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Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of i9-13900K, 7950X in Single-Core Performance
- edude03 3y agoThis is super impressive on paper, but it feels like there aren't really many applications that can take advantage of this power on a phone due to thermal and (battery) power constraints. Is the idea that mobile workloads are spiky so it can boost to full speed to render a webpage for example then go back to sleep? Are there / can there be any applications that sustain high clock speeds?
- Retric 3y agoLatency. I may spend 1,000 times as long looking at a website as it takes to render but that doesn’t mean taking a long time to render is ok. This is why modern consumer processors have boost modes followed by thermal throttling.
- satvikpendem 3y agoWell they're bringing AAA games like Resident Evil 4 Remake and Assassin's Creed Mirage to the iPhone, complete with raytracing support, so it looks like it'll be a golden age of Apple gaming soon enough.
- nxobject 3y agoSo, it looks like Apple will be taking the console path to gaming, instead of the PC way.
- satvikpendem 3y agoThey'll be available on all Apple Silicon devices including Macs, as the processors are so similar.
- kibwen 3y agoGames made with a controller in mind are miserable experiences on a touchscreen. Phones are awkward and uncomfortable to hold like a controller, the lack of physical buttons provides no tactile feedback on where to press, the lack of shoulder buttons means overloading your thumbs with even more inputs, and your fingers obscure half the screen. And if the implication is that they'll port those iOS games to Mac, then I wouldn't count on it if it takes even a single iota of extra effort on their end. There are more Linux gamers than Mac gamers, and yet game devs still can't be arsed to test their games on Steam Deck.
- gilgoomesh 3y agoWhich is why you can stream your iPhone to a TV and connect a controller. There are also many controllers that clip onto the iPhone itself for a Switch-like experience.
- slg 3y agoI don't think they expect people to seriously play Resident Evil 4 with touch controls. I imagine most people who actually complete the game will use either the controllers that attach to the side of the phone like a Switch, controllers that have a mount on top to hold the phone, a normal Bluetooth controls like a Dualshock with their phone in some other dock, or stream everything to an Apple TV.
- etempleton 3y agoI have been surprised they have not been more aggressive with the chips in AppleTV and signed more deals to port games to the platform. In some ways Apple is well positioned to be a player in the game space, but they seem to lack the commitment and flexibility required to make it work.
- enos_feedler 3y agoMobile gaming is gaming and Apple owns mobile. They own a slice of the gaming space already.
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- dylan604 3y agoSounds like Apple will be needing branded oven mitts to hold the thing in the store's accessories section.
- bottlepalm 3y agoiPhone could be a legit game console if developers wanted it to. Pair a Bluetooth game controller with screen mirroring and there you go. There are so many games on Steam I wish they would port to iPhone. It's like having this incredibly powerful device in your pocket and you can't actually use it for anything.
- MBCook 3y agoRemember that whatever is in the A series chips ends up in future M series chips too, only with lower thermal and battery restrictions. I think this would be the base of the future M4.
- jwells89 3y agoAs far as I’ve gathered, race to idle has definitely been a focal point for Apple when it comes to power management along with coalescence of CPU and antenna wakeups — the system batches up work, powers up components, burns through the work as quickly as possible, and then returns components to idle/sleep. This is also why on iOS, apps that become known for abusing or mismanaging background processing are penalized and have their background processes run less often. Even just a couple of processes waffling around instead of completing their tasks and quitting can keep the system from idling and have a big negative impact.
- foxhill 3y ago“new architecture on new process node almost as fast as competitor’s flagship from a year prior, from two process nodes ago” power efficiency aside (which admittedly is non-trivial), this is not that big a deal or particularly interesting, imo.
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- mwint 3y agoThis is a mobile processor being compared to flagship desktop processors. Apple’s lead is almost unfathomable.
- foxhill 3y agotwo process nodes difference. apple have bought out all of TSMC’s “3nm” capacity. they obviously consider it an important competitive advantage.
- vlovich123 3y agoThe Raptor lake refresh doesn’t seem to add much onto the 13900
- m3kw9 3y ago“ There is a catch though: Apple's A17 Pro operates at 3.75 GHz, according to the benchmark, whereas its mighty competitors work at about 5.80 GHz and 6.0 GHz, respectively.” This is why numbers like this don’t matter when you say the performance is within 10%
- nomel 3y agoCould you expand on that? Why does GHz matter? Performance should be measured as a black box, with the metric being the time it takes to accomplishing some task.
- ghughes 3y agoI think OP meant clock speeds don’t matter, relative performance does.
- nixpulvis 3y agoThe catch is that we can expect better performance when they increase the clock to be closer to the i9. However, it’s never clear how high it go safely.
- jocaal 3y agoYou can't just turn up clockspeed and expect linear increase in performance. The chips are packed so dense with transistors that the chips have to do some magic to be able to operate at those clock speeds without frying. Desktop parts don't really care about energy efficiency and are thus designed to be able to operate like that since max performance is more important than efficiency. Microarchitectural design decision allow engineers to pick tradeoffs for where they want to place their chips in the market, but most major advantages between chips come from fabrication. And these days there aren't much gains left to be made there.
- wherefour 3y agoCPUs are designed with a certain clock speed in mind. The target frequency affects the design of literally every component. Turn up the frequency too high and signals won't arrive in time. Increasing the frequency to match performance with AMD and Intel might require an almost complete redesign. Maybe it can run faster given better cooling and less aggressive power-saving. But I'd be surprised if it can be made to clock much higher, else Apple would have done it already. Mobile CPUs already have peak performance well above what they can sustain. An even faster turbo would be used more rarely but would still be useful.
- MBCook 3y agoWhat’s really embarrassing is how it compares to the Snapdragon. Is the gap expanding at this point?
- robotnikman 3y agoQualcomm is just happy lazily sitting back and collecting licensing fees while putting out mediocre products at this point.
- nomel 3y agoThat's not fair at all. Snapdragon 8 gen 2 was ahead of Apples best offering, just a few days ago [1], in gaming. That's not "mediocre". That's much closer to "head to head". Thermal throttling is also a significant problem with iPhones, for anything real world [2]. A new snapdragon will come out shortly, and the battle will continue. [1] https://beebom.com/snapdragon-8-gen-2-vs-apple-a16-bionic-benchmarks/#:~:text=Snapdragon%208%20Gen%202%20vs%20Apple%20A16%20Bionic%3A%20GFXBench%20Test,-GFXBench%20is%20another&text=Snapdragon%208%20Gen%202%20trumps,could%20only%20muster%20243%20FPS https://beebom.com/snapdragon-8-gen-2-vs-apple-a16-bionic-be.... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSzwefx_TXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSzwefx_TXU
- slaw 3y ago> Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 scored 1490 in the single-core > Apple’s A16 Bionic chipset scored 1879. Both on the same 4nm TSMC process.
- jeswin 3y agoThere are different benchmarks one can pick depending on the article they want to write. Geekbench 6 favors Apple CPUs more that Geekbench 5, which was already better on Apple CPUs than say Antutu. Antutu CPU - A16 248335, SnapDragon 8 Gen2 268542 Antutu GPU - A16 394336, SnapDragon 8 Gen 2 580101 If You look at Geekbench 5 scores for A16 and SD8G2, A16 is ahead by less than 10%.
- gary_0 3y agoI find articles like this really vexing because this isn't a general-purpose CPU, it's just a chip meant to run the software that Apple allows on the App Store. Most of the software I use day-to-day can't run on it by design. It's kind of depressing that the most advanced mobile CPU technology (that can only be fabbed by a single company in a far-away country) is monopolized by a company that heavily restricts the software you can run on it, and will never sell it to me with documentation and let me plug it onto my own motherboard--which is ironically how Apple first started, by buying and making full use of the MOS 6502. But the days of the garage hacker getting their hands on cutting-edge parts are long gone.
- GeekyBear 3y ago> this isn't a general-purpose CPU Apple uses the same CPU/GPU core designs for handheld, tablet, laptop, and desktop.
- yakz 3y agoIt’s depressing right now maybe, but at least it probably means we’ll have this level of performance inexpensively in some years. The tech is still getting better quickly.
- Aloha 3y agoJust because you can't run whatever software you like on it, does not make it non-general purpose CPU.
- nixpulvis 3y agoTrue. But it does make it functionally a non-general purpose CPU. I suppose you can load your own programs if you have a dev account or jailbreak right?
- whiddershins 3y agoYes. And a dev account is like $100/year. It’s bad that they can gatekeep like this, I agree. I should just be able to put whatever on the hardware I buy. But the expense in practical terms, immediate pragmatic terms, is negligible compared to what it unlocks.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoYour next Mac Book Pro will be a sleeve for an iPad Pro, which, in turn, will be a sleeve for an iPhone Pro. Turducken computing. ;)
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- andyferris 3y agoI actually like this :)
- auguzanellato 3y agoAsus did that ~10 years ago with the PadFone, you had a phone that could plug into a tablet shell that in turn could be plugged into a keyboard.
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- joshstrange 3y agoMacpadone? I'm not sure how realistic this is but I think I'd love it.
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- 015a 3y agoiPhone 13 Pro, with A15 Bionic, scored around 2250 Geekbench 6 single core. M2 Max, more-so around 2800. These two chips are comparable because they use the same microarchitecture, and it indicates a ~20-25% uplift in single core mostly just through pushing more power through the chip. If they can drive the same increase with an M3 chip based on the A17 Pro microarchitecture, a single-core score of 3500 is within reach. For a laptop. Comparison: the i9 13900KS, the current stock single-core performance champion, can push 3100 with excellent cooling; and it reaches this blistering performance (~10% faster than an M2 Ultra) by, singularly, drawing upward of 220 watts from the wall [1]. The Ryzen 7900x isn't far behind, in both metrics. An entire M2 Max SoC peaks at around 90 watts, and there's evidence that the CPU in isolation draws closer to 35 watts [2]. It cannot be understated how far ahead Apple is. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-13900ks-cpu-review/3 https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-13900ks-c... [2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M2-Max-Processor-Benchmarks-and-Specs.682771.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M2-Max-Processor-Benchma...
- lbourdages 3y agoI can't wait for AMD chips on 3nm so we can see if it really is "just the advantage of the process" like a lot of folk say.
- senttoschool 3y agoIt's already proven that it's not just the node advantage. Just compare Apple's 7nm A series chips to Zen3 or M2 to Zen4. The power advantage for Apple is 3x - 10x.
- huijzer 3y agoApple’s (or actually TSMC’s) advanced packaging makes communication between dies faster. I think that some of the performance gains come from a lower number of clockticks required for accessing memory on an Apple chip.
- skavi 3y agoyour overall point is valid, but it’s somewhat misleading to compare single core performance alongside total SoC power.