
Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread - 762236
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/14/geekbench-android-a10
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cwyers
Perhaps relevant. Linus Torvalds' opinion on GeekBench:

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

> So basically a quarter to a third of the "integer" workloads are just utter
> BS. They are not comparable across architectures due to the crypto units,
> and even within one architecture the numbers just don't mean much of
> anything.

>And quite frankly, it's not even just the crypto ones. Looking at the other
GB3 "benchmarks", they are mainly small kernels: not really much different
from dhrystone. I suspect most of them have a code footprint that basically
fits in a L1I cache.

It's a few years out of date, and maybe Geekbench has improved since then, but
I wouldn't put a lot of stock into these kinds of numbers until I knew that
those kinds of issues had been addressed.

~~~
imtringued
If these phone processors are that amazing why don't we see them being used
outside phones and tablets? I mean take the A10 Fusion give it four cores
instead of two and put it on a server mainboard with all the usual things like
PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet and SATA. Basically do what AMD did with their A1100
except with a good processors and actually sell more than a dev kit. The lack
of total raw processing power per server could be easily offset by the density
and lower price of the ARM server. Why isn't this happening? I don't think
lack of software is an explanation for that. Things like AWS Lambda could
probably be immediately ported to run on ARM servers.

~~~
JimmyAustin
After Apple left the server space when they shuttered the Xserve, I don't
think they are really interested into getting involved into that space. I
think they view themselves as a consumer goods company that makes good
products and uses technological innovation to serve those goals, rather then
create that innovation and figure out how to productise it later.

~~~
asendra
They don't need to sell them to enterprise. They can be their own customer.
They have some of the bigger datacenters after all.

ARM for data storage pools seems like a good fit.

~~~
ksec
Is because the cost of an CPU, within the server, And the cost of Server
within the whole DC, and then the cost of Running the DC. In the grand scheme
of things CPU cost is pretty small. Not to mention we are getting another
round of CPU upgrade with Intel Broadwell-E. And then some price competition
from AMD's Zen.

And Intel Xeon isn't just about the CPU, it is the enterprise grade QA and
testing, Network Controller, SATA controller etc. And the Xeon-D is a very
Decent offering.

Then there is scale, even though Apple's Cloud is huge, it is still no where
near Amazon AWS scale, not Google and Microsoft Azure either. And even if you
add all these three Cloud Giant Combined, I will bet their annual buying CPU
core doesn't even come close to Apple's annual iPhone sales.

So to finalize, there just isn't any financial incentive of switching.

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gallerdude
This shows both the amazing progress of iPhone and disheartening progress of
the Mac line simultaneously.

~~~
cloudjacker
Yeah, Macbook air really feels abandoned

Would love a 16GB model.

For the last 4 years of me saying that, everyone and their brother, and the
Apple reps all say "oh you can configure that on the site", because they have
have access to the parallel darknet version of the Apple site where Macbook
airs ship with 16gb RAM

I really like the air, but I can like the Macbook Pro its not really a big
deal. JUST WISH THEY WOULD YA KNOW

~~~
zyxley
> Yeah, Macbook air really feels abandoned

The Macbook-with-no-suffix line is the implicit replacement for the Air
anyway.

~~~
wyager
Lighter, better screen, cheaper. I'm not sure why you'd buy an Air these days.

~~~
visarga
Keyboard doesn't feel like a keyboard, trackpad is fake, speed is that of a
tablet, and has almost no ports.

I wanted the 11'' MBA with retina and an updated CPU, not a bastardized
laptop. I want to feel keys pressing.

~~~
hrrsn
>Keyboard doesn't feel like a keyboard, trackpad is fake, speed is that of a
tablet, and has almost no ports.

All valid points, bar the trackpad. The force touch trackpad is a pleasure to
use and I much prefer it to previous Apple trackpads (which are still
excellent).

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flamedoge
The day that apple flips switch in opt and ships OS X in Arms means Intel
could be in trouble. They did it before with PowerPC->Intel.

~~~
megablast
Intel will be ok, Apple don't sell that many chips. And it is not going to
affect anyone else.

And Intel are looking at helping Apple out with the next versions of their
chips, possibly fabbing them.

~~~
mungoman2
It would be a powerful statement that Intel is not the given choice for the
CPU in a "real" computers (as opposed to smartphone/tablet) anymore.

~~~
iMark
It would send a signal that Intel isn't the given choice if you've made a vast
investment developing your own CPU line over the years.

~~~
Brakenshire
The rest of the ARM ecosystem is trailing behind Apple, but it is following.
If Apple switched, 2-3 years later the rest of the laptop/desktop space would
be in the same position.

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captainmuon
Cool, does that mean we can scale down the processor performance by half and
still have a phone that is competitive, but has twice the battery life? OK, I
know speed and power consumption are not linear. I'd really love if one phone
would skip a year of increasing CPU speed and thinness, but would keep the
advances in battery tech.

~~~
andruby
No. CPU's in a phone are probably idling 99% of the time. The power usage for
the full-performance and half-performance cpu when idling will be close to
equal.

The full-performance phone might even have better battery life because it can
finish cpu intensive tasks twice as fast, returning to idle power draw faster
than the half-performance phone.

------
frik
I imagine in near future, we will use smartphones as our personal computer in
every situation. In the office, one can then interact with a Bluetooth
keyboard, mouse/touch pad and use a big monitor. Probably, one of the next iOS
will come with a macOS UI as well (under the hood the iOS is based on macOS
anyway) - so if you connect it to a huge monitor, you have the desktop UI of
macOS, and otherwise the iOS UI. The same will happen with
Android/ChromeOS/Google Fuchsia, Ubuntu and MS has some ideas too (but they
cannot execute it, forcing mobile UI on desktop failed big, now they bet on
Win32 again to fill their empty AppStore).

~~~
erikj
The TDP limits of smartphones (no more than ~10W) make them unuseable for
heavier workstation loads, and there will always be demand for a lot of local
computational power.

~~~
ZmFydA__
I feel (hope :-)) that in the future, network bandwidth will be large enough
that large, high-power general computation services can be used to offload
intense processing tasks from personal devices to work around things like
this.

So, if you're on your phone and need to crunch a massive data-set, this gets
offloaded to the big-datacruncher-in-the-cloud, and the result sent back to
your device.

~~~
erikj
Bandwidth is only one part of the problem. Latency is another one, and it
seems to be insurmountable with the modern network media.

------
jaxn
Does this have implications for game consoles too? Is the iPhone the most
powerful gaming device?

~~~
phire
It's quite possibly faster in the CPU department than the PS4/Xbox One, though
those both have 8 (slower) cores.

But the PS4, Xbox One and possibly even the Wii U will have much faster GPUs.

~~~
13of40
The PS4 and XBox One also have four times as much RAM as the iPhone 7. In fact
I was kind of shocked when they announced it would only have 2GB, considering
you can get a Nexus or OnePlus with 6GB this year.

~~~
tigershark
Why in the world you would need 6GB in a phone today? And the nexus can have
all the ram in the world but will always be painfully slow. I am really
surprised that I didn't throw my Nexus 5 against the wall out of frustration
in the end. The real surprise was when my friend bought the nexus 6x or
whatever is called and it was even slower than the nexus 5. Just to sum up,
RAM is the most useless thing if all the rest sucks.

~~~
13of40
I have an iPad mini, and my major complaint is that applications crash due to
lack of memory all the time. Things like a page full of animated gifs will
crash the browser. I got a OnePlus 3 a couple of weeks ago and I haven't even
remembered to charge the iPad since. I'm pretty sure it (the iPad) is going to
end up in my drawer of misfit PDAs.

------
mappu
Almost every mobile Ax SoC has pushed the contemporary boundaries of per-core
performance.

But Apple won't sell these amazing chips to other manufacturers. For now, i
think the openness of the Android ecosystem is still worth more than extra CPU
performance.

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thrden
the source also claims that the iPhone 7 is of a comparable speed to the
macbook pro 13-inch from 2013, which is a computer I use daily for my
programming. I'd love to see a way of using an iphone as highly mobile work
station.

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plantain
It's just a matter of time before we see ARM's in Macbooks.

I wonder if we'll see Rosetta make an appearance for binary backward-
compatibility again.

~~~
_ph_
Rosetta worked, because the Intel chips were much faster than the PowerPcs
back then. I doubt that the ARMs would have a sufficient large lead in
performance. And there are plenty of reasons to run x86 code on Macs, be it
older programs which might not be ported to ARM, or all the Windows and Linux
stuff running in VMs. As much as I would like an ARM based laptop, it would be
much less practical than an x86 one.

~~~
majewsky
> As much as I would like an ARM based laptop, it would be much less practical
> than an x86 one.

We don't need to guess here. Look at the failure of Surface RT.

~~~
jhugg
The RT didn’t have an X86 translation layer like is being discussed in this
thread.

