Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.
The Intel chip you mention isn't in any Apple machine at all. (Except maybe the iMac Pro? Is it even in that?) So you be real. I don't think you've actually looked at the benchmarks. You should do so. I think you'll be shocked at just how much overlap there is, just like I was.
What benchmarks? Geekbench? That's the only one I've ever seen where the fight is close, and Geekbench (like everything that boils performance down to one number) is nearly completely useless.
If you see a two-watt phone CPU beating a 45-watt actively-cooled laptop CPU, you can either conclude that the phone is alien technology decades ahead of anything else on the market or that the benchmark is broken. Which is more likely?
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...
Geekbench may not be the best tool for determining the power of a processor, but at the least it gives you a general idea of power across devices in a consistent set of tests, which can be extrapolated.
That post is pretty outdated. It's about old hardware and an old version of Geekbench. But people still use Geekbench 3 and old x86 hardware, so it's not totally irrelevant.
Knowing Apple had Intel Macs running in the background for years before they announced the jump to x86, I wouldn't be surprised if they already have the chips and know how well it performs.
And I also wouldn't mind if they did another demo like they used to: https://youtu.be/oxwmF0OJ0vg?t=24m45s
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "But Geekbench..." is not extraordinary evidence. Give me a board where I can do an Apple to apples comparison, booting both under the same revision of the same OS, and running industry standard benchmarks (read: plural), and then we can come to that conclusion.
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
"Extraordinary" is in the eye of the beholder. We have some evidence; you're welcome to believe it or not, but unless you supply alternative evidence you're not really making an argument. You're just saying "it might not be true," which is something anyone can say at any time about anything.
It should be irrelevant in Apple's case anyway since they run their own OS. If their OS is faster for a certain task than some other OS then that's part of what you would define as "faster" for a user of the device.
Right? Am I missing something?
We've been asking why Apple doesn't already do it.
The same architecture can generally scale to 10x over a few process generations.
Possibly a patent issue also
Clock speeds alone can probably increase by 30%. Caches and internal datapaths can double or more. Then you can start to add in more execution units or more expensive branch-prediciton or even new more power-hungry instructions.
A 4 Watt Intel Pentium 4410Y Kaby Lake for mobile devices gets about 1800 on Geekbench, while a 115 Watt Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake for desktops gets 5600.
I'm just going to say it: the Apple laptop CPU is going to get Geekbench score... above 9000!
And, yes, I do have a CPU design background.
Once you understand this, then you can understand how CPU designers work to predict future performance. CPU designers use artificial testbenches.
Or even further they could bake a "rosetta" into the chip's microcode and have their CPU natively support the x86 instruction set along with ARM or whatever they come up with.