Comment by kelchm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelchm | Hacker News Reader

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> In fact this makes me wonder: if Apple chips are so far ahead, why are iphones not the fastest, best smartphones by a wide margin?

Apple has pretty consistently had the fastest SoCs for phones and tablets for a few years now, particularly in single core performance. Here are some benchmark results of the iPhone 12 versus some of it’s Android competitors [1]. Notice that last year’s iPhone 11 Pro Max still outperforms Android phones from this year as well.

I think part of the reason this isn’t a major differentiator (for phones at least) is that phones have been “fast enough” for several years now. Given the very aggressive throttling that is utilized on these types of devices, I think the primary difference ends up being battery life / efficiency rather than raw performance.

It’s also worth noting that while the performance / efficiency gap between x86 and ARM seems to be pretty sizable at this point, the gap between various current generation ARM CPUs isn’t nearly as drastic.

1: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-12-benchmarks-this-des...

> It’s also worth noting that while the performance / efficiency gap between x86 and ARM seems to be pretty sizable at this point

It's really not, though. You have to compare performance at a given power target to judge performance/efficiency, which you can't do for most ARM CPUs. But you can get 8 core x86 CPUs that are 15W, or 1.8w per core (example: the 4800U). Similarly 64 core Epycs are around or less than 3W per core. These are all well within similar per-core power numbers as your typical big-core ARM chip.

The perceived gap is larger than it really is, because there just isn't really an x86 tablet-focused market. The M1's jump into laptop-space puts it up and we can really see it shine, but the other ARM jumps into laptop-space were a joke. So comparing equivalent power targets becomes challenging.

But take your articles benchmarks for example. The Snapdragon manages something like 60% of the performance of the A12's. So take the existing M1 mac, cut the performance drastically, and suddenly it'd be not interesting at all. The performance/efficiency wouldn't be impressive at all if it was getting 60% of the performance it is now.

Yeah that's what puzzles me, why has chip superiority not translated into an objectively better phone? For laptops the M1 laptops are best in class in everything, battery and performance.

To a large extent, current Android flagship CPUs are "good enough" for the things people do with phones. Sure, current iPhone chips are much faster, but it doesn't matter that much for the vast majority of consumers (even for games, mobile games tend to target the lowest common denominator to a much greater extent than PC games; no-one's going to launch a mobile game that runs on the latest couple of generations of iOS and nothing else).

iPhones do likely get better longevity out of their faster hardware, mind you.

I honestly don't know why you're being downvoted.

I think for some people (eg my oldest brother), the iPhone is "the best." He's not a tech person - and that might be perspective that you're missing.

I tend to agree that there are great androids that seem competitive with iPhones (disclosure: I haven't really owned a flagship phone for a while; this is one of android's issues! The flagships aren't that much better than the $300-400 phones)

But I know a lot of people who think the iPhone is the premium phone experience, and if they're going to spend over a thousand dollars on a phone, it'll be an iPhone.

My point here is that for many people, the iPhone is objectively better.

He is being downvoted by people who consider the choice of a specific vendor a religious issue and will vote down anyone who in their eyes disparages their vendor of choice. It is a sad fact that the existence of this phenomenon only leads to the reinforcement of the religious behaviour since their insistence on the infallibility of their vendor is questioned by those not part of their cult, whereupon they double down on the magnificence and superiority of their vendor's products over everything else, which leads to more reactions and the cycle continues.

The power/performance ratio of the M1 SoC does not seem to need religious adoration to be seen as a significant step in the establishment of ARM as a real competitor to the AMD64 hegemony. The wait is now for other vendors - Samsung, Qualcomm, etc - to launch similar "desktop-oriented" SoC's which can be used by both traditional "dekstop" vendors (HP, Dell, Lenovo and to a limited extent Samsung etc) as well as traditional mobile-oriented vendors like Xiaomi. Some of those vendors will eventually produce ARM-based platforms which support user-upgradeable memory, GPUs and storage - and possibly also user-upgradeable CPUs - like they do for AMD64-based systems. Once these systems become available ARM has a real chance to take over the market.

Great points. I remember back in (good lord) 2011 when the MRI research was shown [1]

I'm very excited about the new m1. While I'm tempted to buy it, I also can't wait to see what they do with it in their pro models. Or what the second generation looks like.

The competition is great for everyone, and Apple going all in on arm as they run from Intel's manufacturing failures is very well-timed.

I think this was somewhat inevitable, to be sure. Microsoft had Qualcomm and AMD processors in their surface [2], and I think as TSMC continues to dominate in manufacturing, we will see really exciting gains.

Also, I'm thrilled that CPUs are coming with tensor cores now. I think fast matrix operations might be separated from gpus (at the least, you no longer need a >$400 gpu for it), and that's a win for everyone, too.

In two years, we could be able to reimplement early neural network research on a macbook air! (I mean, you already can, but instead of taking minutes/hours/days, even more recent things become accessible)

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2011-05-17-bbc-loving-apple-looks-l...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20888999/microsoft-surfac...

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