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Qualcomm chips are not that far behind Apple's, and Microsoft has Windows on ARM ready for a while now. Those performance advantage won't be there for long. I

Qualcomm chips are not that far behind Apple's, and Microsoft has Windows on ARM ready for a while now. Those performance advantage won't be there for long. I think the bigger question is what does this spell for x86-64?

stu2b50 6y ago
Uh, unless there's some new Qualcomm chip I haven't heard of, the Qualcomm chips are all being utterly crushed by Apple's offerings in geek bench and specperf.
- tinodotim 6y ago
  Guess we'll see (maybe) in December (Snapdragon 875 will be announced December 1st at Qualcomms Digital Summit) - or a bit later, but the 875, now also on 5nm, supposedly will be quite a bump. Leaked (supposed) benchmarks show 30%+ improvement, which would be A14 territory. I also have my doubts, but would be great for the market. (New Exynos 2100 supposedly also being up there.)
  - bydo 6y ago
    A 30% improvement to the 865+ starts getting close to A13 single-threaded performance, on 7nm from a year ago. So Qualcomm won't be quite so far behind Apple, but it's still pretty significant.
    - tinodotim 6y ago
      Sure, more interesting than just pure CPU performance will be improvements to GPU, image processing, ML and others though - at least in my eyes. If we'll just look at geekbench's single core bench, I'm sure Apple will still lead. (And overall likely still produce the better chips.)
- leptons 6y ago
  Qualcomm chips don't have on-chip DRAM at the highest clock rate possible. If they did the same things Apple is doing in that way, the performance advantage of M1 shrinks. There's no real "magic" in the M1 or Apple, it's a reality distortion field that is hitting everyone right now. It's entirely possible to outperform the M1, there just hasn't been a need to do that until now - no major OS would have benefitted from an ARM on steroids before now so there wasn't even a need for it.
  - leptons 6y ago
    Wow, downvoted by apple fanboi shitheads, without a single reply with any good counter arguments. "Hackernews" is a real dumpster fire, even worse than reddit.
    - dang 6y ago
      If you continue to degrade the quality of this site even further, we will have to ban your account. We've asked you about this more than once already. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - leptons 6y ago
        Where have you asked me more than once? Please point me to that. If so, then I'm sorry, but I don't remember being told anything like that before this comment.
        dang 6y ago
        It was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475231 Sorry I said "more than once" — I didn't notice those two comments were in the same thread.
        leptons 6y ago
        It's pretty amazing to me that you consider that comment "mean". How do you ever interact with the world if such a benign comment is considered "mean"? I'm serious, I just can't understand how that comment is "mean". Please try to explain it, because it makes no sense to me. Is any criticism at all considered "mean" now? Can anyone point out flaws in someone else's comment or post without being called "mean"?
The_Colonel 6y ago
> I think the bigger question is what does this spell for x86-64? Not much? People are acting like M1 destroys x86, but as AnandTech showed in the recent benchmark, M1 is trading blows with Zen 3 in single thread performance while having much larger core and process advantage (5nm vs. 7nm) thus being actually more expensive to produce.
- chungus_khan 6y ago
  Plus I would like to remind people that there were points where PowerPC Macs were extremely impressive, and that didn't magically reorder the world because existing software and OS ecosystems mean a hell of a lot more than just straight performance.
- harrygeez 6y ago
  My concern is not with performance but the seemingly energy consumption advantage. If Arm chips perform just as well (or as we've just seen, better) than x86 chips while sipping much less power, why would anyone want x86 on mobile devices? Are there any workloads that requires or perform better with x86?
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    This is clear only when you compare against an obsolete Intel which is known to be throttling power hog. The difference might be way smaller or non-existent once we see some comparisons with latest AMD offerings (especially when we have also CPUs with comparable process).
    - spronkey 6y ago
      Yeah, Anandtech's dive revealed some interesting benchmark results - such as the Zen 2 4200U part being quite close in both performance and power consumption (a little higher) to the M1 in heavily multithreaded tasks, but getting stomped in both aspects in single-threaded ones. The M1 isn't a tiny power-sipping mobile part - it sucks power down just like AMD's 15W TDP CPUs do. The efficiency gains Apple are getting here are likely to be the result of several factors, only one of which are the CPU cores themselves.

stu2b50 6y ago

Uh, unless there's some new Qualcomm chip I haven't heard of, the Qualcomm chips are all being utterly crushed by Apple's offerings in geek bench and specperf.

tinodotim 6y ago
Guess we'll see (maybe) in December (Snapdragon 875 will be announced December 1st at Qualcomms Digital Summit) - or a bit later, but the 875, now also on 5nm, supposedly will be quite a bump. Leaked (supposed) benchmarks show 30%+ improvement, which would be A14 territory. I also have my doubts, but would be great for the market. (New Exynos 2100 supposedly also being up there.)
- bydo 6y ago
  A 30% improvement to the 865+ starts getting close to A13 single-threaded performance, on 7nm from a year ago. So Qualcomm won't be quite so far behind Apple, but it's still pretty significant.
  - tinodotim 6y ago
    Sure, more interesting than just pure CPU performance will be improvements to GPU, image processing, ML and others though - at least in my eyes. If we'll just look at geekbench's single core bench, I'm sure Apple will still lead. (And overall likely still produce the better chips.)
leptons 6y ago
Qualcomm chips don't have on-chip DRAM at the highest clock rate possible. If they did the same things Apple is doing in that way, the performance advantage of M1 shrinks. There's no real "magic" in the M1 or Apple, it's a reality distortion field that is hitting everyone right now. It's entirely possible to outperform the M1, there just hasn't been a need to do that until now - no major OS would have benefitted from an ARM on steroids before now so there wasn't even a need for it.
- leptons 6y ago
  Wow, downvoted by apple fanboi shitheads, without a single reply with any good counter arguments. "Hackernews" is a real dumpster fire, even worse than reddit.
  - dang 6y ago
    If you continue to degrade the quality of this site even further, we will have to ban your account. We've asked you about this more than once already. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - leptons 6y ago
      Where have you asked me more than once? Please point me to that. If so, then I'm sorry, but I don't remember being told anything like that before this comment.
      - dang 6y ago
        It was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475231 Sorry I said "more than once" — I didn't notice those two comments were in the same thread.
        leptons 6y ago
        It's pretty amazing to me that you consider that comment "mean". How do you ever interact with the world if such a benign comment is considered "mean"? I'm serious, I just can't understand how that comment is "mean". Please try to explain it, because it makes no sense to me. Is any criticism at all considered "mean" now? Can anyone point out flaws in someone else's comment or post without being called "mean"?

The_Colonel 6y ago

> I think the bigger question is what does this spell for x86-64? Not much? People are acting like M1 destroys x86, but as AnandTech showed in the recent benchmark, M1 is trading blows with Zen 3 in single thread performance while having much larger core and process advantage (5nm vs. 7nm) thus being actually more expensive to produce.

chungus_khan 6y ago
Plus I would like to remind people that there were points where PowerPC Macs were extremely impressive, and that didn't magically reorder the world because existing software and OS ecosystems mean a hell of a lot more than just straight performance.
harrygeez 6y ago
My concern is not with performance but the seemingly energy consumption advantage. If Arm chips perform just as well (or as we've just seen, better) than x86 chips while sipping much less power, why would anyone want x86 on mobile devices? Are there any workloads that requires or perform better with x86?
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  This is clear only when you compare against an obsolete Intel which is known to be throttling power hog. The difference might be way smaller or non-existent once we see some comparisons with latest AMD offerings (especially when we have also CPUs with comparable process).
  - spronkey 6y ago
    Yeah, Anandtech's dive revealed some interesting benchmark results - such as the Zen 2 4200U part being quite close in both performance and power consumption (a little higher) to the M1 in heavily multithreaded tasks, but getting stomped in both aspects in single-threaded ones. The M1 isn't a tiny power-sipping mobile part - it sucks power down just like AMD's 15W TDP CPUs do. The efficiency gains Apple are getting here are likely to be the result of several factors, only one of which are the CPU cores themselves.