A11 Bionic Chip in iPhone 8 and iPhone X on Par With 13-Inch MacBook Pro, Outperforms iPad Pro

[Phonephreak]

So it really smoked all android devices out there, poor Samsung

This seems to be the biggest problem on the forum. The topic has nothing to do with Samsung but some people always feel the need to bash another company. Member always complain about apple bashing but are so quick to bash other companies.

I have a 7+ and a original iPad Pro 12.9 and love them. Probably would never change to android but that’s not impossible.

 

[Jsameds]

1.1% with my other phone ..the S8+. I can do math too.

Isn't it funny that the only metric you care about is the most useless one of them all.

 

[robeddie]

Apple's advancement in SoC development is the reason why your daughter can use such an old iPhone. The A11 will last a very long time as well.

Huh? What does a super fast iphone 8 have to do with how long my daughter can use her iphone 5? I'm not following.

 

[cgsnipinva]

But that’s the issue.. iOS and even most third party apps aren’t maximising the chip’s ability. What needs attention is, software..the hardware has already been quite advanced for a while now.

Now this is a valid point --- Apple needs to consolidate its internal activities into a Software Division. I think the updates to iOS11 show they recognize the need to do this. The recent spate of updates to iWork and iLife apps shows this as well. But they need to do more to exploit the power of the hardware they are developing.

That being said - this thread is about their new chip and by any standards -- they are doing a great job developing it.

Now lets see some weight behind the software.

 

[AdonisSMU]

This seems to be the biggest problem on the forum. The topic has nothing to do with Samsung but some people always feel the need to bash another company. Member always complain about apple bashing but are so quick to bash other companies.

I have a 7+ and a original iPad Pro 12.9 and live them. Probably would never change to android but that’s not impossible.

Its an Apple forum. What did you expect on a Apple site with paid Samsung trolls posting? Apples perf is great. Samsung is not. People are going to bring it up.

 

[tann]

Would be cool if we could utilise this in a desktop environment through a dock if some sort. Almost feels like a waste!

 

[Delgibbons]

Would be cool if we could utilise this in a desktop environment through a dock if some sort. Almost feels like a waste!

An "Apple Dex" if you will

Cool idea.

 

[Hattig]

Are you serious? It's a tiny pocket device with no fans. It'll never catch up with a laptop, let alone a desktop computer. It may feel as fluid, but it doesn't mean it's as fast. It has much fewer pixels to drive to begin with. My iMac drives 14.6 million pixels, a phone is usually 1080 at best.

Indeed. But you wouldn't put the A11 as-is into a laptop.

You would likely design a new chip for the desktop/laptop devices, that incorporates a more suitable set of hardware, and had a higher TDP. Say 4+4 cores instead of 2+4, at higher speeds, with more PCIe, a more powerful GPU that could power 3 4K displays (internal and 2 over USB3/Thunderbolt), and other features suitable for laptop/desktop use. Yes, it would be a lot larger, and probably not so viable on current 10nm processes that Apple is using, but next year it may be reasonable. Or they'll wait for 7nm, or a little longer and have a chiplet SoC/SiP if they're working on this technology...

Indeed the biggest issue is Thunderbolt compatibility. I don't know if it's opening up anytime soon.

 

[Phonephreak]

Its an Apple forum. What did you expect on a Apple site with paid Samsung trolls posting? Apples perf is great. Samsung is not. People are going to bring it up.

Ca you provide a source for the paid troll comment? Very curious about this. If it’s true does Apple pay trolls on the android boards.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

But the iPads got the chips first.

Example please? All iPad X chips came out after normal A chip releases of the same generation for iPhones and the iPad Air using A7 was announced after the 5s.

 

[jecowa]

Just to be clear, the 13-inch MacBook Pro still beat the iPhone in single-threaded performance, which is going to be a better indicator of how fast the devices perform most tasks. The 13-inch MacBook Pro was 10.9% faster than the iPhone 10,2 in the Geekbench single-threaded benchmark.

Although the iPhone beat the 13-inch MacBook in the Geekbench Multithreaded Benchmark, it was only 8.7% higher. And the iPhone needed 6 cores to beat the 13-inch MacBook Pro's 2 cores. Since most apps don't benefit from more than two cores, and the MacBook Pro's cores are each about as powerful as 3 iPhone cores colbined, the MacBook Pro would still be faster for most use cases.

The only things that the iPhone might be faster at are functions that make great use of multiple cores, such as 3D animation rendering and video encoding. But even then, the iPhone is a passively-cooled device, so it may have to throttle itself a bit more than the MacBook Pro when performing intensive tasks like these over a long period (computers automatically throttle themselves when they get too hot to try to protect themselves from over heating).

 

[fourthtunz]

Enjoy that 0.3% advantage.

Heh too bad it has to run android.
I'll take the "smaller" X that runs iOS with a great OS and great apps made for it that get updated

 

[convergent]

You can’t blame Apple for excel, blame Microsoft for not putting all the features into the mobile app. Same as most other apps that people complain about. Also lol at saying something they’re fixing with the latest software.

That's good... blame the software vendors because the platform is crippling. There are things you can't practically do in iOS for a variety of reasons and that isn't really going to change unless Apple decides to change it. While Apple stubbornly insists that a tablet and a computer are two separate devices, Microsoft gets better and better at showing they can be one.

And completely unnecessary. It's a phone for goodness sake! What kind of hardcore tasks will you do on your phone anyways? It's perfect for bragging rights, but it's usefulness in the real world is debatable.

Yeh, I was just wondering how my Ford F150 would line up in power compared to my toaster and my iPhone?

THANK YOU so much for saying this. One of the biggest mass-market computing blunders of the past decade is the Microsoft Surface line*; arguably, part of why they've worked so hard on their x86-64-based Surface Pro line, is to help make the original Surface initiative a bad, bad, distant memory.

I think some users here BOTH:

Underestimate the power and flexibility of a full fledged operating system like MacOS (or, yes, Win10); it's silly to assume malice when technical complexity explains it: Excel is on Windows/MacOS because it's MUCH easier to write that kind of complex application on a full, mature, truly deeply-multitasking OS.

Fail to appreciate how nice iOS is; that you think it's worthwhile to port Excel to ARM-on-MacOS is really a compliment to iOS—and you're right, in use case after use case, iOS has found ways to replace the traditional x86-64 platform. iOS 11 just might be the nail in consumer x86-64 computing (with Android after-Oreo trailing behind), ensuring once and for all that full blown desktops and laptops are just for hardcore gamers, serious design professionals, and programmers.

*Notice I didn't say "Pro"; the original "non-Pro" line was ARM

What you call a blunder, others might call progress. Microsoft is willing to take risks in the market to innovate and move forward. You don't know if something works unless you try it. And what you call a blunder led to a "non Pro" Surface that was pretty good. Rumors suggest another non Pro is coming... we will see if they learned and make it better.

Microsoft has failed miserably in the mobile OS space... one they were in and leading the market before Apple ever thought about making a phone. They lost the App Store battle and who knows if they can ever get back in it. It would be better for all of us if they were... a 3 horse race is better for innovation than a two horse race. But regardless... the end result is that Apple is now largely a smartphone company that has a lot of accessories (the Mac is an iPhone accessory now), and Microsoft is a computer software company. I prefer to have my primary computer to be on a platform who's producer is still actively trying to innovate and progress.

But I will bring the "Pro" into the discussion, since you are talking about the value of a full fledged OS. Microsoft has been quite successful in creating the detachable keyboard market segment, which I believe is the only growing part of the market right now. Apple meanwhile sits on the sidelines and insists you can't have one device be a tablet and computer. Microsoft is by no means perfect, but each generation they get better and better.

 

[djlythium]

And completely unnecessary. It's a phone for goodness sake! What kind of hardcore tasks will you do on your phone anyways? It's perfect for bragging rights, but it's usefulness in the real world is debatable.

At this point, I think calling these devices ‘phones’ is myopic. They’re so much more than that, and I think having such a strong processor is absolutely appropriate. I’ve been searching for a more applicable term to describe these devices, and when it’s found, I think we’ll start to adopt it.

 

[bufffilm]

No question the A11 is quite an improvement over the A10...but this year's standard iPhones should rightly be called the 7s/+.

Marketing aside...it continues Apple's dominance in the mobile marketplace.

 

[Hattig]

Im guessing its called Bionic since the last few were called like Cyclone and Typhoon etc....bit insensitive if the next one was Hurricane..

Hurricane was the name of the big core in A10 IIRC. Following on from Typhoon in A9. A11's big core is called Monsoon.

"Bionic" is just a fancy name like "Fusion".

 

[WWPD]

Putting this thing in an iPhone 8 is like putting a Bugatti Veyron engine in a Volkswagen Beetle, but I'm not complaining.

 

[Pilgrim1099]

This seems to be the biggest problem on the forum. The topic has nothing to do with Samsung but some people always feel the need to bash another company. Member always complain about apple bashing but are so quick to bash other companies.

I have a 7+ and a original iPad Pro 12.9 and love them. Probably would never change to android but that’s not impossible.

The issue is with their Apple obsession and the need to defend the company, despite the missteps it's made and ignore it. Almost like the GOP saying 'there's no such thing as global warming'. The other thing is that Samsung is not Android as they fail to realize that it all got started with Google. It was Google that created the Android OS, not Samsung.

In a sense, Samsung is Google's pit bull. When it comes to Android OS, Google's the one pulling the strings. Nothing wrong with that, though because they're the one that licensed it out to Samsung's hardware. Perfectly understandable. Business as usual.

They confuse Android with Samsung too many times to the point that they don't know how to accurately pinpoint the arguments on. And they usually think like raging gamers in a " Apple RULEZ! Apple PWNS! Samsung bad! Android evil! " kind of way. If there's anything to blame, that's on Apple for 'creating' the blindfolds on the fans early on in 2007 with their keynotes and manipulating the masses.

Why do you think they wanted to 'control the message' away from the Macworld expo? Obviously, to get attention and spew forth any garbage out of their mouths without any resistance with a clap happy audience.

The other thing I noticed is when Tim Cook asked the engineers and workers to stand up near the end of the keynote, it made me wonder, " Wait a second. Isn't this keynote event supposed to be for the media and special guests only? Did he just bring the workers in to fill the audience up? ". It supposedly houses 1,000 seats. If all that hard clapping is coming from the workers, who else is applauding?

I oftened wondered about that stupid clapping lady, the moment Cook unveiled his Apple Watch. She stood up and clapped/hollered like a clown. And it made me wonder if Apple told her to do that? Remember, the cameras were FIXATED on her the moment it happened as if they knew she was going to do it.

 

[Stella]

Benchmarks are quite different from real world performance!

 

[GoodWheaties]

Now I understand why Apple raised the price of the iPad Pro by $50 yesterday; because it's S-L-O-W-E-R than an iPhone! Can't innovate may ass right Phil?

Raised the price? It's been at $649 since the 10.5 was released or were you referring to something else?

 

[vmachiel]

ARM MacBooks by 2021.

No way. Totally different workloads, different instruction sets. No more emulation of windows. Recompiling of apps. So many problems.

 

[cgsnipinva]

An "Apple Dex" if you will

Cool idea.

This is a good idea and I do like how Samsung implemented this. I do believe Microsoft actually demoed something similar first.

However, they will be hampered by the real lack of mobile applications optimized for larger screens - you only have to look at the dismal Tablet environment for Android to see that.

Apple should leverage their current advantage in the tablet space to implement something similar using the iPhone. If they continue to add features to their iWork and iLife software for iOS this could be a killer.

As mentioned before - this will be won by software not necessarily hardware.

 

[obitow]

If there is a company with know-how to change its desktop OS architecture, it's Apple. If that's a wise decision, remains to be seen.

Also, I think that's a fair comparison. macOS is definitely heavier than iOS and it would probably run terribly on the A11, but the A11 was never intended to run macOS and an Apple designed ARM chip for Mac would have much more performance.

 

[cgsnipinva]

No way. Totally different workloads, different instruction sets. No more emulation of windows. Recompiling of apps. So many problems.

While I agree you couldn't take the A11 chip as is and place it into a macbook/iMac platform. I don't think its wrong to say a version of the A11 (AXX) chip optimized for this platform couldn't drive full MacOS. Microsoft is already testing full Windows 10 on an ARM processor platform. Not a crippled version of Windows like RT but a full blown version. Technically it is not impossible.

 

[Tummy]

Lately we've been creating daily Youtube videos, usually in 4k, and my 2015 iPad Pro or iPhone 7 Plus exports video 3x faster than our 2014 MacBook Pro i7. Using LumaFusion for iOS and Adobe Premiere for Mac. So I'm really excited to see how the new A11 compares.