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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Besides everything else going on, they left 68k because it was falling behind and couldn’t compete or speed up enough. They left the G3/G4 line when once again they were stuck and Intel was running away.

So they went to Intel. They’re now on the same treadmill as everyone else. Can’t do better, can’t be totally stuck. But Intel isn’t progressing very fast, and they don’t seem to be focusing on the things Apple wants like ultra-low power.

But Apple’s chip division is kicking ass. The 10.5” iPad Pro is a monster, and could easily power a MacBook faster than an Intel chip. The real question is what to do on the MBP and iMac Pro.

Apple has never been keen on AMD for some reason, not sure if they have a chance on the high end. My impression is they don’t compete on low end/low power but I don’t know how accurate that is.

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> The 10.5” iPad Pro is a monster, and could easily power a MacBook faster than an Intel chip.

Very true. I have that exact iPad Pro (10.5") and the MacBook 12" and I can tell you that the iPad Pro is much stronger. The damn thing never stops for breath. Even trendy games with very very detailed graphics take 10 seconds to start on a bad day (usually 5-6) and they run at 60+ FPS at all times.

If we are talking about everyday apps and Safari, the iPad Pro is the last tablet you will ever need in your life. It's simply perfect.

> The real question is what to do on the MBP and iMac Pro.

My only complaint about my other MacBook (Pro 15", 2015) are the loud fan noises, to be fair. I know Apple's thin and beautiful laptops are what people love but I'd buy some slightly bulkier MacBook if it was quiet.

Speaking of which, the iMac Pro is the quietest machine of its class out there. Definitely gonna gather some cash and buy it. I don't think I'll need another desktop machine for at least 7 years, if not 10-12...

Never been a fanboy in my life but I honestly can't wait to see Apple chip exclusive iPhones and MacBook. (I am mentioning iPhones because they still use Qualcomm's or Intel's radios and chips for their signals stack.)

A Mac Pro with an epyc cpu seems like it could be pretty sweet.

Is there actually any fundamental reason an ARM chip couldn't be made as powerful as Xeon or that it's harder than it is for x86, or is it just a matter of the (obviously expensive and time consuming) research and development not having been done yet?

Don't forget the full (not i) Mac Pro, which they've committed to updating.

Pretty sure an ARM tablet chip is not going to beat Intel, even on the low end. Otherwise we would have moved on already. Also, apple does like AMD and uses their gpus because they have bad blood with nvidia. Apple primarily makes laptops and AMD has not been competitive until they developed Ryzen.

https://9to5mac.com/2017/09/22/iphone-8-geekbench-test-score...

The iPhone 8 CPU is competitive with a Core i5

That a myth; Geekbench results aren't comparable cross-platform.

No, that is no longer true. Since Geekbench 3, results are comparable cross-platform.

From the linked article:

"Geekbench comparisons between phones and laptops used to be pretty meaningless, as the tests were not directly comparable, but that hasn’t been the case for some time now. Founder John Poole confirmed that it is legitimate to directly compare scores across platforms"

Look at these workloads[0] and tell me what doesn't look comparable across platforms? Parsing a 1.5MB HTML page, running SQLite queries, compiling code using LLVM, running Dijkstra's algorithm on a huge graph, repeatedly rendering PDFs, etc, etc.

[0] https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench4-cpu-workloads.pdf

That claim would be highly suspect in general, given that a desktop CPU has at least 10 times more headroom in power consumption.

For such a claim to be true, you would have to expect that the phone CPU is somehow 10 times more efficient per Watt, while having the same kind of architecture (general CPU, not GPU/TPU/...).

It’s perfectly possible that the iPhone CPU can’t run 4 hours straight due to heat issues in its enclosure while a desktop CPU can. But that could be fixed.

Intel has not been optimizing for TDP/power draw as aggressively as Apple has. Apple started from that position and went up in performance. Intel started more in performance and had tried to keep TDP in check.

If you give the i5 it's full voltage and crank up the clock speed it'll totally beat an Apple chip. But in order to fit in a Macbook Air's power envelope you need to really throttle things back and a chip that's designed to operate in that regime has a big advantage over a chip that isn't.

I think he might be correct.

Apple A11 has 297 GFlops CPU performance. (1)

That “7th gen i5” is apparently i5-7360U. 32 FLOPs/cycle/core (2) * 2 cores * 3.50 GHz (=max turbo) = 224 GFlops.

> the phone CPU is somehow 10 times more efficient per Watt

Not 10 times. The i5’s TDP is just 15W. I don’t know about A11 but high-end Qualcomm chips can be up to 5-6W, just 3 times difference.

> while having the same kind of architecture (general CPU, not GPU/TPU).

That’s a continuum. They both CPUs, they both have SIMD that’s how they achieve that high flop/cycle, but the architecture can be quite different. A11 has 6 cores. Intel spends many transistors, and therefore energy, doing very complicated things: branch prediction, indirect branch prediction, cache synchronization between cores, speculative execution… Apple has full control over OS and software, they can probably get away with not doing some of these. Intel and AMD have to maintain compatibility with all software (including single threaded), built by all compilers and languages, that’s why they have fewer tradeoffs available to them.

(1) https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2021926/

(2) https://stackoverflow.com/a/15657772/126995

It is true but at the same time it is not. Geekbench measures the unthrottled performance of a CPU. One thing you have to consider is that ARM SoCs contain a cluster of heterogenous cores. A high performance low efficiency core for bursty workloads or games and a highly efficient core for "sleepless" standby.

What happens is that people see a benchmark and they see low power consumption and now conclude that it must have 10 times better performance per watt. x86 is bad, ARM is good

But the thing is you cannot have your cake and eat it too. The ARM SoC is clearly more efficient but only during standby or low intensity workloads and because everything is integrated into a single chip. As soon as you use a constant CPU/GPU intensive workload like servers or video games or even just google maps [1] you will have the same energy efficiency as intel chips.

[1] My phone battery barely lasts 2 hours with google maps

Video encoding is a pretty poor benchmark for this.

I know you are wrong because Geekbench scores are showing the A-series chips to be competitive with Intel chips already.

Can’t they have an architecture where specialized chips deal with the most common heavy duty tasks to counteract raw CPU power ?

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