6 ms·

> That's going to need some citation. So this is Geekbench 5 showing the difference between a 2012 macbook air i5 and a 2020 macbook air i5 - both base models

> That's going to need some citation. So this is Geekbench 5 showing the difference between a 2012 macbook air i5 and a 2020 macbook air i5 - both base models and similar price: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2613713?baseline=2613509 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2613713?baselin... And this is a thread in the rust subreddit about compilation speed on macbooks where some users report the performance increase for different generations of macbook pros and macbook airs, if you want a more "realistic benchmark" to calibrate geekbench results: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/gypajc/macbook_pro_2020_compile_performance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/gypajc/macbook_pro_20... This is the ipad pro 2020 crushing the macbook air 2020: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2612714?baseline=2613509 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2612714?baselin... And this is the improvement from the previous generation ipad A10 to the ipad pro's A12Z - 2x speed up in single a generation: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2613991?baseline=2613301 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2613991?baselin... You are definetely right that Moore's law is hitting Intel hard. But AMD is still doing quite well, nvidia and "ati" are doing incredibly well, and Apple chips have been doing extremely well over the last couple generations. Maybe you are right, and Apple won't be able to deliver 2x speed ups in the next 2 generations. I'd expect that, just like for Intel, things won't abruptly change from one gen to another, but for this to happen over a longer period of time. Right now, only apple knows what perf their next 2 gens of chips are expected to deliver. The only thing we know is that Apple ARM chips are crushing their previous generation both for ipads and iphones year after year, and now they are betting on them for macbooks, and potentially mac pros, probably for at least the next 10-15 years.

asjw 6y ago
It could well be that MacOS is a slower OS It's been the case for years in comparison to every other competitor Let's put Linux on both those chips and see what happens
ComputerGuru 6y ago
There is no point in benchmarking anything: Macs have long shipped with CPUs one to two generations behind. If performance or efficiency (they’re interchangeable In this regard) on the desktop/notebook fronts mattered to Apple as a company, that would never have happened. Clearly there are other factors beyond the performance/efficiency curve at play and so it’s not a matter of benchmarking anything.
- runjake 6y ago
  The benchmarked Mac in his post is running the latest 10th gen Intel that everyone else is using.
  - asjw 6y ago
    Yes, the 10th generation of the Facebook/email CPU Nobody would use that for real work, Apple won the laptop market when developers started using it, now they are killing them for tablets, which are gadgets, not work machines.
    - messe 6y ago
      > Nobody would use that for real work It always amuses me how warped many commentators on HN's perspectives are on what is and isn't "real work". At time's it's bordering on "no true scotsman" fallacy. I assure you that plenty of people are using those computers and getting paid for the work they do on them.
      - oarsinsync 6y ago
        Most of these people do their work without writing any JS too, enabling them to cope without 32TB of RAM to manage their 16 tabs of JavaScript each running in its own chromium instance. Some day, we’ll re-learn some old lessons about the need for efficient utilisation of resources. In the mean time, check out the latest old game re-implemented at a fraction of the frame rate in your browser.
        chinesempire 6y ago
        To be fair my laptop at work has 8 cores and 64gb of ram and it's already 3 years old I'm gonna change it soon not because it's not good anymore, but because some of the hardware has become too slow for the things are necessary nowadays Mind you it's not my choice only, things are more complex, deadlines aren't longer, quarterly reports are still every 3 months but the things we have to do have become more complex and computationally heavy and need new hardware to keep up I'm an hobbyist musician, a 300 dollars laptop is good enough and even if I was a pro it would be enough Truth is that the computational power of a 100 dollars smartphone would be enough So a new chip by Apple doesn't change that their mobile line is already overpowered for the average use cases and the laptop one is underpowered and overpriced
oarsinsync 6y ago
> And this is the improvement from the previous generation ipad A10 to the ipad pro's A12Z - 2x speed up in single a generation Single product generation, not single chip generation. There is a new A SoC every year. The A11 was a thing for the iPhone X & 8. Apple doesn’t claim to “tick/tock” like Intel did. Apple is also dealing with significantly less mature technology which enables exponential gains like the sort they’ve been delivering through since the A4. The technology is maturing. The hockey stick growth doesn’t work forever for any metric. Given enough time, it will always flatten out. Apple is already seeing that too. They’ve gone from year on year 2x performance to (per your above) 2x every 2 years. That timeline will continue to stretch. The only major advantage Apple’s A chips have over Intels is that they can be optimised to Apple users (and I do mean the large aggregate, not the niche coders) typical use cases to maximise battery life. There are no other customers Apple cares about beyond that large majority.
- ethbro 6y ago
  We're also talking about two different ISAs: x86-64 vs A64. In addition to the underlying architectures to implement them. It's not inconceivable that Intel simply made enough arch / process / design mistakes that they've ended up at the end of a performance box canyon. It's happened before. Pentium 4 was a deadend, while Pentium M-derived architectures continued to improve performance. So "Apple realizing continued gains by optimizing a less mature architecture" is one hypothesis. But "Apple realizing continued gains by optimizing a more evolveable architecture" is a valid alternative.
ajross 6y ago
> This is the ipad pro 2020 crushing the macbook air 2020 You keep coming back to that citation. It's more than a little spun. The parts have comparable semiconductor process (Intel 10nm vs. TSMC 7nm) and die size (146.1 vs. 127.3 mm2). But the the A12Z in the iPad is running as fast as Apple can make it (it's basically an overclocked/high-binned A12X), where the Intel part is a low power, low-binned variant running at about half the base clock of the high end CPUs, with half the CPUs and half the L3 cache fused off. A more appropriate comparison would be with something like the Core i7 1065G7, which is exactly the same die and can run in the same 12W TDP range but with roughly double the silicon resources vs. Apple's turbocharged racehorse.
- klelatti 6y ago
  But the A12Z (based on the A12) is not using the latest TSMC process as used for the A13 (which is almost certainly in higher volume production than Intel 10nm). Plus, if Apple can afford to put an overclocked / high-binned TSMC chip in the lower-cost iPad but has to put a low binned i5 in the Air doesn't that say something about the relative economics / yields. For what it's worth I have a Core i7 1065G7 and it's decently fast but gets very hot and definitely needs a fan (which the iPad doesn't) and has good battery life (but not as good as the iPad's). The advantage still seems to me be to be very strongly with the Apple parts.
  - ajross 6y ago
    > if Apple can afford to put an overclocked / high-binned TSMC chip in the lower-cost iPad but has to put a low binned i5 in the Air doesn't that say something about the relative economics / yields. Potentially. It probably also says more about the relative product positioning of the iPad Pro (high end, max performance) vs. MacBook Air (slim, light, and by requirement slower than the MPB so that the products are correctly differentiated). The point is you're reaching. The A12 is a great part. TSMC is a great fab. Neither are as far ahead of the competition as Apple's marketing has led you to believe.
- fluffything 6y ago
  Both products (ipad pro 2020 and macbook air 2020 i5) are similarly priced (ipad pro being ~25% cheaper), yet the ipad pro has longer battery life while having a much better display, and much better raw performance (~1.6x faster !). The first i7 from apple starts at ~1.6x the price of the ipad pro in the macbook air 2020, yet the results of comparing the a12z with that show that, performance wise, nothing really changes: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2626721?baseline=2613301 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2626721?baselin... I'd suspect the reason is that these benchmarks are long enough, that the Intel CPUs just end up completely throttled down after the first ~30-60s, while the A12Z does not. Either way, the trade-offs here have multiple axes, and honestly die-size is not something I as a user care about. I care about performance / $ and battery life / $. The A12z seems much better along these two axes than either of the Intel CPUs in the Air 2020. To find something competitive in terms of performance (but worse battery life) from Intel, one does need to go to the Core i7 1065G7 that you mention, which delivers approximately the same performance as the A12Z: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2627162?baseline=2613301 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2627162?baselin... However, the first machine with that CPU is the Macbook Pro 13' 2020, and that starts at ~2x the price of the ipad pro. From looking at the upgrade prices, the cost of that i7 alone might be by itself ~50% of the whole ipad pro cost, or larger. So while you are right that these two are comparable in terms of raw power, I doubt they are comparable in terms of performance/$ and battery life/$. Without knowing the exact costs of each we can only speculate. If that intel i7 is 2x more expensive than the A12Z, then perf/$ would be half as good, and since raw battery life is worse, the battery life/$ axes would be twice as bad.

asjw 6y ago

It could well be that MacOS is a slower OS It's been the case for years in comparison to every other competitor Let's put Linux on both those chips and see what happens

ComputerGuru 6y ago

There is no point in benchmarking anything: Macs have long shipped with CPUs one to two generations behind. If performance or efficiency (they’re interchangeable In this regard) on the desktop/notebook fronts mattered to Apple as a company, that would never have happened. Clearly there are other factors beyond the performance/efficiency curve at play and so it’s not a matter of benchmarking anything.

runjake 6y ago
The benchmarked Mac in his post is running the latest 10th gen Intel that everyone else is using.
- asjw 6y ago
  Yes, the 10th generation of the Facebook/email CPU Nobody would use that for real work, Apple won the laptop market when developers started using it, now they are killing them for tablets, which are gadgets, not work machines.
  - messe 6y ago
    > Nobody would use that for real work It always amuses me how warped many commentators on HN's perspectives are on what is and isn't "real work". At time's it's bordering on "no true scotsman" fallacy. I assure you that plenty of people are using those computers and getting paid for the work they do on them.
    - oarsinsync 6y ago
      Most of these people do their work without writing any JS too, enabling them to cope without 32TB of RAM to manage their 16 tabs of JavaScript each running in its own chromium instance. Some day, we’ll re-learn some old lessons about the need for efficient utilisation of resources. In the mean time, check out the latest old game re-implemented at a fraction of the frame rate in your browser.
      - chinesempire 6y ago
        To be fair my laptop at work has 8 cores and 64gb of ram and it's already 3 years old I'm gonna change it soon not because it's not good anymore, but because some of the hardware has become too slow for the things are necessary nowadays Mind you it's not my choice only, things are more complex, deadlines aren't longer, quarterly reports are still every 3 months but the things we have to do have become more complex and computationally heavy and need new hardware to keep up I'm an hobbyist musician, a 300 dollars laptop is good enough and even if I was a pro it would be enough Truth is that the computational power of a 100 dollars smartphone would be enough So a new chip by Apple doesn't change that their mobile line is already overpowered for the average use cases and the laptop one is underpowered and overpriced

oarsinsync 6y ago

> And this is the improvement from the previous generation ipad A10 to the ipad pro's A12Z - 2x speed up in single a generation Single product generation, not single chip generation. There is a new A SoC every year. The A11 was a thing for the iPhone X & 8. Apple doesn’t claim to “tick/tock” like Intel did. Apple is also dealing with significantly less mature technology which enables exponential gains like the sort they’ve been delivering through since the A4. The technology is maturing. The hockey stick growth doesn’t work forever for any metric. Given enough time, it will always flatten out. Apple is already seeing that too. They’ve gone from year on year 2x performance to (per your above) 2x every 2 years. That timeline will continue to stretch. The only major advantage Apple’s A chips have over Intels is that they can be optimised to Apple users (and I do mean the large aggregate, not the niche coders) typical use cases to maximise battery life. There are no other customers Apple cares about beyond that large majority.

ethbro 6y ago
We're also talking about two different ISAs: x86-64 vs A64. In addition to the underlying architectures to implement them. It's not inconceivable that Intel simply made enough arch / process / design mistakes that they've ended up at the end of a performance box canyon. It's happened before. Pentium 4 was a deadend, while Pentium M-derived architectures continued to improve performance. So "Apple realizing continued gains by optimizing a less mature architecture" is one hypothesis. But "Apple realizing continued gains by optimizing a more evolveable architecture" is a valid alternative.

ajross 6y ago

> This is the ipad pro 2020 crushing the macbook air 2020 You keep coming back to that citation. It's more than a little spun. The parts have comparable semiconductor process (Intel 10nm vs. TSMC 7nm) and die size (146.1 vs. 127.3 mm2). But the the A12Z in the iPad is running as fast as Apple can make it (it's basically an overclocked/high-binned A12X), where the Intel part is a low power, low-binned variant running at about half the base clock of the high end CPUs, with half the CPUs and half the L3 cache fused off. A more appropriate comparison would be with something like the Core i7 1065G7, which is exactly the same die and can run in the same 12W TDP range but with roughly double the silicon resources vs. Apple's turbocharged racehorse.

klelatti 6y ago
But the A12Z (based on the A12) is not using the latest TSMC process as used for the A13 (which is almost certainly in higher volume production than Intel 10nm). Plus, if Apple can afford to put an overclocked / high-binned TSMC chip in the lower-cost iPad but has to put a low binned i5 in the Air doesn't that say something about the relative economics / yields. For what it's worth I have a Core i7 1065G7 and it's decently fast but gets very hot and definitely needs a fan (which the iPad doesn't) and has good battery life (but not as good as the iPad's). The advantage still seems to me be to be very strongly with the Apple parts.
- ajross 6y ago
  > if Apple can afford to put an overclocked / high-binned TSMC chip in the lower-cost iPad but has to put a low binned i5 in the Air doesn't that say something about the relative economics / yields. Potentially. It probably also says more about the relative product positioning of the iPad Pro (high end, max performance) vs. MacBook Air (slim, light, and by requirement slower than the MPB so that the products are correctly differentiated). The point is you're reaching. The A12 is a great part. TSMC is a great fab. Neither are as far ahead of the competition as Apple's marketing has led you to believe.
fluffything 6y ago
Both products (ipad pro 2020 and macbook air 2020 i5) are similarly priced (ipad pro being ~25% cheaper), yet the ipad pro has longer battery life while having a much better display, and much better raw performance (~1.6x faster !). The first i7 from apple starts at ~1.6x the price of the ipad pro in the macbook air 2020, yet the results of comparing the a12z with that show that, performance wise, nothing really changes: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2626721?baseline=2613301 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2626721?baselin... I'd suspect the reason is that these benchmarks are long enough, that the Intel CPUs just end up completely throttled down after the first ~30-60s, while the A12Z does not. Either way, the trade-offs here have multiple axes, and honestly die-size is not something I as a user care about. I care about performance / $ and battery life / $. The A12z seems much better along these two axes than either of the Intel CPUs in the Air 2020. To find something competitive in terms of performance (but worse battery life) from Intel, one does need to go to the Core i7 1065G7 that you mention, which delivers approximately the same performance as the A12Z: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2627162?baseline=2613301 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2627162?baselin... However, the first machine with that CPU is the Macbook Pro 13' 2020, and that starts at ~2x the price of the ipad pro. From looking at the upgrade prices, the cost of that i7 alone might be by itself ~50% of the whole ipad pro cost, or larger. So while you are right that these two are comparable in terms of raw power, I doubt they are comparable in terms of performance/$ and battery life/$. Without knowing the exact costs of each we can only speculate. If that intel i7 is 2x more expensive than the A12Z, then perf/$ would be half as good, and since raw battery life is worse, the battery life/$ axes would be twice as bad.