5 ms·

If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace. Huawei was perhaps even c

by emn13 6y ago

If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace. Huawei was perhaps even closing the gap before the trade war knocked them out of contention. I don't think apple was really all that special in this regard. They were ahead of the curve, which is impressive, but the market was created by arm, not just apple. I doubt we'd be seeing this kind of resurgence had others - especially google - not also jumped on the ARM bandwagon. A rising tide lifts all boats; both android and ios likely benefited from each others shared usage of arm because it helped the whole ecosystem. For some sense of scale: qualcomm's latest chip just released some benchmark numbers, and while they're not all that impressive (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snapdragon-888-benchmarks https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snap...) it's still good to put "not that impressive" in perspective: they're comparable to i7-6700k in single-threaded workloads, and to an i7-4770k in multi-threaded workloads. The oldest iPhone that runs the same geekbench version I can find is the iPhone 5s, which is a little more than 4x slower in the single-threaded benchmark, and 8x in the multi-threaded. Yet that chip was no slouch! Obviously, apple's impressive pole position completely hogs the spotlight, but it's worth remembering that the competition isn't actually all that bad. That level of performance would make for an extremely fast chromebook - were it not for the fact that most are cheap cheap cheap and will never use a high-end chip. Development across the board has been so fast, that if you remember slow ARM chromebooks, I think you attribute that slowness to 2 things other than apple vs everybody else: firstly, they were built to a bargin-basement price, and thus you weren't getting anything near this performance not because it wasn't apple, but simply because they didn't use the right chips in the first place, and secondly, it's been a while, and when things improve that quickly, then a slightly outdated model can easily appear terrible without that being a condemnation of the whole approach.

GeekyBear 6y ago
> If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace. Not really. Look at the difference between Apple's "little" cores and the stock ARM "little" core. >The performance showcased here roughly matches a 2.2GHz Cortex-A76 which is essentially 4x faster than the performance of any other mobile SoC today which relies on Cortex-A55 cores, all while using roughly the same amount of system power and having 3x the power efficiency. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 Apple's Icestorm "little" cores are in the same performance ballpark as the big cores in the Qualcomm variant of a Galaxy S10. That's a night and day difference.
- emn13 6y ago
  Apple is wealthy and powerful, and gets the cream of the crop - i.e. the first batch of the new 5nm output. This isn't new, apple always releases their models a few months before equivalent snapdragons come out. This is a meaningful advantage, to be sure, but if you're trying to figure out how much apple's perf win is due to their great chips and not merely a generational gap, it's misleading. Comparing the s10 today, which is clearly on a inferior process to the iphone 12 pro today isn't useful from this perspective. It's better to compare the upcoming 5nm 888 to apples A14. And here, the numbers just don't back up the claim that apple is running rings around qualcomm in terms of performance. Not just that; the difference between apple+qualcomm chips hasn't changed all that dramatically over the years; if anything it's gotten smaller. Yes, if you look at power at equivalent performance that looks better for apple, but then that's always the case because nobody runs client side CPUs at an optimal perf/watt power, but faster. It's also not really how people use their phones, is it? People don't turn off the high-power cores in iphones; they use em as designed, i.e. at approximately equivalent power, just faster. The point here isn't that Apple's win doesn't exist; simply that it's not the mythological night-day difference it's sometimes painted to be. Furthermore, because apple consistently releases earlier on a new process node, at the moment of their release the perf numbers look better than they are on average over the products lifetime; in effect, you're seeing the combination of both Apple's good CPUs, and a 1 generation gap. Then there's the fact that Apple's CPU's are so fast due not solely to the skill of their silicon division, but also their willingness to spend for more transistors. We don't have numbers for the 888 yet, but it's very likely going to be a lower-cost design if history is any guide (and the anandtech article goes into some other non-obvious ways in which is saves costs too, like power planes, that I bet apple is willing to go the extra mile on). All that matters, because you're trying to predict how other CPUs will perform, and thus need to tease out the impact of stuff like process node, and apples willingness to spend extra on larger caches, and x86 vs ARM - and just ascribing all that perf uplift to apples magic pixie dust won't help you make predictions regarding the rest of the CPU market in the future.
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    > We don't have numbers for the 888 yet The 888 uses the same Cortex-A55 cores mentioned above (the same core all the Android SOCs have been using for a couple of years now) with Apple having a 4x performance win at the same power levels.
saagarjha 6y ago
They really haven't–Apple has slowly gained on, then outpaced them over the last several years. Apple's chips these days "lap" others, where the best that competitors have to offer perform poorer than last year's design.
- emn13 6y ago
  The 888 (the first qualcomm chip on the same 5nm process) has approximately equivalent performance (91%) to the Apple A14 in multicore benchmarks, and 71% of the single-thread geekbench 5 score. source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snapdragon-888-benchmarks https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snap... If you look a few years ago, a similar comparison would be the snapdragon 820 vs. Apples A9 (both on samsung's 14nm process, though apple was dual sourcing with TSMC 16nm). Then, the iphone 6s plus scored 535, and the oneplus 3 (using the 820) scores 306 - i.e. 57% of apples performance. On multicore it achieved 77% of the performance (also a larger difference than today). Qualcomm has been catching up lately on single-thread and multithread perf, just not very quickly (i mean at this rate it'll be well over a decade before they're equal in single thread perf...). Sources: https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks and https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks, search for oneplus 3 and iphone 6s plus.

by emn13 6y ago

GeekyBear 6y ago

> If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace. Not really. Look at the difference between Apple's "little" cores and the stock ARM "little" core. >The performance showcased here roughly matches a 2.2GHz Cortex-A76 which is essentially 4x faster than the performance of any other mobile SoC today which relies on Cortex-A55 cores, all while using roughly the same amount of system power and having 3x the power efficiency. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 Apple's Icestorm "little" cores are in the same performance ballpark as the big cores in the Qualcomm variant of a Galaxy S10. That's a night and day difference.

emn13 6y ago
Apple is wealthy and powerful, and gets the cream of the crop - i.e. the first batch of the new 5nm output. This isn't new, apple always releases their models a few months before equivalent snapdragons come out. This is a meaningful advantage, to be sure, but if you're trying to figure out how much apple's perf win is due to their great chips and not merely a generational gap, it's misleading. Comparing the s10 today, which is clearly on a inferior process to the iphone 12 pro today isn't useful from this perspective. It's better to compare the upcoming 5nm 888 to apples A14. And here, the numbers just don't back up the claim that apple is running rings around qualcomm in terms of performance. Not just that; the difference between apple+qualcomm chips hasn't changed all that dramatically over the years; if anything it's gotten smaller. Yes, if you look at power at equivalent performance that looks better for apple, but then that's always the case because nobody runs client side CPUs at an optimal perf/watt power, but faster. It's also not really how people use their phones, is it? People don't turn off the high-power cores in iphones; they use em as designed, i.e. at approximately equivalent power, just faster. The point here isn't that Apple's win doesn't exist; simply that it's not the mythological night-day difference it's sometimes painted to be. Furthermore, because apple consistently releases earlier on a new process node, at the moment of their release the perf numbers look better than they are on average over the products lifetime; in effect, you're seeing the combination of both Apple's good CPUs, and a 1 generation gap. Then there's the fact that Apple's CPU's are so fast due not solely to the skill of their silicon division, but also their willingness to spend for more transistors. We don't have numbers for the 888 yet, but it's very likely going to be a lower-cost design if history is any guide (and the anandtech article goes into some other non-obvious ways in which is saves costs too, like power planes, that I bet apple is willing to go the extra mile on). All that matters, because you're trying to predict how other CPUs will perform, and thus need to tease out the impact of stuff like process node, and apples willingness to spend extra on larger caches, and x86 vs ARM - and just ascribing all that perf uplift to apples magic pixie dust won't help you make predictions regarding the rest of the CPU market in the future.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  > We don't have numbers for the 888 yet The 888 uses the same Cortex-A55 cores mentioned above (the same core all the Android SOCs have been using for a couple of years now) with Apple having a 4x performance win at the same power levels.

saagarjha 6y ago

They really haven't–Apple has slowly gained on, then outpaced them over the last several years. Apple's chips these days "lap" others, where the best that competitors have to offer perform poorer than last year's design.

emn13 6y ago
The 888 (the first qualcomm chip on the same 5nm process) has approximately equivalent performance (91%) to the Apple A14 in multicore benchmarks, and 71% of the single-thread geekbench 5 score. source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snapdragon-888-benchmarks https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snap... If you look a few years ago, a similar comparison would be the snapdragon 820 vs. Apples A9 (both on samsung's 14nm process, though apple was dual sourcing with TSMC 16nm). Then, the iphone 6s plus scored 535, and the oneplus 3 (using the 820) scores 306 - i.e. 57% of apples performance. On multicore it achieved 77% of the performance (also a larger difference than today). Qualcomm has been catching up lately on single-thread and multithread perf, just not very quickly (i mean at this rate it'll be well over a decade before they're equal in single thread perf...). Sources: https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks and https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks, search for oneplus 3 and iphone 6s plus.