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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

With the M2 chip expected to debut at WWDC next month, here's the difference between the A14 efficiency cores used in the M1 and the A15 efficiency cores used in the current gen iPhones.

>The core has a median performance improvement of +23%, resulting in a median IPC increase of +11.6%. The cores here don’t showcase the same energy efficiency improvement as the new A15’s performance cores, as energy consumption is mostly flat due to performance increases coming at a cost of power increases, which are still very much low.

Also, when compared to the efficiency cores used in the Snapdragon 888:

>The comparison against the little Cortex-A55 cores is more absurd though, as the A15’s E-core is 3.5x faster on average, yet only consuming 32% more power, so energy efficiency is 60% better.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo...

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Obviously will never find out but it would be really interesting to see a 100% functional Android install on an A15 or A16 phone to see how well it runs, what kind of battery life it gets, etc.

Apple does a lot of optimizing of their chips for operations that are common on their operating systems. One example is that their languages use reference counting instead of garbage collection. Apple optimized specific operations on the M1 chips that are used by reference counting call and that made a big difference in overall performance.

Android would not have that kind of close optimization so it is unclear if the performance would benefit from the A-series chips.

That’s true. But given how much faster Apple chips are than the current crop of Snapdragon chips I’m guessing it would still be ahead running code that doesn’t optimize quite as well. Even if it came out even the energy efficiency could still mean incredible battery life when combined with the larger batteries that Android phones seem to have.

Cortex-A55 cores are almost half a decade old at this point. If anything, this just proves that Moore's law is dead as disco.

> Cortex-A55 cores are almost half a decade old at this point. If anything, this just proves that Moore's law is dead as disco.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 is not a design from a decade ago, nor is it fabbed on a process node from a decade ago. It's Qualcomm's current flagship, regardless of the design choices they make.

Also, ARM's successor A510 efficiency cores that Qualcomm is expected to ship this year don't sound like they will be an improvement on power efficiency.

>We’ll have to wait for the new generation SoCs to actually hit the market for us to test the new A510 cores, but if indeed they come with larger power consumption operating points to achieve higher performance, then Arm won't be much nearer in catching up to what Apple has been doing with their efficiency cores. As of the latest generation of SoCs, Apple’s efficiency cores were around 4x faster than any Cortex-A55 based SoC. Which, running at roughly the same system active power, also made them 3-4x more efficient in the traditional benchmarks. As presented, a theoretical A510 SoC won't be able to close that efficiency gap at all.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16693/arm-announces-mobile-ar...

And also the best mid-core ARM has to offer. What a dead ass useless company. Maybe maybe maybe the A510 they announced year ago[1] can span half the gap, but given what a fantastically unimpressive useless thud of an impact A55 made versus A53, given the half decade cycles it takes to deliver woefully meager improvememts, I could not have less faith in ARM. We should be shipping more advanced Intel Lakeview+ in phones, Galileo++++ in sbc, x86 everywhere.

Yet still RISC-V has so far to go to even start to compete. This stuff is not easy. But wow, after a decade of thinking arm may some day turn the corner & start delivering (amd "seattle" a1100 anyone?), I see so little hope for this plodding lumbering archticture. It has been designed/refined to sell flagship phones (now well over $1000) and fuck all the rest.

Rockchip seems to be the only company even making a consumer-available arm core of any note at all, and the only systems we're seeing on the radar are nearly $200 A76's. With like 1/20th the connectivity/io bandwidth we get from a cheaper celeron system.

x86 keeps getting better. Arm archticture & cores are just defined by a bunch of miserly vultures keeping the cellphone market in thrall, the incremental of incrememtalist gains. Moore's law is getting more complex but is fine. ARM just is nads, worthless.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16693/arm-announces-mobile-ar...

I'm inclined to agree. x86 seems to have the most performance still "left on the table" so-to-speak, at least of the major architectures. My fingers are crossed that the next 5 years of RISC-V development come swiftly so we can finally kick ARM back down to the microcontroller market that it performed best in. I seriously doubt ARM will be able to compete when x86 chips are at the same transistor density, we might need an even bigger scam performance metric than "performance-per-watt"... "performance-per-watt-per-area" perhaps?

I guess in terms of a computer that a normal person can buy, you do have PowerPC as an option now

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