Hacker News Reader

"Apple’s iPhone Xs is faster than an iMac Pro on the Speedometer 2.0 JavaScript benchmark"

Yes, Safari, but iPhones do compete with your average desktop processor (not the top end).

https://macdailynews.com/2018/09/23/apples-iphone-xs-is-fast...

They can compete in certain workloads. As a computational tool however, desktop Intel CPUs can be optimized far, far beyond the capabilities of any A-series CPU.

Don't forget that Intel CPUs have things that A CPUs are missing like QuickSync, AVX2, massive PCIe interconnectivity.

Whether the A-series CPU could be modified into something competitive on that front is yet to be seen. Whether this actually matters considering the state of our compilers and software development is yet another question.

Apple's newest CPUs have hardware explicitly for accelerating Javascript, so it's not surprising they'd pull ahead there.

And as you said, you're comparing the top-of-the-line iPhone to an "average" CPU.

> Apple's newest CPUs have hardware explicitly for accelerating Javascript

They really don't. A12 added a couple of instructions for floating point conversions, but contrary to claims making rounds on Twitter at the time, they were not even generated by WebKit when the benchmarks were run.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com