M1 iPad Pro over 50% Faster Than Previous Generation in Early Benchmarks | Hacker News Reader

M1 iPad Pro over 50% Faster Than Previous Generation in Early Benchmarks

macrumors.com

33 pointstosh8 comments

Well considering the last one was already very powerful, that's really impressive. But the "desktop" experience is still quite lacking.

Someone speculated about jailbreaking these and running Mac OS on them, that would actually be pretty great for productivity.

But not exactly keeping up with Moore's Law, is it? (Or Dennard scaling, if you're a righteous nerd).

I remember when we yawned at any new CPU that wasn't at least 100% faster. Now 50% faster is "insanely great"?

Well, it could be worse. At least, we're no longer bedeviled by growing bloatware or slowing languages...

"50% faster in the same thermal and power envelope" has always been impressive. When CPUs were gaining 100% per year, they were often growing their power use just as fast, if not faster.

I don't think this is entirely true. (Although please let me know if I misunderstood your comment or if I'm wrong.) While it is true that CPUs' power usage increased significantly between the 1980s and 2006, I believe you were able to get much better performance "in the same thermal and power envelope" during that time period. There's two conflicting factors that made these energy efficiency gains less apparent in the market: power efficiency and power usage. Roughly until 2006, both Dennard Scaling and Moore's Law held, so you got ~2x performance efficiency (performance per watt/performance in the same thermal and power envelope) every 1.5 years. [1,2] Power consumption also increased at the same time [3], so you got both more performance in the same thermal and power envelope (useful for mobile/embedded chips) and greater power consumption (useful for desktop/server chips).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Relation_with_...

2. https://iscaconf.org/isca2018/docs/HennessyPattersonTuringLe... - slide 25

3. http://www.edwardbosworth.com/My5155_Slides/Chapter01/ThePow... - "Here is a Clue to the Problem" graph

I think at this point Apple should just do something similar to Samsung Dex and give you the choice of using macOS when you connect your iPad Pro to an external monitor.

I bet Xcode and possibly other pro apps are coming to iPad - probably will be announced at WWDC.

Xcode on iPad would look great and possibly draw many more professional app devs to the platform. But I just can’t see myself ever trying to develop seriously on an iPad.

I do primarily web development. With tools like Visual Studio Code Remote (see Github Codespaces), I can imagine a future where I run the code editor in Safari; the issue almost always comes back to debugging and dev tools, and I don't see those coming to iOS any time soon. :(

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