult to enforce.
- ryacko 7y ago
  Box86 exists though. They don’t need fat binaries, they only need x86 emulation. Many x86 patents have also expired or will expire soon, so the set of instructions that need to be emulated is reduced.
  - toast0 7y ago
    Emulation works as a transition layer, and they've done it before (see Rosetta from ppc->x86 and the 68k emulator from when they switched to ppc), but native binaries will be significantly faster and more energy efficient.
    - ryacko 7y ago
      Native binaries using the latest stable libraries with the latest compiler optimizations will always be faster and more energy efficient. Even the Xbox had backwards compatibility across ISAs. Somehow I doubt people will care that much about efficiency.
      - Narishma 7y ago
        They will care on a laptop with a battery.
- Tinfoilhat666 7y ago
  Instead of switching macOS to arm, they could promote iPadOS to laptops. They already added a file manager and advanced windowing to it.
_trampeltier 7y ago
I wonder, why Apple has nothing like Samsung DEX. But also I wonder why Samsung and Google don't push this feature not more. I almost bought one of the last Windows phone, the HP Z3, because it could be use as base for a small notebook (they had just a "dumb" notebook for it, just the screen and a keyboard, all the processing was over air or cable from the phone). Even the new Linux phone (Librem 5) comes with a feature to connect the phone to a monitor and keyboard etc. Apple has never showed any of this concepts even a tiny bit.

saagarjha 7y ago

For those interested in comparing, note that Geekbench has updated their baseline recently. Make sure to use Geekbench 5 in your tests!

GrayShade 7y ago

So an i3-8100 has a single score of 1000, and the highest PC score they have is 1371? These Geekbench comparisons keep showing phone CPUs being faster than server ones, but I question their validity.

jdc 7y ago
Here's an iMac (i9 9900K) result of 1402: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/172942 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/172942
Veedrac 7y ago
The A12 has better single-threaded SPECint2006 scores than EPYC7742 almost across the board. It's about 10% worse than the 3900X, and 20% worse than the i9-9900K, so if the 20% uplift holds true for SPECint scores then the A13 should be pretty much par with the i9-9900K. ikr https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re... https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-gen/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-gen/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14664/testing-intel-ice-lake-10nm/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14664/testing-intel-ice-lake-...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
audunw 7y ago
Why? Remember that we're talking about single-thread performance. There's no big reason why servers should be more optimised for single-thread performance than mobile ones. It's more useful to use the extra die area for more cores, or other features. They have the same fundamental limitations that makes it hard to scale to higher single-thread performance (remember that CPU processors also have to minimise power consumption, even if they use a lot more power in total). They're both using cutting edge processes, and they both have more than enough die area to make a single core perform as well as is physically possible. I really do think this indicates that Apple/ARM has caught up to Intel when it comes to architecture and we already know TSMC has surpassed them in process technology.

belltaco 7y ago

Does that include the new Mac Pro? If so does that mean PC games would theoretically run faster on an iPhone 11 than on desktop PCs (ignoring GPU speeds)?

toast0 7y ago
Most modern games are able to use four or more fast cpu cores, and even a budget desktop can afford a quad core cpu for less than $100 these days: intel i3-9100F (no graphics, coffee lake), or amd ryzen 5 3200g (graphics, zen+) are likely much better for multithreaded experiences. Plus heat dissipation, optionally more ram, and i/o abilities. If you're willing to spend $200 on a cpu, you can get faster or more cores.
kyriakos 7y ago
playing games means sustaining stable high performance for long periods. gaming PCs have active cooling which helps. i doubt a phone can do that without hitting thermal issues.
Narishma 7y ago
Probably for a few seconds before it starts throttling.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
The Mac Pro is actually a poor comparison here. Mac Pros run Xeon processors that prioritize having many cores. Their single core performance is very good, but worse than Intel's top mainstream chips, like the 9900K.

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

There's no doubt that Apple is currently making the best SOCs for the consumer smartphones. But, we should also be careful when comparing it with Apple Computers as some of them are underpowered e.g. Core M3 in Mid 2017 MacBook is same as the that found in intel based SBCs such as LattePanda Alpha. It would be interesting to see the single thread performance of intel Xeon W-3275M CPU from the Mac Pro 2019. The Cascade Lake architecture supposedly increases single thread performance by decreasing the base frequency of certain cores while increasing other cores as part of its Speed Select Technology (SST). Of course this depends on the power configuration set by Apple, I wonder whether they would voluntarily keep it under max performance in order to project the single thread superiority of their AX chips.

altmind 7y ago

... according to geekbench that was always favoring iphone cpus.

harrygeez 7y ago

Sorry if this sounds stupid, but I've always wondered: is 1 point in Geekbench for ARM really equivalent to 1 point for x64? Are they really comparable in the first place? If yes, how is it that the ARM SOC can beat an i5 while consuming so much less power? And why is ARM outstripping x64 in terms of single core speed? It just doesn't add up.

for_xyz 7y ago
Linus called Geekbench as useless few years ago since it uses hardware implementations of crypto algorithms on some architectures and not on others. [1] https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136666 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...
- ksec 7y ago
  This keeps getting posted and it was on Geekbench 3. He is OK with Geekbench 4 [1]. [1] https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=159853&curpostid=159860 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=159853&curpost...
NathanOsullivan 7y ago
I don't know the answer to your question, but as a moderately frequent geekbench user I do know that even within x86 the Linux version outscores the windows version. On this basis alone I would be extremely dubious comparing between platforms

speedplane 7y ago

Comparing modern hardware like this is fine, but kind of pointless. The sad truth is that processing speed improvements have slowed down to a crawl. The exponential predicted by Moore's law looks more like a shallow linear progression today. Computers are not improving nearly as quickly as they once were. Weirdly, no one is talking about this. If computers stop improving, efficiency will stop improving, which will ultimately mean that standards of living will stop improving. If standards of living stop improving, i.e., the pie stops growing, there could be a whole variety of horrible social and political repercussions as everyone fights for their finite slice.

Veedrac 7y ago
This is actually pretty interesting. The statistic most people noticed is frequency, which climbed exponentially between 1995-2003 and came to a dead stop a year later. https://i.imgur.com/QAEqcie.png https://i.imgur.com/QAEqcie.png However, almost immediately afterwards, IPC, which had been stagnant over that whole time period, started itself steadily climbing exponentially, with the rate falling only fairly slowly. https://i.imgur.com/KiUqMhl.png https://i.imgur.com/KiUqMhl.png The overall result is exponential growth in ST performance that far outlived frequency growth, and which has only truly tapered recently... though it's likely AMD's recent reentry to the market starts to recover trends somewhat. https://i.imgur.com/h2jN9RK.png https://i.imgur.com/h2jN9RK.png But now that IPC is starting to struggle (though not falter), core counts are finally taking off. We haven't hit the end yet.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > But now that IPC is starting to struggle (though not falter), core counts are finally taking off. We haven't hit the end yet. The fact that the industry is now relying on these tricks are actually good evidence that performance is hitting a wall. In the past, if you wanted to 2X boost in performance, you could just wait a year. Now waiting doesn't work. You need to build your own ASIC or move things to the cloud where you can rely on big-tech's economies of scale. We have hit an end, and the performance boosts we see today are one trick ponies. After you build your ASIC, you can't get much faster. After you move to the cloud and reduce processing power costs, you can't reduce further. These tricks have slowed the "perceived" deterioration of Moore's law, but they are acts of desperation, not real progress.

aloknnikhil 7y ago

It makes zero sense to compare like this. Geekbench is closed source. So, there is no way of knowing what they're even running on ARM v/s x86. But, no way is my MacBook Pro slower than my iPad Pro This Geekbench comparison, on the other hand, tells me they're on par (both single and multi-core scores) https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/140913?baseline=201758 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/140913?baseline... I'd take this claim with a massive boulder of salt, if you consider it at all that is.

coldtea 7y ago
Well, memory aside (the iPad Pro having less) and perhaps SSD performance, how is the iPad Pro slower? What have you tried? It can run at least some code (the Geekbench) equally well. So what other programs could it run equally well?
- aloknnikhil 7y ago
  Video encoding. The iPad pro is significantly slower at encoding 4k video compared to my MacBook Pro.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - holstvoogd 7y ago
    That makes sense, you're MBP has a pretty decent GPU to do that.
    - Youden 7y ago
      The quality of the GPU usually has no impact on video encoding. At best, you can use a hardware encoder that happens to come with the GPU but usually you won't want that because it comes with a compression hit compared to software.
      - 7y ago

veselin 7y ago

I question all these scores. The reason is that the Apple chip also has pretty low frequency and not so fast memory. This would mean that there is a lot of IPC opportunity left in comparison to the top x86 chips. This is the range of 2x in comparison to Skylake. This is a crazy wide core. What kinds of reorder buffers are required for this? Just 2x more execution units won't be enough.

_ph_ 7y ago

With all the discussions on how realistic the geekbench results are, why isn't there an open source benchmark suite which can be run as an app on iOS devices which would give a more thorough comparison between different architectures?

wayneftw 7y ago

Gee, that’s great! It’s just too bad that you don’t really have any ownership or control over what that CPU runs, despite having paid for it in full.

tambourine_man 7y ago

Geekbench’s usefulness aside, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the A series has surpassed x86 for the ultraportable laptop chip. An ARM MacBook would be a kickass machine. I actually hope they don’t release some sort of emulation layer like they did in the previous transitions. We don’t want to be spending battery with that when the tooling these days is much more homogeneous and high level. It’s also very tempting to speculate what they would be able to do with a larger, 40 something watt budget.

thesquib 7y ago

I just want a phone with a battery that lasts a few days, what about a week? I will never edit video on my phone