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Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap
- altmind 7y agogeekbench have unreliable perfromance stats that've been favoring iphone for a looong while. check your conclusions - 90% of articles with rocking iphone performance cite geekbench.
- scarface74 7y agoWe also know that the average selling price of Android is less than half that of an iPhone. Most Android phones being sold are lowend phones. Besides that, there have been plenty of articles where they found that Android manufacturers were detecting when benchmarks were being run and cheating.
- sharpneli 7y agoPractical experience with developing native cross platform applications in my experiece strongly aligns with geekbench results. Cross platform as in most CPU intensive code is in C++ that is exactly shared between both, only trivial but obviously needed differences in input handling. And for Android the renderer is Vulkan and for iOS it’s metal, both essentially identical in how features are used. Some super high end Android phones come close in some cases, but on average iOS devices wipe the floor with Android ones. I want to emphasize that on top of Android HW being slower on average it is also hampered by the decision to use Java. Some api’s are Java only requiring JNI, which is slow, to access. Another issue is GC pauses, they are small but can result in skipped frame here and there, making the experience subtly worse.
- Symmetry 7y agoThere was a version of Geekbench a while ago for which you could make a good argument for that but Geekbench 5 seems to tell the same story that Spec, web tests, etc all tell. Apple's cores really do seem to be that good though they benefit from running at the clock speed they were designed for, unlike an Intel U-series which has more pipeline stages than it needs to hit its clock. And Apple also benefits from being able to set their own page size and probably from getting to have caches that are virtually indexed and physically tagged rather then physically indexed and physically tagged. Doing address translation in parallel with way lookup is a nice little performance boost. There are rumors of other cleverness in the cache heirarchy from control of the OS but I don't know the details.
- fulafel 7y agoWhere can I see these SPEC results for Apple CPUs?
- opencl 7y agoAnandtech frequently includes SPEC results in their reviews. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...
- fulafel 7y agoThanks! These are SPEC2006 which is already retired, but those numbers for the A13 do indeed come in the same ballpark as the last official SPEC2006 results that were published for Xeons in 2017 before retirement.
- altmind 7y agospecint2006 shows that A13 outperforms desktop ryzen 3900x. 5W vs 105W. 6 cores vs 12 cores. something is wrong with numbers here.
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- em500 7y agoAnandtech uses SPEC2006 and the performance gap is not much different than Geekbench: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15207/the-snapdragon-865-performance-preview-setting-the-stage-for-flagship-android-2020/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15207/the-snapdragon-865-perf...
- scarface74 7y agoEven though the average Android phone doesn’t compare performance wise to an iOS device and really sucks when it comes to running complicated web apps, it’s mostly Android users here who claim that progressive web apps are the future and that Apple is holding them back.
- pjmlp 7y agoBecause Angular, React, Vue aren't needed for like 90% of those applications, server side rendering is more than enough. Specially when tons of "native" applications are actually Cordova and Ionic garbage that take longer to start than a HTTP server reply to the native browser. Native applications are great, when we are talking about stuff that actually makes use of the GPGPU or hardware sensors. Outside games, office and drawing applications, I don't have any applications installed that couldn't easily be done as mobile Web sites.
- scarface74 7y agoHow are you going to have a PWA that works offline with server side rendering? The latest “Apple wants to force everyone to develop apps instead of using the web so they can get their 30% cut of mostly free apps” controversy was about offline storage expiring after 7 days. Not to mention that the same people who are buying cheap Android phones probably have limited data plans and/or low bandwidth.
- pjmlp 7y agoBy having a server worker that caches the whole site, done. Apple's decision doesn't apply to PWAs as clarified on a later update. Plus updating the browser cache every couple of days isn't a big deal, native apps get store updates almost every day.
- scarface74 7y agoSo, no dynamic changes of the UI? We are talking about “web apps”.
- huffmsa 7y agoWhat do you iPhone users do with all of your power?
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agobrowse Twitter and marvel at how mobile rhythm games can't maintain 60fos
- Macha 7y agoWow, that's gone backwards. Tap tap revenge used to work fine on my iPod touch 2g.
- Jonnax 7y agoThe other question to ask is why do some consumers want less for their money? Apple is making luxury goods, they're not going to drop their prices. It's like how there's recently been a bunch of articles about how phones are getting "too much" RAM and the comparison is laptops. When the question should really be, why do laptop manufacturers get away with putting 4 or 8gb of RAM in a laptop and mobile phones are catching up. And anyway. What most people do is use their devices however they want with the expectation that everything runs smooth, they can multitask and the demands of higher quality video/pictures/refresh rates can be met. Of course there are people that are satisfied with yesterday's technology. Plenty of people use 10 year old ThinkPads and get their work and entertainment done. Same with getting a £100 smart phone.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago> When the question should really be, why do laptop manufacturers get away with putting 4 or 8gb of RAM in a laptop and mobile phones are catching up. I think this is comparing cheap laptops to expensive phones.
- jiggawatts 7y agoWell, for example, I recently used my iPhone X to edit a 4K 60fps video using iMovie. This was quick, easy, and all playback was silky smooth. I did this while sitting at the airport lounge waiting for my flight, and it didn't use too much of my battery. Meanwhile, my very high-end gaming PC struggles to play the video files from my iPhone at 60fps for some mysterious reason.
- baybal2 7y agoWhat about no.js?
- iainmerrick 7y agoWhat are these charts intended to show? The relative differences seem broadly the same, going back years. Is the idea that if all Android phones were magically 2x faster, some type of app architecture would magically become usable?
- Jonnax 7y agoThis is essentially Qualcomm vs Apple in the mobile market. But the question I've got from looking at the the Geekbench site: iPhone 11: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611448 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611448 AMD 3900x 12 Zen 2 12 Core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611445 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611445 The iPhone has higher single core performance than a desktop CPU with a 105W TDP. Of course it has more cores. But am I missing something here? Is this test actually representative of device performance? Or are certain desktop features not tested? Does the whole RISC Vs CISC of X86 and ARM make a difference? Assuming core count was equal. Would a desktop CPU and an Apple SoC run at equivalent performance if it was running Ubuntu and running native compiled code?
- The_rationalist 7y agoGeekbench is a flawed benchmarck that discriminate x86, at least that's what I read on the AMD subreddit a year ago.
- Macha 7y agoGeekbench is not measuring raw performance in terms of operations per second. It's measuring very specific use cases (their current blurb mentions AI and ML, in the past mentioned synthetic tests to approximate browsers). Because thermal constraints would prevent Apple from competing in a brute force approach, Apple have been more willing to include specialised hardware for tasks like AI/ML as in the A12 CPU. Of course, single core AI/ML perf is a bit of a silly metric but it's one thing geekbench is claiming to measure here that Apple probably wins at. I think in the past encryption/decryption similarly had acceleration sooner on Apple platforms, and Safari is able to make better use of the GPU with less varied hardware to support, and I think real web browsing is another component in geekbench tests.
- endorphone 7y agoOperations per second is a notoriously useless measure. Which is why we have higher-level benchmarks like GeekBench that are actually incredibly broad in what they test, performing a lot of real-world type activities in a larger macro-benchmark suite. The Bionic chips aren't cheating to a win. They win GeekBench, and virtually any other cross-platform activity that you can throw at them. As I mentioned in another post, my iPhone 11 absolutely lays waste to my laptop with an i7-7700HQ processor at the JetStream 2 benchmark. Now this is a JavaScript benchmark that runs on completely different software stacks / OS / etc (my i7 running Windows 10, Chrome 80, etc), but it is layers and layers of dependencies on the performance of the platform. And my big beefy i7 is beaten by a tiny little mobile processor. It is quite remarkable. It's a blazingly fast little processor. We would probably have seen them use them in other hardware sooner if Apple wasn't always suspicious that Intel was sandbagging in some way and was ready to wow the industry.
- _trampeltier 7y agoOn the other side, on my old Moto G4 I could listen to music in background, now with my new Samsung Note I allways have to stream videos, so the display stay on.
- stefan_ 7y agoWhat is even the hypothesis here? Websites are slow because Android devices are slow? Lest we remind our web developer friends of the cache hierarchy, the slowest part of all here is still fetching the fricking page over the internet. On this mobile Twitter page alone two spinners are spinning simultaneously. If, after all the network stuff, you are still taking a second to render in a world where smartphones can play Doom 3 at 60 fps - you are just taking the piss.
- BossingAround 7y ago> the slowest part of all here is still fetching the fricking page over the internet. That may be true, but have you tried browsing the web on an older device? Once the webpage is loaded, I can't say the experience is very nice on my iPad mini 2. Now, granted, that's a 2013 device. All I'm saying is that after all the "network stuff" you mention is done, the device power matters greatly, especially on JS-heavy sites.
- pxtail 7y ago> What is even the hypothesis here? Websites are slow because Android devices are slow? Hypothesis is: websites are slow because developers are testing them using their high end devices where bad code performance is compensated by higher performance of devices. All of this while real world users are struggling with garbage quality end product.
- bob1029 7y agoSeems to me if you want an "equal" experience across the board, you make the clients responsible for the bare minimum functionality. Everything that can be is processed server-side. You should target the lowest common denominator wherever possible. Anything else is tantamount to digital elitism or simply bad customer service. Assuming compute & bandwidth costs are fixed, are there any remaining justifications for doing SPA, et. al., especially if the server is required at all times in order to satisfy application requests? Is pushing a final compressed DOM over the wire really all that much worse than pushing 20 different JSON objects in order to recompose the same logical DOM client-side? Doesn't it seem like one of these approaches would be substantially faster and easier than the other in most cases? I think we got off track somewhere around when cloud computing was introduced. I can see a huge motivating factor for pushing the "offload to client" narrative if your cloud compute portfolio provides 10% the relative cost-adjusted performance compared to a rack full of DL380s sitting in a colo. With the density of compute being offered today (e.g. 256 x86 cores in a 2U w/ 2TB ram), I feel a lot of businesses should start to look back to these approaches. The software and operating systems have vastly improved as well. Just take look at the performance you get with something like Kestrel in .Net Core: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r18&hw=ph&test=plaintext https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r18&hw=... Nearly 7 million HTTP requests per second on a single 10GBe host. For 99% of business applications out there, just 1 of these servers is probably all you would ever need... A decade ago we were putting the finishing touches on 10k/second. Why the hell are we not aggressively trying to leverage this 100x speedup? Is it because all of this extra margin is being spread thin by Amazon, et. al for purposes of maximum profit extraction? Or, is there a more nuanced game afoot?
- cageface 7y agoSPA is overused to be sure. But people are also building far more complex things on the web now and some of them are difficult or impossible to do purely with SSR. So pick the right tool for the job but let’s not pretend that we can do everything with just one tool. And you might say those kinds of applications shouldn’t be built on the web but I’d rather have them on the web than locked up in some proprietary app store with all the centralization and potential abuses of power that allows.
- _bxg1 7y agoIs this really about the CPU though? My guess is - especially in the countries where these low-end phones are popular - bandwidth is a much bigger bottleneck.