Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

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

Makes me curious if someday not too far away, we will see Desktop bigLITTLE architectures where ST are ran through a SoC like the A12 and threaded logic is thrown to a more traditional i7 type CPU.
[doublepost=1538779993][/doublepost]

Dj64Mk7 said:
Is that why, when I re-open some apps after time away, the app appears briefly in the state it was before I exited but quickly returns to the default view?
Click to expand...

On iOS, a screenshot is taken of the last activity of an app when it loses focus. If the app needs to reload, the screenshot is used as a placeholder image while the app is loading. That’s why you can tap tap tap and nothing works until you see the app reload visually.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Delgibbons
Icaras said:
Agreed on the A-series running macOS, but not Intel mobile CPU running iOS, when in a device as small as the iPhone as it would just fry the entire thing.
Click to expand...
Actually, there are still intel x86 phones on the market. intel is supplier for the Spreadtrum SC9853i SoC, which uses x86 cores (old intel Atom). However, since iOS requires ARM and is tailored for Apples CPUs, that won't work...
 
That's nice, but if they're putting such a powerful CPU in a device, please allow us to connect it to a keyboard, mouse and monitor, so we can work properly at a desktop. The iPhone (along with the iPad) would be the most secure consumer computer. But without a proper keyboard and mouse, I'm as productive as a kitten in a mitten. You can't even do precise selection and clipboard operations.
 
  • Like
Reactions: gamrin
cppguy said:
That's nice, but if they're putting such a powerful CPU in a device, please allow us to connect it to a keyboard, mouse and monitor, so we can work properly at a desktop. The iPhone (along with the iPad) would be the most secure consumer computer. But without a proper keyboard and mouse, I'm as productive as a kitten in a mitten. You can't even do precise selection and clipboard operations.
Click to expand...

Just say it : We want iPhone converge. :D
 
  • Like
Reactions: gamrin
techwhiz said:
This is a desktop ARM -> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/08/cavium_thunderx2/
The A12 isn't even close.
Click to expand...
Give A12 a cooling solution that allows it to dissipate 120W like that and it will hold its own.
[doublepost=1538782612][/doublepost]
marty1980 said:
Makes me curious if someday not too far away, we will see Desktop bigLITTLE architectures where ST are ran through a SoC like the A12 and threaded logic is thrown to a more traditional i7 type CPU.
[doublepost=1538779993][/doublepost]



On iOS, a screenshot is taken of the last activity of an app when it loses focus. If the app needs to reload, the screenshot is used as a placeholder image while the app is loading. That’s why you can tap tap tap and nothing works until you see the app reload visually.
Click to expand...

Also, it wouldn’t return to the “default” view but would instead return to exactly where it left off if the app developer correctly handled encoding and decoding the state and used the apis apple provides for that functionality.
[doublepost=1538782892][/doublepost]
chucker23n1 said:
No, there isn't. RISC/CISC hasn't been a meaningful designation since the 1990s.

A modern x86 CPU is internally "RISC" and only externally emulates the classic x86 instruction set.



It has some less cruft because it's younger, but other than that, it really isn't that different.



I assume by "SSHD" you mean Fusion Drive. The Boot Camp / 3 TB issue is unrelated to Fusion Drive.
Click to expand...

Cisc doesn’t emulate risc. Cisc x86 chips use a hardware microcode rom and replaces each cisc instruction with the appropriate sequence of microops. Of course many native cisc instructions require no such replacement. And for something like amd64, where we threw away as much cruft as we could, hardly anything needs to be resequenced.

But this is the way it has worked since as at least as far back as the 80386, so it’s nothijy new.
 
techwhiz said:
Not even close to a thread ripper.
The A12 is missing multiple DDR channels, PCIe lanes, etc.....
Not a CPU for a Mac at all.
Click to expand...

It’s only missing those because there’s no need for them on a small embedded device like a phone. Those are easy adds.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Yvan256
Tech198 said:
Just say it : We want iPhone converge. :D
Click to expand...

I don't want Mac and iPhone to merge into one. At least not this time, when iOS is so limiting. It's a security advantage that we can take advantage of, but we're not at the point where we can stop using desktop machines. iOS is perfect as a secure platform for banking, doing taxes, billing, accounting, HR, running a business, marketing. What I do is computer vision, software development, photo and video editing, which are not nearly there. I'm sure one day all devices can merge, but at this time iOS is too limiting. If I can't run Visual Studio, Xcode, Acrobat, FinalCut, Photoshop, Python (for neural network and natural language processing), then I cannot replace my Mac and Windows PC yet.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Solomani
[AUT] Thomas said:
Performance wise yes!
Practically: No. At least not yet.
While the A11 already achieved >10k in geekbench, an i5 7th gen scores less than 10k.
However, these CPUs are optimized for phones and tables. Not sure how much changes will be necessary to add 32GB of RAM, PCIe, SATA, USB,... Anyway, ARM CPUs are getting faster a lot quicker than intels, not just Apples Axx.
Click to expand...

There's also the issue of what to do about all the x86-only applications (AKA all existing Mac apps). Intel has threatened to sue anyone who is not licensing their patents (and I believe they have at least some patent coverage on all the MMX/SSE instruction extensions still)

If you quote me, please do it right. I literally wrote below that statement:
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.
iOS can't minimize Apps properly. I have an iPad Mini 4 and running split screen easily pushes the iPad to its limits. Granted, the Mini only has 2G RAM, the XS already 4, so will do the job better, but even 4 likely isn't enough. There's a reason Safari on iOS unloads unused tabs.

For now it'd be great if the XS Max would finally get landscape mode and some other tablet style features... The strongest hardware is useless if it's crippled by the software.
Click to expand...

The apps aren't necessarily killed until the device needs the memory - instead they can just stop getting scheduled for CPU time, stop receiving events, and have all their networking/hardware resources released.
 
JPack said:
Interesting note about Apple's OLED power consumption:

"One thing to also very much to take into account is the base power consumption of the phones. The iPhone X, XS and XS Max all fluctuate around 480-500 mW when on a black screen, which is around 150mW more than the iPhone 8 LCD models. This might not sound much, but’s it’s an absolutely huge figure when taking into account that it’s an unavoidable power consumption of the phone whenever the screen is on. I do hope Samsung and Apple alike would be able to focus more on optimising this, as like we’re about to see, it will have an impact on battery life."
​
Looks like Apple hasn't focused on OLED power consumption for this generation, which could explain why the XR has such a significantly higher battery rating.
Click to expand...
The XR doesn’t have an OLED screen
 
Want to run "Marzipan" versions of Apps on an iPhone connected to an external Monitor. To use a Desktop class CPU as a Desktop...
 
What is bionic about the chip?
[doublepost=1538786108][/doublepost]
noraa said:
Imagine one of these chips in a desktop or laptop that is not limited by the constraints of an iPhone or iPad. Especially with proper cooling, these chips could be absolute beasts.

When rumors starting swirling about Apple potentially moving the Mac lineup to the A series of chips, I was pretty skeptical and concerned. But at this point I'm actually excited by the prospect. The biggest issue will be the transition from x86 to the ARM architecture - but Apple has proven to be quite good at those types of transitions.
Click to expand...
When you go from an iPhone/iPad to a "computer", you are going from essentially a single tasking machine to a multitasking machine so what works for one device doesn't necessarily equate to being great in another device.
 
dilbert99 said:
If Apple is so great at chips, why don't they release them as general purpose desktop cpu's and be the next intel.
Click to expand...
The next big company in a dying industry? Why would they want to do that? Intel dreams of selling systems and other value added devices instead of just cpus.
 
  • Like
Reactions: FFR
As I said many months ago, any Apple-designed macOS cpu will not be ARM-based. Rather, it will be a full-custom design. The benefits will be huge.
 
"very small margins until Apple’s mobile SoCs outperform the fastest desktop CPUs in terms of ST performance."

It would be helpful if you'd include an explanation of "ST performance" after that quote. I guess it means "Synthetic Test Performance" as in benchmarks?
 
dilbert99 said:
If Apple is so great at chips, why don't they release them as general purpose desktop cpu's and be the next intel.
Click to expand...
By the way, many of their key engineers used to work at AMD and DEC. They know what they’re doing at least as well as intel.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back