For a person who claims to know so much about cpus - you don’t seem to know much about the a11.That is exactly what I have been saying since the thread started.
A11 is not a competitor to an i9, no matter what Geekbench says.
From Geekbench
Nov 16, 2017 iMac19,1Intel Core i9-7900X 3312 MHz (10 cores) Mac OS X 64-bit 5644 42660
Oct 26, 2017 MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017)Intel Core i7-7920HQ 3100 MHz (4 cores) Mac OS X 64-bit 4969 16999
Apr 04, 2018 iPhone XApple A11 Bionic 2390 MHz (6 cores) iOS 64-bit 4262 10529
Now Geekbench gives a number for single and multicore workloads.
They claim real world workloads but I haven't seen the code.
But normalizing the multicore performance and just scaling speed; that gives
(1.29 x 10529)/6 = 2263 - A11
(1.06 x 16999)/4 = 4504 - i7
42660/10 = 4266 - i9
Clearly that's not how we evaluate performance but even normalizing for speed; the multicore performance of the A11 needs double the performance per core to be in the class of an i7 or i9.
For a single core normalizing for clock speed gets you in the ballpark, but that makes a lot of assumptions and none of them include the I/O for a balanced laptop/desktop system that the A11 does not have.
Once again, I didn't say Apple can't do it.
The ROI needs to make sense to invest the billion dollars in people, tools, silicon characterization, packaging research, etc. that it's going to take to even start to get a family of processors.
Ask Sun, HP, HAL and others how much money it takes to go head to head with Intel.
It has 2 high performance cores. The other 4 cores are high efficiency and are much slower. So you cannot just divide by 6. Just look at the single core result to see what the high performance core is capable of.
Look at the iPad Pro using the last generation a10x. It is approx 9500x1.29/3.
In any case, Apple won’t just plonk an a11 in a Mac and call it a day. Mobile processor max out at less than 3w compared to 45w in the MacBook Pro and 100w + in the iMac