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Comment by awill | Hacker News Reader

I do find these articles frustrating. They continue to rave about ARM (or Qualcomm) improvements, while casually mentioning that they're at least 2 years behind Apple. Being 2-3 years behind Apple should be front and centre of the article. It's a big deal! Unfortunately, as an Android user, I don't have a choice, and I suspect my next phone will have an SD845.

You didn't see that kind of leniency when AMD was releasing slow/inefficient CPUs pre Zen.

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I think it's because the ecosystems are quite different. In x86 processors you can swap them in isolation and keep the same connectivity standards, the same types of RAM, the same operating systems and programs. In phones you can't just buy an Apple processor and drop it in, you have to "sign up" for a whole ecosystem of particular devices, a single OS that runs on those devices, a single software store that serves that OS, a particular connector, etc.. A direct CPU-to-CPU comparison doesn't hold as much weight when you can't actually act upon it without changing a whole host of other stuff you might be perfectly happy with.

I think you're expecting it to be a general purpose mobile CPU comparison, when it's not. It's a very specific look at the next generation of ARM processors. Similar to a look at the next generation of Intel processors or the next generation of AMD processors, it makes sense to compare and contrast specifically it to what came before in the same line. That said, they do include A10 and A11 processors in the benchmarks, so you can see how it is projected to perform in comparison with current processor lines.

Additionally, there's far more to compare that raw performance, especially when looking at these types of CPUs. Actual size (others here have mentioned Apple's processors are quite large due to cache), power draw at idle/peak, etc are very important for mobile CPUs.

In the end, it's not a buying guide, it's an info-dump about a new product.

The end result is that people who prefer Android devices are still stuck paying iPhone money for a phone that has much, much lower single threaded performance.

At what point does any user stop to complain about their single threaded performance on their handheld device? Quite literally the two devices are incomparable as Apple is a service with proprietary devices. Their selling point is all _their_ software will run similarly anywhere on any device. Android is free of that cycle, thankfully.

> At what point does any user stop to complain about their single threaded performance on their handheld device?

That's in the world where developers make performance at least their third-highest priority, and a couple hundred MIPS can run the vast majority of apps without regularly lagging. Let me know if you have any ideas to make that world become real.

> Quite literally the two devices are incomparable as Apple is a service with proprietary devices.

They have the same form factor and run largely the same apps. It's crazy to say that iphone and android are incomparable.

Lots of websites are bloated with megabytes of poorly optimized Javascript such as advertising network tracking and commenting systems. Animated images tend to drink CPU time as well.

iPhones still have significantly faster CPUs, especially single threaded.

The end result is that even though web browsing is typically categorized as a basic computing activity (compared with media production, 3D gaming, or simulations) it actually requires regular CPU upgrades to keep up with more complex/bloated websites. There are obviously other factors like whether or not the system is memory pressured, SSD or not, use of GPU acceleration, and if the Internet connection is adequate.

I think their selling point is the whole package - iPhone + apps + iCloud (photos mainly) that will be supported in person in store. Though Android is free of such a tightly integrated package of hardware software, services, and supportmaybe not so thankfully....

Worth pointing out you can pretty much replace all the default apps with 3rd party apps, it would definitely be an improvement if you could set them as the default apps though.

The difference is that Apple's chips are only in Apple devices and not on the market for anyone to build a system around - So the other chips are all we have.

It's more likely that Apple doesn't release a lot of technical information about their chips that sites like Anandtech can rework into some kind of article.

"Apple releases new X series chip, 40% faster, internal details unknown" is not really a compelling story.

Indeed. I'd like to buy a Chromebook with an Apple arm chip.

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