10 ms·
iPhone 16's A18 Pro chip outperforms the M1 chip
- cedws 2y agoSeems like an obscene amount of computing power for a phone. Who is pushing their phone that hard? Majority of people just want to send/receive texts and scroll through Instagram.
- beached_whale 2y agoCan turn the chip off faster to save power probably.
- heyoni 2y agoIt almost definitely does and probably always runs at a fraction of that speed while using up the battery. Even current gen phones don’t do face recognition unless you’re connected to a charger.
- rvnx 2y agoLLM / Extracting objects from pictures / Generating pictures
- cedws 2y agoIsn't all the AI stuff running on Neural Engine, which is a separate coprocessor?
- Salgat 2y agoDepends, data preprocessing is often done on the CPU though.
- morsch 2y agoIsn't almost all of the AI stuff running in the cloud on dedicated hardware, drawing power that would melt an iPhone?
- dagw 2y agoThe whole selling point of Apples AI stuff is that the processing for most things can be done on the phone and thus your private data won't have to leave you device
- michaelmrose 2y agoSeems like the logical way to do that would be something like a mini without a monitor or keyboard plugged into your router. I fully expect remote solutions to smoke local options and an ultimate transition to remote solutions.
- dagw 2y agoI fully expect remote solutions to smoke local options Once you include the all the network overhead of sending images/video files to a server and back over a not very fast connection, I suspect it will be closer than you think for most real world use cases. And even if a cloud solution can improved the overall performance from say 4 seconds to 2 seconds, I don't see that as a huge win overall. All that being said Apple does also offer an AI cloud compute solutions for operation too heavy to run on the phone.
- heyoni 2y agoExcept what would have been a Mac mini plugged into your router is now handheld and way less janky than needing the user to maintain two separate devices.
- michaelmrose 2y agoThe phone doesn't have the memory/compute/cooling/or power budget to be a meaningful replacement for a desktop device which in turn doesn't hold a candle to the power or economy of doing it on the server side. Herein privacy and utility are clearly in tension. The only sane thing to do is do it on the server but if you ARE going to do it locally doing it on a computer on the clients premises is the only way to actually do it because mobile devices power/compute/cooling/power budgets are so anemic whatever a synthetic benchmark says a device can do in the space of a moment or two. I'm presuming that the ultimate strategy that a lot of players are going to actually follow is all server all the time wherein companies who are terribly concerned about privacy will rather than doing it locally do it on a server that they own.
- para_parolu 2y agoThese people will be fine with regular iphone 16.
- noncoml 2y agoYou underestimate what people do with their phones these days AR, CAD, Video Editing, games, etc.. Even just sending a video on WhatsApp requires transcoding
- ahmedfromtunis 2y agoExactly! It's not my fault that you are underutilizing the incredible marvel of engineering that is your smartphone. Reading and watching old sci-fi taught me to appreciate the technology I'm lucky to be in possession of and to take full advantage of it. Video calls, gaming, AR... are very compute intensive and need every last transistor to perform well.
- troupo 2y agoI... already do all that on my iPhone 12 Pro, and people have been doing that for a while now. For anything truly groundbreaking... Apple has too locked down of a system. And I say it as a long time fanboy
- heraldgeezer 2y agoYes I love gaming on my phone!! I love the feel of the inprecise touchscreen controls, the worse experience compared to a console or PC and all the ads and microtransactions!! Anyone that can afford a new iphone and games should just get a console or PC... jesus.
- okdood64 2y agohttps://direct.playstation.com/en-us/buy-accessories/backbone-one-playstation-edition-mobile-gaming-controller-iphone-lightning https://direct.playstation.com/en-us/buy-accessories/backbon...
- noncoml 2y agoI have to agree. I enjoy games so much better now that I always carry on me my second PS5 and my 36” 4k monitor. I have trouble getting on planes however because they won’t allow my True Sine Wave UPS through security.
- forgetfulness 2y agoInstagram. I was completely fine using a well-taken-care-of iPhone 8 until Instagram's input boxes became unusably slow on it, now I have an iPhone 13. I'm guessing that there'll be a race to make more powerful AI assistants, but makers of far more mundane apps will gobble up the computing power readily.
- deaddodo 2y agoInstagram's web app drains my computer's battery / knocks it into performance mode. It's obscene for a basic messaging and photo gallery site.
- zamfi 2y agoWhat is it actually doing with all that compute? Is it every animated thumbnail? Is it scaling thumbnail images? Re-flowing the page 120x/sec? Mining bitcoin? Anyone know?
- codersfocus 2y agoImproving the developer experience
- akomtu 2y agoSome sort of distributed face recognition offloaded to user devices?
- the_snooze 2y agoBloated JavaScript libraries and their bloated dependencies.
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoInstagram and FB eats a lot of memory on desktop too. Actually, a LOT of memory. Lots of times OOM kicks in, although on Linux only.
- piva00 2y ago
- Almondsetat 2y agoSeems like an obscene amount of computing power for a personal computer. Who is pushing their desktop that hard? Majority of people just want to send/receive emails and write a document.
- jchw 2y agoI know this is meant to be sarcastic, but it's a perfectly reasonable point. Not only that, it already came true; a lot of the time compute power has become so plentiful that we're more concerned about battery life and efficiency than actual raw grunt in personal computers. The main exceptions are gamers and people who use productivity software, but let's face it: Grandma does not need a 7995WX to log into Facebook.
- eesmith 2y agoYou are not wrong. Don't most people have a desktop computer which is less powerful than an M1? That strengthens the original comment, yes?
- decafninja 2y agoI’d go even further, at least anecdotally - most people don’t seem to have a desktop or even laptop computer these days. Literally none of my non-techie circle own a personal desktop. Only a few own a personal laptop - and even then, it only gets turned on occasionally. Most of them do all their personal computing on an iPad or smartphone.
- doublepg23 2y agoThey can subsidize the costs of developing fast chips with iPhone margins and then use the faster chip tech in their computers.
- michaelmrose 2y agoMobile computing performance is largely bounded not by how much work you can do this second but by how much work you do without exhausting your battery too quickly to be usable or overheating. Comparing them as if both were equally capable of going flat out is deceptive. Other things being equal working faster means spinning down quicker and using less juice.
- wslh 2y agoThat's exactly why I miss the Samsung DeX [1], it gave me the option to turn my mobile phone into a desktop, solving one choice problem. But, of course, there’s always another choice around the corner. I don’t even trust Linux in battery management, and while Chrome OS Flex [2] offers a decent alternative, in the end, I don’t miss notebooks and their battery-draining habits. I’ve learned to embrace the fruit… and its own ecosystem: iPhone + MacBook. I expect someone will really wake up soon, but as long as companies like Microsoft continue to be cash cows, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. Even if Qualcomm makes the chips, Microsoft Windows won’t handle the energy efficiently. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX [2] https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/ https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/
- paulryanrogers 2y agoHow were the thermals? I can't imagine doing anything CPU intense for more than a few seconds with how hot phones get.
- wslh 2y agoI remember that the Samsung ~S21 was frequently hot beyond the DeX, comparing to iPhone.
- wmf 2y agoApple showed several AAA games like Assassin's Creed running on iPhones.
- jsheard 2y agoBut approximately nobody actually bought them, which comes back to the point about all that compute power being a solution in search of a problem. People don't want to play AAA games on a phone. https://mobilegamer.biz/under-2000-people-have-paid-to-play-resident-evil-7-on-ios-estimates-say/ https://mobilegamer.biz/under-2000-people-have-paid-to-play-...
- ac29 2y agoThats a lousy article. Its based on 3rd party estimates of sales of a game released only 2 weeks before the article date. And, its a 2017 console title released on iOS in 2024, so presumably most fans of the series had already played it (it was released on 8 platforms before iOS). "AAA" is kinda a vague term, but there are definitely some big budget games on mobile that do massive numbers (hundreds of millions of dollars).
- guidedlight 2y agoThese aren’t games designed for touch devices. They are console games ported to iOS. To play them you need to pair a controller, making the experience subpar.
- idunnoman1222 2y agoLocal AI obviously
- troupo 2y agoNot with 8GB of RAM
- mensetmanusman 2y agoHow the ram is actually managed in the firmware can make the 8 GB number not entirely illuminating. Now, this is the case for software graphics, but it might not be the case for LLMs.
- melling 2y agoAdd a wireless keyboard, mouse and monitor then you’ve got a desktop computer. Not gonna happen from Apple but I’m eagerly awaiting the day.
- chairmanmow 2y agoAnd an operating system that's designed for it, because if you want to you can hook up those things now you can cobble something together hooking up those things but to call that experience "desktop like" is mostly held back by how much consideration iOS has put into the concept of a "cursor" designed for clicks. If you hook up a mouse to iOS and want a cursor, you need to turn on some assistive touch accessibility feature to get a circle that's about the size of an index finger tip, with about 10 times the click surface of an ordinary cursor. If you can activate a setting that feels like a hack and get past the bad cursor, only done 2/3 at a given time myself, but I'd imagine if you hook it up to a bigger screen, the resolution probably won't adapt and your cursor will be massive, but you can mirror an iPhone screen to a monitor. As far as using a wireless keyboard though, no issues I've really noted there, behaves like I'd expect a keyboard to, I was surprised when I could CMD-Tab to switch between apps on iOS like a desktop machine, surprised that feature exists in iOS because I don't see how you would invoke that except without an external keyboard, i.e. via touch, so it exceeded my expectations there by supporting that shortcut. If Apple elevated the cursor to less of an afterthought it would open things up a lot more.
- melling 2y agoYes, I want it to turn into macOS on the desktop.
- zer0zzz 2y agoEven for the most mundane phone usage I find the faster and faster socs being better at driving mobile safari to keep up with desktop websites. That alone I think is worth periodically upgrading.
- wenc 2y agoI need that kind of power, not for apps, but computational photography and videography.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago640k ought to be enough for anybody, huh?
- wredue 2y agoThat was in a time when people didn’t envision every person in the first world having access to their entire lives at their finger tips. I would tend to agree that today’s apps are… dogshit. Without a doubt, the vast majority of today workloads (99.9%) should be able to run on 2008ish era processing power if they were well programmed.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoI do. I can almost do my entire knowledge worker job from the phone. My 14 is getting slowed down by iOS Microsoft Office enhancements, so hopefully the 16 can make me just as productive as I was last year.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ein0p 2y agoThey also take pictures and videos. That takes a ton of compute nowadays, with all the computational photography stuff going on in the background. Most laptops cannot do realtime processing and compression of 8K video.
- mlsu 2y agoMy fiance takes a lot of videos on her phone. She has become a pretty talented video editor. Watching her “work” is actually a wild experience because it really is a whole different way of using a computer. She is comparably fast to someone on a desktop editor. 4K video editing — you need a pretty powerful desktop PC to smoothly edit/preview 4k video. CPU, GPU, and memory.
- samsolomon 2y agoI imagine at some point you’ll be able to take your phone to any screen and use it as a desktop computer. Obviously there are a lot of UI differences for touch vs keyboard interfaces, but it feels like that’s going to be the future at some point.
- dizhn 2y agoThey started allowing console emulators on the store very recently.
- superkuh 2y ago>It sure is a shame that we can’t do more with this power. I think it’d be really cool to be able to plug in your iPhone to an external USB-C monitor and run Stage Manager with an external mouse and keyboard. Maybe one year. To dissipate heat you need volume/mass to soak it and surface area to dissipate it. Phones will never have the volume/mass or surface area to compete with normal size computers.
- brianshaler 2y agoCurrent generation computers, sure, but I think there's still steady progress toward increasing amount of compute per unit of energy. For phones, that's almost as important for heat dissipation as it is for battery life, as we're less likely to get more energy per unit of volume in the near future.
- giobox 2y agoThe concept works just fine, Samsung etc have at various times demoed this exact concept with their own android handsets. Sure it might not be able to run at 100% load for long periods due to cooling restrictions, its still going to be more than fast enough for a lot of the activities most people do. One of the nice things CPU improvements bring us - the amount of thermal "volume/mass" needed for a given task is going down all the time, and right now an iPhone would comfortably drive a monitor and keyboard, just like the iPad with similar cooling constraints and physical architecture already does. The screen on the latest iPhone runs at up to 2,868 x 1,320 at 120hz on the Pro Max - some desktop monitors would actually be easier to drive (1080/60 etc) than its own internal display.
- jsheard 2y ago> The concept works just fine, Samsung etc have at various times demoed this exact concept with their own android handsets. More than a concept demo, it's been a production feature in all S, Note and Fold series Samsungs since 2017. https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-dex-3156766/ https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-dex-3156766/
- michaelmrose 2y ago
- qaq 2y agoWell Apple build a super slim notebook with A18 Pro chip that will have insane battery life :)
- rock_artist 2y agoBased on current available silicon we can assume M4 chips especially the “Pro” ones will be a major jump expected by M1 Pro owners. Qualcomm perform close to M3, Intel’s latest chips also perform close and compare to the M3. But the iPad M4 benchmark already showed very interesting results and I guess all those are based on same design and fabrication process.
- bonney_io 2y agoThey do! It's called the M1 MacBook Air.
- idle_zealot 2y ago> It sure is a shame that we can’t do more with this power. I think it’d be really cool to be able to plug in your iPhone to an external USB-C monitor and run Stage Manager with an external mouse and keyboard. Even if Apple did this (they won't) having to use Stage Manager for multitasking would make it intolerable anyway.
- humours 2y ago[dead]
- jajko 2y agoCrazy times... also newest Snapdragon 8 gen 4 is apparently a bit slower in single core but faster in multicore compared to it, so practically no performance gap across the market, then it boils down to various optimizations.
- tedunangst 2y agoThis shouldn't be too surprising, should it? The M1 itself is a somewhat scaled up phone CPU. Four years later the baseline has caught up to scaled up.
- zamadatix 2y agoThere were people in the Zen 5 release thread saying the reason AMD had < 10% of the increase on single core after 2 years is just the reality of physics. In half that time this year Apple to the single core score of the iPhone from below the 7950X to above the new 9950X. Scaling has slowed down in some aspects, it's definitely not the late 90s anymore where your PC is just obsolete 4 years later, but things like this are a good reminder execution by chip designers is still by far the bigger factor in how large the generational growth will be.
- janandonly 2y agoThis might seem like obscene fast now, but remember, most people replace their phone only when the battery dies, not when next years model comes out. In other words, thanks to the “overkill” that Apple is willing to sell now, their user five years down the line will still feel that their old phone is a premium product. And they’ll be happy to buy a replacing iPhone for it when it does die.
- d0mine 2y agoImagine if people could replace their phone battery! (some do)
- throwaway48540 2y agoPeople can and do replace iPhone batteries, but it's usually taken as a sign that you had the phone long enough to morally justify getting an update. The old phone with dead battery is very often sold and the battery gets replaced - Apple sells refurbished phones too.
- paulryanrogers 2y agoIt was more common when they were user serviceable
- throwaway48540 2y agoDo you seriously think many people are not trading in their super expensive phones? I don't know anyone who doesn't...
- acdha 2y agoI think this was more true 5 years ago. Most people I know just replace the battery because it’s 10% of the cost.
- mannyv 2y agoFaster processing means less time-to-sleep means better battery life.
- zamadatix 2y ago100%, for mobile devices performance has more to do with overall efficiency than it does actual long lasting compute heavy workloads.
- nrjames 2y agoI'd like to see them sell a dock and turn the phone into a full blown gaming console that you can pick up and take with you, like the Switch.
- everdrive 2y agoWhich is exciting, except for the fact that this much computing power is useless on a phone. You can't even do 'real' multitasking, and your applications are incredibly limited.
- audunw 2y agoI’m mostly happy with the computing power of my iPhone SE. It has been a bit sluggish lately. It could be new apps being less efficient but I suspect it’s mostly the phone throttling because the battery is old and can’t supply as much current without dropping voltage. Yet I think the computing power of the A18 is great, and plan to upgrade to iPhone 16 now. Not for what I need today, but for what I need years down the line. Phones last a long time these days. The processor in my iPhone SE (2nd gen) is ancient, yet it’s still OK. My kid will probably use it for a couple of years more. I’d say that there is a decent chance of phones becoming actually good smart assistants now. Much of that will be driver by specialised hardware, but the general processing power will be useful for some of that processing.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoMicrosoft should develop a dock that you plug this phone into to activate monitor / keyboard and mouse with the full office suite. Maybe the dock has a little bit of extra ram to facilitate.
- nothercastle 2y agoJust let people plug their phone into a dock and make it a full desktop. That’s a killer business feature, never own a laptop again.
- aaomidi 2y agoThis is why I want hardware to be open for me to install whatever else I want on the damned phone. This hardware is too good to be wasted.
- Lionga 2y agoSo Apple could not sell many Macbooks anymore? Good luck with that idea
- nothercastle 2y agoMacBooks are a looser for profits. They make way more on the pro and upgraded versions that people would still buy. The phone would act like a gateway MacBook lite. Get people hooked on the ecosystem
- busymom0 2y ago> That’s a killer business feature, never own a laptop again It's also a business killer feature which would kill their MacBook sales. So, won't happen anytime soon imo.
- heyoni 2y agoThink of all the accessories they could sell though to make that work! God knows Apple loves to sell accessories and marks them up quite high.
- nothercastle 2y agoOnly the low level Mac book. Knowing Apple the dock will cost half the price of a MacBook anyway. Also make it a pro/max feature only that price delta is pure profit.
- 2y ago
- developerDan 2y agoAll of this computing power and it will still barely be able to load web pages without an ad blocker.
- KMnO4 2y agoShow me a chip 10000x more powerful and I’ll show you a program that runs 10000x slower
- guidedlight 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
- Dban1 2y agoNintendo Switch played this concept well contrapositively
- throwaway314155 2y agoYou can get ad blockers in the app store, btw.
- heyoni 2y agoAlso by downloading Firefox which comes with a safari plugin
- numpad0 2y agoReinforces my belief that there must be evolutionary pressure forcing apps and shells to be just buttery sluggish.
- drdaeman 2y agoAt this point it should be possible to just read the page and extract only actually meaningful and relevant information (+ navigation bits) from it, effectively presenting a "reader mode"-like view instead of the original page content with all the junk and bloat.
- eagerpace 2y agoI just want to have my computer plug into my monitor and transform into a desktop. I’ll pay twice as much to have one device capable of adapting to every form factor.