It's a little bit astonishing to think we could legitimately see Apple beating Intel at their own game, on Intel's home turf (the conventional PC space), potentially in the next year or two. It'd make Macs an oddball in the computer world again, but honestly, if the raw performance numbers were good enough and an x86->ARM Rosetta-like layer was competent, it'd be hard to argue against it.
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AnandTech Calls A12 Bionic in iPhone XS 'Just Margins Off' Best Desktop CPUs in New Review
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Also: Intel's CPUs (especially H-series and up) tend to handle sustained loads better. Ax will heavily throttle after a while to prevent overheating.
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It's rather funny how iPhone XS actually has x86 on it — inside the modem.
I know you know this chucker, but for the benefit of the other guy even that's actually not even true.
An app you close like that is given a few seconds (and can ask for up to 10 minutes more iirc) to continue processing or start one of the long running background processes (music apps, location based apps etc.) but then it is only suspended unless some memory event requires it to be killed. Only if it's killed is it coming back as a screenshot (and then only if that's how the dev chose to handle recovery from being killed). In suspended state the app can resume processing right from where it left off if it chooses. It does not need to refresh, though some for some apps that's an appropriate thing to do.
People carry some seriously old and seriously wrong misconceptions on how iOS multitasking works.
That's exactly what I came here for... was expecting at least a 1,000 Cinebench score... Except even that score is measly considering the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX gets about 5,000… which absolutely destroys Apple’s best offering (courtesy of the poorly cooled iMac ‘Pro’ 18core) of 3,000.
And we’re to believe their hokey iPhone chips are supposed to compete?
Because x86 is a 40-year old architecture.
Ain't nobody rewriting all that software for fun.
Yeah...That's not correct. There's an issue with the latest version of Windows that just came out the other day and Bootcamp, but Bootcamp in and of itself is working fine.
Because they're garbage, LOL. Take a look at the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX. Sure it's the top tier CPU, but ARM doesn't even come close to competing with an Intel 8700k.
WHY do so many of you continue to push the ARM agenda in desktops?
All true. There are probably far beyond 100 background tasks, but iOS seems to require -or at least allocate- quite substantial ressources for actual foreground (GUI) Apps. At least switching between Apps on a 2G device isn't smooth at all. I owned an XS Max for a few days and noticed it doing it much better. So, 4G seems to be enough, but since we are talking desktop class performance I'd like to keep my tabs open and switch to Outlook and possibly Photos, probably inbetween to Messages without the Apps stalling & reloading.
Anyway, that 2002 iBook won't open a webpage today without unloading almost anything else to swap. In 2018 I would consider 6G the absolute minimum on RAM. Of course, less will work too, but at the expense of using swap.
It is. GUI Apps are being frozen when put to background. At least after a short time. Ever used RDP, VNC or SSH? That's where it becomes obvious.
iOS does have true multitasking. As the iPad shows, the one-app-on-screen limitation is mostly down to screen size and quality of the experience - basically, can you actually use the Apps and get stuff done if there are lots of overlapping, floating windows crowding the display?
The closest Apple is willing to go towards floating windows is slide-over and PIP videos on the iPad. There, the screen is large enough to present a reasonable experience for the content being displayed.
You could maybe argue for PIP on iPhone, given that the content is not interactive and the screen is very high resolution, allowing for smaller windows. I don't think split-view or slide-over have a place on the iPhone, though.
The other reason for limiting the iPhone to one-app-on-screen is battery life. People want a thin phone with a battery that lasts all day (or longer), because they carry them around all the time. The equation is different when it comes to iPads.
Oh sure, but as a gross simplification and by design, it's largely impossible for the user to distinguish whether a background app:
- continued to run (because it's a VoIP app, because it's still within its limit, etc.)
- was suspended, and is being resumed from memory
- was killed altogether, is literally being shown as a "screenshot", and being relaunched from scratch
That said, regardless of how iOS internally handles background apps*, my main issue with this conversation is the idea that a 2018 iPhone is somehow not beefy enough for multitasking. That's not at all the issue. Apple just doesn't feel that a traditional overlapping windows paradigm makes a whole lot of sense on a 5-inch touchscreen UI. And even on 12 inches, they feel more comfortable with a tiled UI, with few exceptions such as picture-in-picture.
That's a deliberate design decision, not a spec weakness.
*) I don't actually currently ship one myself, so I only have limited exposure.
Ah! That explains it. We don't need a MacPro, when we have an iPhone XS! I did not understand that. 
How big is the intel 8700k, and how much power does it draw?
Imagine if apple put more cores in a new a series chip without the limitations of size and power draw?
Apple has an architecture license, not a design license. Third parties could absolutely buy Apple Ax chips and put Windows or whatever on them. But Apple isn't selling.
I'm not questioning any of this for a second.
And I LOVE great powerful/fast and efficient designs.
However, I do have a question that I've never seen examples of.
What (let's say games) are there on Apple Phones, that run, at a far higher quality or far higher frame-rates than Android phones with the latest Snapdragon chip-sets?
And I LOVE great powerful/fast and efficient designs.
However, I do have a question that I've never seen examples of.
What (let's say games) are there on Apple Phones, that run, at a far higher quality or far higher frame-rates than Android phones with the latest Snapdragon chip-sets?
Apple wouldn't need to switch to iOS to run these processors on the Mac. And porting software to the chip should be relatively straightforward.
Your original implication was that iOS couldn't run additional apps "because it would need at least double the RAM."
That, however, isn't true.
The reason an RDP, VNC or SSH client doesn't continue running in the background is because Apple deliberately doesn't want that scenario to work (among other reasons: because they don't want iOS to become yet another OS where all sorts of magical, dangerous, malicious stuff can happen in the background; rather, if you connect somewhere, you do so very deliberately and very transparently), not because there are hardware limitations.
The article is about the A12. The A10 handles PiP just fine on an iPad, so obviously the A11 and A12 can handle PiP as well.
The 8700k has 95 W TDP; the Ax chips are roughly in the 5 W TDP ballpark. They're comparable to Intel's Y-series (née Core M), as used in e.g. the 12-inch MacBook, not this desktop-class S-series.
Could this be the shift where Apple downgrades support now so, there’s no moaning later when they switch. Since Google has replaced Microsoft as the company locking the web to their browsers with proprietary plugins that only work with Chrome. They appropriated WebKit to put us in the same situation we were with Microsoft 20 years ago. The very think Apple hoped to avoid by making WebKit Open Sourced.
Now that Microsoft office and Adobe tools are cloud based the need for Windows is greatly deminished and an Apple platform that Apple could leverage as having more powerful desktop chips than available for PCs means companies with software on the iPad that already makes Windows or Mac Apps can more easily port those over