Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

Geekbench is not measuring raw performance in terms of operations per second. It's measuring very specific use cases (their current blurb mentions AI and ML, in the past mentioned synthetic tests to approximate browsers). Because thermal constraints would prevent Apple from competing in a brute force approach, Apple have been more willing to include specialised hardware for tasks like AI/ML as in the A12 CPU. Of course, single core AI/ML perf is a bit of a silly metric but it's one thing geekbench is claiming to measure here that Apple probably wins at. I think in the past encryption/decryption similarly had acceleration sooner on Apple platforms, and Safari is able to make better use of the GPU with less varied hardware to support, and I think real web browsing is another component in geekbench tests.

I don’t think comparing Geekbench scores directly between completely different processor architectures tells you that much about real world application performance. It’s a synthetic benchmark that may be affected disproportionally by factors that aren’t very significant for ‘normal’ use cases, e.g. specific optimizations (compiler, hardware, etc) that hit the happy flow for some part of the benchmark on one architecture, but not the other.

But the main difference is thermals and performance under sustained load. So far none of the Appple SoC’s have been shown to handle sustained workloads at heir highest frequency. The CPU in the most recent iPhones is known to throttle under load quite fast, and nobody but Apple knows how it would perform in an active cooling setup.

"Assuming core count was equal. Would a desktop CPU and an Apple SoC run at equivalent performance if it was running Ubuntu and running native compiled code?"

Yes. Of course there are going to be edge conditions where one or the other are going to shine particularly well, but overall the performance is going to be close, if not giving a nod to the Apple device.

This is the reason there have been wide expectations that Apple would move their desktop/laptop platforms to their own chips, and if rumors are true that will be next year. In a situation where their own chips had credible heat dissipation and wouldn't be subject to thermal throttling, it would be very impressive. I mean it's already spectacularly impressive, but it would be quite dominant with real cooling.

Apple needs to be careful, though, explaining their patience. There has always been the potential that Intel comes out with a game changer.

Of course in such discussions everyone is going to discount whatever benchmarks are used. Yet we've seen this in benchmark after benchmark, at generalists tasks that annihilate any trick instruction. Out of curiosity I just ran JetStream 2 -- it yields a 81.6 score on my i7 laptop, and 153 on my iPhone 11. The iPhone with incredibly poor heat dissipation.

The ARM / x86 / x86_64 / CISC / RISC things are all abstract higher level notions now and aren't the reason. Apple's team has just proven astonishingly good at designing chips. Which quite honestly I thought would turn out otherwise, and Apple would end up begging the industry for whatever the new hotness was.

> Does the whole RISC Vs CISC of X86 and ARM make a difference?

Not really. Arm hasn't been RISC for quite a while now (there's a "Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero" instruction(!), SIMD, etc etc).

The difference can be explained partially by the memory model: x86 has total store ordering, which can be slower than Arm's weak memory model (it allows the hardware to be more creative).

> running native compiled code

There's more to it than 'running native code'. It depends a lot on what code is running (any CPU implementing the above javascript instruction would be much faster on a web benchmark for example). It also depends on the compiler. If the code is control-flow heavy, there isn't much to do except having large cache sizes and wide pipes, which most high-end, out-of-order CPU do already.

I read an analysis somewhere (anandtech?) which suggested that a lot of the performance of Apple's chips could be attributed to them having a really large / fast cache system.

> the slowest part of all here is still fetching the fricking page over the internet.

That may be true, but have you tried browsing the web on an older device? Once the webpage is loaded, I can't say the experience is very nice on my iPad mini 2. Now, granted, that's a 2013 device. All I'm saying is that after all the "network stuff" you mention is done, the device power matters greatly, especially on JS-heavy sites.

> What is even the hypothesis here? Websites are slow because Android devices are slow?

Hypothesis is: websites are slow because developers are testing them using their high end devices where bad code performance is compensated by higher performance of devices. All of this while real world users are struggling with garbage quality end product.

That's because it's not performance that's holding back PWAs. With a bit of work, perf was good enough for web apps on an iPhone 4S or earlier. iPhone 4s was released in 2011, so if low-end android devices are not hitting 2012/2013 iPhone performance levels, then they're also good enough for PWAs.

It's the lack of platform APIs for things like offline storage and push notifications that are holding back web apps, not performance.

Because Angular, React, Vue aren't needed for like 90% of those applications, server side rendering is more than enough.

Specially when tons of "native" applications are actually Cordova and Ionic garbage that take longer to start than a HTTP server reply to the native browser.

Native applications are great, when we are talking about stuff that actually makes use of the GPGPU or hardware sensors.

Outside games, office and drawing applications, I don't have any applications installed that couldn't easily be done as mobile Web sites.

I run my own PWA on a 2012 Samsung Galaxy S3 and the only performance problems I have, are due to bad decisions as a developer (e.g. loading all elements of a list isn't such a great idea when the list grows over time and you use the app for 3 years (so far)).

So if you are serious about building PWAs you shouldn't have performance issues. Yes, they are a bit slower than native apps, but with today's devices that shouldn't matter.

The issue with Apple is, however, that they don't support all the APIs you need to create an awesome PWA (and decided recently to throw away the localStorage every 7 days unless the user wants to clutter his desktop with every PWA that needs to store data on the device for longer periods).

SPA is overused to be sure. But people are also building far more complex things on the web now and some of them are difficult or impossible to do purely with SSR. So pick the right tool for the job but let’s not pretend that we can do everything with just one tool.

And you might say those kinds of applications shouldn’t be built on the web but I’d rather have them on the web than locked up in some proprietary app store with all the centralization and potential abuses of power that allows.

Practical experience with developing native cross platform applications in my experiece strongly aligns with geekbench results.

Cross platform as in most CPU intensive code is in C++ that is exactly shared between both, only trivial but obviously needed differences in input handling. And for Android the renderer is Vulkan and for iOS it’s metal, both essentially identical in how features are used.

Some super high end Android phones come close in some cases, but on average iOS devices wipe the floor with Android ones.

I want to emphasize that on top of Android HW being slower on average it is also hampered by the decision to use Java. Some api’s are Java only requiring JNI, which is slow, to access. Another issue is GC pauses, they are small but can result in skipped frame here and there, making the experience subtly worse.

There was a version of Geekbench a while ago for which you could make a good argument for that but Geekbench 5 seems to tell the same story that Spec, web tests, etc all tell. Apple's cores really do seem to be that good though they benefit from running at the clock speed they were designed for, unlike an Intel U-series which has more pipeline stages than it needs to hit its clock.

And Apple also benefits from being able to set their own page size and probably from getting to have caches that are virtually indexed and physically tagged rather then physically indexed and physically tagged. Doing address translation in parallel with way lookup is a nice little performance boost. There are rumors of other cleverness in the cache heirarchy from control of the OS but I don't know the details.

We also know that the average selling price of Android is less than half that of an iPhone. Most Android phones being sold are lowend phones.

Besides that, there have been plenty of articles where they found that Android manufacturers were detecting when benchmarks were being run and cheating.

Anandtech uses SPEC2006 and the performance gap is not much different than Geekbench: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15207/the-snapdragon-865-perf...

The other question to ask is why do some consumers want less for their money?

Apple is making luxury goods, they're not going to drop their prices.

It's like how there's recently been a bunch of articles about how phones are getting "too much" RAM and the comparison is laptops.

When the question should really be, why do laptop manufacturers get away with putting 4 or 8gb of RAM in a laptop and mobile phones are catching up.

And anyway. What most people do is use their devices however they want with the expectation that everything runs smooth, they can multitask and the demands of higher quality video/pictures/refresh rates can be met.

Of course there are people that are satisfied with yesterday's technology. Plenty of people use 10 year old ThinkPads and get their work and entertainment done. Same with getting a £100 smart phone.

browse Twitter and marvel at how mobile rhythm games can't maintain 60fos

Well, for example, I recently used my iPhone X to edit a 4K 60fps video using iMovie. This was quick, easy, and all playback was silky smooth. I did this while sitting at the airport lounge waiting for my flight, and it didn't use too much of my battery.

Meanwhile, my very high-end gaming PC struggles to play the video files from my iPhone at 60fps for some mysterious reason.