Apple's A18 Pro chip in iPhone 16 Pro has faster CPU than 6GHz Intel i9-14900K | Hacker News Reader

Apple's A18 Pro chip in iPhone 16 Pro has faster CPU than 6GHz Intel i9-14900K

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27 pointsretskrad18 comments

In single core performance. Still very impressive given the clock speed gap and power usage gap.

The power usage gap is much less in single-threaded tasks, than the gap between the nominal TDPs of the CPUs.

A desktop CPU at 5 to 6 GHz in single-threaded mode has a power consumption in the range of 20 W to 30 W per core.

I do not know about the latest Apple CPU, but for the older Apple smartphone CPUs the power consumption in single-threaded mode was between 4 W and 5 W per core, similar to the power consumption of an Intel or AMD CPU core when running at clock frequencies between 3 GHz and 4 GHz.

The engineering samples of Arrow Lake S running at 5.7 GHz have demonstrated slightly higher ST GB6 scores (e.g. 3450), while AMD 9950X at 5.7 GHz has demonstrated ST GB6 scores insignificantly lower (e.g. 3418).

For all practical purposes, it can be considered that the current desktop CPUs of Intel and AMD (Arrow Lake S with Lion Cove cores, e.g. 285K, and Granite Ridge with Zen 5 cores, e.g. 9950X) and the new Apple A18 Pro CPUs have the same single thread speed, because the differences between them do not exceed 1%.

Of course, it is very impressive that Apple's smartphone CPU matches the single-thread speed of the desktop CPUs, but for multithreaded applications the performance depends very little on microarchitecture and it is mostly determined by the CMOS manufacturing process and by the configured power limits, so there no smartphone CPU can approach the throughput of a desktop CPU.

Single core performance is why people have bought Intel over AMD historically

And got burned.

Just count the instances of svchost.exe on your computer.

Can we make the title less sensational and clickbait-y please?

CPU -> CPU core in Geekbench

Sprinters who run very fast at the start of a race are technically faster at measurement time than a marathon runner who paces themselves over a prolonged period, despite finishing ahead of the sprinter at the finish line.

Isn’t it fun to measure things and create feel good narratives when it’s advantageous to your plot?

This seems a tad defensive, very ra ra go team. Can't we all celebrate a step forward in computing technology?

We can do both?

This benchmark is very sensationalized, I don’t get the intention here other than trying to get engagement (positive or defensive otherwise).

Where is the catch?

The catch is that it's a mobile processor with very limited cooling so it's only good for bursty loads. Which happens to be a good fit for the kind of stuff people do on phones.

If you're in Lightroom all day, or compiling code all day, the Intel chip is probably faster.

"Which happens to be a good fit for the kind of stuff people do on phones."

reminds that my pixel pro cpu shutsdown if I have a whatsapp video call longer than 20min in 40C.

The desktop version of this processor will be announced in a month or so.

It will have proper cooling and a higher TDP.

Will be interesting to compare it for sure!

Is that a real catch, though? The intel chip requires good cooling too to perform well, doesn't it?

Maybe is the Apple's chip more limited in multithread tasks vs Intel's one

> Apple's chip more limited in multithread tasks

It would several times slower, yes

if its sounds too good to be true ...

Nothing stops Intel or AMD from building on ARM cores and bolting on ASICs to improve efficiency. They just choose not to...for now.

Why do you think switching to ARM would help? That’s just an implementation detail..

> Nothing stops Intel or AMD from building on ARM cores

Is there any ARM version of PSpice ? The Intel version sucks big time but, who knows, maybe ARM is the future. /s

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