
Tested: Why the iPad Pro really isn't as fast a laptop - bhauer
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3006268/tablets/tested-why-the-ipad-pro-really-isnt-as-fast-a-laptop.html
======
minimax
I'm not sure this is a great article, but I went down the rabbit hole anyway
and eventually landed on some pretty cogent thoughts from Linus Torvalds
regarding flaws in the Geekbench benchmarking methodology.

[http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curposti...](http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136703)

~~~
justifier

        you see code with tons of indirect function calls, 
        lots of wrapper functions (ie one function massages 
        some arguments a bit and then just calls another 
        function), and no, it's not inlined because it's of
        ten all about interfacing between different library
        levels (webkit, various font rendering libraries, low-
        level drivers for "in memory" vs "on screen" yadda
        yadda)
    

can anyone speak to these criticisms?

i often write code that starts as this:

    
    
        function ae(arr) {
          //do 
          //first 
          //something to arr
          //do
          // second
          //  something to arr
          //do
          // third
          //  something to arr
        return arr
        }
    

then refactor it as:

    
    
        function first(arr) {
          // do
          //  something 
          return arr }
        function sec(arr) {
          // do
          //  something 
          return arr }
        function third(arr) {
          // do
          //  something 
          return arr }
    
        function ae(arr) {
          arr=first(arr)
          arr=second(arr)
          arr=third(arr)
        return arr
        }
    

is this what torvalds is referring to?

i thought i had done 'extensive' research on the perf burden of function calls
and found them to be negligible so i decided to refactor for the sake of
readability

what's best practices in regard to indirect function calls, wrapper functions,
and inlining?

------
gilgoomesh
This article seems really half-hearted in places.

The author couldn't read the iMovie requirements enough to run a movie
encoding test on the iPad?

Also, the author is against using SHA2 for tests (since it uses optimized CPU
instructions on iPad) but has no problem with ZIP which may use any number of
SSE instructions on Intel?

~~~
ant6n
I had trouble making it through this wall of text that's not getting to the
point. Does the article in the end actually explain why the iPad is slower?

~~~
lowpro
The graphs speak for themselves, you don't have to read any of it as the
author only explains the number of graphs which are simple and readable.

------
jheriko
i could be wrong, but i came to the same conclusion in a different way as i
first heard the statement made during the announce about the power being
comparable with laptops.

as soon as he said whatever high percentage of laptops it was i was thinking:

"clever. people who care enough to watch this are likely to care enough about
hardware to have high power laptops - as apple fanboys some macbook or other.
they probably don't even realise what kind of laptops people buy in large
volume and how little horsepower they have - nor what kind of proportion of
the wider market macbooks actually make up - iirc around 1 in 20, which is
probably enough to exclude most of them from '90% of laptops bought' over any
given period, because they are clustered up near the top end of the range."

i guessed the performance might be similar to last years bottom end macbook.

there is also the programmer inside of me who is skeptical from experience
working on low-level optimisations for x86/64 and arm (various 5/6/7) code on
various platforms...

apple are genuises at marketting imo. the cult, the fanboys, the elitism, the
beauty... all of it culminates in making it difficult for people to think
objectively about their products. so i'll not be surprised if the idea of the
iPad pro being a laptop killer doesn't die - and maybe even comes into
fruition. it doesn't actually have to outperform anything if people believe
that it does...

~~~
TheCondor
You know what reminds me of? A handful of years back various people asserted
that developer time was more valuable than computer time and the joy of using
tools that might be ten or twenty times slower or even slower than that with
quick dev times was worth it. Hardware is cheap, good developers are not, do
what's fun. There is both truth and non-truth in that. iPads and especially
the pro are the hardware device version of that assertion. Nobody seriously
would say they'd outperform a stout Intel core chip, but they are amazingly
close and when you look at all the people that were/are still living on XP I
think the benchmarks miss the point. It's not the performance that will be the
difference, it's the controlled ecosystem and walled garden of the device that
does.

Honestly, it looks like performance is in the realm of becoming a nonissue and
I'm stunned at the app selection. The weak thing to me is actual data
management, but that's a legacy emotion I have as a data pack rat. Laptop
killer for technical pros? Not even close but a laptop killer for the masses?
I'd say it's capable and just a matter of market perception.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Laptop killer for the masses? At this rate, future programmers, unless they
themselves are the children of devs, won't have general purpose computers to
experiment on growing up.

------
bobbles
"The benchmark has two performance modules, which give you an idea of how fast
the device would be in web browsing and email. The result for iPad Pro is
tepid, with performance just beating the Nexus 9 and its Tegra K1. "

OK then... just how 'slow' are these tablets at browsing?

Considering my ipad mini 1 isnt 'slow' at web browsing, does this matter? I've
never even noticed the speed being an issue.

This article basically amounts to "those benchmarks are stupid! look at these
benchmarks!!"

------
thoughtsimple
There are some really odd results in his benchmarks. For example, he has a
Dell Venue 11 Pro with a Core-M beating a Surface Pro 4 with a Core-i5 on some
video tests. It is unlikely that a Core-i5 loses out to a Core-M for anything.

He has problems with video testing in general. It seems he couldn't figure out
how to test 4K video editing on the iPad Pro. For reference, 9to5 Mac got it
to work with some bugginess.

~~~
williadc
It does not surprise me that a Broadwell CoreM can have faster graphics than a
Haswell Core i5. There was significantly more die area allotted to graphics in
the Broadwell generation. It's also my understanding that significant effort
was spent improving performance/watt in low-power scenarios (sorry, don't have
a source for this; I heard it at work).

Take a look at the difference in Die area:

Haswell:
[http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7003/Screen%20Shot%202013-0...](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7003/Screen%20Shot%202013-05-31%20at%207.59.16%20PM.png)

Broadwell CoreM: [http://www.extremetech.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/09/intel-...](http://www.extremetech.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/09/intel-core-m-broadwell-y-die-diagram-map.jpg)

------
peteretep

        > Executive Editor, PCWorld
    

Next up, the editor of Oil&Gas Weekly on why Tesla cars get such poor
performance.

~~~
jheriko
not even an argument, but had me in stitches. :)

bravo

------
swiley
It really doesn't matter whether your computer is that fast. For heavy
(scientific) number crunching you probably want to use a cloud provider or at
least a dedicated machine. For pretty much anything else a two year old phone
has plenty of power and it's just a matter of whether the proprietary OS that
comes with it lets you run the software you want to run.

~~~
mtrpcic
I disagree. You're painting modern computing as either hard number crunching
or the most basic of browsing. Modern phones can barely handle WebGL, are
abysmal at multitasking, and definitely aren't able to handle editing source
code of the magnitude that I deal with daily at work. Then there's gaming,
video editing, large scale image editing (read: Photoshop/Sketch), and many
more. There are use cases for the in-between, and I'd argue they're a larger
market segment than the two tails combined.

~~~
chadgeidel
This is absolutely correct. A non-technical friend's circa-2010 15" MBP with
8GB and hybrid Fusion drive (custom, by me) runs at full memory usage and high
cpu utilization and is quite sluggish from my perspective. The reason? 150+
tabs open in Safari.

I'm not certain said friend is aware that many tabs are open or even cares,
but web browsing is quite cpu and memory intensive, and can cripple even fast
machines.

~~~
umanwizard
Has {s,}he tried other browsers? I vaguely remember that in Firefox or Chrome,
memory for a tab is kept together (tabs don't stomp on each other's pages) so
the OS will naturally page it out when you haven't looked at that tab in a
while.

This might not be true but I thought I'd make the suggestion.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Firefox remembers your tab icons and names between sessions but won't load the
pages unless you interact with that tab. Most folks with 150 tabs open never
look at more than a handful of them.

Note that pinned tabs will always be loaded as the assumption is you're using
them for chat or something similar which needs to be loaded each time
(messenger.com, hangouts.google.com, etc).

------
Retric
An odd conclusion when it's beating many laptops.

Also, an i3-4005U Processor (3M Cache, 1.70 GHz) is fairly topical of a new
baseline laptop.

~~~
Guvante
A $1k ARM platform beating a $300 x86 platform isn't interesting though. If
things are close in price the difference isn't material but 3x the cost means
comparing performance is almost meaningless, except to say "at least its
better than".

~~~
blinkingled
Also beating at what exactly? If I loaded a page on the iPad Pro will I notice
it being substantially quicker and interactive than if I did it on the x86?
Synthetic benchmarks claiming this is faster than that are just that - they
are used as a marketing tool not as anything that bears any relation to
reality.

------
Scuds
Just for kicks I ran this on a few devices
[http://browserbench.org/JetStream/](http://browserbench.org/JetStream/)

An iphone 6 gets ~65

iphone 6s gets ~120

ipad pro ~130

new Macbook Pro (safari, haswell i7) ~210

Not scientific, but last years phone was half as powerful, in two years the 7s
will also have a jump in performance. I don't think an intel system will have
anywhere near as large as a jump since we're bumping against the limit of how
fast a single core can be.

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting article. I am still waiting to get my hands on an iPad Pro to
compare it to the Surface Book clipboard. I am primarily interested in
comparing the drawing performance but there are lots of ways you can make a
more dedicated system perform its intended task better than a more general
system. When I bought the Surface book I understood that I was paying a
premium for that generality.

~~~
melted
I've tried both quite extensively. FWIW, iPad Pro _feels_ faster and more
fluid. Still not the right device for me, but I had no complaints wrt
performance. I did not buy iPad Pro though: not the right device for what I
do. I did buy the Surface Book, but took it back to the store a couple of days
later. It was bluescreening a couple of times a day seemingly due to driver
issues. Its UI performance was choppy as well, particularly scrolling non-
WinRT apps such as e.g. Chrome or Firefox. This was basically the top of the
line Core i7 model, so I expect that things are even worse with the lower end
models.

~~~
wlesieutre
Firefox and Chrome are frankly not good at scrolling smoothly in step with
fingers. I use FF on my desktop and phone, but run IE on my Surface because of
this. Chrome is tolerable (smooth, but the momentum is wrong). Firefox
_sucks_.

Haven't checked in on the Mac versions lately, but I remember the same
experience in FF there a couple of years ago. It feels like scrolling was
designed entirely around moving in 3-line chunks per click of the mouse wheel,
with some smoothing done for longer continuous spins. Then they tried to bolt
incrementless trackpad scrolling on top of that and it went really poorly.

~~~
melted
My primary machine is a MacBook Pro, and it has no problems scrolling Firefox
or Chrome. Neither does my dual boot Win10/Linux workstation downstairs. I
think choppy scrolling is mostly a trackpad issue in this case, TBH. The
settings aren't quite right. Disabling pinch zoom gesture improves things a
bit, but for $2900 I expect that I wouldn't have to resort to hacks to get the
core functionality working.

~~~
Kayou
I have a Surface Pro 3 and I confirm what wlesieutre said. Scrolling with the
touchpad on the Typecover is completely smooth in Firefox, but for some
reason, this isn't smooth when using the touchscreen. I don't know why.

~~~
wlesieutre
Ah good point, I was referring to the touchscreen more than the touchpad.

Firefox scrolls smoothly on the touchpad, though it definitely has perceptible
lag compared to IE.

------
mcguire
So you have your lies, your damned lies, your statistics and your benchmarks.

------
pacomerh
The user interaction isn't as fast because its a touch screen device mixed
with an external keyboard in a device where the OS is still not optimized to
be used as a laptop. The OS is meant to be used as a simplified touch device.
For many reasons, but one very obvious one is file management.

------
xlayn
The thing is... is actually killing the pc, it doesn't matter what anyone
does, it's the king... for the people who check twitter... "writes" and post
to facebook... Disclaimer... it's ironic, I'm actually very happy to see this
happening, why it's the mistery, could it be apple shinning aura fading away?
less money to throw to make it incredible? or just 6 or 7 years is the time to
get someone to post some kind of results like this? I tell people that pc is
the most generic and more powerful way of computing we have, when in doubt
open vmware, launch macosx, inside macosx run the ipad emulator, inside of it
the browser test and see if you can replicate on the ipad.

~~~
xlayn
Now... yes it flawed for the reason there is no way to test the whole system
in the same way because every system is different... Or said in other way all
of them are different and serve different purpose... hence no way one killing
the other.

------
senthilnayagam
it is not a threat to x86 laptop vendors, which is the vast majority and OEM
driven

what people need to realize is that apple is not becoming a CPU vendor
threatening intel, but it has reached a point where next macbook air can be a
A9X or AXX, and macbook pro will not be too far away in future.

interesting part would be these chips might be manufactured by Intel and not
Samsung or TSMC

------
jtchang
Well learned a new acronym today. I assume L1 I$ means Layer 1 pipeline cache?

~~~
wmf
I$ = instruction cache

