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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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