AnandTech Calls A12 Bionic in iPhone XS 'Just Margins Off' Best Desktop CPUs in New Review

[jecowa]

You mean this is almost as powerful as a 32-core Threadripper?

The A12 is almost as powerful as an old 28-core Skylake processor in single-threaded benchmark. That old 28-Skylake CPU would roast the A12 in a multithreaded task.

I think a much more appropriate CPU to compare the A12 with is the CPU of the 12-inch Retina MacBook since both are designed to be low-power fanless. It is odd to compare the A12 to a server processor like this, imo. I'd be much more interested in knowing if it could replace a laptop than a server. Maybe Apple has plans to start producing servers again, though.

 

[cmaier]

The A12 is almost as powerful as an old 28-core Skylake processor in single-threaded benchmark. That old 28-Skylake CPU would roast the A12 in a multithreaded task.

I think a much more appropriate CPU to compare the A12 with is the CPU of the 12-inch Retina MacBook since both are designed to be low-power fanless. It is odd to compare the A12 to a server processor like this, imo. I'd be much more interested in knowing if it could replace a laptop than a server. Maybe Apple has plans to start producing servers again, though.

It’s not that odd. It shows that if Apple decided to make a 28 core A-series processor it would hold its own against the high end.

 

[Defthand]

Being easily able to access the best of iPad software as well as the best of class traditional Mac apps is going to be awesome.

Having the advances of iOS come to the Mac is going to be great too.

None of the iOS apps I use, that have a MacOS equivalent, are superior to their desktop doppleganger. Evernote, for example, has an article clipper on the desktop that is missing altogether on iOS.

Which iOS apps are needed on the desktop? And how will their UX be preserved without the benefit of touch?

 

[cmaier]

None of the iOS apps I use, that have a MacOS equivalent, are superior to their desktop doppleganger. Evernote, for example, has an article clipper on the desktop that is missing altogether on iOS.

Which iOS apps are needed on the desktop? And how will their UX be preserved without the benefit of touch?

I write my own software. Games, legal research, text analysis, etc. I never bothered targeting mac. Since marzipan was leaked I’ve been adding more and more “desktop” features to some of the productivity apps in anticipation of a mouse interface. Some of it isn’t even exposed on iPhone or iPad because I can’t figure out a reasonable user interface on those devices.

 

[DNichter]

None of the iOS apps I use, that have a MacOS equivalent, are superior to their desktop doppleganger. Evernote, for example, has an article clipper on the desktop that is missing altogether on iOS.

Which iOS apps are needed on the desktop? And how will their UX be preserved without the benefit of touch?

A lot of first party apps on macOS come from iOS as it is. Home, News, and Stocks were recent good additions. I think Apples plan is more about third party apps on macOS coming to the iPad. Overall I think it could be beneficial to both platforms.

 

[adnbek]

No, it doesn't. And it can't because it would need at least double the RAM.
You can have exactly 2 Apps running in foreground, everything in the background is halted -and what you see is only a screenshot until the App fully loads and refreshes.

Um no. In iOS, if an app in the background actually needs to be running it will. For example, if you start a download, play music or use navigation (or any other situation where an app hasn’t completed its task), the app will continue to function even in the background. Also if Background App Refresh is enabled, a notification will also trigger an app to wake up to download new information.
If an app doesn’t need to be running, it is suspended. Which seems like the smart thing to do in a portable device with limited battery life.

Why should it continue to run and drain resources in the background when it isn’t doing anything? Android has implemented changes to emulate this behaviour too with their latest version. Because that’s what an OS should do: manage resources on the device properly.

 

[cmaier]

No, it doesn't. And it can't because it would need at least double the RAM.
You can have exactly 2 Apps running in foreground, everything in the background is halted -and what you see is only a screenshot until the App fully loads and refreshes.

https://developer.apple.com/documen...updating_your_app_with_background_app_refresh

https://developer.apple.com/documen...e/preparing_your_app_to_run_in_the_background

Apple says you are making that up.

 

[bluecoast]

Because the "best of class traditional Mac apps" are programed to run on Intel hardware; they will not run on an Apple A12 chip

I’ll qualify that:

A12 (consumer) Macs will likely be targeted to run marzipan apps ie iPad apps.

I understand that apple aren’t happy with their own marzipan apps right now (according to Jason Snell) so the assumption is that what we’ll eventually get will be much better.

Though I would not be surprised if Apple make it relatively trivial for Mac apps to run on ARM chips - with the caveat that they’ll have in use Apple’s latest frameworks etc. So that’s a pretty big caveat, admittedly.

Intel macs will get both marzipsn apps and the classic apps.

I’d expect apple’s pro apps to still use intel for the next 2-4 years with both Intel and Arm Macs being available at the same time

Hopefully that explains better what I meant.
[doublepost=1538849156][/doublepost]

None of the iOS apps I use, that have a MacOS equivalent, are superior to their desktop doppleganger. Evernote, for example, has an article clipper on the desktop that is missing altogether on iOS.

Which iOS apps are needed on the desktop? And how will their UX be preserved without the benefit of touch?

WWDC 19 is going to be a critical event for software on the Mac.

Apple is going to have to stand up on the stage and demonstrate that it’s solved all that you mention.

I’ve absolutely no insider knowledge whatsoever, but I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that Apple have already signed key developers up to develop marzipan apps with them under NDA.

Who? People like Panic, Affinity, The Pixelmator team, some iOS game devs, some big desktop/console titles - maybe even Microsoft with Outlook.

As far as first party goes, I think we can also expect all of the iWork apps to turn marzipan - GarageBand too.

Apple mail, calendar, messages, notes etc too.

I doubt that their pro apps will make the transition just yet.

Anyway, this is what I feel that Apple will need to demonstrate next year to get people onboard for the vision for marzipan - and to have loads to apps ready that can turn be easily switched to work on ARM.

 

[name99]

Two things I find weird about this article:

• it mentions desktop-class performance several times, but never seems to actually compare A12 results to those in a Coffee Lake or Ryzen (or even just Apollo Lake) CPU
• it laments the relative lack of iOS benchmarks but doesn't try Geekbench

It wouldn't be the first time that the iPad Pro gets more cores than the iPhone.

(For example, the current iPad Pro features a six-core A10, whereas the iPhone 7 had a four-core A10.)

A setup where the next iPad Pro comes with an eight- or ten-core A12 instead of the iPhone's six cores is plausible.

(a) Andrei doesn't NEED to publish GB4 results. Everyone else does that, and you you didn't read Ars', or any other review, you can just go to the GB website.

(b) There is NO comparable data for desktop CPUs. No-one seems to have run SPEC2006 under the same conditions. The PC world seems to operate by running "system" benchmarks like BapCO that test everything, not CPU-ONLY benchmarks. The best you can find is
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade/14
which tests some server CPUs under the same conditions. (Bottom line Apple is essentially equal to better than all of them at INT. This page does not have SpecFP scores, but we know that the sort of code that can use AVX512 [linear algebra, some parts of FFT] will do a lot better than Apple )

(c) There is ZERO point in getting numerical about this. If you're willing to accept reality, it's clear where Apple is. If you're unwilling to accept these numbers (and the pattern of the past few years) you're simply going to throw up an endless stream of stupid crap. We've already seen this.

Complaints that Apple has fewer cores than Intel. (Well duh! When Apple ships the DESKTOP SoC they will ship a DESKTOP appropriate number of cores. Adding extra cores is no magic trick that only Intel and AMD know how to do.)

Complaints that Apple doesn't have AVX512. (Well true. And neither does Intel across most of their line, and what they do have comes in so many variants that no-one uses it. Apple will probably add SVE to its cores soon. In general it takes about two years from the simple ARM extensions to move from public to implemented --- eg PAC and ARMv8.3 was made public two years ago. SVE came out slightly before ARMv8.3 but it's a lot bigger, so we shouldn't be surprised that neither Apple nor anyone else has yet shipped an implementation.)

Complaints that Apple doesn't have SMT. (Generally made by people who don't have a clue as to the negative consequences of SMT, or the performance ramifications, but think it's vitally important as a buzzword. Bottom line --- Apple can and will offer more cores (large and small) so as to swamp the meager improvements SMT buys you.)

Complaints that it's "just a low power phone core". (So, yeah, your claim is that Apple is consistently able to engineer the best mobile core in the world across multiple process generations at different fabs, without EVER slipping schedule, but the technology of how to scale up a low power design to one that uses somewhat more power, that's just beyond them? Yeah, well, like I said, if someone is determined to be an idiot, you can't stop them.)

 

[noraa]

When you start talking about emulation you loose the benefits of a fast chip

If done properly the performance penalties can be minimal - which Apple proved with Rosetta during the PowerPC to Intel transition. And, of course, this would be a temporary solution until programs can be recompiled (which they undoubtedly will be).

 

[IowaLynn]

Simply not true. iPads have had true multitasking in split view for years with the same amount of RAM as these phones.

IPad Pro 10.5 - 4GB and no there wasn’t an iPhone yet - and holding more app page fixed into memory would reduce lag and delay - which I see comparing my iPad Pro to X, and compared to Note 9.

More memory, larger battery to offset OLED screen. And pray for LODDR5 along with UFS3 in a year.

 

[WatchFromAfar]

If done properly the performance penalties can be minimal - which Apple proved with Rosetta during the PowerPC to Intel transition. And, of course, this would be a temporary solution until programs can be recompiled (which they undoubtedly will be).

Why do people still bring up the "PowerPC to Intel transition" what makes people think it's gonna be that easy to go from Intel to an A12?

 

[mentaluproar]

Why do people still bring up the "PowerPC to Intel transition" what makes people think it's gonna be that easy to go from Intel to an A12?

The biggest hurdle is supporting old code during the transition. While there are lots of weird quirks developers would have to account for, feeding a compiler source code and saying "okay, this time, I want you to output ARM instead of x86 instructions" isn't that bad. All current software, meaning anything that a developer still works on, can simply have its next version recompiled for ARM instead.

The issue is convincing them to do it. If a customer sees current software runs like crap on ARM, they won't be convinced to buy it, and a developer won't be convinced its worth compiling for ARM without customer interest. It's a circular problem.

Rosetta translation was never intended to be a long term solution. It was just there to break this circular logic. So on the one hand, Apple just needs to make a translation layer that works well enough for long enough to convince developers to switch. Customers generally won't care as long as it can do what the intel ones can do.

On the other hand, there's lots of old, neglected code that won't ever be recompiled and that's going to be a bitch to keep running well. That's the area that's the real issue. Translation isn't the problem, supporting someone else's neglected product is.

 

[smulji]

They could work it and put some serious R&D into it, this is Apple we are talking about. Build it from the ground up, if Microsoft can do it then I’m sure Apple can.

That's what iOS is => macOS rewritten from the ground up optimized for multi-touch / Pencil. I don't see macOS getting touch / Pencil but I do see iOS getting more features / tasks that are given to the Mac. The following article is an excellent write-up regarding Apple's product strategy:

https://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2018/9/19/connecting-the-apple-dots

 

[bluecoast]

Why do people still bring up the "PowerPC to Intel transition" what makes people think it's gonna be that easy to go from Intel to an A12?

I think they’ve already started to prepare the way by deprecating OpenGL and moving the Mojave graphics stack to Metal2, so I understand. And of course the marzipan apps are not just about bringing iOS derived apps to the Mac.

I’m pretty sure that at WWDC Craig F gave an interview where he pointed out that devs should now just be using Apple’s own frameworks on the Mac - most of which have correlations on iOS, as far as I’m aware.

something which means that it should be relatively easy for an app that does this to compile to ARM and then carry on using the Apple frameworks - which will be ARM instead of Intel.

Btw I’m not a dev so any glaring mistakes in the above, I apologise for!

 

[cmaier]

Why do people still bring up the "PowerPC to Intel transition" what makes people think it's gonna be that easy to go from Intel to an A12?

Ok. How about the Motorola to powerpc transition?

 

[smulji]

Define "post-pc world". No software can do what windows can do with as much polish and sophistication and depth It's true one needed wintel a long time ago, to check email if that was your only use case for using a computer, now options abound. Now there are proprietary ways to accomplish things that you can't even do on a pc; ie facetime. But the pc is far from dead, although like android it has been commoditized.

A post-PC world doesn't mean a world without the PC / Mac. It means a world where the majority of users' computing needs are met via mobile operating systems, in this case iOS & Android.

 

[Feenician]

IPad Pro 10.5 - 4gb

And? Multitasking works on older iPads with less RAM

and no there wasn’t an iPhone yet

What do you even mean “yet”? People are talking about the current large X/XS/XR phones.

 

[Lankyman]

Seems like a lot of power for simply accessing social media, iMessage, emails, Youtube, oh and making the odd phone call. I am of course referring to what the majority of phone users use their devices for.

 

[Amplelink]

They are not cheaper even for Apple. It all has to due with how the chip is designed. As per the Anandtech article, the A12 probably costs about 50% more to fab than what Qualcomm sells the SD845 for. The reason they can afford to do that is because they know it is going in a very expensive device where they can recoup their costs. Basically Apple can completely ignore the cost of the chip and build it to the best specifications which may not be a valid business plan for a company who sells chips that will go in a multitude of devices.

Well said. And that logic can be applied to much of what Apple does in its industrial design. It's why Apple devices look and feel so much better than the competition in many ways. They know they can command very high margins for their products and so it becomes much easier to design pretty much without regard for cost.

 

[I7guy]

Seems like a lot of power for simply accessing social media, iMessage, emails, Youtube, oh and making the odd phone call. I am of course referring to what the majority of phone users use their devices for.

Or maybe also use the power of the chip for Smart HDR, faster browsing in Safari due to processing javascript, rendering videos with imovie. I'm sure nobody uses the features.

 

[shpankey]

Really love to see what this hardware team could do on desktop cpu's. Apple brightest shining star, this team. They are miles ahead of everyone.

 

[Markoth]

I hope this won't happen any time soon as HW without SW is kind of useless. I really don't want anything like iOS on Mac

Most software should be easy to recompile for ARM, although some open-source software will need modifications to their build systems. Most of them support ARM for other operating systems (primarily GNU/Linux distributions).

 

[Analog Kid]

Considering how Jobs looked at Google/Android stealing from Apple, I’m sure he put in place ultra barriers from exposing any of the inside tech of Apple. And considering how the Chinese think about IP (basically none), it’s understandable that Apple is not going to disclose these things as readily as in the past.

It's more the difference between using a third party CPU (PowerPC and Intel had to advertise their strengths because they were competing for customers) and using a first party CPU (no reason to share details with anyone because the only people who need to know are in the office next door).

 

[cmaier]

It's more the difference between using a third party CPU (PowerPC and Intel had to advertise their strengths because they were competing for customers) and using a first party CPU (no reason to share details with anyone because the only people who need to know are in the office next door).

People in the industry pretty much know what the chips are. There’s just less information directed at the general public.