The Macbooks will have a CPU that's comparable or better than the iPad Pro. The iPad Pro already beats the Macbook Pro in some well-known benchmarks, such as Geekbench.
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/12/ipad-pro-vs-macbook-air...
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/12/ipad-pro-vs-macbook-air...
>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.
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.
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.
Could make the Macbook Pro the fastest laptop in some benchmarks while also offering more affordable options.
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. :)