Comment by jheriko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jheriko | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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...

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.

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.

i dunno my experience with users in the real world is that software is slow, as slow as it always was and they are frustrated with it now as much as ever.

i'm not saying performance won't go away eventually, but we are not there yet.

Linus's comments make a lot of sense but the fact of the matter is this: a number is a number is a number. If I run the same "flawed" benchmark suite on last year's iPhone 5, it will tell me that, yes, its CPU is indeed slower than that of a 6S. The tests might not holistically represent real-world usage but they output just enough data to tell me quantitatively how much better one phone performs over another in a vacuum.

The "real" benchmark; actually running automation on a cross section of phones against a few popular apps, would probably be a more useful test. But Anandtrch and their cohorts don't seem to agree.

i wasn't really referring to linus's comments although he is pretty much spot on, i hate to say (i have no great love for him XD).

you are right that numbers are numbers, but that says nothing about what they mean or measure. i can write a program that has benchmark in its name and just pulls any old number out, like how many millseconds since the last hour ticked over and give that back as a number. you will get meaningless results.

the argument the author of the geek bench software makes sounds kind of valid but there is something i learned many years ago about optimisation and performance. measurement trumps everything. given that the futuremark physics demo uses bullet physics, complete with its own tight inner loops is a great example of a measurement showing that this benchmark does not correlate with real world uses. the large number of other benchmarks that agree are even more data to support that argument.

that being said his argument is technically baseless afaik too. no app, not even a simple renderer of a blank screen will spend all of its time inside of a short tight innermost loop - it will spend its time bouncing between multiple of them, doing a lot of waiting and having its time stolen at any given point by the OS. i'd be curious to know how he thinks these behaviours will go away in the future? the i-cache setup and L1 cache sizes are not enough for even some quite simple loops even if they are 8-way associative and bristling with all the latest features - its often quite trivial to construct pathologically bad cases using common programming practices - e.g. writing your code using objective-c or swift there is a lot of scope for cache missing and pollution. i can go into excruciating detail about this if you are interested and provide repeatable experiments to back my claims, i've done plenty of work on these things writing and optimising code... but this is long already. :)

Sure, measuring one iPhone against the next makes some sense with synthetic browser benchmarks, but I think where the hype breaks down is in using that browser benchmark to say that the iPad Pro can squash any other portable device out there. At the very least these benchmark results indicate that it's (surprise!) more of a mixed bag than has been reported.

Regarding the need for a "real" benchmark, from the article:

"While Geek Bench 3 attempts to create what its makers think is an accurate measure of CPU performance using seconds-long “real world” algorithms, BAPCo’s approach is actually more “real world.” BAPCo’s consortium of mostly hardware makers set out to create workloads across all the different platforms that would simulate what a person does, such as actually editing a photo with HDR, browsing the web, or sending email."

The author goes on to concede that they have custom apps for each platform to accomplish this task, but it seems that the TabletMark developers are aware of the exact issue you raise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com