Apple A17 Pro SoC single-core benchmark score close to Intel i9-13900K,AMD 7950X

https://www.techspot.com/news/100160-apple-a17-pro-soc-single-core-benchmark-close.html

by thunderbong • 3 years ago

38 32 3 years ago

BearOso• 3 years ago

Of course. When you buy out all the capacity of the TSMC 3nm node for a year and use it to make huge, low-yield chips and charge a small fortune for them, you can get some performance advantages.

Intel's fabs are catching up, though, and have more money invested in them again. Ideally, we'll see a more competitive market soon.

brucethemoose27• 3 years ago

Another factor is that Apple designs big cores exclusively for consumer apps on iPhones. There is no compromise for server workloads, high clock targets, chips with modest die areas, slow memory, dies without efficiency cores, AI SIMD and so on.

I don't think any other company in the world can financially justify such a specialized big core, except maybe Samsung (who has failed in their ventures so far).

Kirby64• 3 years ago

Do they? It seems their system architecture between the A-series for phones and the M-series for their pads/laptops/etc is largely the same. It's certainly the same design facility.

ksec2• 3 years ago

use it to make huge, low-yield chips and charge a small fortune for them, you can get some performance advantages.

1. It is not huge, by CPU Core or by SoC Die Space.

2. It is not low-yield either.

3. Comparatively speaking, what Apple include their SoC as BOM / COGS isn't anywhere as high as Qualcomm charges, hardly a small fortune.

4. It is performing close but at a much lower wattage. That is not just coming from a node advancement but mostly microarchitecture.

hu3• 3 years ago

Do you have a source for these claims?

piinbinary• 3 years ago

That gives some hope that Moore's law isn't quite dead yet.

That said, the score came from Geekbench, which I believe isn't considered to be very representative of real application performance.

brucethemoose27• 3 years ago

Geekbench is not so bad, like Passmark or those SEO spam benchmark sites you see on Google.

But the best benchmark is always the apps you are CPU constrained in.

jychang• 3 years ago

The app that stresses my CPU the most is Geekbench lol

CamperBob2• 3 years ago

What are some of the criticisms against Passmark scores? I maintain some documentation that cites them as a basis for recommending PCs for specialized applications, so if that's a bad idea it'd be good to know.

agialignment• 3 years ago

mohrs law has been dramatically outpaced in the last 6 months are you serious?

biogene• 3 years ago

Is this peak or sustained? I can't imagine an SoC inside a water tight (IP68?) enclosure having better heat management.

kernal• 3 years ago

Of course it’s peak. The A series are notorious for throttling.

wtallis• 3 years ago

On single-core workloads?

Jtsummers• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37515625

Yesterday's discussion on this topic.

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

[dupe]

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37515625

Szpadel• 3 years ago

I'm curious if such great perf/watt is something that arm architecture is allowing or the same is possible in x86? if that's because of risc instruction set does it mean that riscv could achieve something similar in the future?

TylerE2• 3 years ago

I don’t think it’s risc-the-philosophy per se, but a difference of priority. X86 historically prioritized clock speed (ultimately culminating in the utter dead end that was Pentium 4).

Then Intel back tracked to The Core/iN/M series, which actually reverted to essentially an updated Pentium 3 design, and has focused on raw power, power draw, heat, and cost be damned.

ARM, in the other hand focused on power-per-watt from day 1.

My M1 studio, fully wide open, draws less than a quarter of what my old i7/3080 beat did at idle.

HumblyTossed• 3 years ago

Why does it matter in a phone? And please don’t say future proof. A lot of Apples newest software features are only available on the newer phones. Even though the older ones could easily handle it.

ellipticaldoor• 3 years ago

good question, this is so overkill for like most of the users

htk• 3 years ago

Online browsing for one. Gaming... If you don't think you'll profit from the performance, don't buy it.

Apple A17 Pro SoC single-core benchmark score close to Intel i9-13900K,AMD 7950X

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