With the heavy rumours of Apple moving forward with ARM chips in Macs, Intel clearly showed the plans for this chip to Apple last year, and Apple said no thank you.
While Intel showed this, Apple was currently selling iPhone 11s with processors that would clearly outpace this. The A13 has two large cores and four small cores, whereas either one of the large cores outperform the comparable 'Core' core in this, and I'm betting the smaller cores do as well, possibly at less power. Supposedly their ARM< Mac CPU is a 12 core architecture, I imagine with four large cores and 8 small cores. Thats a massive hardware difference...did I mention that the 12 core CPU is supposed to be build on TSMC's 5nm? Intel is trying to get current and honestly, maybe Apple will ship a Macbook Air with it.. but probably not.
The evidence of this is flimsy at best. It's possible the A13's big cores are faster than Intel's Sunny Cove, but also not very likely, and certainly not established fact. The only real evidence here is Geekbench, which is a highly questionable benchmark that also has extreme OS dependencies (compare results for the same CPU on Windows & Linux, for example).
When/if an Apple releases something running MacOS with their custom ARM cores then you'd finally get a good comparison to isolate the CPU's performance by itself.
We already knew what to expect from Intel Willow Cove, we will have to wait and see what A14 has in store for us.
So not as fast as the latest processors on a per core basis, but still pretty damn fast.
Can't really make assumptions, but you would think with the higher thermal envelope Apple can boost clock speeds making them even more competitive.
OS and compiler dependencies, really. On the other hand, comparing macOS and iOS results may well be more meaningful (they use the same compiler and much of the OS is shared, especially at layers likely to significantly affect performance).
Geekbench (v4 especially) is definitely flawed, but the results in this case don't seem out-of-line with what we see on specINT for example.
e.g., https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/15541405?baseli... comparing shows an A12X roughly matching a Sunny Cove 1060NG7 on single-thread performance (and it mostly follows where I'd expect Intel's strengths to be, with a wider vector unit and specialized instructions); in multi-thread performance the A12X unsurprisingly wins, but it also has double the number cores (okay, four of them are little, but that's still providing extra capacity to get work done).
I'm going to switch from a Pixel to an iPhone this year. The CPU is just clearly better, and seems to actually matter for taking photos and web browsing. (The Pixel still takes like 5 seconds to post-process a photo. iPhones do it instantly.)
Those "tests" almost invariably suck at measuring anything useful or being accurate.
The main area where normal people notice this is in web usage, where Mobile Safari has handily outpaced Android browsing for many years — see e.g. https://discuss.emberjs.com/t/why-was-ember-3x-5x-slower-on-... from 2014. How much that matters depends on how much a particular website is limited by single-core JavaScript performance — well-engineered sites probably don't have a huge impact but it's quite noticeable on anything which has a bloated SPA and the web has been moving in the latter direction for years.
Gaming is the other area where this is fairly noticeable but that varies both in where the bottlenecks are (CPU vs. GPU), how prominent the effect is, and the relative quality of the ports so it's harder to do a fair comparison.
I appreciate your effort with giving more background, although I think 2014 is a bit dated with Firefox Quantumn becoming more of a thing on Android. Can't remember if the Preview has it yet or not.
It also includes :AI:
The Pixel 4 has renamed it the "Pixel Neural Core" and has given it even more machine learning tasks and offloading such as Google Assistant and face unlock.
I just wanted a touch ID, notcheless, fast and current phone, and Apple did not offer one until recently.
I am not going back, and I am also now seeing the same thing with their laptops. Crappy keyboards, non optional and useless touch bars, low performance per dollar and software that gets in your way. No thanks. Windows 10, WSL, Surface Book/Go/Alienware, wow. Just good, open, usable stuff.
Literally phoning home every 2 mins:
Intel can’t meet deadlines which forces Apple to restructure their plans constantly.
We are on 14nm+++++ or something?
In 2008 Apple bought PA Semi to design processors for iOS, make processors for Macs is likely something they've been working on since way before Intel was late on 10nm.
It always seems like a good idea to do your own thing when your supplier is stumbling. The problem then is you're on your own. If they find their footing you're in trouble -- either you've blown a huge pile of money developing something which you then don't use because the competition has something better, or you use it anyway and get to relive the final days of Sun Microsystems.
And the same thing happens if anybody can beat you. If Intel can't but AMD does, you lose. If AMD can't but Qualcomm does, you lose.
Worse, success precipitates failure. If you make an in-house processor which is only a couple of percent faster, that's boring. You spend a lot for a little. If you make one which is more than a couple of percent faster, that's war. Intel can't have that. Google can't have that. Samsung can't have that. Microsoft can't have that. Even if you're bigger than any of them, you're not bigger than all of them. So they double their R&D, combine their resources, whatever it takes, and soon you're Sun Microsystems again.
https://www.gsmarena.com/benchmark-test.php3
I see a lot of Android devices at the top of those lists.
Apple likes to cherry pick. For example, they require everything on iOS to use their browser engine, then they spend a lot of time optimizing their browser engine for their CPUs. But that's not superior hardware performance, it's software optimization, which they could do with whichever commodity CPU they chose as well.
Intel does the same thing. They spend resources optimizing popular software for their CPUs. Qualcomm not so much.
it's not apple simply being control freaks (although they are and can afford to be), it's intel shooting it's own foot.
Yeah, Intel's chips are not the biggest fish in the Apple fish fry.
I'm not even an Apple customer, I'm just forced to use them by my employer. (And it feels like most employers nowadays.)
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/5/18251264/macbook-pro-2018-...
[2]: https://support.apple.com/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-recall
[3]: https://support.apple.com/13inch-macbookpro-battery-replacem...
[4]: https://thenextweb.com/apple/2016/10/27/cant-connect-new-mac...
[5]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/01/an-ode-to-apples-awful-mac...
[6]: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/7/3/18761691/right-to-rep...
¹I now limit my use of Apple keyboards to an absolute minimum.
Lakefield, Foveros, 10nm were suppose to arrive in 2018. And Apple would likely have known about this roadmap before that time.
Looks like there will be lots to unpack in WWDC, unfortunately it wont be a staged keynote like it used to.
*Edit: I wanted to add that I left about 2 years ago, and thought the project had been cancelled, along with so many other 10nm products.
Why left? If you dont mind sharing :)
Yes, BK was fired right around the time I gave my notice.
> Why left?
A lot of reasons that would sound like griping. I was recruited by Google for a similar job, but with a chance to build something from the ground up. That sounded like the adventure I was looking for, so I took the offer. I must say, it's been an adventure!
Thanks. I guess that does sums it up and align with lots of other similar sentiments I heard over the years.
Off Topic: I think we live in a world where we put too much emphasis on the positives and neglect any negativities. So we end up having any valid complains to be viewed as moaning or griping. I wish as a society there are better ways to handle these rather than simply ignoring it, which would leads to all sort of bad things happening as we seen in the world today.