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matthoiland

The A11 chip is insane for a tablet. Would love to see a Surface Pro with this performance.

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The i5 and i7 of Surface Pros absolutely melt A11's performance. The A11 would have run laps for battery life though.

Not really according to geekbench.

a11: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/5286336

i7 (rmbp): https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/5285899

4.1k vs. 4.8k

Interesting that the multi-core score is a lot lower. Probably you're seeing thermal management in that multi-core score, meaning a macbook with active cooling should be able to reach much higher multi-core numbers.

The A11 is way too overpowered for a phone or tablet. Apple is clearly in the awkward phase where they've almost gotten the right CPU to put in their laptops. The A12 will be a no-brainer. Same performance as i7, way better battery life, way cheaper to produce.

I think hyperthreading with the i7 also gives it an edge with multi-core

Note that the A11 has two "big" cores, and four much slower but power efficient "little" cores. If they were making an A11 variant for desktop use they would have the power profile to use more big cores.

I think we are headed into the world of multi-cpu world. I see the ARM being helped by a CUDA power efficient co-processor with I/O similar to Power9. The issue is our tools as developers wouldn't be able to take advantage of this for a while. 95% of people's applications don't take advantage of multi-threaded processors.

I would love to see a rendering benchmark. This is only single thread comparison and multi-thread isn't close.

Are you guys serious? Not saying A11 isn't fast, but come on - this is beyond ridiculous.

Raw performance is nowhere near intel chips.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3006268/tablets/tested-why-t...

Although that article is from Nov 2015, using the A9X. Would like to see an updated test, same benchmarks.

It was ridiculous but I was still surprised how strong the A11 is getting.

Apple's A11 (single thread) 4217 (multi) 10164 https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks

Intel i7 8700k (single thread) 6089 (multi) 26654 https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

4.1k vs. 4.8k

The A11 is running at 2.4Ghz. The i7 in the single-thread test at 3.1Ghz (actually up to 4.1Ghz). Cycle for cycle the A11 is faster than the fattest Intel chip.

Which is insane. I am no Apple booster, but this is quite an incredible switch up. With a fatter TDP budget (the A11 has a TDP of something like 5W, the i7-7920HQ a TDP of 45W) they could not only increase the clock ceiling, they could start copy-pasting the big core.

A few years back people were talking about Apple starting to move their chip designs to their laptops and desktops. It sounded insane. Now it's actually entirely possible if they can get their software stacks and targeting all working.

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