8 ms·
Those benchmarks are impressive. iPhone SE beating the 2019 MBP in single core performance? That's fantastic! I wish I could comment on or know what he was tal
by Thorentis 7y ago
Those benchmarks are impressive. iPhone SE beating the 2019 MBP in single core performance? That's fantastic!
I wish I could comment on or know what he was talking about with the iPhone X vs "old iPhone" interaction paradigm. I personally thought the "single button" hardware interface was an incredible innovation that changed everything. Even Android relies on it. My Galaxy S9+ has a "software home button" (like most Androids do) in place of the iPhone's. I'll have to find a friend with an iPhone X or later to try the new swipe up gestures and see if they are indeed better.
- noncoml 7y agoFun fact: iPhone's buttons are not mechanical buttons starting with iPhone 7. The click you feel when you press it is just the taptic engine. If you have an iPhone 7 or 8, try turning it off and try to press the button.
- paxys 7y agoYou can also adjust the "clickiness" of the button from your phone settings, which is amazing.
- memco 7y agoTook me a while to realize this also applies to the magic trackpad and integrated trackpad on macbooks, but it is nice to be able to customize it. The trackpads even have two clicks the second being a "deep" click which requires even more pressure than a regular click.
- derefr 7y agoIt's pretty easy to notice with the magic trackpad—it loses its ability to be "clicked" when it loses power/when you turn it off. (The trackpad on the laptop does as well, but I feel like you're just less likely to try clicking the trackpad on a macbook/MBP if the computer's not on. Whereas with the external one, you'll notice it when you go to pick it up/move it around and it doesn't accidentally click in your hand.)
- saagarjha 7y agoThe trackpads actually have an “infinite” number of clicks. Try it on the seeking buttons in QuickTime or IINA.
- danieldk 7y agoAlso a nice feature, which unfortunately not a lot of applications use, is the haptic feedback. E.g. when you drag an object in OmniGraffle, you will feel very subtle feedback in the trackpad when two objects align.
- function_seven 7y agoAlmost 20 years ago I had a cool Logitech mouse that did this. The mouse had a haptic (Synaptics, I think?) engine in it, and when you moved the cursor over buttons, menus, or other UI elements, it would give a slight “tick” as you crossed each boundary. It was very cool. There was a lot of customization available for it as well. I had to ditch that mouse when I switched to Linux. I think it didn’t have any standard HID-type driver or something.
- kalium-xyz 7y agoJust the home button, the rest are mechanical even on the newest iphones.
- etrautmann 7y agoThe X adds Taptic to the mechanical click of volume buttons
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoIt’s such a weird feeling when the “button” is dead.
- riffraff 7y agoI knew this was true, as you can't click it when battery is off, but I still don't get it: how does it work, and why?
- jolux 7y agoHow: haptic feedback using a weighted linear actuator. Why: I suspect because it debuted with the iPhone 7, the first officially water resistant iPhone, that it was a waterproofing move to get rid of possible ingress points.
- culturestate 7y ago> I suspect...it was a waterproofing move I've always assumed it was partially about reliability and partially about saving space, since water-resistant physical buttons are fairly standard components. The phone needs to have some form of haptic motor anyway, and switching to a virtual button allows them to eliminate a complex moving part - removing one potential point of failure - while freeing up a few cubic millimeters of internal volume. Anecdotally, the home buttons always seemed to be one of the more fragile parts of an iPhone, to the degree that many people started to use the on-screen assistive touch dialogs to avoid wear and tear.
- saagarjha 7y agoGood haptics.
- chrizel 7y agoOn the older iPhones, the home buttons got problems after a couple of years. My old iPhone 4 had this problem. They got unreliable in registering being pushed. I think that’s also the reason it makes sense to not be an actual hardware button. Less moving parts makes it more reliable and it’s more likely to work after many years.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- viraptor 7y agoSame with MBP touchpads which many people don't even realise since the feedback works even when the laptop is sleeping. It's a really weird experience when you actually turn it off and... nothing - you can't actually "press" it.
- danieldk 7y agoWhen I had the first generation MacBook 12", people wouldn't even believe that it was not a mechanical click when you told them. I often had to turn the machine off to convince them that it is fake. Which I would happily do to see the look on their faces ;).
- aikinai 7y agoI remember pressing the home button on a powered off iPhone 7 a few times. It feels like attempting to take the last step in a flight of stairs when you miscounted by one.
- Thorentis 7y agoYeah when I got my 2015 MBP that track pad was mind blowing. I remember turning it on and off and comparing the feeling of trying to click it. It's an incredible innovation. Small, but amazing from an engineering/UX perspective.
- freepor 7y agoYou shouldn't need to turn it off, it feels like a knockoff of a real button, like a fake designer bag. Don't know what was wrong with a regular button that presses.
- dutchCourage 7y agoThe physical home button broke a lot.
- sh87 7y agoI suspect water resistance played a part in moving in this direction.
- glacials 7y agoModern stock (Google-flavored?) Android has also taken up buttonless gestures with the last couple of generations of Pixel devices. Depending on your Android version and your phone, you can toggle it on and off in settings by searching for "gesture".
- p1necone 7y agoI wonder how comparable Geekbench actually is across different CPU architectures and operating systems though? Linus Torvalds is quoted here: https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=185109&curpostid=185132 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=185109&curpost... as saying that Geekbench 4.0 shouldn't be treated as a valid comparison between desktops/laptops and phones. (However this review used Geekbench 5.0 - not sure what differences there are).
- berti 7y agoSpecint benchmarks conducted by Anandtech show the A13 going toe-to-toe with the 9900K [0], although x86 still has a decent lead for floating point. [0] 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... (scroll down to the 2nd last plot, look at the right half)
- p1necone 7y agoDo mobile chips focus less on floating point for some reason? Could that explain the seemingly massive difference in perf/watt?
- ip26 7y agoFloating point tends to matter for classic 'number crunching' workloads- crypto, media encoding, anything to do with modeling the physical world, image processing, AI. Phones tend towards 'control flow', e.g. display an interface, accept a user input, communicate with a server, display information... and media decoding & gps both have dedicated hardware. FP workloads can be incredibly power hungry, so it's fortunate mobile devices mostly manage to avoid them. But any chip with an FP unit is going to shut it off when running integer code.
- wtallis 7y agoCrypto doesn't do floating point. Media transcoding does SIMD, but not usually not floating point.
- ip26 7y agoSomething has got to be screwy. The iPhone has a TDP of 6W and a clock speed of 2.5GHz. The MBP has boost clocks of 5GHz and a 45W TDP.
- throwaway2048 7y agoSynthetic benchmarks are extremely unreliable.
- p1necone 7y agoI imagine even more so than usual when the two things being tested have different operating systems and CPU architectures. Although these benchmark results would still have to be wrong by a lot to stop being impressive.
- skavi 7y agoEach A13 Lightning core has around 2.5x the transistors of a Skylake core. The Skylake design is also 5 years old and on a node at least a generation out of date. Geekbench is also a short enough test that thermals aren’t a huge concern.
- FrankBooth 7y agoWhere are you getting the per-core transistor counts from?
- skavi 7y agoIt’s a very rough estimation. Basically ((core + L2 area)/(total die area))(Total transistors on die). For A13 with unified L2, I used L2 per core. Of course, transistor density isn’t consistent across the chip, but this should be good enough for the relative comparison I’ve done.
- jdsully 7y agoYes but AMD is on a much newer node and still only achieves a very slight improvement in IPC nowhere near >2x these benchmarks imply.
- ksec 7y agoTo Me, having been using the Swipe Up Gestures for years now, I still prefer the Home Button. It is simple and it works. People are saying the occasional error in Swipe up and back to Home Screen is not annoying are the exact same type of people they prefer the MacBook to have larger track pad, where the occasional false touch didn't matter. It did to me. I sort of demand zero false positive from trackpad. Which was possible in old MacBook Pro 2015, and not any more since 2016 with larger trackpad. For iPhone, at least I could understand the trade off, you are wasting lots of potential screen area, and while I prefer to have home button, I dont want to trade the screen area for it. On MacBook though, I dont understand the need for that slightly larger trackpad. I felt it was the wrong trade off.
- aacid 7y agothe real question is why we need that performance in your phone? I'm honestly asking, because with every flagship phone (no mater the brand) there is the hype about performance (X's processor is 2x quicker than Y) and it always makes me think. I don't think that in the last 10 years I ever had thought "I wish my phones CPU had higher clock speed"...
- dwaite 7y agoFirst, the whole phone needs to be well architected - the CPU, GPU, Flash, wireless and cell radios can each be bottlenecks for good performance. As the screen size and refresh rate increase, the needs of the CPU/GPU and Flash will increase. Mobile phones tend to be more interactive and thus have a larger negative experience with slow/jerky scrolling, slow response to taps including app launch, etc. Microcontrollers tend to have options from slowing down the clock rate to going into a deep sleep mode when there is no scheduled work. There has been a lot of work to optimize the scheduling of network/driver/app tasks to minimize power draw. It is also fairly common to see a CPU have lower power cores, typically for the OS to leverage for hardware support and background tasks separate from what might be considered the 'main' CPUs for this reason. Likewise, Apple has stopped shooting for a 50-100% increase in performance year over year, instead going for a mix of performance and power efficiency improvements. They have also started to do significantly more custom silicon design to support their hardware features, such as the Secure Enclave and neural engine additions used to support Face ID. 10 years is a long time though. Four years ago would be what, the iPhone 3GS? Apple went several years doubling the CPU, GPU, _and_ Flash performance and it was extremely noticeable.
- aequitas 7y ago> I don't think that in the last 10 years I ever had thought "I wish my phones CPU had higher clock speed"... Thats a thing with the computer industry, everthing is getting faster all the time but everthing keeps feeling getting slower. For me the pinnacle of UI was Mac OS 9, it was just so snappy and responsive. It's (pre emtive) multithreading was a pain to wait for but the UI itself was tactile. Apply only approached this on Mac OS X with (I believe) 10.7 Lion when they overhauled stuff under the hood (after upgrading to that version it felt like I bought a new machine). After that it's been downhill again.
- bluedino 7y agoI'd be interested in seeing how the numbers compare if there was a porting of Cinebench to the iPhone