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Ugh. Spec2006 is energy efficiency estimate, an Intel and AMD CPU with 45+w at their disposal and thermal headroom will look very different with server and wor

Ugh. Spec2006 is energy efficiency estimate, an Intel and AMD CPU with 45+w at their disposal and thermal headroom will look very different with server and workstation workloads if it was possible to run meaningful server/workstation benchmarks against Apple's CPUs that is - and the full AT comment is - "This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least." So yeah your comment is business as usual for Apple fan - taking comments and benchmarks out of context, comparing apples to oranges and just being generally dense to support some narrative. I.E. Nothing closer to the reality of having ARM CPUs beat AMD or Intel if I wanted to build a server or workstation or even a big powerful laptop with not optimized for email and browsing battery life.

mpweiher 6y ago
> Spec2006 is energy efficiency estimate SPEC doesn’t agree with your characterization of their benchmark. “The SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark is SPEC's industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite, stressing a system's processor, memory subsystem and compiler.” https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ Neither does Wikipedia: “SPECint is a computer benchmark specification for CPU integer processing power. It is maintained by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). SPECint is the integer performance testing component of the SPEC test suite” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECint Nothing about energy efficiency, and notice the definite article “the” in front of “integer performance testing component”. So SPECint tests general compute tasks, such as compiling, XML processing and running Perl programs. Of course you can combine the perf measurements of SPECint with power consumption measurements to arrive at an efficiency measure, if you so choose. The other benchmark was SPECfp, which focuses on scientific computing tasks such fluid dynamics, quantum chemistry etc. So tasks you are unlikely to perform on...your iPhone. The A13 still does well, but not as well as on integer, presumably because Apple just didn’t focus on putting idle resources on their iPhone chip. Increasing FP performance when you have great integer performance is straightforward, afaik: just add more FPU resources.
- blinkingled 6y ago
  Only one of the benchmarks you linked to compares it with Intel/AMD - https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/spec2006-a13_575px.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/spec2006-a13_575px.p... - that says at the top - SPEC2006 Energy Efficiency Estimate. There is no power usage for Skylake or Zen2. But leaving that aside, it is also a single threaded performance measure which is nice but not quite a big deal for desktop / workstation / server workloads. It's not very convincing that they will have a 12 core part for workstation that I can use (leaving aside the fact that I won't be able to run what I want on it) - that will perform much better than AMD/Intel in real world workloads including virtualization etc. So I still maintain that narrowly focused performance benchmarks Geekbench or SpecInt mean very little in factoring OP's question on whether you will replace your primary system with ARM - the other CPUs are also limited to what Apple's CPUs can run - not Java stuff for example. ARM as a whole had lot of time to compete with others in desktop/workstation/server market and there is little evidence they got anywhere big.

mpweiher 6y ago

> Spec2006 is energy efficiency estimate SPEC doesn’t agree with your characterization of their benchmark. “The SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark is SPEC's industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite, stressing a system's processor, memory subsystem and compiler.” https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ Neither does Wikipedia: “SPECint is a computer benchmark specification for CPU integer processing power. It is maintained by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). SPECint is the integer performance testing component of the SPEC test suite” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECint Nothing about energy efficiency, and notice the definite article “the” in front of “integer performance testing component”. So SPECint tests general compute tasks, such as compiling, XML processing and running Perl programs. Of course you can combine the perf measurements of SPECint with power consumption measurements to arrive at an efficiency measure, if you so choose. The other benchmark was SPECfp, which focuses on scientific computing tasks such fluid dynamics, quantum chemistry etc. So tasks you are unlikely to perform on...your iPhone. The A13 still does well, but not as well as on integer, presumably because Apple just didn’t focus on putting idle resources on their iPhone chip. Increasing FP performance when you have great integer performance is straightforward, afaik: just add more FPU resources.

blinkingled 6y ago
Only one of the benchmarks you linked to compares it with Intel/AMD - https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/spec2006-a13_575px.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/spec2006-a13_575px.p... - that says at the top - SPEC2006 Energy Efficiency Estimate. There is no power usage for Skylake or Zen2. But leaving that aside, it is also a single threaded performance measure which is nice but not quite a big deal for desktop / workstation / server workloads. It's not very convincing that they will have a 12 core part for workstation that I can use (leaving aside the fact that I won't be able to run what I want on it) - that will perform much better than AMD/Intel in real world workloads including virtualization etc. So I still maintain that narrowly focused performance benchmarks Geekbench or SpecInt mean very little in factoring OP's question on whether you will replace your primary system with ARM - the other CPUs are also limited to what Apple's CPUs can run - not Java stuff for example. ARM as a whole had lot of time to compete with others in desktop/workstation/server market and there is little evidence they got anywhere big.