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Would a device like this be more powerful than my early 2015 MBP?
by wayanon 6y ago
Would a device like this be more powerful than my early 2015 MBP?
- Joeri 6y agoYes. The A12Z in the ipad pro is already 25% faster is in single core and 50% faster in multicore than the highest end i7 in the 2015 macbook pro according to geekbench 5. Given that the chip in macbooks will be a lot faster than the A12Z, it could very well offer twice the multicore performance.
- bitL 6y ago> geekbench 5 Now try some math workload on A12Z, i.e. real-world stuff and weep. Most of the die space on x64 CPUs is spent on caches and SSE, so if you cut them out to be more power-friendly, you lose performance in high-end applications.
- jki275 6y agoWhat makes you believe Apple doesn’t know this or has removed them?
- bitL 6y agoA12Z is still using ARM 8.3 instruction set, therefore no 2048-bit SVE2 for math. Their L1 cache is also 2x smaller than on Zen 2 - that gives them a massive power advantage. I'd wait out this generation of ARM-based notebooks and go with their next CPU that should have SVE2 implemented. It's not like anything faster than Pentium J is needed for Office, browsing or even front-end development, so in that segment their first gen should be good enough and maybe even better than i3/i5.
- floatboth 6y agoSVE is a niche HPC thing just like AVX512. For most applications NEON (aka AdvSIMD) is more than enough.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jki275 6y agoAgreed, but the A12Z is an iPad processor. It's not likely to be what they're releasing as a laptop processor.
- GeekyBear 6y agoThe new Apple Silicon laptop chips will be based on the same core used in the A14, not the one in the A12. Rumors have pegged the entry level laptop chip at 8 big cores and 4 little cores. However, it will be interesting to see if that A14 big core implements the ARMv9 instruction set, which is said to be imminent. Apple did implement the ARMv8 instruction set much earlier than it's competitors, so there is a bit of a history there. ARM teased new features like an up to 2048 bit SIMD implementation with SVE2 and Transactional Memory for the ARMv9 instruction set back in early 2019, but has mostly been quiet. https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/processors/b/processors-ip-blog/posts/new-technologies-for-the-arm-a-profile-architecture https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/processors/b...
- plorkyeran 6y agoFor the real-world performance thing I care about (compiling code), the devkit has comparable per-core performance to the i7-7700K in my 2017 imac.