
Performance comparison between 2017 iPad Pro and 2012 iMac - my123
http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline=231758
======
lorenzhs
It might make more sense to compare to a current-gen laptop, not a Desktop
machine from five years ago:
[http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline...](http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline=3041332)
(archive: [http://archive.is/EVcuE](http://archive.is/EVcuE))

~~~
asendra
I think this is a better comparison, as both have same TDP and fanless. (That
Intel is a Kaby Lake Y Core i5 1.2Ghz/3.2Ghz Boost cpu)

Edit for perspective: Thats the same cpu in the just upgraded MacBooks.

[http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline...](http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline=2922710)

~~~
zrm
Both of those are comparing a 3-core iPad with a 2-core Intel CPU.

And parity at the same TDP is unsurprising. The trouble is that the i5-7Y57 is
quite slow by desktop standards and there is currently no ARM equivalent to 4+
core 45+ watt Intel processors at any TDP.

~~~
asendra
Unsurprising? So it is an easy thing to do to at least equal Intel with their
vast experience after only a few years, when no one else is able to do it?

By the way if you have a problem with the number of cores just compare the
single core score. I don't see a problem though, it they can cram one more
core in same tdp then it's fair.

The jury is still out wether Apple could compete with Intel at those higher
TDPs (15w-28w-45w)

~~~
zrm
> By the way if you have a problem with the number of cores just compare the
> single core score.

Then the Intel processor comes out ahead despite the iPad having a higher
clock speed.

> I don't see a problem though, it they can cram one more core in same tdp
> then it's fair.

The quad core i5-7442EQ will destroy the dual core i5-7267U at anything
threaded even though it has a lower TDP. Having more cores is an asymmetric
advantage in threaded benchmarks.

~~~
asendra
Ignore the stated frequency in the geekbench page as its almost always wrong.
That intel cpu is pegged at 3.2Ghz for the duration of the bench vs
(supposedly) 2.36Ghz on the iPad.

------
userbinator
There is an... interesting post by Linus Torvalds about GeekBench:

[http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curposti...](http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136666)

In other words, Linus claims it's mainly testing the speed of specialised
instructions implemented in hardware, and not general-purpose computing. For a
similar analogy, compare the speed of a Bitcoin mining ASIC vs. a GPU or even
a CPU. At the same clock speed, dedicated hardware will vastly outperform the
software implementation.

I think it's somewhat ironic then, that the "RISC" CPU is getting higher
scores due to the presence of such CISC-y instructions.

~~~
my123
I would argue that the LLVM test isn't skewed with specialized instructions,
and the iPad wins it regardless.

~~~
twoodfin
I'd really be interested to see an evaluation of what makes the difference
there.

First guess: The iPad's massively larger L2 cache.

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andrepd
Well, you're comparing against a 5 year old machine. What point does this
make? It's about as meaningful as saying my smartphone has reached parity with
a Cray supercomputer (but a 20 year old one).

~~~
IBM
You don't think it's a little impressive that a mobile SoC in a tablet (that
is constrained by power and physical space) is matching the performance of an
i7 in an iMac that has the benefits of sitting on your desk plugged into power
all day, isn't constrained by size, and has significant active cooling?

~~~
danmaz74
Mobile CPUs have many constrains to adapt to, but "size" shouldn't really be
one of them.

~~~
blackflame7000
I'm curious why you say that. Circuit board real estate seems to be a precious
commodity especially in iphones. What do you mean by size?

~~~
danmaz74
I was answering about the CPU (or SoC)

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ferongr
For how long? Sustained performance of SOCs in tablets and smartphones is way
lower than what measured by benchmarks.

Edit: Furthermore, something looks fishy with the Intel results. Desktop Intel
CPUs definitely have a multiprocess score ratios near their physical core
counts (increased by 10-30% for HT-capable ones) yet Geekbench only seems to
achieve an MP ratio a bit above 2.

~~~
numerlo
Still, if performance is actually comparable (for which I have my doubts) that
means we could get ARM laptops which could easily sustain it.

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saturdaysaint
Wow, I have that i7 3770 in my tower at home (now paired with a Geforce 1070)
and it still feels delightfully overpowered. If I could run Ableton Live or
Reason on this, or even if Apple simply had a canonical, first-rate controller
that encouraged interesting Switch-like games, this would be tempting. As it
is, I can't think of a single thing I could do with this that I couldn't do
with the iPad Air 2 that mostly sits unused on our coffee table.

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du_bing
So, in the near future, we will have more companies that are able to make
fast-enough CPUs for consumption other than Intel and AMD.

I think this is a good thing. Traditionally, the technology of CPU seems so
complex that few can handle that. But now Apple, Google and some other
manufactures will compete in this field.

This will lower the cost of massive computing.

~~~
jug
You mean like ARM? Microsoft builds Windows for ARM these days, full fledged
Windows this time unlike Windows RT. Photoshop has been demo'ed on a Qualcomm
Snapdragon CPU running Windows 10 and devices are expected to be released
later this year.

And maybe the end game for Apple's A series of CPU's is to get them at least
into Macbook and Macbook Air if not Macbook Pro, to begin with. They'd get a
whole other kind of control over that supply chain and not having to stall
releases based on Intel schedules. I wouldn't be surprised if they have a
version of macOS already compiling.

~~~
du_bing
The macOS compiling on ARM you mentioned is very interesting. I guess probably
Apple or other big manufactures may be already able to make CPU of X86_64 or
other architectures.

------
throw2016
Arm socs throttle aggressively and reaching x86 level of sustained performance
will lead to more power consumption so the geekbench scores can be misleading.

Having said that the performance of some of the newer Arm socs are
encouraging. For instance you can now get a tiny 4k htpc for as little as
$50-80 making the use of expensive and power hungry x86 parts redundant.

Gigabit routers, nas, htpc devices and even some chromebooks now perform
adequately with arm socs while sipping power.

~~~
asendra
iPads/iPhones, the last few generations don't throttle, at least not in 30m-1h
of continuous usage, compared to Android devices.

Check Anandtech reviews if you don’t believe it.

------
lorenzhs
Archive link for those having trouble loading the site:
[http://archive.is/V4K0P](http://archive.is/V4K0P)

------
spronkey
Whoever posted this took a very, very pessimistic 3770. Here's a much more
representative result:
[http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline...](http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline=3035146)

I also have strong suspicions that real world workloads that aren't so cache-
optimised would swing massively in favour of the 3770 as well. The best
benchmarks we have of that unfortunately are things like 3DMark physics bench
(the old A9X was half as fast as even an M-5Y71 in that benchmark).

It's also worth noting that for TDP comparisons, even Intel's own 35w and 45w
parts compare favourably to the desktop parts, and newer generations increase
this gap substantially. Some multi-core geekbench scores per watt (higher is
better):

77w i7-3770: 162 - 45w i7-3770T: 255 - 45w i7-3632QM: 257 - 17w i7-3687U: 315

3.5w - 7w i7-7Y75? 900 - 1800.

A10X, assuming it's 5W TDP? 1800.

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wand3r
This is a big deal but a terrible way to point it out. I had that iMac until
recently and it rips, that's a big boost for a tablet. That said it's like
saying, iPhone has more computing power than NASA...In 1963.

------
Quequau
Makes me wonder when we'll see a MacBook Air with an ARM SoC.

~~~
rimliu
When transition to Intel was announced Steve Jobs said, that they had OS X
running on Intel CPUs since the first version. I would not be surprised that
there are ARM powered Macs in Apple labs right now.

~~~
digi_owl
Given how often the common internals between MacOS and iOS is paraded around,
you can bet your ass they have.

Heck, iOS 11 seems to be one serious transition point in that regard.

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satai
What does it say? Is it "A10X is awesome" or is it "geekbench sucks"?

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bo1024
Something fishy is going on here. I don't have a ton of experience with
hardware, but enough to be pretty sure that the 2012 iMac is under-performing
its specs here.

(edit) For example, if you just look at CPU benchmarks, the processor in the
iMac is not far off the i7 7700k that someone posted a benchmark for elsewhere
in the thread, yet the 7700k supposedly thrashes the iPad while the iMac
doesn't. Maybe both the iMac and iPad have thermal issues that a standard PC
desktop would not.

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manmal
The thing standing out to me is the almost-twice-as-good LLVM performance of
the iPad. It might make for a good iOS dev machine, after all. I still don't
think it would be pleasant without a touchpad, but I also haven't tried it
yet. Also, using it all day would be very hard on the arms/shoulders, I think.

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robin_reala
Right, but that’s a 5 year old machine they’re comparing against. Still
impressive, but not what the title implies.

~~~
my123
That's a quad-core desktop Core i7 with 4 cores and 8 threads, and clocked
much higher than the Apple A10X.

~~~
onli
It's still old. There was the 4770, 4790, 6700 and now the 7700 after it. Each
version was only a bit better than its predecessor, but 4 times a small bump
results in a big bump.

It is not slow, but it is not as fast as a modern machine. Maybe impressive,
but not parity.

~~~
hvidgaard
the i7-7700 is around 20-25% faster. An ultra low power chip only 20-25%
behind current high power desktop chips is quite impressive.

~~~
onli
Not in geekbench though, see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505189).
That's 20k multi thread score vs 9k.

That benchmark might be a bit flawed.

~~~
hvidgaard
Something does not add up here. Taking that benchmark and compare it to the
other, we get
[http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/231758?baseline=...](http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/231758?baseline=3039096)

The i7-7700K is not twice as fast.

~~~
my123
It's the iMac's thermal throttling...

~~~
hvidgaard
That is incredible poor design. A beefy CPU crippled because it't throttled.
Why not use a lower power CPU instead and get better performance.

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bluehazed
Title should probably mention the "Intel platform" is 5 years old.

------
jumpkickhit
Wow, ARM has blown up due to cellphones. It's starting to compare to x86 in
performance to a degree.

Wonder how long people are going to keep buying thousand-dollar cellphones
each year that's fueling this.

------
eb0la
Looks like processor architecture really matters.

Btw - is LLVM _still_ faster on a 5-year-old machine than on an iPad? I am
seeing well, right?

~~~
lorenzhs
You've got it exactly the wrong way around. The iPad has nearly double the
score in that particular benchmark (higher is better).

------
marvel_boy
ARM chips are awesome! I'm sorry I can not buy ARM shares. Next generation of
Macs will probably have ARM chips.

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snovv_crash
Are they really saying that the iPad has 30% more memory bandwidth?

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xylon
lol the mac is 5 year old

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ungzd
And despite of this, lots of things that you could do on Commodore 64 or ZX
Spectrum you (almost) can't do on iPad: text editing, programming.

~~~
threeseed
Of course you can edit text on an iPad. That's ridiculous. There are hundreds
and hundreds of apps. I would start with something like Coda:
[https://panic.com/coda-ios/](https://panic.com/coda-ios/)

As for programming well it depends on the language. You can code Python:
[http://omz-software.com/pythonista/](http://omz-software.com/pythonista/)

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DrNuke
The US went to the moon and back with relying on hand calculations, it has to
be put in the perspective, innit?

~~~
vacri
Hand calculations and 4% of GDP :)

~~~
tgb
I think you might be confusing GDP with something else. Apollo spending peaked
in 1966 at just shy of $3 billion [1] while US GDP was 815 billion [2] for
about 0.3% percent of the GDP. On the other hand, [3] shows US federal outlays
at $17.2 billion, so Apollo would have been 17% of the total budget.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs)
[2]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=gdp+of+us](https://www.google.com/search?q=gdp+of+us)
[3]
[https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals](https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals)

~~~
vacri
Hrm, I read it stated that way somewhere, but looking at this link, it was
more like 4% of the federal budget. Still an incredible outlay of money.

[https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/feb/01/nasa-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/feb/01/nasa-
budgets-us-spending-space-travel)

