[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/21/21298607/first-arm-mac-ma...
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/12/ipad-pro-vs-macbook-air...
for instance: Integer WorkloadsLZMA CompressionLZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm) is a lossless compression algorithm. The algorithm uses a dictionary compression scheme (the dictionary size is variable and can be as large as 4GB). LZMA features a high compression ratio (higher than bzip2).The LZMA workload compresses and decompresses a 450KB HTML ebook using the LZMA compression algorithm. The workload uses the LZMA SDK for the implementation of the core LZMA algorithm.
They compress just 450KB of text as a benchmark - even the dict size is greater then the input. If both fits the CPU caches - the results are supreme, if not - horrible compared to the former. Also it'd vastly depend how fast the CPU can switch to full turbo mode (for servers that doesn't matter at all)
[0]: https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench4-cpu-workloads.pdf
I agree these benchmarks have issues, but there's a consistent trend (eg. AnandTech's SPEC results are similar—they use active cooling to avoid the question about thermals) and the most reliable benchmarks, like compilers, aren't outliers.
Doing the test below 4MB of L3 would hurt, doing with with less than 2MB would decimate the test.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3006268/tested-why-the-ipad-...
That's not true.
Could make the Macbook Pro the fastest laptop in some benchmarks while also offering more affordable options.
>Overall, in terms of performance, the A13 and the Lightning cores are extremely fast. In the mobile space, there’s really no competition as the A13 posts almost double the performance of the next best non-Apple SoC. The difference is a little bit less in the floating-point suite, but again we’re not expecting any proper competition for at least another 2-3 years, and Apple isn’t standing still either.
Last year I’ve noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still roughly 15% behind.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...
I think performance per watt is going to be just as important as overall performance. Apple's "little" cores were a new design in the A13, and compare very well against stock ARM cores on a performance per watt basis.
>In the face-off against a Cortex-A55 implementation such as on the Snapdragon 855, the new Thunder cores represent a 2.5-3x performance lead while at the same time using less than half the energy.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...
It will be interesting to see how much performance they can get when they are on a level playing field when it comes to power and cooling constraints.
We keep hearing this especially from the Apple-bubble blogs, yet why does it not translate into higher end work being done on these iPads if they are supposedly so powerful, yet all we ever see is digital painting work that isn't pushing it at all and extremely basic video editing.
Also good luck to Apple if they lock down macOS the same way.
They are locking down macOS gradually. Their hardware revenue is declining indefinitely and they know it. Their push is to lock down the software and reap a cut as much as they can.
Apple's particular ARM CPU core happens to look like a beast vs. Intel's particular x86 CPU core. But those are far from the only implementations. AMD's x86 is, at the moment, also very strong, and incredibly efficient. Lookup Zephyrus G14 reviews for example - the AMD 4800HS in that is crazy fast & efficient vs. comparable Intel laptops.
Similarly, lookup Apple A12/A13 vs. Qualcomm benchmarks - Snapdragon is also ARM, but it kinda sucks vs. Apple's A12/A13.
In terms of power realize that there's quite a bit of overlap here. Apple's big cores on the A13 pull about 5W. That's not really that different from X86 CPU cores at similar frequencies. The quad-core i5 in a macbook air, for example, pulls around 10w sustained. It's just a product design question on what the power draw stops at. More power = more performance, so usually if you can afford the power you spend it. So far there's been relatively little product overlap between x86 & ARM. Where there has been, like the recent ARM server push, power consumption differences tend to immediately go away. Laptops will be a _very_ interesting battle ground here, though, as differences get amplified.
Apple simply can't create any kind of x86 chip whatsoever (at least if they plan to use it :) ) - they don't have an ISA license and likely won't ever be able buy one, because Intel doesn't sell.
Well, apart from outright buying AMD. Or Intel. Or both. :)
Intel chips have basically stagnated for about 5 years and they abused their monopoly and market leader positioning by offering marginal improvements each year in order to protect margins, as well as fab shrink problems that insiders describe as coming from culture not dissimilar to Boeing; just with less lives at stake.
In the meantime, competitor foundries have caught up, and exceed Intel's ability to ship in volume. ARM obviously is eyeing the desktop, but more critically server market so the latest ARM IP is geared towards higher performance computing, quite well I may say.
State of the art fab + state of the art processor IP = state of the art processor. Not a huge surprise :)
Since normal processors calculate a lot of important things, I'm wondering if there really are fewer lives at stake. Of course it would be more indirect, but I could imagine that there are many areas where lives are tied to PCs doing the right thing.
E.g. what if a processor bug leads to security issues in hospital infrastructure.
I wouldn't imagine just upping the vcore and the frequency clock will just magically make it faster and compete at the same level as an intel chip.
I'm deeply skeptical as a developer, you -will- get compiler errors, and it's going to suck for a while.
Isn’t this the exact concept of the VAG EA888 motor used in the Audi A4 and extended all the way up to the S3?
That said, the rumored chip is an actively cooled 12 core 5nm part which is more like an RS3 motor with extra cores/ cylinders
I guess its all trust that Apple can pull it off and there's no detailed rumors yet?
Having said that, I think the top requirement for most laptops is that "it's gotta run what I need it to run on day one".
For a huge amount of light users, ARM Macs are going to satisfy that requirement easily.
Once you move up the food chain to users with more complicated requirements, however, it's less of a slam dunk... for the moment.
I had a friend with an old old powerbook and the key shape reminded me of a thinkpad.
They can do it, but the flat short throw keys are too form over function.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/MacBook_...
The 2016 keyboard fiasco was too far for me though, and even now with my 16" 2019 mac with the "fixed" keyboard, I still prefer the wireless 2014 model, or the KB from my 2014 MBP.
they WILL compete, and they've been playing leapfrog with AMD for years.
I'm waiting to see the intel response for the new 32 and 64 core chips from amd.
I'm guessing the switch is for those reasons, plus a more important one (my opinion only), control.
If they use their own chips, they're not stuck waiting on Intel (or any other x86 CPU manufacturer) to build CPUs that have the attributes that matter to them the most.
Yes they have. It's why we have 10+ hour thin & light laptops. The quad-core i5 in a macbook air runs at 10W, that's comparable per-core power draw to an A13.
Controlling the CPU will give Apple more controls to tune total-package power, particularly on the GPU / display side of things, but CPU compute efficiency isn't going to be radically different, and that's not going to translate into significant battery life differences, either, since the display, radios, etc... all vastly drown out low-utilization CPU power draw numbers.
Otherwise it's just fantasy sports.
This[1] claims ARM Macs will be unveiled today (Monday) at WWDC. I guess we'll see soon enough.
___
1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/21/21298607/first-arm-mac-ma...
Until we actually have details of Apple's implementations, there's no realistic way we can discuss
> how the new ARM-powered MacBooks will perform compared to the Intel-powered MacBooks
(Fun and potentially useful, if you want to plan ahead, play the market, and other causes...)
However, I can also see their chips outperforming Intel in sustained workloads. Apple has a history of crippling Intel performance by allowing the CPU to only run at full speed for a short while, quickly letting it ramp up the temperature before clocking down aggressively. Some of that is likely because of their power delivery system, some of it is because they choose to limit their cooling capacity to make their laptops make less noise or with fewer "unattractive" airholes. Either way, put the same chip in a Macbook and in a Windows laptop and the Windows laptop will run hotter but with better performance.
However, with a more efficient chip, Apple could allow their CPU to run at a higher frequency than Intel for longer, benefiting sustained workloads despite the IPC and frequency being lower on paper. This is especially important for devices like the Macbook Air, where they didn't even bother to connect a heatpipe to the CPU and aggressively limit the performance of their Intel chip.
I'd even consider the conspiracy theory that Apple has been limiting their mobile CPU performance for the last few years to allow for a smoother transition to ARM. If they can outperform their current lineup even slightly, they can claim to have beaten Intel and then make their cooling solution more efficient again.
It does appear to be a very poor thermal design, but you can see that most of the issues appear to be from trying to make the user not feel the heat.
It feels a bit icky to leave performance on the table like that; since you paid for a CPU and are getting a marginal performance from it. But I remember Jobs giving a talk before about how "Computers are tools, and people don't care if their tools give them all it can, they care if they can get their work done with them well"
That's not a defense of a shitty cooling solution, but it is a defence of why they power limit the chips. When I got my first (and only) Macbook in 2011, it had more than twice the real battery life of any machine on the market. That meant that I was _actually_ untethered. That's what I cared about at the time much more than how much CPU I was getting.
the vertices would be power, heat and perf.
Apple just hasn't shipped an arm chip with high power and "excessive" cooling.
The Windows laptop can't possibly run hotter than a Macbook, all of which reach the throttle temperature (~100 °C) almost instantly.
I actually agree to the artificially limited performance, artificially worsened thermals theory. The Macbook Air design is extremely fishy.
With a new A14 chip combined with intel stagnation, it wouldn't be too crazy to see a 50-100% increase, especially if you looked at multi-core scores.
What does that even mean? The Intel platform is running Android?
Linux: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2638097 Windows: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2635048
Geekbench is a terrible benchmark.
In my own personal experience, running Geekbench on many machines, Geekbench scores are pretty close running between Windows and Linux on the same machine. At least for compiling code (my main use for powerful machines), their compilation benchmark numbers also fairly closely match compilation times I observe.
Also first i7 chip was released in 2008. (The chip you refer to appears to be modern though, from 2018.)
To prevent any misunderstandings, I agree A13 has performance comparable to a modern laptop. I just don't think Geekbench is a right tool to measure that difference.
If this sounds like I'm saying it's apples (no pun intended) to oranges... that's pretty much the case. Apple is likey not going to produce an ARM chip in directly comparable fashion to an Intel chip. E.g. equal cache, memory bandwidth, TDP (using Intel calc method), PCI-e lanes etc. Mostly because it doesn't make sense to do so because Intel's chips are designed to be a component of the system while ARM chips are largely designed to be an SOC.
* They need to ramp the clockspeeds -- much easier to say than do.
* They need to include 256 or 512-bit SIMD operations without breaking the power budget.
* They need to design a consistent and fast RAM controller (and likely need to add extra channels)
* They need to integrate power-hungry USB4/thunderbolt into their system.
* They need to add a dozen extra PCIe 3 or 4 lanes without ballooning the power consumption.
* They need an interconnect (like QuickPath or HyperTransport/Infinity Fabric) so all these things can communicate.
These are the hard issues that Intel, AMD, IBM, etc all must deal with and form a much bigger piece of the puzzle than the CPU cores themselves when dealing with high-performance systems.
The access to iOS and macOS means that they can profile every single app everyone runs and improve real-world performance, and they do.
If you are a company that supplies anything (software or hardware) to Apple or Amazon, and you are operating on >20% gross margins, Apple and Amazon will destroy you, and destroy your margins. You have to continuously innovate and can't just relax and chill and collect your margins, like Intel has been doing for the past 5 years, milking their advantage that has evaporated.
Other than the modem, I don't think there's a component on the latest iPhones that has more than 20% margins for the supplier. Apple is ruthless. So is Amazon, when it comes to fulfilment.
Apple is using the same fabrication process as everyone else in a mature industy. There simply isn't 2x improvement possible unless everyone else was staggeringly inconpetent. Imagine Apple decided to build their own car, and made their own electric motors. Would you believe claims that their motors are 2x as efficient?
Single core performance is currently doubling every five years or so. We’re not about to see it double in the next 24 hours.
there is a time-honored way to do exactly that.
Constrain the comparison.
"Double the performance" (of $899 to $901 laptops with 2560x1440 resolution)
"Twice as fast" (as all laptops with thunderbolt 3 and no sd card reader)
Apple's ARM chips probably perform much better than reference ARM chips because they are much closer to the micro architecture that Intel uses. But Apple's chips still consume less power than Intel chips used in laptops. The secret sauce is probably the fact that the SoC has cores with different performance and power profiles. Big cores are used for peak performance bursts and lots of small cores for energy efficiency while the device is waiting for user input.
I think Geekbench is measuring peak performance and not sustained performance but the numbers are probably correct. Making a representative comparison between mobile devices and desktops isn't possible because their different thermal profiles but it's highly likely that Apple will go for a passively cooled design if they can.
Yeah, until they put the same chip, or better in a laptop envelope. Then what for Intel?
This was from 2016. People being surprised by this haven't been paying attention to where this was going:
https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/221881-apples-a9x-goes-he...
Also, I said it many times before, Intel trying to be as misleading as possible with the performance of its chips, such as renaming Intel Atom chips to "Intel Celeron/Pentium" and renaming the much weaker Core-M/Y-Series (the same chips used in Macbook Air for the past few years) as "Core i5" is going to bite them hard in the ass, when Apple's chips are going to show that they can beat "Intel Core i5". But Intel kept making this worse with each generation.
https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/intel-renames-core-m-core...
Maybe I'm spoiled because my development is mostly java, python, Go, docker, etc, all of which should have no runtime problem.
In terms of IDE, It looks like vscode is ported which is great.
I see two projects in my workflow: intellij and iterm2. I can live with a vanilla terminal but I'll need intellij. It looks like there's some[1] discussion around support.
1. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/commit/db531...
It’s no stretch to say that iTerm 2 is a major one of the reasons I cannot stand desktop Linux (or Windows, even with the new terminal there).
https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_46#_windows-arm64-i...
EDIT: It works great, and it has remote for ssh and wsl!!! This made my day!
The biggest potential issue will be how people get hardware for doing the builds. Hopefully Apple will provide a good way of cross-compiling or a new machine that is suitable for datacenter deployment (ARM based mac mini?). We'll have to wait for the WWDC announcement to find out.
Outdated information: Windows on ARM requires you to build UWP apps which is more work than just a recompile.