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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

Well, you're comparing against a 5 year old machine. What point does this make? It's about as meaningful as saying my smartphone has reached parity with a Cray supercomputer (but a 20 year old one).

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You don't think it's a little impressive that a mobile SoC in a tablet (that is constrained by power and physical space) is matching the performance of an i7 in an iMac that has the benefits of sitting on your desk plugged into power all day, isn't constrained by size, and has significant active cooling?

Mobile CPUs have many constrains to adapt to, but "size" shouldn't really be one of them.

It makes a big difference for cooling though.

As in: the bigger, the better?? :)

I'm curious why you say that. Circuit board real estate seems to be a precious commodity especially in iphones. What do you mean by size?

I was answering about the CPU (or SoC)

Huh? Size of the system is one of the defining constraints of "mobile". I guess you are saying the chip is small enough you don't think size of the CPU will be the limiting factor for setting the size of the system? True that other components are larger, but not true that the CPU is insignificant!

As an aside, In a high production volume chip, size (silicon area) == cost. It's really that simple for a lot of design choices.

Its definitely a noteworthy accomplishment. Not sure of all the benchmarks they used, but hopefully they tested more than just hardware accelerated operations or else it detracts from overall versatility a bit.

I, for one, am constantly amazed by the performance of such mobile/small devices (regardless of type and model). However, shouldn't such a result also say something about the iMac (or any other "desktop" for that matter)? I mean, 5 years is not that much when it comes to performance; "shrinking" a desktop in 5 years (while keeping the performance) to such an extent seams unlikely.

I think it's impressive in a general Moore's law is mind-boggling way, in the way my phone is more powerful than the desktop I bought in 2007. Nothing particular to this SoC, and nothing special about this particular comparison to this particular machine.

the i7 can keep that performance indefinitely though. Can the SoC do the same thing (i.e. not trigger thermal throttling) without active cooling and on battery power?

Honest question btw, I have no idea how the Apple cpu behaves in this scenario.

You're right that it is an unfair comparison to the state-of-the-art. And a lot of people are considering upgrading their older systems not because those systems are slow or under-performing but because of other factors like portability, dying batteries, and failing hardware. I think their point is that an iPad can be a suitable replacement for a lot of people not necessarily looking for an upgrade.

My mom has a behemoth of a Dell laptop from 7 or 8 years ago. It's an i7 with 8GB of RAM and if I dropped an SSD in it for her then it would hum along just fine. It has performance parity with my maxed out Yoga 2 from a couple years back. She's looking to upgrade it not due to performance but because it's heavy, the battery is dead and a replacement is $200, and she want's a 10-key.

My point is that performance is no longer the driving force compelling people to upgrade.

Well, it is somewhat on iOS because somehow Apple's software gets extremely heavy. Wirth's law or something. The iPad 2 used to feel pretty damn speedy, now it's an absolute dog.

Definitely and I think that trend will continue as the platform matures into something approaching feature parity with a desktop operating system.

Hopefully that won't actually happen. Apple and Google are putting a great deal of thought into the APIs and features they're implementing on iOS and Android with much consideration to factors such as battery use and performance.

That being said, the latest versions of Google's apps have really kneecapped the Nexus 4 which I've used as my daily driver since 2012. Sadly I might just have to upgrade.

I would say an important point of note is that a lot of people who would consider themselves power users still use Intel chips from the early 2010's. Coming from someone who's using a Sandy Bridge i7.

Like you I'm using a quand-core 'Server' Mac Mini from 2012 with a Sandy Bridge processor. What exactly do you make of this? That we are not power users? (Not being sarcastic or anything like that, I've been thinking along these same lines for a while, but I cannot quite put my finger on it.)

That desktop CPU performance gains have slowed.

Well the power wall has kind of set an upper bound on clock speed. (although kaby lakes can do 5GHz no problem which is pretty impressive) So until a fundamental breakthrough in heat extraction happens, were kinda left with only power efficiency and parallelism as ways to increase performance (which desktops have done). Mores law has still more or less held true thus far. I think ARM just had a long way to catch up but it will eventually hit physical barriers at some point and performance increases will slow.

It makes the point of a click-bait headline :). Try running a latest gen Intel i7 against the latest ARM chip on desktop workloads (high-end gaming, databases, compilers, video encoding, AI computation, etc.) and we will see a bit of a different picture.

And while these small devices do an amazing job, one should never forget that they are also extremely optimized for efficiency. Intel Desktop CPUs have different goals and you need to take the whole picture into account at which point you will see that comparing Intel & ARM is like comparing apples and bananas.

> desktop workloads (high-end gaming, databases, compilers, video encoding, AI computation, etc.) and we will see a bit of a different picture.

Well that still matters. A lot of desktop user even in enterprise are not doing any of that and 5 year old machine is perfectly good enough. We are talking 10's of thousands of desktop in each large company have become matched in power by the latest smartphone and tablet.

So that could mean the end of the general user gravy train for Intel and AMD. That could mean your next MBP is going to cost even more than the next best tablet for a smaller but still significant enough performance difference.

You might prefer this one, as I find it much more relevant. http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline...

That is a Core-i5 Kaby Lake Y. Same approximately TDP, both fanless. Thats the CPU in the new Kaby Lake MacBooks that Apple just upgraded too.

It still loses to the A10X it seems in multicore, very similar single core performance.

Well for one it shows the progress made in 5 years time. And a lot of desktop PC's nowadays are 5 years old or even older.

That reference i7 is significantly faster than the main PC of %95+ of my friends/relatives. Then again, the vast majority of people need a proper home PC for little more than the occasional word processing task, so this really is getting pretty academic until an iPad is at least interesting to musicians, video editors or hardcore gamers.

I think it's more impressive to compare a phone with a 20 year old Silicon Graphics workstation. The OpenGL performance obliterates it.

You don't think that a battery-powered pocket computer with as much computing power as a 1997 Cray is meaningful?

I think it's more meaningful that this iPad comparison is surprising. Back in the full throes of Moore's law this would be expected.

It really shows we're in a new era of sub exponential improvement.

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