Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread | Hacker News Reader

Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

daringfireball.net

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Perhaps relevant. Linus Torvalds' opinion on GeekBench:

http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curposti...

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It's a few years out of date, and maybe Geekbench has improved since then, but I wouldn't put a lot of stock into these kinds of numbers until I knew that those kinds of issues had been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

GB3 -> GB4 removed some sha1(?) tests for which Snapdragon introduced fixed-function hardware.

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.

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.

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.

How can we know that they're not already doing that?

(Asking in a purely epistemological sense. I'm not familiar with Apple's datacenters at all.)

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.

I half-way expect the next line of Apple laptops to be powered by such a chip architecture. Imagine a MBP consisting of 4 A12 chips with bucketloads of RAM, etc. Not only could it run macOS but you could run iOS apps as well. Not that I think that's a good thing (looking at you Microsoft Metro) but it should be possible.

Updated thoughts regarding Geekbench 4, the newer version. http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=159853&curposti...

TLDR: Much better.

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

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

> Yeah, Macbook air really feels abandoned

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

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

To avoid dongle hell.

One man's dongle hell is another's unplug-one-thing-and-go heaven.

i'd be on board with two ports, i think, but one is a hard sell. i regularly want to plug things into my laptop while charging it. it's a shame, because they've almost sold me on the thing.

A second port wouldn't break your usecase.

I've noticed that having no choice in the matter makes it significantly more likely to be the case. After making the switch, I do feel that my experience is nicer for it.

Expansion lives on the outside, tailored to the environment in which it resides, and the battery lasts long enough that I can spend most of my day without the power adapter connected.

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.

>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).

Disagree, I use one of these machines on a daily basis (as well as one of the newer bluetooth keyboards with the same keys), and they are fantastic keyboards once you get used to them. The trackpad is fantastic as well

Cheaper? Not at all. While I agree that the MacBook 12" is the new Air and the better purchase, it's rather expensive and currently the sole purpose of the original MacBook Air is covering the price range around 1000 €. Until the MacBook gets there.

Right now the display port and the two USB ports for the Air feel just about right for me, and it seems like the ideal "minimalist" laptop.

Performance wise I hear that both are comparable and you'll get similar battery life on both, but for me the Macbook_Raw barely crosses the line of "too minimalist". Though honestly, even a second USBC port would probably change my mind on it.

I also really like the feel of the 13" screen - it seems just right, but I suppose I could get used to the 12". Also don't really wanna go back to a Bluetooth Mouse again, but this is ultimately a minor quibble that I could get over pretty easily.

Battery.

Because the Macbook runs slower the more you throw at it

>>Yeah, Macbook air really feels abandoned

That's because it is.

What's interesting however is that my 2011 Macbook Air still works like a champ. It has a 1.7 Ghz Intel i5 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD. And, amazingly enough, the battery still lasts for 3-4 hours, even after five years of heavy usage.

Macbook Pro is too heavy for me, and I don't like the lack of ports in the newer "Macbook" line, so I've held out. At this point the only thing I wish I had was a retina display, honestly.

I have the 2012 Macbook Air 8gb RAM and 512 GB SSD

Still perfect for me, I do casual video editing and some compositing in 1080p and rendering time is still great, I compile large programming projects and it is comparable to all the spiffy new macbook pros companies want to set me up with

I did replace the battery for around $100

It has all the right ports at the right speeds, multiple usb 3.0, sdxc card slot with sdxc speeds, thunderbolt at thunderbolt speeds

The user experience still beats out all the sub $1000 laptops because the target audience accepts a lot of compromises and their budget is $400 (okay, I haven't looked at the market, just see what I see. a lot of people switched to tablets)

So I just wish they'd release the 1 TB version with 16gb RAM

The macbook air 2012 is the machine I always wanted to exist for half a decade, and it is still great. Not the model before, or the model before that.

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.

I think this becomes more and more viable with every Apple A-series release and that this is the year where if they were to release the right machine, I probably wouldn't flinch switching to an ARM "daily driver" computer

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.

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.

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.

No, you can already use other vendors chips. What it would say for consumer products is that it isn't the given choice provided you developed and ported your own OS (or -ha- use linux).

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.

It's not that Intel's not given the choice -- that would still be very far away. It's that Apple's move would be the first real example of overlap in computing space. Others can follow and eventually claw at Intel's market share in laptop/desktop market.

PowerPC -> Intel worked because more software was shipping in x86 than PPC. The Mac software library actually grew after that.

Intel -> Arm locks out almost all pro software

I am betting this will happen in 2018. Likely to be announced in Summer 2018 WWDC. TSMC announced their 7nm will also comes with a High Performance variants. Most leading nodes has always be Mobile first, and I cant think of anyone other then Apple who would pay to get this. Other CPU and GPU makers no longer compete with Mobile's Soc Fab capacity, they just sit and wait until the yield and price is acceptable.

All this, is assuming the Mac dont just fade out, where we will simply dock our Personal Computer ( Our iPhone ) and OSX UI running.

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.

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.

Apparently the A10 chip has two high-perf cores and two low-power cores, sort of like what ARM call "big.LITTLE". So yes, sort of.

Unless you are playing games with it all day, Otherwise you want the Baseband Modem to be super energy efficient, or may be you some how mangically get the best reception signal everywhere.

And the Connection is only 2nd energy drain, the first being Display. I am not even sure if MicroLED could improve much at all. But any energy saving in Display Tech would be huge.

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).

My phone catches on fire whenever I open up chrome. How will it handle multiple IDEs? Would be interested to hear from a hardware person if cooling is a hard or soft bottleneck for something like this...

You have major phone producers removing 3.5mm jacks to save space, by the aame attitude I think it's safe to assume no one will add a "thick" cooling system.

As far as I know Ubuntu and Windows are already doing this. But as you said without much luck.

I also think this is the future. But not only for the switch to desktop. Also as car console, key store, tv remote, synthesizer (just put it in a midi device) and so on.

You personal key to everything. And your single attack vector...

The Andromium guys are trying to do that right now. They had a Kickstarter for a dock for your phone that does this for you, but it failed a few years ago. Just a month ago they tried the same thing with a very streamlined "laptop-like shell", and that Kickstarter[2] succeeded. I am one of the backers and I am quite excited about it.

[2] Non-referral link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...

The idea that we'll want to plug our smartphones into a dock and use them as desktops reflects really poorly on modern operating systems. The driver for this seems to be so that settings and files are always applied and accessible in every context. Sharing data between machines on a local network requires a lot of setup, is easily broken and is never seamless, but I don't think is has to be like that.

Personally, I want the opposite of "settings and files ... accessible in every context"—I don't want my personal data or configuration touching a corporate network, or vice-versa. I want the "bring your own machine" philosophy to be taken to its fullest extent: where there's no such thing as a workstation any more, because everyone just owns a PC (their phone) that they bring to work, which maybe contains a sandbox/VM with their work stuff in it, or acts as a thin client for a corporate shell-server, but is ultimately their machine.

This enables you to e.g. set up your own VPN for host traffic, to securely access whatever you want during work hours, completely opaquely to packet-sniffing on the corporate network. The "work sandbox" can ignore that VPN and just use the corporate network (maybe through its own VPN) like normal. Whereas with a shared workstation + LAN, all your personal data and traffic and ability-to-use-software is completely at the behest of corporate IT policies.

Oddly enough, this is already pretty much what the experience is like for iOS with a MaaS360-managed profile installed and Exchange ActiveSync-based accounts set up. Translate that to a desktop UI while keeping the isolation metaphor and it'd be perfect.

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.

Most people don't run workstation loads, let alone anything remotely resembling "heavy".

The parent comment was talking about "every situation", not "most people".

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.

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

I hope the closed iOS model with no option to choose between default apps doesn't become "desktop OS". I mean kudos for them for the HW achievement, but iOS is "dumbed" down as it gets.

I have been wondering on the same thing. 90% of people using the desktop or Laptop now are basically the same as they are doing on phone. Social Media, Youtube, Web Surfing etc. Even some heavy lifting like Video Editing can be done on a Phone. In terms of computational power, if you add two more Core ( Our current Desktop CPU gets 4 thread from 2 Core ), and double the memory, there is nothing much left apart from the UI difference.

How far are we from that? 2 - 3 years? Where will iPad fit into it?

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

That usually depends more on the graphics card than the processor.

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.

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.

Probably iPhone will be faster in every day usage with 2GB of RAM then these 2 phones with 6 GB.

yep. the fact that iOS apps typically don't use GC and that multitasking is much more restricted both reduce the amount of memory that iOS needs. (though more is always better!)

more computing means less battery life. rather have more efficient setup than larger one if there is no difference in perceived performance other than battery life.

ARC is GC algorithm.

http://gchandbook.org/

it's true that reference counting is a type of GC, but i think it was clear what i meant.

Not to those that don't have skills in compiler design.

I know I was being pedantic, but that is how misconceptions get spread.

Oh. I didn't even notice. Everyone was busy talking about the headphone jack.

There is one price you pay for more RAM on an SOC and that is higher power consumption, which is probably why.

Considering my iPad Air has only 1gb of RAM an performs acceptably, despite having to render at 2560x1600 - it shows that iOS is surprisingly light on ram usage. 2gb will do well for the phone. iOS is also very quick to relaunch apps and the iPhone has very fast flash memory and fast CPU to do that.

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.

Maybe not today, I bought a Oneplus 3 with 6GB ram because I plan on using it for some 4 to 5 years.

I used my old HTC Desire HD for 5 years, it became ram strapped lately with its 768mb

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm thinking it's more likely that MacBooks (and probably Macs) are killed off altogether (or merged into iPads). I think we're about 2 iOS iterations away from the iPad being a complete Macbook replacement (and we're there for a vast majority of consumers right now). I'm assuming Xcode for iOS arriving next year, along with loosening the restrictions on running locally-developed code. Then one more year to clean things up. Couple that with a few little hiccups in iOS self-sufficiency (read: System restores, another year for the software ecosystem to fill out), and we're there.

As much as I like iOS for my iPhone, for replacing a "Computer" Apple would need to introduce some kind of file system, where data can be shared between apps, and lift most restrictions about what apps can do. A linux VM running on an iPad would be a game-changer for me.

It's getting there, with the evolution of sharesheets + iCloud Drive.

I've been meaning to play around with a 4g iPad + cloud boxes for webdev and analytics workflow.

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.

> 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.

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

More likely than something Rosetta-like are "universal applications," application bundles containing both x86 and ARM executables.

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