Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.
We've been asking why Apple doesn't already do it.
The same architecture can generally scale to 10x over a few process generations.
Possibly a patent issue also
Clock speeds alone can probably increase by 30%. Caches and internal datapaths can double or more. Then you can start to add in more execution units or more expensive branch-prediciton or even new more power-hungry instructions.
A 4 Watt Intel Pentium 4410Y Kaby Lake for mobile devices gets about 1800 on Geekbench, while a 115 Watt Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake for desktops gets 5600.
I'm just going to say it: the Apple laptop CPU is going to get Geekbench score... above 9000!
And, yes, I do have a CPU design background.
Once you understand this, then you can understand how CPU designers work to predict future performance. CPU designers use artificial testbenches.
Or even further they could bake a "rosetta" into the chip's microcode and have their CPU natively support the x86 instruction set along with ARM or whatever they come up with.
The Intel chip you mention isn't in any Apple machine at all. (Except maybe the iMac Pro? Is it even in that?) So you be real. I don't think you've actually looked at the benchmarks. You should do so. I think you'll be shocked at just how much overlap there is, just like I was.
What benchmarks? Geekbench? That's the only one I've ever seen where the fight is close, and Geekbench (like everything that boils performance down to one number) is nearly completely useless.
If you see a two-watt phone CPU beating a 45-watt actively-cooled laptop CPU, you can either conclude that the phone is alien technology decades ahead of anything else on the market or that the benchmark is broken. Which is more likely?
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...
Geekbench may not be the best tool for determining the power of a processor, but at the least it gives you a general idea of power across devices in a consistent set of tests, which can be extrapolated.
That post is pretty outdated. It's about old hardware and an old version of Geekbench. But people still use Geekbench 3 and old x86 hardware, so it's not totally irrelevant.
Knowing Apple had Intel Macs running in the background for years before they announced the jump to x86, I wouldn't be surprised if they already have the chips and know how well it performs.
And I also wouldn't mind if they did another demo like they used to: https://youtu.be/oxwmF0OJ0vg?t=24m45s
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "But Geekbench..." is not extraordinary evidence. Give me a board where I can do an Apple to apples comparison, booting both under the same revision of the same OS, and running industry standard benchmarks (read: plural), and then we can come to that conclusion.
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
"Extraordinary" is in the eye of the beholder. We have some evidence; you're welcome to believe it or not, but unless you supply alternative evidence you're not really making an argument. You're just saying "it might not be true," which is something anyone can say at any time about anything.
It should be irrelevant in Apple's case anyway since they run their own OS. If their OS is faster for a certain task than some other OS then that's part of what you would define as "faster" for a user of the device.
Right? Am I missing something?
The greater threat is the ios-ofcation of macOS. We've seen many companies pull their apps from the Mac App store due to the limitations of the sandbox.
Imagine if they're not held back by the battery at all, or even just have to match the power consumption of the power-hungry x86 chips.
If we had a MBP with 64 wimpy a53 cores it would still only have 50% of the performance of a Intel i7 8700k or AMD Ryzen 1800X on paper. Of course that is faster than most notebooks but if you truly care about CPU performance then you usually wouldn't use a notebook in the first place.
Arguably, the A11 Bionic is already faster than mainstream desktop CPUs.
"The iPhone 8 even edged out the score from the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro with a 7th-generation Core i5 processor. That notebook notched 9,213. Is Geekbench 4 really comparable from phone to desktop? According to the founder of Geekbench, John Poole, 'the short is answer is yes that the scores are comparable across platforms, so if an iPhone 8 scores higher than an i5, then the iPhone 8 is faster than the i5.'"[1]
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-benchmarks-fastest-pho...
From my understanding, which might be wrong, Geekbench only tests what both can do. Comparing a pickup truck and a sports car you need to look at more than just how fast they can do. You can both move furniture, but the sports car will need to do a lot more to be able to what the pickup can.
Yes, Geekbench is a terrible CPU benchmark, but both of them are Turing complete, so there is no functionality difference. And complex instructions are broken into uOps in x86 too.
But more seriously and less snarky there's a reason they used the 13" macbook pro there specifically and that's because the 15" with the quad-core i7 destroys the A11, 15k vs. 10k. Of course that's with wildly different power & thermal budgets, and I haven't seen much reason to think these geekbench results are at all representative of anything, so grains of salt and all that.
Also if you look at the performance trajectory of A-series in the last five years, 2020 sounds about right for where the crossover will come even between iOS based A-series processors and the fastest of what Intel has to offer, provided they can keep up the pace of performance improvement.
Have they really, though? What lines are actually crossing? Intel's mobile CPUs have continued to shed power, so how much of this is actually Apple "catching up" to Intel vs. Intel just optimizing for power at the cost of performance? As in, is there any performance gap that's actually shrinking, or are phone SoCs just getting more power hungry while laptop ones are getting less power hungry?
Because phone SoCs have gotten rather monsterously power hungry compared to years past. They are actually 5w under real world load parts now, with devices just letting them thermal throttle rapidly to achieve higher burst rates. Laptops, by contrast, are ~10w TDP, vastly less than they were a decade ago.
This would probably make a fascinating in-depth analysis, but the singular data point of a 5w SoC being within spitting distance of a 10w SoC is hardly a revolutionary story. It's pretty much what you expect.
will apple up the battery requirements for their own cpu/gpu, or would they simply drop battery while striving for a thinner laptop?
this from someone who's been buying/using Macs for a long time - I'd love to see some very fast arm competition, but is that what it'd really turn out to be?
Geekbench is based on the unthrottled peak performance of the CPU. Increasing the TDP headroom eliminates throttling but Geekbench doesn't measure throttling.
You can perhaps increase performance by overclocking but this requires the CPU to be designed for higher frequencies. AMD's Ryzen CPUs usually top out at around 4 GHz. Intel's CPU can be overclocked up to 5 GHz. The maximum clock speed is limited by the slowest component of the CPU. If the slowest operation takes 0.25 nanoseconds to complete this limits your frequency to 4GHz. If Apple had enough foresight to design their chips with this in mind then maybe but in reality they probably optimized the chip entirely for mobile TDPs.
I'm sorry, we need better evidence.
Apple is probably looking at all these trends and concluding that they don't really need Intel.