A20 Pro vs Intel Ultra 7 Series 3
I hope everyone reading this realizes that score chart is misleading at best.
They failed to point out clearly in the posted image in OP that the scores are for burst compute. As in, if the chip sustained that workload for more than a few seconds it would fry itself.
Taken out of context, everything can be impressive. That title is really, really misleading.
Even as someone who despises Apple for their product philosophy, I gotta admit their new chips are baller… Lots of undeserved hate in this thread
No iCrap gets the hate well deserved. They torpedo their own products.
The chips are good but the company can go fuck itself
I have had a similar mentality for a long time. I don’t like the company or the philosophy, but the HW they make is pretty sick. That’s why when I was finishing university, I bought an iPad for note taking and such. It was just a well made device. However I stopped using it after grad, so sold it to a friend.
They probably optimize for the benchmark… It’s not uncommon
The benchmark itself measures burst compute.
For any sort of sustained workload it’s nowhere near laptops, let alone near desktops.
The whole post, and especially the title and image, are misleading.
It generally is with Apple
I used to sell their gear, and there was always a lot of shitty comparisons and even boasting about things that existed on the competition, but they just didn’t advertise it (because they had it so long)
I don’t really like geekbench. It always feels like it favors apple devices.
Sometimes companies build product to get high scores, rather than to work well in real settings.
Apple has done a remarkable job with their silicon though.
I got an used M1 2020 MacBook Air (base model, no upgrades) back in 2023 and that thing is still going strong. Doesn’t feel slow at all. Not even slightly.
I got a used 2010 thinkpad and it doesn’t feel slow at all (I play solitaire and browse the web on it on Linux Mint)
I think I need not explain the parallel here, right?
Yep, still using my M1 MacBook air as well. Amazing that when I got it it was $800, and it performs just as well if not slightly better than the new Macbook Neo.
I bought an M1 MacBook Air as my first Apple Silicon Mac when they hit the market (longtime Mac user, so direct comparison to Intel Macs). It blew me away. Still have it, despite replacing it with a MBP. At this point, it’s the extra screen off to the side playing videos while I nerd out in my office, though it can do much more.
My kid made a 5 minute short in Blender over the summer on an M1 2020 Air. He only used basic textures but was able to render the thing, create the “score”, and then packaged it all together in iMovie all on that little machine. Blew me away given I was only using it to stream shows and surf the ‘net (as we used to say in the older days). Best little laptop ever. Just waiting on that Linux distro….
And can do that for two seconds before throttling.
I’m not familiar with GeekBench, but I assume that, as with benchmarking software that Ilve used in the past, its benchmark runs for more than two seconds to help make numbers reproducible.
Well if Hitler made universal healthcare for all I’d be very wary as well
If Jack’s beanstalk went sideways we could all have grapefruit with our steak
Sir I think you’re lost this is a Wendy’s.
Wtf
Don’t worry guys, we’ll get a RISC-V device that blows Apple ARM out of the water any second now.
Annnnyyy second now…
They always do this comparison and it is always misleading. They are the first to get a processor on the new TSMC node, so of course the processor will be faster.
Okay, but that Intel CPU was part of the first family of CPUs on Intel’s equivalent node (18A) too. If nothing else, it serves as an interesting Intel vs TSMC lithography comparison. Which one would expect TSMC to win anyway, but at least now we have numbers.
They’re the first to get the fastest chips, so saying their chips are the fastest is… misleading? But also “of course” it’s true?
I’m confused.
I don’t think anybody was misled into thinking it meant this chip would always be the fastest on the market.
Saying the first new CPU on a new node is fastest is uninteresting from a technical standpoint, as there isn’t any competition yet, even if it is not inaccurate.
The average consumer doesn’t care why it’s the fastest. For a time, they’ll have a faster chip than their peers. Only people on Lemmy would say “yeah but that’s only because new nm process, so it doesn’t count!”
If the conversation is between chip manufacturers talking shop, that matters. For everyone else, it’s irrelevant.
For even a semi-informed user, it matters. E.g. you can buy the fastest processor (in this single benchmark, which might be or not be important to you) in a Macbook Pro from Apple for $3000. But knowing that this is only because of the 2nm TSMC node that Apple got first, but Qualcomm, AMD, etc. will also get very soon (a few months), means that you probably will be able to buy an even faster chip in a laptop with Windows or Linux for $2000. Which, depending on what you plan to use the PC, might be just as viable to you.
So I would say it IS important to users to know the facts of the situation in order to make an informed decision on their next purchase.
Wouldn’t that always be the case though? If you wait until next year you will always be able to buy a faster and better computer. It will likely cost more as well. Seem like if you want the ‘fastest’ now, you’d buy something with the A20 pro, but hey tomorrow someone else may come out with something faster.
All of this performance is wasted on Apple’s closed hardware and OS. What a shame.
Yes this right here the context the people are actually missing is that these trips are going to be proprietary to Apple products.
The last Apple product that I purchased was a iPod mini in 2008.
On the iPhone, sure, but it would be equally wasted on Android phones because who needs this much performance in a phone anyway. However, I expect them to also use it in next year’s Macbook Neo, which is a surprisingly capable laptop for its price with even the A18 Pro chip. It also bodes well for the next generation of their M series chips if the A20 Pro is this fast… and there are TONS of people using Macs for real work. Code compilation in particular got super fast with the M1 Pro and I believe it’s great for creative applications too, though I haven’t really used those much myself. Creatives types gravitated towards MacOS even before Apple Silicon, especially video editors because of Final Cut Pro.
The more performant the chips, the more you can downclock them (or the faster they finish their tasks), the less battery they use
It should in theory be good for battery life
Theyre wasted on ipads with iPadOS too, maybe even more so than on iOS
I believe the power can be used with Android’s Desktop Mode, or even Android’s current multitasking capabilities like multi-window and pop-up window.
It’s also unfortunate timing. The most valued chips these days are the ones with high parallelism, for AI performance. If Apple turned its eye to GPUs, maybe they could challenge Nvidia.
Their iGPUs have serious performance, but it doesn’t matter because they insist on stupid proprietary APIs that no real developer bothers to write software for.
If we’re talking about AI performance the software is there, and models often get ported to MLX.
More cats in my dwarf fortress are never wasted.
Honestly, DF was the last time i thought about single core performance.
Cats are the best source of soap in DF :)
I think Minecraft is single-threaded
Hasn’t really been for years, and minecraft isn’t a terribly hard game to run anymore anyway.
With the new vibrant visuals and ray tracing features on bedrock, midrange devices cannot keep up.
Those are both GPU-dependent, and certainly not single-threaded.
Not sure, if it is a GPU problem only then it will just be FPS drops. But for my case, the game freezes at specific intervals and doesn’t do any thing even if I tap anywhere on the screen. It may sometimes be even playing (the graphics) but I can’t change items, probably because the CPU cannot handle something somewhere.
I don´t know what that total freeze is about, but I suspect it’s something other than being behind on processing instructions. Does it only happen in wide open areas where you can see to the horizon? That’s the only time Minecraft used to get laggy for me and I´d lower the draw distance and it would be better.
It’s honestly amazing what these chips can do.
Unfortunately it’s stuck behind the Apple ecosystem.
Linux is inevitable
Apple will fight it with everything they can. Latest MacOS27 hides linux partitions from the bootpicker so it is blocked in firmware.
If Apple didn’t want to allow Linux to boot they would have removed the functionality they specifically put into the firmware to allow Linux to boot.
Not exactly, the bootpicker just won’t show partitions that are not flagged as bootable. This is a departure from previous versions, that would check to see whether partitions were bootable without looking at the flag, and took a little bit of investigating to figure out this undocumented behavior, but it is an easy fix:
deleted by creator
Slop
ARM64 cucks X86_64???
And yet, it can’t (be made to) run a full desktop OS or play AAA games. But you can personalise the Siri voice (older phones can do the conversational stuff)… maybe edit photos faster.
Apple went and made a phone you could use for ten years, but next year they’ll be telling you why their new phone is so much better than the last one. They don’t expect you to upgrade every year, but they expect you to want to, and after a couple of generations, they want you to think that you have to.
I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max (2024), and the 18 Pro/Max presentation definitely gave me a bit of phone envy. But I also have a Galaxy S10 (2019), and that does a few things better than the iPhone, even though it’s 5 years difference between them. Apple’s keyboard likes to hallucinate weird results (like changing out common words for names of people I don’t even have in contacts) and edit after the fact. Gboard just works. When it doesn’t, the mistake makes sense (if and of for example). Also, I’ve used the same wallpaper on both phones. It always looks better on the Samsung. Sharper colors and contrast. Hold both up and ask anyone which looks better, they’re gonna point to the Samsung, even if you turn the iPhone’s brightness up all the way.
Phone manufacturers are desperately trying to convince you that you need the latest and greatest. You don’t — unless you want to do AI stuff. And even then, they’re going to charge you for it. And they’re sure you’ll pay, because you’ve already shown your hand by opening your wallet again.
And yet, it can’t (be made to) run a full desktop OS
I’m not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but you do realize the MacBook Neo running the desktop macOS is using the A18 Pro, right? The A20 is an iteration on the same design and will likely end up in the next MacBook Neo.
I think OPs point is not that it’s unable to, is that Apple won’t let it
“Won’t let it” by putting it in a Macbook and running MacOS on it?
As in you plug your phone into a monitor and it becomes a fully fledged desktop running MacOS, and you don’t have to buy a 2nd device from Apple.
Edit: Like Samsung DEX
Who said anything anything phones specifically? You pulled some random criterion out of your ass.
And by this logic, Google also doesn’t let you run desktop OSes on phone CPUs, because their phones don’t do some random thing that you saw somewhere.
Apple intentionally limits what features iOS and ‘iPadOS’ have versus macOS to sell as many devices as possible. An alternate reality where Apple were consumer-friendly would converge all three operating systems into one, with a limited feature set on smaller screens that expands into the full feature set if connected to an external monitor with a docking adapter.
And Android is as full-featured as a desktop?
Jobs was pretty much describing iPad as what computers would be like ‘in the future’ in interviews in the eighties. It was his vision for ages. IPhones and iPads allowed more people to use computers than all desktop OSes combined.
And again, what does this have to do with the processor? You people just jump at any opportunity to mention how you hate Apple?
They could even sell a laptop shell that connects with the phone so you don’t pay for the phone internals twice except the shell having a 2nd battery for the bigger display. The shell could then survive for an even longer time than a regular laptop as the internals keep getting upgraded via the phone instead of a whole new laptop.
Dex is a really neat concept, but ultimately sucks ass.
Maybe the duo will baby step us towards that. But even iPad OS which supports this for years is rough.
Have you tried the newer one built into AOSP yet? Is that one any better?
It’s been a year or two since I tried it last. Are current Samsung phones using dex or the AOSP one? Or does the Pixel 9a running Graphene OS support it?
It appears OP wasn’t clear they were talking about a phone using the A20 SoC, their message was a direct reply to the article posted which was about the A20 Pro itself and not any particular phone using it. Hence my reply which was also about the A20 SoC and not any particular phone.
I stand behind what I said: The A20 Pro will likely end up in a future MacBook, where it will definitely be running the desktop macOS.
Now, the fact that desktop macOS is becoming more and more like iPadOS/iOS is a discussion for another thread ;-)
I don’t really see how you can read that post and not see they were talking about phones, but you are right that the A20 Pro will almost certainly show up in a MacBook Neo successor at some point.
Edit: And what do you think the benchmark was run on? It was a phone.
Plus, if game developers targeted ARM instead of x86, im sure their games would actually run great on those A20s, but they’re probably not going to make an ARM version of their game.
I don’t think triple-A is meant to run on those chips in anything but low at 1080p60. Not even double-A
The A20 could theoretically handle 4K gaming. Just depends on the game developer. The iPhone 18 Pro has 7 GPU cores, and it has about 12GB unified RAM to share between the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine.
Plus the ARM instructuin set is a bit more modern, so there is probably performance gains to be had that x86 couldnt handle
For any games running on phones with those A20s, they’re already compiling for ARM.
For anything that gets an official MacOS release, they’re probably targeting ARM at this point and soon they’ll have to. Rosetta 2 support is getting dropped next year (supposedly a limited subset of Rosetta 2 will stay around for old x86 games).
Doesn’t mean anything currently running an A20 can run a desktop OS. Point still stands.
We’ll see what the next Neo runs and how when it releases. The A18 Pro in the Neo is what’s in my phone and it’s said to be between M1 and M2.
I’m doing just fine by not looking at new phones as long as my current one works - ignorance is bliss.
This is where I stand.
I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max (2024), and the 18 Pro/Max presentation definitely gave me a bit of phone envy.
I have a 16 base… and I didn’t raise an eyebrow. What kind of app running can a 18 do that a 16 can’t, other than whatever is self inflicted with software bloat?
A LOFIC camera would have gotten me interested, but they didn’t ship that.
Battery life is the only thing I’m interested in. Not only does the 18 perform great, but it gets insane battery too.
I’m not buying it because no SIM card slot, but it does have me interested.
I think physical SIM slots are probably done for, why add more hardware that is “unnecessary” now?
Because not all carriers easily support esim. Last I was in Costa Rica maybe 1 carrier supported esim for prepaid lines, but will the employee at the store know how to set that up? Physical sim? Yeah, they’ll do it in a minute or two. I guess the 18 will force them to learn, but in some fuck ass small town how many people are rocking an iphone 18 and a prepaid line?
I’d love to get a phone that supports mmwave 5g, but the freedom of physical sim is well worth it. Also I spent a fuck ton importing this 15 pro, I’m not just chucking it willy nilly.
This does indeed get better every generation.
I suppose the 16 hit the point of diminishing returns, for me. It lasts all day, even when busy on vacation or something, though I acknowledge that’s entirely dependent on one’s usage.
As someone forced to use a spare iPhone for WhatsApp because they flagged my account and I can’t use it on my GrapheneOS phone… That iOS keyboard is an absolute, borderline unusable, piece of shit. That “feature” where tapping the top bar scrolls you up can absolutely go eat shit as well. How is that a feature on a phone that puts the back button right below that functionality??? I ALWAYS scroll up first before tapping out of a chat on WhatsApp, its unbelievably infuriating UX.
The hardware could be a miraculous tech from a utopian future but if it runs proprietary apple software I really couldn’t care less.
Tapping the top to go up was great in Apollo, a Reddit client, but the guy took it a step further, tap again to go right back to where you were. Otherwise agree, it’s a good idea but it’s not explained (at all) and it can get in the way.
I got you beat though: by default, iPhone has a feature called “shake to undo”. It’s very sensitive. One of the first things I disabled. I mean you hit a speed bump (as a passenger) and everything you typed is just gone.
I got an S22+ in 2022, I bought the flagship thinking I’d keep it for at least five years. As far as I can tell there is still next to no reason to upgrade.
Your only real reason to upgrade if the phone is still perfectly good is that you’ll stop getting security updates in 5 months (at least that’s how it’s been scheduled by Samsung). A shame because any 2022 flagship is bound to still have solid performance for pretty much any use case I could think of (except maybe high-end games? Who runs those on a phone anyway?)
You’d possibly get an extra year or 2 likely next time with an iPhone (historically longest major version support + sometimes abnormally long security update support, the 2015 iPhone 6s still got security updates until May this year), but there’s no guarantee and if you prefer Android, Samsung’s up to 7 years of promised security updates now for the latest flagships, as is Pixel and if you’re on a popular model unlockable phone, you can go way beyond that with custom ROMs. Samsung doesn’t allow unlocking all of their phones, but if yours is unlockable, you may yet use it for several more years if you so desire. Phones are pretty damn expensive, even moreso now, custom ROMs are great to further increase device lifespan if you can use them.
I’ll take a look into the custom ROM. Thanks for the info!
One of the big reasons for getting a new phone when I bought was the years of security updates.
My wife has an S22. Literally the only problem is the lack of storage. Losing the memory card slot was a mistake. My S10 is her old one. I stuck a 256GB SD card in it and now it has whatever that plus 128GB is. It’s the second most spacious phone I’ve used after my 512GB iPhone.
The move was to self-host storage. I moved my drive backups to a NAS and now it doesn’t matter how much storage the phone has. It can send anything I want to conserve or fetch whatever I need to use. It is a phone, it’s biggest strength is mobile connectivity, so it doesn’t need to have all the storage on device. Plus I can upgrade the NAS as needed and use it for other stuff.
Memory hasn’t been an issue for me (256 gb), but that is more of a personal use thing. I dont use the camera much, and don’t keep video or audio books on my phone
I would be so much more interested in phones if I could run Debian on them. Check out my proxmox server rack, its a pile of every phone I could acquire from friends throwing out old phones! Between them they run 20 factorio servers with clusterio.
Apple’s keyboard likes to hallucinate weird results (like changing out common words for names of people I don’t even have in contacts) and edit after the fact.
Never seen that on any of the iPhones in my family, and never heard of that happening on any of my friend’s iPhones despite being the usual tech help contact for them. And this is going back to 2012.
Maybe take it to a Genius Bar and have them correct whatever strange problem that is.
Because that kind of behaviour is extremely unusual.
I had this issue during the very short time I had AI enabled on my iPhone. Autocorrect went INSANE. It was miserable.
I turned AI features all off and autocorrect went back to being serviceable; I don’t have any issues now other than typing on a screen sucks compared to a physical keyboard.
I had AI enabled on my iPhone.
Oooohhhh… maybe that’s where the problem is coming from.
I work in pretty much all sectors of IT, and while I am cautiously optimistic about AI, it was a steaming pile of bullshit when it was first included and it’s still largely unusable/untrustable now. So I have always had it turned firmly OFF for myself, my family, and strongly recommended it for everyone else I helped.
Besides, I’ve noticed that not many people outside of the techbro scene actually want AI. It’s invariably crammed down their howling piehole without their desire or consent.
Kinda unrelated, but ive had issues with the google keyboard doing things like me typing the word four, and autocorrect deciding I wanted to write your or hour or similarly close word before and replacing it as I move onto the next word. Drives me nuts when it happens.
I don’t think it is. The keyboard was awful on every iPhone I’ve had. I always switched to gboard instead because of it.
Everyone I know with an iPhone has this issue. The iPhone keyboard is known to be one of the worst in the industry.
iOS has been doing that for a few years for me. Word or phrase that seems perfectly fine? Nah. Also the auto fill thing keeps trying to change and to Andrew. No I’m not talking about Andrew 24/7
I have no clue what’s up with auto correct.
Actually insane they are beating desktop processors with a phone CPU.
Not that crazy to beat a desktop CPU in specific category like this. This article went off the deep end when they made the comparison to the Huawei CPU. If you actually put one of these in a phone and spent any amount of time getting the kind of performance they’re claiming it would almost immediately thermal throttle or cook itself. These comparisons are pointless.
having a high peak performance means you can underclock it, giving it less energy to get the same performance as before with less heat, meaning at the thermal throttle point it is that much faster than before
Exactly what I wanted to say. On paper my pixel 1 was significantly faster then my pc at the time, an ancient core2quad q8400. In a lot of ways the phone did feel faster, then I tried to decompress a large 7z file on both of them and,despite using a mechanical hard drive, my pc took just over half as long.
Now overall, there were a lot of things that chip could manage better than my desktop but the point is that using a single benchmark or benchmark suite that leans into the strengths of the hardware is pointless.
These “benchmarks” are great for marketing, so not pointless. Just pointless for users.
pointless for users.
So it’s just pointless
Toms Hardware is a corporate propaganda op anyway.
Yep, synthetic benchmarks aren’t worth much outside of theoretical performance. Test a complete system as you can actually buy it and with an actual real-life workload - i’m sure the performance will still be good, but nowhere this outstanding.
Edit: that doesn’t even take into account the amount of times companies have been caught cheating on those tests, which is only possible because they are not a real life scenario
Core Ultra 7 355 is a mobile (laptop) CPU, with a nominal power draw of 25W and a base clock speed of 2.3GHz.
Yeah that’s a different goalpost, but it’s still nuts.
Eh, it’s 2 years newer than the AMD architecture, on a better node, and has better memory packaging. I mean it’s great they’re getting this performance, but wait until Zen 6 for a contemporary architecture and node comparison.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills every time Apple releases a CPU. Their designs are good but most of it is the new TSMC node they use. When others get access to the node the difference is not that large but then the cycle starts again.
Except they aren’t, outside of synthetic geekbench benchmark that is designed to produce this exact result…
Geekbench is basically known for favoring Apple. It’s the consumer pc equivalent of “my dad can beat up your dad” because it is all made up and not real.
Yes, geekbench numbers are completely meaningless and do not reflect reality
Unironically, yes. Especially when one is ARM and one is X86.
That would be crazy indeed and might be possible, but the CPU they compared against is a mobile CPU (Intel Core Ultra 355 that is).
Yeah they have to distribute all that compute for a reason.
What do you mean?
You don’t own your iPhone, and you def ass don’t own the baseband chipset.
Are you saying that there’s a conspiracy to build a giant distributed compute engine using our phones?
What are they using it for?
Middle out compression.
…and I can prove it!
Fam lookup TEE designs and all of the camera based processing that everyone is doing inherently. Then remove the TEE part.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_execution_environment
What does that stand for? I literally can’t look that up, all I get is t-shirts with phones on them, no matter how many apparel-related keywords I tell it to ignore
Edit: I see your reply to that other comment,
I dont get your original comment though:
Yeah they have to distribute all that compute for a reason.
The comparison that matters is always left out. Computing performance by dollar cost.
It does matter but performance per currency alone is also kinda shit of a metric too. Might point you towards getting like 50 atom CPUs but then good luck finding memory for all of them to do anything useful.
Better to show performance between each and then list the cost to let the user decide if it is worth it. Make your charts between hardware in set price ranges is also pretty good.
Even higher, since those Apple silicon chips are very efficient.
You misread. OP mentioned price/performance, and I think you’re referring to performance/watt.
Oh, you mean the upfront price per chip, not the operating cost. Funny enough, the A20 chips are no more expensive (and possibly cheaper) than their Intel and AMD counterparts. The main issue is that the A20 is locked inside an iPhone, which is overpriced.
You can’t buy them standalone. There’s no way to compare them.
but can it run linux and real software? what would I want more powerful cpu for if not linux server?
Apple silicon still only supports Apple’s proprietary operating systems but you can run Linux in a virtual machine or use Asahi which is still not recommended for daily use.
