19 ms·

The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster and More Efficient

191 points by vanburen 5y ago

marcodiego 5y ago
Intel and AMD should consider how much goodwill they may gain by just removing IME and PSP. The framework and librem laptops show that there is a market of people willing to pay for upgradable devices which are independent from makers and free from out-of-the-box backdoors.
- least 5y ago
  > Intel and AMD should consider how much goodwill they may gain by just removing IME and PSP. On a very practical scale; none. It'd make some nerds happy but it's like a subset of a subset of a niche population. > The framework and librem laptops show that there is a market of people willing to pay for upgradable devices which are independent from makers and free from out-of-the-box backdoors. All it shows is that there is some market for it but I think you're either severely overestimating framework and librem's scale or are severely underestimating intel and AMD's. I'm extremely skeptical that either company cares about that niche nor do I think they'd rework all their processors just to satisfy that niche.
- acdha 5y ago
  > Intel and AMD should consider how much goodwill they may gain by just removing IME and PSP. Too small to measure: the subset of privacy activists who are concerned about it is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of IT workers who use those features, and that's a tiny fraction of the number of people buying computers. Calling it as a backdoor is your choice but consider that using a term not following its standard definition is not likely to be effective or good for your credibility if you're trying to draw attention to something more important in the future.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    I'll consider the advice.
- dev_tty01 5y ago
  Compared to the markets Intel serves, the Librem and framework markets are inconsequential. No good financial incentive for them to invest in such a move.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  For siblings commenting that the librem and framework markets are small... You're right, it is small indeed. What is harder to measure is the impact of the goodwill they could gain. It is not very different from what they gain of sponsoring events. Of course changing behavior could be more expensive or complicated, but it may be worth in the long run. IME features maybe useful for some people. But there are people who don't want it. I don't think it would be expensive to make it possible to disable it via eFuses. Remember that linux was once much smaller than any commercial UNIX. So was Apache and Nginx. Linux is still very unpopular among gamers; that didn't prevented Valve from investing in what now is their lifeboat. A small market should not be seen as an excuse to not invest in something that will certainly bring goodwill.
flakiness 5y ago
I wonder if there are any reviews that measures their progress on the camera ISP, which occupies large amount of real estate on these smartphone SoCs. Clearly Apple invests a lot on the area, and it shows on their presos, yet almost no review mentions about how it progresses over time. Same for media codecs, and lesser extent, NPU kind of stuff.
hajile 5y ago
Those efficiency cores are something to behold. They positively blow away the A55. A510 is the next best thing. Like bulldozer, it will have two integer units sharing a single floating point unit. I doubt companies will ship 8 A510 cores which means that overall little core performance will likely not be improving a huge amount. In fact, it's looking to me like A79 is going to be the "little" core while X2 will be the big core and a couple A510s will be strictly limited to secure low-level processes.
retskrad 5y ago
People love to ding Tim Cook for Apple's lack of innovation but the I'd argue the M1 is a revolutionary product on the same level as the first iPhone. Of course, it's not as sexy and in your face as the first iPhone but people in the industry and consumers immediately felt the impact of the shock wave. When you think about it, the M1 perfectly encapsulates Apple under Tim Cook. It didn't come out of nowhere. They have slowly improved on their A-series in the iPhones the last decade and it accumulated into the M1. That's exactly how Apple is run today. Inch by inch.
- Thaxll 5y ago
  M1 is an implementation detail.
  - pohl 5y ago
    * ...an implementation detail that makes the implementation possible.
- okamiueru 5y ago
  By what metric do you consider the M1 revolutionary? "Inch by inch" and "revolutionary" are a bit contradictory, no?
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    It was developed gradually: The A series is already at number 15! Macs suddenly switched to these ARM processors. That's the revolution, and the number is M1, but it's based on the gradually developed A series.
  - MangoCoffee 5y ago
    its the first ARM based PC that doesn't suck. Microsoft Windows ARM didn't move people to ARM based PC while Apple succeed.
    - ghshephard 5y ago
      Not sure who downvoted you - I completely agree. People have been talking about Arm as the next generation for a long time. I would suggest that Amazon made it successful with Graviton in the cloud, and Apple made it successful on the laptop/desktop with the M1.
wronglebowski 5y ago
While seeing these deep dives on A series processors is fascinating I find how powerful they are to be highly disappointing. Here you have undoubtedly some of the finest processor technology available, manufactured in the hundreds of millions, wasted by the constraints of its platform. If the Pi foundation had access to cores, processes, and even pieces of this level of technology the overall computing world would be so much more capable. Even beyond that, the iPhones themselves? Severely limited by the I/O they possess. As these devices age they could have several recycled general computing purposes but they're constrained by the single lighting port. iPhone use NVMe storage, they have PCIe lanes! All this work, effort and engineering for a platform who simply seeks to make more off of the revenue of whales in their app stores. Edit: I think my comment around Pis is a little misleading. What I meant is the general educational Linux community. Not specifically the Pi foundation. If after X years Apple unlocked the bootloader and you could install other operating systems to better leverage the hardware I'd feel better about the state of it.
- mcphage 5y ago
  > If the Pi foundation had access to cores, processes, and even pieces of this level of technology the overall computing world would be so much more capable. Even if they had access to it I don't think it would be anywhere near as affordable as the Pi foundation wants their devices to be. An M1-powered Raspberry Pi would be amazing, but also probably several hundred dollars.
  - JetSpiegel 5y ago
    Which Intel sells as NUC.
- xoa 5y ago
  >wasted by the constraints of its platform I mean, ignoring that there are some fairly serious number crunching things to do on iPhones (I think the lidar and basic 3D scanning features intro'd with the iPhone 12 Pro are already quite useful professionally for example, like cameras themselves on smartphones), how can you say this following Apple's switch of Macs to their chips too? Obviously the economies of scale and constraints generated by iPhone development has fed Apple's move up the stack in classic disruptive fashion to the iPad and then last year the Mac. Hwever you feel about smartphones themselves, it seems a little more than a little odd to see this comment now in 2021 given that it's going straight into more classic personal computers as well?
ksec 5y ago
Even though I am no longer an Apple Fan I was surprised at the sentiment on A15 after the Keynote and Reviews. Do people really expect revolutionary improvement every single year? ~20% Improvement YoY within the same power envelop is god damn impressive. And if this is not good enough? This is just layering ground work for next year's 3nm and LPDDR5. ( Or 4nm depending on circumstances ) The E Core are interesting because they are a preview of what to expect in next generation Apple Watch. I was hoping there is some investigation on new Display Engine and Video Encoder / Decoder. Especially on power usage. But looks like these kind of interest are in the minority.
- Mailtemi 5y ago
  Totally agree. More than happy with the performance. I would worry about it if I can pair a 4K monitor to the iPhone , and it becomes a Mac, or at least an iPad. Until this killer feature, I prefer longer time between re-charge.
  - kossTKR 5y ago
    That would honestly be amazing and probably very feasible with the new chipsets. Imagine having a desktop setup and an "empty" laptop case with slide in dock. Everything in one place. Same system for the iPad. Will probably never happen though because that's less products to sell?
    - orangepanda 5y ago
      Microsoft already did that with Continuum. No one used it. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/continuum https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/continuum
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - danudey 5y ago
        That's because: 1. No one used Windows Phone either 2. The use-case wasn't really clear. "Run Office apps on a regular computer-sized monitor!" I can already do that, using the computer-sized computer connected to my computer-sized monitor. "Setup is simple using Continuum-compatible accessories" So I have to buy a new keyboard/mouse/monitor/something else? (No, but it sounds like I might have to) The pitch was "You can use your phone kind of like a PC, assuming every app you need runs on Windows phone" (which, for almost everyone, is absolutely not the case). If there's one thing Windows phone was famous for, it was not having apps. Essentially, Microsoft was trying to pitch you a feature that let you use a phone + monitor and keyboard as a replacement for some of the apps on your PC. Not a compelling pitch, except for presentations.
GeekyBear 5y ago
Interesting SPEC 2017 performance figures for the A15 performance cores vs x86 that the story's author posted in the story comments: >Comparative subsets would 5950X 7.29 int / 9.79 fp, 11900K 6.61 int / 9.58 fp. versus 7.28 / 10.15 on A15
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Is that per core?
  - wtallis 5y ago
    That's single-core/thread performance, which isn't quite the same as per-core performance, because you usually won't get N times the score by running N copies of the workload across N cores.
paulpan 5y ago
This denotes how important TSMC and having the fabrication node advantage is for Apple. The A15 seems to be an all-around good chip, just not the magnitude of performance jumps (20%+) Apple has shown since the A7. For reference, this chip is on an improved TSMC 5nm (N5P) node but still 5nm nonetheless like last year's A14. Last year's M1/A14 cores had performance gains due to the combined architecture improvement and the shifting from TSMC 7nm to 5nm fabrication. At the time it was difficult to determine the % of gains attributable to either, so now it seems we have a better idea that node advantage could be the majority. It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the next M-series chip announcement, e.g. M1X or M2. I still think it's plausible Apple switches the M-series chips to 3nm first in order to cement their superiority over Intel. That said, porting architectures across nodes is no small feat (as we saw in Intel's Rocket Lake, though that was small -> big).
Osiris 5y ago
ARM SoC developed for Android devices, on the other hand, are consistently way behind in performance and are nearly all based on ARM designs. I've been waiting for years for someone other than Apple to make a fully custom ARM SoC that can compete with Apple. I suspect there isn't a lot of incentive for Qualcomm to do it as they as nearly a monopoly in the Android space. I've been hoping that AMD or Intel would step up and make an ARM core that crushes Qualcomm. I just got a used iPhone 7 for my so and despite being 5 years old is still really smooth running the latest iOS 15. It's the only iPhone I own (the rest are Android) and I'm a bit jealous.
- harpratap 5y ago
  They acquired Nuvia which is meant to be the custom CPU attempt from Qualcomm. But not sure if they will bring Nuvia expertise to Mobile SoCs or keep them for desktop & servers
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  Qualcomm dominates at radios, which matters far more than single-core CPU performance. So there's no pressure on Qualcomm to be better, and really all they do is take off-the-shelf ARM designs for the CPU cores anyway. So it'd really be ARM themselves falling behind. Perhaps Qualcomm is pressuring them to keep die sizes small, so ARM just isn't willing to make a proper "big" CPU core. Or maybe ARM themselves just don't have the right incentives to do so. Who knows. But the end result is nobody really wants to compete against Qualcomm in the mobile phone SoC space, since Qualcomm's radios means they win by default. Then in the laptop & server space, Intel & AMD have no incentive to switch to ARM instead of sticking with x86. At least not at this point in time.
  - n8cpdx 5y ago
    > Qualcomm dominates at radios, which matters far more than single-core CPU performance. that is nonsense. I switched from iPhone to a Pixel 4 post-CSAM scandal and the difference is night and day. My phone now makes me wait. Every single fucking day I wait. Wait Wait Wait. Slow Slow Slow. And this is a phone without the bloatware. Fucking miserably slow. Not in absolute terms necessarily, it would have been competitive 10 years ago. But in 2021, Qualcomm is fucking over every single Android user and their management should be ashamed. I assume nonsense about single core performance being good enough is how the industry (Apple aside) has ended up in such a sorry state.
tiffanyh 5y ago
I get that these Apple chips are fast but has anyone spent anytime comparing how fast the Operating System is to other OS? macOS/iOS vs Windows or Linux. Usain Bolt is the fastest person on earth. But if he’s wearing 5 kilogram shoes, he’s not going to be any faster than a normal person.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  Alternative operating systems like Asahi Linux are apparently not far enough along to give you anything meaningful, but here are some benchmarks of Linux virtualized under QEMU: “vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly fast” https://www.sevarg.net/2021/01/09/arm-mac-mini-and-boinc/ https://www.sevarg.net/2021/01/09/arm-mac-mini-and-boinc/

191 points by vanburen 5y ago

Intel and AMD should consider how much goodwill they may gain by just removing IME and PSP. The framework and librem laptops show that there is a market of people willing to pay for upgradable devices which are independent from makers and free from out-of-the-box backdoors.

least 5y ago
> Intel and AMD should consider how much goodwill they may gain by just removing IME and PSP. On a very practical scale; none. It'd make some nerds happy but it's like a subset of a subset of a niche population. > The framework and librem laptops show that there is a market of people willing to pay for upgradable devices which are independent from makers and free from out-of-the-box backdoors. All it shows is that there is some market for it but I think you're either severely overestimating framework and librem's scale or are severely underestimating intel and AMD's. I'm extremely skeptical that either company cares about that niche nor do I think they'd rework all their processors just to satisfy that niche.
acdha 5y ago
> Intel and AMD should consider how much goodwill they may gain by just removing IME and PSP. Too small to measure: the subset of privacy activists who are concerned about it is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of IT workers who use those features, and that's a tiny fraction of the number of people buying computers. Calling it as a backdoor is your choice but consider that using a term not following its standard definition is not likely to be effective or good for your credibility if you're trying to draw attention to something more important in the future.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I'll consider the advice.
dev_tty01 5y ago
Compared to the markets Intel serves, the Librem and framework markets are inconsequential. No good financial incentive for them to invest in such a move.
marcodiego 5y ago
For siblings commenting that the librem and framework markets are small... You're right, it is small indeed. What is harder to measure is the impact of the goodwill they could gain. It is not very different from what they gain of sponsoring events. Of course changing behavior could be more expensive or complicated, but it may be worth in the long run. IME features maybe useful for some people. But there are people who don't want it. I don't think it would be expensive to make it possible to disable it via eFuses. Remember that linux was once much smaller than any commercial UNIX. So was Apache and Nginx. Linux is still very unpopular among gamers; that didn't prevented Valve from investing in what now is their lifeboat. A small market should not be seen as an excuse to not invest in something that will certainly bring goodwill.

flakiness 5y ago

I wonder if there are any reviews that measures their progress on the camera ISP, which occupies large amount of real estate on these smartphone SoCs. Clearly Apple invests a lot on the area, and it shows on their presos, yet almost no review mentions about how it progresses over time. Same for media codecs, and lesser extent, NPU kind of stuff.

hajile 5y ago

Those efficiency cores are something to behold. They positively blow away the A55. A510 is the next best thing. Like bulldozer, it will have two integer units sharing a single floating point unit. I doubt companies will ship 8 A510 cores which means that overall little core performance will likely not be improving a huge amount. In fact, it's looking to me like A79 is going to be the "little" core while X2 will be the big core and a couple A510s will be strictly limited to secure low-level processes.

retskrad 5y ago

People love to ding Tim Cook for Apple's lack of innovation but the I'd argue the M1 is a revolutionary product on the same level as the first iPhone. Of course, it's not as sexy and in your face as the first iPhone but people in the industry and consumers immediately felt the impact of the shock wave. When you think about it, the M1 perfectly encapsulates Apple under Tim Cook. It didn't come out of nowhere. They have slowly improved on their A-series in the iPhones the last decade and it accumulated into the M1. That's exactly how Apple is run today. Inch by inch.

Thaxll 5y ago
M1 is an implementation detail.
- pohl 5y ago
  * ...an implementation detail that makes the implementation possible.
okamiueru 5y ago
By what metric do you consider the M1 revolutionary? "Inch by inch" and "revolutionary" are a bit contradictory, no?
- kzrdude 5y ago
  It was developed gradually: The A series is already at number 15! Macs suddenly switched to these ARM processors. That's the revolution, and the number is M1, but it's based on the gradually developed A series.
- MangoCoffee 5y ago
  its the first ARM based PC that doesn't suck. Microsoft Windows ARM didn't move people to ARM based PC while Apple succeed.
  - ghshephard 5y ago
    Not sure who downvoted you - I completely agree. People have been talking about Arm as the next generation for a long time. I would suggest that Amazon made it successful with Graviton in the cloud, and Apple made it successful on the laptop/desktop with the M1.

wronglebowski 5y ago

While seeing these deep dives on A series processors is fascinating I find how powerful they are to be highly disappointing. Here you have undoubtedly some of the finest processor technology available, manufactured in the hundreds of millions, wasted by the constraints of its platform. If the Pi foundation had access to cores, processes, and even pieces of this level of technology the overall computing world would be so much more capable. Even beyond that, the iPhones themselves? Severely limited by the I/O they possess. As these devices age they could have several recycled general computing purposes but they're constrained by the single lighting port. iPhone use NVMe storage, they have PCIe lanes! All this work, effort and engineering for a platform who simply seeks to make more off of the revenue of whales in their app stores. Edit: I think my comment around Pis is a little misleading. What I meant is the general educational Linux community. Not specifically the Pi foundation. If after X years Apple unlocked the bootloader and you could install other operating systems to better leverage the hardware I'd feel better about the state of it.

mcphage 5y ago
> If the Pi foundation had access to cores, processes, and even pieces of this level of technology the overall computing world would be so much more capable. Even if they had access to it I don't think it would be anywhere near as affordable as the Pi foundation wants their devices to be. An M1-powered Raspberry Pi would be amazing, but also probably several hundred dollars.
- JetSpiegel 5y ago
  Which Intel sells as NUC.
xoa 5y ago
>wasted by the constraints of its platform I mean, ignoring that there are some fairly serious number crunching things to do on iPhones (I think the lidar and basic 3D scanning features intro'd with the iPhone 12 Pro are already quite useful professionally for example, like cameras themselves on smartphones), how can you say this following Apple's switch of Macs to their chips too? Obviously the economies of scale and constraints generated by iPhone development has fed Apple's move up the stack in classic disruptive fashion to the iPad and then last year the Mac. Hwever you feel about smartphones themselves, it seems a little more than a little odd to see this comment now in 2021 given that it's going straight into more classic personal computers as well?

ksec 5y ago

Even though I am no longer an Apple Fan I was surprised at the sentiment on A15 after the Keynote and Reviews. Do people really expect revolutionary improvement every single year? ~20% Improvement YoY within the same power envelop is god damn impressive. And if this is not good enough? This is just layering ground work for next year's 3nm and LPDDR5. ( Or 4nm depending on circumstances ) The E Core are interesting because they are a preview of what to expect in next generation Apple Watch. I was hoping there is some investigation on new Display Engine and Video Encoder / Decoder. Especially on power usage. But looks like these kind of interest are in the minority.

Mailtemi 5y ago
Totally agree. More than happy with the performance. I would worry about it if I can pair a 4K monitor to the iPhone , and it becomes a Mac, or at least an iPad. Until this killer feature, I prefer longer time between re-charge.
- kossTKR 5y ago
  That would honestly be amazing and probably very feasible with the new chipsets. Imagine having a desktop setup and an "empty" laptop case with slide in dock. Everything in one place. Same system for the iPad. Will probably never happen though because that's less products to sell?
  - orangepanda 5y ago
    Microsoft already did that with Continuum. No one used it. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/continuum https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/continuum
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - danudey 5y ago
      That's because: 1. No one used Windows Phone either 2. The use-case wasn't really clear. "Run Office apps on a regular computer-sized monitor!" I can already do that, using the computer-sized computer connected to my computer-sized monitor. "Setup is simple using Continuum-compatible accessories" So I have to buy a new keyboard/mouse/monitor/something else? (No, but it sounds like I might have to) The pitch was "You can use your phone kind of like a PC, assuming every app you need runs on Windows phone" (which, for almost everyone, is absolutely not the case). If there's one thing Windows phone was famous for, it was not having apps. Essentially, Microsoft was trying to pitch you a feature that let you use a phone + monitor and keyboard as a replacement for some of the apps on your PC. Not a compelling pitch, except for presentations.

GeekyBear 5y ago

Interesting SPEC 2017 performance figures for the A15 performance cores vs x86 that the story's author posted in the story comments: >Comparative subsets would 5950X 7.29 int / 9.79 fp, 11900K 6.61 int / 9.58 fp. versus 7.28 / 10.15 on A15

lostmsu 5y ago
Is that per core?
- wtallis 5y ago
  That's single-core/thread performance, which isn't quite the same as per-core performance, because you usually won't get N times the score by running N copies of the workload across N cores.

paulpan 5y ago

This denotes how important TSMC and having the fabrication node advantage is for Apple. The A15 seems to be an all-around good chip, just not the magnitude of performance jumps (20%+) Apple has shown since the A7. For reference, this chip is on an improved TSMC 5nm (N5P) node but still 5nm nonetheless like last year's A14. Last year's M1/A14 cores had performance gains due to the combined architecture improvement and the shifting from TSMC 7nm to 5nm fabrication. At the time it was difficult to determine the % of gains attributable to either, so now it seems we have a better idea that node advantage could be the majority. It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the next M-series chip announcement, e.g. M1X or M2. I still think it's plausible Apple switches the M-series chips to 3nm first in order to cement their superiority over Intel. That said, porting architectures across nodes is no small feat (as we saw in Intel's Rocket Lake, though that was small -> big).

Osiris 5y ago

ARM SoC developed for Android devices, on the other hand, are consistently way behind in performance and are nearly all based on ARM designs. I've been waiting for years for someone other than Apple to make a fully custom ARM SoC that can compete with Apple. I suspect there isn't a lot of incentive for Qualcomm to do it as they as nearly a monopoly in the Android space. I've been hoping that AMD or Intel would step up and make an ARM core that crushes Qualcomm. I just got a used iPhone 7 for my so and despite being 5 years old is still really smooth running the latest iOS 15. It's the only iPhone I own (the rest are Android) and I'm a bit jealous.

harpratap 5y ago
They acquired Nuvia which is meant to be the custom CPU attempt from Qualcomm. But not sure if they will bring Nuvia expertise to Mobile SoCs or keep them for desktop & servers
kllrnohj 5y ago
Qualcomm dominates at radios, which matters far more than single-core CPU performance. So there's no pressure on Qualcomm to be better, and really all they do is take off-the-shelf ARM designs for the CPU cores anyway. So it'd really be ARM themselves falling behind. Perhaps Qualcomm is pressuring them to keep die sizes small, so ARM just isn't willing to make a proper "big" CPU core. Or maybe ARM themselves just don't have the right incentives to do so. Who knows. But the end result is nobody really wants to compete against Qualcomm in the mobile phone SoC space, since Qualcomm's radios means they win by default. Then in the laptop & server space, Intel & AMD have no incentive to switch to ARM instead of sticking with x86. At least not at this point in time.
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  > Qualcomm dominates at radios, which matters far more than single-core CPU performance. that is nonsense. I switched from iPhone to a Pixel 4 post-CSAM scandal and the difference is night and day. My phone now makes me wait. Every single fucking day I wait. Wait Wait Wait. Slow Slow Slow. And this is a phone without the bloatware. Fucking miserably slow. Not in absolute terms necessarily, it would have been competitive 10 years ago. But in 2021, Qualcomm is fucking over every single Android user and their management should be ashamed. I assume nonsense about single core performance being good enough is how the industry (Apple aside) has ended up in such a sorry state.

tiffanyh 5y ago

I get that these Apple chips are fast but has anyone spent anytime comparing how fast the Operating System is to other OS? macOS/iOS vs Windows or Linux. Usain Bolt is the fastest person on earth. But if he’s wearing 5 kilogram shoes, he’s not going to be any faster than a normal person.

Eric_WVGG 5y ago
Alternative operating systems like Asahi Linux are apparently not far enough along to give you anything meaningful, but here are some benchmarks of Linux virtualized under QEMU: “vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly fast” https://www.sevarg.net/2021/01/09/arm-mac-mini-and-boinc/ https://www.sevarg.net/2021/01/09/arm-mac-mini-and-boinc/