
Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap - luu
https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/1233275220275818498
======
Jonnax
This is essentially Qualcomm vs Apple in the mobile market.

But the question I've got from looking at the the Geekbench site:

iPhone 11:
[https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611448](https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611448)

AMD 3900x 12 Zen 2 12 Core:
[https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611445](https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611445)

The iPhone has higher single core performance than a desktop CPU with a 105W
TDP.

Of course it has more cores. But am I missing something here?

Is this test actually representative of device performance?

Or are certain desktop features not tested?

Does the whole RISC Vs CISC of X86 and ARM make a difference?

Assuming core count was equal. Would a desktop CPU and an Apple SoC run at
equivalent performance if it was running Ubuntu and running native compiled
code?

~~~
Macha
Geekbench is not measuring raw performance in terms of operations per second.
It's measuring very specific use cases (their current blurb mentions AI and
ML, in the past mentioned synthetic tests to approximate browsers). Because
thermal constraints would prevent Apple from competing in a brute force
approach, Apple have been more willing to include specialised hardware for
tasks like AI/ML as in the A12 CPU. Of course, single core AI/ML perf is a bit
of a silly metric but it's one thing geekbench is claiming to measure here
that Apple probably wins at. I think in the past encryption/decryption
similarly had acceleration sooner on Apple platforms, and Safari is able to
make better use of the GPU with less varied hardware to support, and I think
real web browsing is another component in geekbench tests.

~~~
endorphone
Operations per second is a notoriously useless measure. Which is why we have
higher-level benchmarks like GeekBench that are actually incredibly broad in
what they test, performing a lot of real-world type activities in a larger
macro-benchmark suite.

The Bionic chips aren't cheating to a win. They win GeekBench, and virtually
any other cross-platform activity that you can throw at them. As I mentioned
in another post, my iPhone 11 absolutely lays waste to my laptop with an
i7-7700HQ processor at the JetStream 2 benchmark. Now this is a JavaScript
benchmark that runs on completely different software stacks / OS / etc (my i7
running Windows 10, Chrome 80, etc), but it is layers and layers of
dependencies on the performance of the platform. And my big beefy i7 is beaten
by a tiny little mobile processor. It is quite remarkable.

It's a blazingly fast little processor. We would probably have seen them use
them in other hardware sooner if Apple wasn't always suspicious that Intel was
sandbagging in some way and was ready to wow the industry.

~~~
imtringued
The Geekbench score is a pretty useless metric when you have a specific
workload in mind. If you are choosing a machine for video editing you're not
going to look at the Geekbench score. If you are choosing a machine for
compiling code you're not going to look a the Geekbench score. If you need a
machine for gaming you're not going to look at the Geekbench score. If you
have no specific requirements then you might not even care about having the
best performance.

~~~
endorphone
At this point the conversation turns completely useless where we all tell
ourselves that no benchmark matters.

Only they do. The Bionic chips are ridiculously performant, and are bound to
have a much wider range with even moderate cooling.

------
stefan_
What is even the hypothesis here? Websites are slow because Android devices
are slow?

Lest we remind our web developer friends of the cache hierarchy, the slowest
part of all here is still _fetching the fricking page over the internet_. On
this mobile Twitter page alone two spinners are spinning simultaneously.

If, after all the network stuff, you are still taking a second to render in a
world where smartphones can play Doom 3 at 60 fps - you are just taking the
piss.

~~~
BossingAround
> the slowest part of all here is still fetching the fricking page over the
> internet.

That may be true, but have you tried browsing the web on an older device? Once
the webpage is loaded, I can't say the experience is very nice on my iPad mini
2. Now, granted, that's a 2013 device. All I'm saying is that after all the
"network stuff" you mention is done, the device power matters greatly,
especially on JS-heavy sites.

------
scarface74
Even though the average Android phone doesn’t compare performance wise to an
iOS device and _really_ sucks when it comes to running complicated web apps,
it’s mostly Android users here who claim that progressive web apps are the
future and that Apple is holding them back.

~~~
nicoburns
That's because it's not performance that's holding back PWAs. With a bit of
work, perf was good enough for web apps on an iPhone 4S or earlier. iPhone 4s
was released in 2011, so if low-end android devices are not hitting 2012/2013
iPhone performance levels, then they're also good enough for PWAs.

It's the lack of platform APIs for things like offline storage and push
notifications that are holding back web apps, not performance.

~~~
scarface74
I bought my son a MotoG back in 2017. Because I kept reading that it was a
good midrange Android phone. It was slow running “native” apps, web
performance was even worse.

He was more than happy to “upgrade” to my iPhone 6s (2015) in 2018.
Performance was noticeable better. Also, it is _still_ supported by the latest
version of iOS.

Of course by then the phone was three years old so I replaced the battery.

~~~
Justice4Yall
ios 14 won't support 6s most probably and soon your iphone 6s will go to
trash.

So your comment is lucky to have some truth for a couple of months while I
look at my trashed iphone5 and iphone 6.

~~~
scarface74
The iPhone 6s would have gotten 5 years of os upgrades. But, just because
Apple won’t support a device with latest version of iOS, doesn’t mean that it
won’t provide security patches and bug fixes. For instance, Apple released bug
fix patches for iOS 9 and iOS 10 supporting phones back to 2011 last year.

[https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/22/apple-issues-
ios-...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/22/apple-issues-ios-936-and-
ios-1034-updates-for-older-iphone-and-ipad-models)

As far as going into the trash. I had an old iPad 1st generation (2010) that
last saw an OS upgrade in 2011. I could still download the “last compatible
version” of apps like Netflix, Hulu, Plex and Crackle and they still work.
iCloud syncing also works with Apple’s iWork apps and the built in apps
(except for Notes).

~~~
Justice4Yall
basic html support doesn't work on earlier versions of ios safari due to the
wrong decision that safari is bundled to ios.

you heard safari is the new internet explorer? that's why it's impractical and
unsafe to use earlier versions of ios.

~~~
scarface74
I’ve “heard” a lot of things. But, my first generation iPad from 2010 could
render any page that I went to. Of course it crashed all of the time because
that iPad only had 256Mb of RAM.

As far as being “unsafe”, Apple was publishing patches for iOS 9 and 10 as
late as the middle of last year.

But do you really want to compare Apple supporting older hardware to Android?

------
bob1029
Seems to me if you want an "equal" experience across the board, you make the
clients responsible for the bare minimum functionality. Everything that can be
is processed server-side. You should target the lowest common denominator
wherever possible. Anything else is tantamount to digital elitism or simply
bad customer service.

Assuming compute & bandwidth costs are fixed, are there any remaining
justifications for doing SPA, et. al., especially if the server is required at
all times in order to satisfy application requests? Is pushing a final
compressed DOM over the wire really all that much worse than pushing 20
different JSON objects in order to recompose the same logical DOM client-side?
Doesn't it seem like one of these approaches would be substantially faster and
easier than the other in most cases?

I think we got off track somewhere around when cloud computing was introduced.
I can see a huge motivating factor for pushing the "offload to client"
narrative if your cloud compute portfolio provides 10% the relative cost-
adjusted performance compared to a rack full of DL380s sitting in a colo. With
the density of compute being offered today (e.g. 256 x86 cores in a 2U w/ 2TB
ram), I feel a lot of businesses should start to look back to these
approaches. The software and operating systems have vastly improved as well.
Just take look at the performance you get with something like Kestrel in .Net
Core:

[https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r18&hw=...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r18&hw=ph&test=plaintext)

Nearly 7 million HTTP requests per second on a single 10GBe host. For 99% of
business applications out there, just 1 of these servers is probably all you
would ever need... A decade ago we were putting the finishing touches on
10k/second. Why the hell are we not aggressively trying to leverage this 100x
speedup? Is it because all of this extra margin is being spread thin by
Amazon, et. al for purposes of maximum profit extraction? Or, is there a more
nuanced game afoot?

~~~
cageface
SPA is overused to be sure. But people are also building far more complex
things on the web now and some of them are difficult or impossible to do
purely with SSR. So pick the right tool for the job but let’s not pretend that
we can do everything with just one tool.

And you might say those kinds of applications shouldn’t be built on the web
but I’d rather have them on the web than locked up in some proprietary app
store with all the centralization and potential abuses of power that allows.

------
altmind
geekbench have unreliable perfromance stats that've been favoring iphone for a
looong while.

check your conclusions - 90% of articles with rocking iphone performance cite
geekbench.

~~~
Symmetry
There was a version of Geekbench a while ago for which you could make a good
argument for that but Geekbench 5 seems to tell the same story that Spec, web
tests, etc all tell. Apple's cores really do seem to be that good though they
benefit from running at the clock speed they were designed for, unlike an
Intel U-series which has more pipeline stages than it needs to hit its clock.

And Apple also benefits from being able to set their own page size and
probably from getting to have caches that are virtually indexed and physically
tagged rather then physically indexed and physically tagged. Doing address
translation in parallel with way lookup is a nice little performance boost.
There are rumors of other cleverness in the cache heirarchy from control of
the OS but I don't know the details.

~~~
fulafel
Where can I see these SPEC results for Apple CPUs?

~~~
opencl
Anandtech frequently includes SPEC results in their reviews.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-
iphone-11-pro...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-
iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4)

~~~
fulafel
Thanks! These are SPEC2006 which is already retired, but those numbers for the
A13 do indeed come in the same ballpark as the last official SPEC2006 results
that were published for Xeons in 2017 before retirement.

------
_bxg1
Is this really about the CPU though? My guess is - especially in the countries
where these low-end phones are popular - bandwidth is a much bigger
bottleneck.

------
iainmerrick
What are these charts intended to show? The relative differences seem broadly
the same, going back years.

Is the idea that if all Android phones were magically 2x faster, some type of
app architecture would magically become usable?

------
_trampeltier
On the other side, on my old Moto G4 I could listen to music in background,
now with my new Samsung Note I allways have to stream videos, so the display
stay on.

------
baybal2
What about no.js?

------
huffmsa
What do you iPhone users do with all of your power?

~~~
jiggawatts
Well, for example, I recently used my iPhone X to edit a 4K 60fps video using
iMovie. This was quick, easy, and all playback was silky smooth. I did this
while sitting at the airport lounge waiting for my flight, and it didn't use
too much of my battery.

Meanwhile, my very high-end gaming PC struggles to play the video files from
my iPhone at 60fps for some mysterious reason.

~~~
w0utert
Yes it’s funny how fast people forget how much power is actually required to
run all that basic stuff included in mobile OSes by default. Take the camera
app on iOS e.g, it stitches 20+ MP panoramas in real-time, with filers
enabled, does continuous zoom by combining images from multiple cameras etc.
It wasn’t very long ago that I had software on my Linux desktop PC that did
that (with _much_ worse results) and it took up to half an hour in some cases.
Or try browsing the modern web with a iPhone 4 or a ~5 year old Android phone
for that matter. You don’t need to be a power user at all to benefit from the
increase in processing capabilities in modern phones.

