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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the point of comparing an A12Z running x86-64 emulation to the Microsoft SQ1 processor which is also an ARM processor but nowhere as beefy as the A12Z. I am not familiar with the Surface Pro X but if Microsoft is doing x86-64 emulation on it I am not surprised it's not as fast as the A12Z.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-sq1-processor-su...

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It makes fans of Apple feel better about how much more superior their platform is over the others. That's mostly the gist of it in most of these debates - the comparisons are usually pretty meaningless and cherry-picked to make a writers favorite brand look better.

The more interesting comparison is just how much better the ARM macs will be from the x86 ones in comparable workloads and power consumption. Seeing the Apple ARM cores being able to show all they can with proper cooling and less power limitations is something we've been waiting for awhile.

I don't know how tongue-in-cheek that comment is but I am curious what the performance of these new ARM-powered Macs will be. I do photography on the side and Adobe Lightroom on the iPad Pro runs just about as fast (if not faster for some rendering and processing tasks) as it does on my MacBook Pro. How the heck this is possible is beyond me but it gives me hope that photo and video editing on an ARM-powered MacBook Pro could be faster, maybe even significantly faster, than my i9-powered MacBook Pro.

See my comment at the same level as yours. 2020 iPad Pro is about the same as an i7-7700k. It’s insanely fast at a much much much lower TDP.

It's true, but for some workloads.

I wonder, and I really wish it's gonna be a game changer, how well they will behave on jobs that go on for hours or days at full CPU load.

Agreed. I’m going to wait for someone else to find out that before me. My mac is mostly a terminal emulator though so I’m quite happy to lose some watts and not gain much for it.

Yes and no. It’s a confidence builder. A better comparison is an A12Z in an iPad Pro has similar synthetic benchmark result as an i7-7700k. And it feels like it in daily use. So when Apple drop desktops out with this class of CPU we’re not going to be left SOL with something as weak as a gnat’s fart.

I think what it really shows is that Microsoft hasn't put much effort into making their ARM cpu device competitive.

There will always be fanboys for Apple and anyone else, but this is effectively a 2 year old CPU winning on a benchmark where I don't think anyone thought it would. That suggests that when the real hardware comes out that it will make Microsoft's ARM efforts look downright anemic.

Of course, I might be wrong, but based on Apple's history, I think I'll be proven right by January.

This leads to the next question - why is Microsoft's device so slow? Are they doing this on purpose or due to a technical limitation? Or some other reason?

It's probably not fair to blame Microsoft for the performance of a chip developed by Qualcomm.

At one point Qualcomm developed it's own high performance custom ARM cores, but after a huge fumble on their transition to 64 bit, they just gave up and started licensing stock ARM cores.

ARM is getting ready to license a higher performance extra-big core to anyone interested, so there should be some movement there in the not too distant future.

However, you can definitely blame Microsoft for making a bad call on emulating legacy Win32 software.

They tried to transition to ARM based WindowsRT without supporting legacy x86 software at all. Even today, Windows on ARM doesn't support legacy x86 64 bit programs.

> they just gave up and started licensing stock ARM cores.

This is not correct. Their CPUs are heavily modified, just not very well executed.

The problem is that Qualcomm puts most its efforts on other parts of the soc, such as the stupid ML coprocessor. Now you have like 5-6 different DSP-like coprocessors.

Edit: oh, and 5G. They spent $$$$ to be the first with working 5G modems that nobody needs.

This seems to be a misunderstanding. Microsoft isn’t doing emulation. The iPad emulation of x86 on arm is faster than the surface arm without emulation.

This is a demonstration of how powerful Apple’s current silicon is in absolute terms, and it also shows that it can run x86 code at more than adequate speed for many use cases.

Not necessarily. The DTK is in a Mac Mini chassis so perhaps it simply has better cooling than the passively-cooled Surface X and therefore can run at higher power?

Other articles have shown that it is in fact under-clocked compared to the iPad.

You're still ignoring the cooling factor

Even if present, how much do you think that affects it, and how does it change the outcome?

I’d say not much, and not at all. Even if cooling is a factor the outcome still has the same meaning.

Apple silicon is way ahead, and emulation is excellent to the point of being a non-issue.

Cooling and power+thermal throttling are the limiting factor in many devices. A look at the overclocking tools for your platform will usually show what the limiting factor on clock speed is at a given moment, and it's usually either power or thermal in my experience.

A devkit that can supply more watts of electricity and remove more watts of heat would definitely have an advantage.

A most fair comparison would require using the same type of case, power, and cooling for both CPUs.

Sure but you are ignoring the disadvantage that the dev kit isn’t running native code.

And unfortunately we can't quantify that disadvantage without controlling for all the other variables.

Sure we can’t produce a precise number yet.

But we can clearly see the order of magnitude, and it is quite obviously impressive in both of the ways already stated.

iPads are faster than Mac mini’s even with the same thermal differential.

The thermal issue does nothing to dismiss this truth.

That Apple silicon is way ahead isn’t new: https://twitter.com/elkmovie/status/1174003718188142592

No. Apple’s SoC is far superior to whatever is in the Surface.

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