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Why wouldn't they! While Intel showed this, Apple was currently selling iPhone 11s with processors that would clearly outpace this. The A13 has two large cores

Why wouldn't they! While Intel showed this, Apple was currently selling iPhone 11s with processors that would clearly outpace this. The A13 has two large cores and four small cores, whereas either one of the large cores outperform the comparable 'Core' core in this, and I'm betting the smaller cores do as well, possibly at less power. Supposedly their ARM< Mac CPU is a 12 core architecture, I imagine with four large cores and 8 small cores. Thats a massive hardware difference...did I mention that the 12 core CPU is supposed to be build on TSMC's 5nm? Intel is trying to get current and honestly, maybe Apple will ship a Macbook Air with it.. but probably not.

kllrnohj 6y ago
> The A13 has two large cores and four small cores, whereas either one of the large cores outperform the comparable 'Core' core in this The evidence of this is flimsy at best. It's possible the A13's big cores are faster than Intel's Sunny Cove, but also not very likely, and certainly not established fact. The only real evidence here is Geekbench, which is a highly questionable benchmark that also has extreme OS dependencies (compare results for the same CPU on Windows & Linux, for example). When/if an Apple releases something running MacOS with their custom ARM cores then you'd finally get a good comparison to isolate the CPU's performance by itself.
- ksec 6y ago
  There are lots of other test from SPEC to Javascript benchmarks ( Using same JS Engine ) that shows what A13 is capable of. And so far results are comparable in many cases, better in some cases, and slower in other cases. We already knew what to expect from Intel Willow Cove, we will have to wait and see what A14 has in store for us.
- rpiguy 6y ago
  This is not true we have a pretty good idea of where the A13 stands. Anandtech has run SpecInt and SpecFP on the A13 and shows it to be in the same range of performance as a Xeon Silver 4112 (2.6ghz base/3.0ghz turbo), which is a 14nm chip from 2017. So not as fast as the latest processors on a per core basis, but still pretty damn fast. Can't really make assumptions, but you would think with the higher thermal envelope Apple can boost clock speeds making them even more competitive.
- rayiner 6y ago
  It’s not just geekbench. People have run SPEC on the Apple chips, which is a suite of real applications like GCC.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    A12's spec results are close to Intel's single-thread performance at comparable clock speeds in SPEC, yes, but that wasn't the claim. The claim was that A12 was faster and that is what doesn't really have much evidence to support. Particularly since at comparable clock speeds is great and all, but not if your competitor can just outclock you by a landslide. The A12 can almost certainly go higher than 2.5ghz when actively cooled. But can it hit 4ghz? That's a different story.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      On SpecInt2006, Apple is matching a 9900K and a 3900X even at a substantially lower clock speed: 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...
- gsnedders 6y ago
  >Geekbench, which is a highly questionable benchmark that also has extreme OS dependencies (compare results for the same CPU on Windows & Linux, for example) OS and compiler dependencies, really. On the other hand, comparing macOS and iOS results may well be more meaningful (they use the same compiler and much of the OS is shared, especially at layers likely to significantly affect performance). Geekbench (v4 especially) is definitely flawed, but the results in this case don't seem out-of-line with what we see on specINT for example. e.g., https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/15541405?baseline=15386177 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/15541405?baseli... comparing shows an A12X roughly matching a Sunny Cove 1060NG7 on single-thread performance (and it mostly follows where I'd expect Intel's strengths to be, with a wider vector unit and specialized instructions); in multi-thread performance the A12X unsurprisingly wins, but it also has double the number cores (okay, four of them are little, but that's still providing extra capacity to get work done).

kllrnohj 6y ago

> The A13 has two large cores and four small cores, whereas either one of the large cores outperform the comparable 'Core' core in this The evidence of this is flimsy at best. It's possible the A13's big cores are faster than Intel's Sunny Cove, but also not very likely, and certainly not established fact. The only real evidence here is Geekbench, which is a highly questionable benchmark that also has extreme OS dependencies (compare results for the same CPU on Windows & Linux, for example). When/if an Apple releases something running MacOS with their custom ARM cores then you'd finally get a good comparison to isolate the CPU's performance by itself.

ksec 6y ago
There are lots of other test from SPEC to Javascript benchmarks ( Using same JS Engine ) that shows what A13 is capable of. And so far results are comparable in many cases, better in some cases, and slower in other cases. We already knew what to expect from Intel Willow Cove, we will have to wait and see what A14 has in store for us.
rpiguy 6y ago
This is not true we have a pretty good idea of where the A13 stands. Anandtech has run SpecInt and SpecFP on the A13 and shows it to be in the same range of performance as a Xeon Silver 4112 (2.6ghz base/3.0ghz turbo), which is a 14nm chip from 2017. So not as fast as the latest processors on a per core basis, but still pretty damn fast. Can't really make assumptions, but you would think with the higher thermal envelope Apple can boost clock speeds making them even more competitive.
rayiner 6y ago
It’s not just geekbench. People have run SPEC on the Apple chips, which is a suite of real applications like GCC.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  A12's spec results are close to Intel's single-thread performance at comparable clock speeds in SPEC, yes, but that wasn't the claim. The claim was that A12 was faster and that is what doesn't really have much evidence to support. Particularly since at comparable clock speeds is great and all, but not if your competitor can just outclock you by a landslide. The A12 can almost certainly go higher than 2.5ghz when actively cooled. But can it hit 4ghz? That's a different story.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    On SpecInt2006, Apple is matching a 9900K and a 3900X even at a substantially lower clock speed: 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...
gsnedders 6y ago
>Geekbench, which is a highly questionable benchmark that also has extreme OS dependencies (compare results for the same CPU on Windows & Linux, for example) OS and compiler dependencies, really. On the other hand, comparing macOS and iOS results may well be more meaningful (they use the same compiler and much of the OS is shared, especially at layers likely to significantly affect performance). Geekbench (v4 especially) is definitely flawed, but the results in this case don't seem out-of-line with what we see on specINT for example. e.g., https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/15541405?baseline=15386177 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/15541405?baseli... comparing shows an A12X roughly matching a Sunny Cove 1060NG7 on single-thread performance (and it mostly follows where I'd expect Intel's strengths to be, with a wider vector unit and specialized instructions); in multi-thread performance the A12X unsurprisingly wins, but it also has double the number cores (okay, four of them are little, but that's still providing extra capacity to get work done).