To clarify, this is not for mobile devices, for those who want to compare it to the A12x Bionic.
Also like to know the L1, L2, L3 #.
It is hard for any system company to sell CPU. Apple is only for their own use. I believe the Samsung's AP is for their own use also.
They're the number 2 phone maker in the world...
Most people don't need the extra power a desktop offers, but the performance advantage over mobile systems is enormous.
It might be more useful to argue "workstation" but I think his point remains, people calling their 5W 8 core part "desktop" class are referring to the "laptop without a battery" class of devices that exist in the low end space and don't take advantage of the capabilities of the desktop form factor.
That's not saying it's better than the BEST desktop CPUs, but then, 99.99% of people don't have a 16 core Threadripper or whatever.
The point is, Apple's mobile chips have reached a point where they are absolutely desktop class processors and most normal users wouldn't notice a thing if you replaced their laptop or Desktop CPU with them. This is because most normal users use their home computer for web browsing, photos, music, and Netflix.
For example, the A12 bionic is absolutely more powerful than my 2015 Macbook Pro and my PC which I built in 2014. You might not like this reality, but unless you're a "power user", this processor is desktop class. End of story.
Then because you can run a web browser on it that makes it desktop class?
Please that argument doesn't hold an ounce of anything. For that matter the processor in the original iphone was desktop class because it was capable of surfing the web better than the Pentium II's common in desktop machines in 2000.
Which is why tons of people just bought ipads and stopped upgrading their desktops. I never made an argument that you couldn't replace a desktop with a phone/tablet/whatever, that wasn't what this was about. It was about claiming that apple's products were performance competitive with (current) desktop class machines. Which for some use cases they probably are, for others like heavy gaming, engineering work, or basically most of what people actually have desktop machines for these days (as opposed to laptops which is probably a better comparison) its not really a comparison outside of some great marketing.
Of course this is the usual apple crap, I've been hearing it since the PPC in the mac was a "supercomputer".
When you start scaling out cores, interconnect starts to eat a huge amount of the power budget. All the extra PCIe and other IO eat even more.
When you start to ramp up into the 3+GHz clockspeed range, things start to get really hard and you have to make IPC tradeoffs.
The idea that a 5-10w A12 beats the performance of a 95w x86 processor is talk from a place of extreme ignorance.
Add all the features even a workstation laptop chip has and the A12 will start to struggle just like every other architecture does. There's no magic in chip design. There aren't really big competitive edges to be found anymore as all the low-hanging fruit has already been picked a decade ago.
And my guess is the OP was using the word Desktop as being PC, Laptop + Desktop. I am just guessing but He should have been more clearer in that.
A 13" ipad pro starts at $999 and goes up over $2,000. Any desktop in a similar price range will stomp the ipad processor without much issue.
No one buys $2000 Desktop anymore. Majority don't. And you had to pick the most expensive 0.1% Market Desktop compared to A12X. The A12X here is a specific comparison, while the words "Desktop" is an generalisation. When I say my X Bike is comparable to Road Cars, Road Cars here means everyday cars, not your Lamborghini or Ferrari 455. Which we ALL KNEW would be faster than this Bike anyway.
But you had to nitpick on the word "Desktop". And then decide to use Similar price range as an argument which was never the intention nor what we started to compare it with.
What makes you say it's closer to Intel U?
Its really too bad that no one has managed to get a stock linux running on an iphone....
If something in chip design seems too good to be true, it is.
The test itself is basically just writing a tiny todoMVC in a dozen different frameworks. Any one of those sub-tests would fit in only a couple MB of cache (for example, the React todo source is around 550 lines in total).
An i7-8650U has a max clockspeed of 4.2GHz, so for short bursts of single-core processing where everything fits in cache, performance can definitely come close to that Xeon (there's a reason why people buy the Xeon instead of the U-series chip though)
JS uses only 32-bit integers and 64-bit floats and executes on a single core (JS has typed arrays, but they certainly aren't going to be used in those kinds of frameworks).
The power of modern x86 architectures is completely bypassed in that kind of test. A huge amount of the size and TDP an x86 core (I'd guess the majority given the width) is tied up in vector units, but those go entirely unused in JS code (and the JS SIMD proposal was completely killed making that unlikely). What are the other 7 to 17 Xeon cores doing during that benchmark? 30-50% of the TDP in these chips goes entirely to the interconnects because the hardest part of scaling chip design stopped being the actual core a long time ago.
https://ark.intel.com/products/124968/Intel-Core-i7-8650U-Pr...
Geekbench for example puts the A12 about 15% above the 8650U in single threaded performance and 9% below it in multithreaded performance. I would say that is pretty close to U-series performance.
Single-threaded is an important comparable point.
Sure it's 'comparable' to the iMac Pro if the comparison you want to make is that it is 1/4 as fast.