First A14 Benchmarks from iPad Air 4 Appear Online

[Homme]

First, this is not really six cores, it is two fast cores plus four low power cores.

you’d be right if all the cores won’t work simultaneously (like A10/A10 X) but since A11 and above they do so yes your wrong

Seeing the metal scores finally a non X chip which beats the metal scores of A10X and higher of the X line

A10X’s metal scores were far ahead of it’s time beating A11/A12/A13 and finally A14 beats it and slightly more than A12Z as another poster said here

 

[Kushanth]

I think I’ll stick to i11 for another year..

 

[joshwithachance]

Honestly not that impressive. Barely an improvement over the A13, which itself was barely an improvement over the A12. And only 4GB of RAM... bleh.

 

[sfwalter]

Its amazing that these A-Series processes beat the pants off the Intel Xeon in the Mac Pro for single core performance.

 

[theorist9]

What we want to know is how the programs we actually use, when run in MacOS on AS, will compare to those same programs run in MacOS on Intel. These GB benchmark comparisons are two steps removed from this. They aren't comparing actual programs, and they aren't using the same OS.

How much does this two-step removal matter? I don't know.

Based on these GB comparisons, and the assumption that the processors in the AS Macs will be faster than those in the iPads (for thermal and other reasons), people are expecting that even the first AS laptops will have single-core speeds, on real-world programs, that far exceed (are at least 50% greater) those of the fastest Intel desktop processor.

But at least some cautious skepticism is in order until AS is relased into the wild.

 

[ian87w]

If they don't update the iPad Pro in October, I'd be confused as to why anyone would buy it over the Air now. Their iPad lineup is a bit unbalanced at the moment.

The Pro still have specific features like more RAM, better camera and flash (useful for scanning documents),. The larger RAM itself might push some people to the Pro regardless of the chip.

Of course, that means lay people are better served with the Air considering the lower price.

 

[cmaier]

Wow, a 2.99GHz chip almost twice as fast as a 1.8GHz chip, imagine that. The skilz Apple has.

Why don’t you try taking a 1.8GHz chip and making it run at 3GHz?

 

[cmaier]

Honestly not that impressive. Barely an improvement over the A13, which itself was barely an improvement over the A12. And only 4GB of RAM... bleh.

That’s silly. What other CPU maker has achieved 20% year-over-year improvement year after year like Apple?

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Why do the newer iPads bend; is it the square, hollow aluminum chassis? My iPad 6 is a workhorse. It can handle a lot. Although it did incur the bright, white spot and the home button. I hope Apple solved this as well. Super annoying.

They all bend if you apply enough pressure. The straight edge ones have far more lines where a deformity can be easily seen.

 

[QCassidy352]

This is cute to say, but not true.

If you say so. Every iPhone since the 3GS has felt blazing fast at launch and pretty much crawls by its last iOS update. My 7 is a total dog on iOS 14 compared to what it used to be on 11 and 12.

 

[GuruZac]

The speed of these chips is impressive, but in the real world it’s not going to ever be a night and day difference from A11 to A12 to A13 to A14 etc...

I am currently using the iPhone XS (A12) and its still plenty fast, my partner has the iPad Air 3 (also A12) and is also plenty fast for general usage.

I think that although the numbers side by side look impressive, but when comparing it to the A13 or even A12 your not going to be seeing massive differences in real world usage.

You will probably only majorly notice a difference in comparison to an A10 or A11... these chips are usually about 4-5 years ahead of their time, and only start to get sluggish after that time as the vast majority of apps generally used don’t stress the chips to their limits.

This is a great point. I have an iPad Pro 10.5 with the A10X and an iPad Pro 12.9 with the A12X and use both all the time and don’t notice a difference in performance at all. My iPhone 11 Pro with A13 and 4GB of RAM doesn’t really feel faster opening apps and doing normal daily tasks than my old 7 Plus with the A10. Testament to optimization and A series chip performance. Interestingly I ran GB5 on my 12.9 iPad Pro and it seemed to score about 100 points higher on multicore score...probably margin of error. I am on iPadOS 14.2 if that makes any kind of difference.

 

[dgdosen]

20% every year.

How fast do you think an A14X (or whatever shows up in the first macs) will be? if you figure:

- Die shrink
- 2 years of focus/improvement since A12X
- More power because of better heat management

Will it beat a Tiger Lake i7?

 

[cmaier]

How fast do you think an A14X (or whatever shows up in the first macs) will be? if you figure:

- Die shrink
- 2 years of focus/improvement since A12X
- More power because of better heat management

Will it beat a Tiger Lake i7?

I think it will be 50% faster than tiger lake, on average. All depends on whether they chose to focus on lower thermals (for new machine form factors) or higher performance (and, of course, same chip can meet both roles, depending on what box it’s intended to go into).

 

[PsykX]

Which positions the A14X as scoring 7200, which is equivalent to the 2017 iMac Pro.
Assuming the difference between the X and the non-X is about 60% as it was on previous models.

I really wonder if they'll use the A14X in Macs, or if they will go for a variant. Now I kind of understand why they want to replace the 21.5-in soon and wait for the 27-in, especially since the 27-in has been refreshed 2 months ago.

 

[cmaier]

Which positions the A14X as scoring 7200, which is equivalent to the 2017 iMac Pro.
Assuming the difference between the X and the non-X is about 60% as it was on previous models.

I really wonder if they'll use the A14X in Macs, or if they will go for a variant. Now I kind of understand why they want to replace the 21.5-in soon and wait for the 27-in, especially since the 27-in has been refreshed 2 months ago.

I think that the “x” (i.e. the ipad Pro part) will appear in macbook Airs (or something like the 12” MacBook), but there will be more powerful variants for macbook pros, imacs, etc. The difference may simply be the number of cores (cpu and GPU), or possibly also clocking differences. Guess we will see.

 

[Jony Ive and Co.]

20% every year.

And way too little. Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave at how stagnating the performance improvements are.

 

[Velli]

Wow, a 2.99GHz chip almost twice as fast as a 1.8GHz chip, imagine that. The skilz Apple has.

So, which phone do I buy to get a 2.99 GHz Snapdragon?

*crickets*

 

[daabido]

And way too little. Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave at how stagnating the performance improvements are.

Some of us remember the PowerPC days when IBM struggled to get an extra 50 Mhz out of a chip after a year.

 

[Gerdi]

Based on these GB comparisons, and the assumption that the processors in the AS Macs will be faster than those in the iPads (for thermal and other reasons), people are expecting that even the first AS laptops will have single-core speeds, on real-world programs, that far exceed (are at least 50% greater) those of the fastest Intel desktop processor.
But at least some cautious skepticism is in order until AS is relased into the wild.

People are not expecting much higher single core performance from AS Macs. The expectation is much higher multi-core performance. Increasing frequency is probably the worst way of increasing SoC level performance.
That having said, you might see slightly! higher clocks in the AS Macs.

 

[R3DH3R0]

For perspective,

Top spec'd MacBook Pro 13" with Intel I7: 1348 single, 4908 multi
Top spec'd MacBook Pro 16" with Intel I9: 1105 single, 7114 multi

These are for the very top spec'd models of each, and the highest scores I can find of many posted. The "A14X" derivative that will likely go into the new MacBooks will likely exceed the multi on the current 13" Pro and be very competitive with the 16"

Compared to cheaper the Ryzen 4800HS


1195 Single Core
7914 Multi Core


Geekbench 5.2.4 Tryout for Windows x86 (64-bit)
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Upload Date	October 3rd 2020, 5:16pm
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[the8thark]

This is cute to say, but not true.

20% every year.

It's just as untrue as what you said.

 

[FelixDerKater]

All we need is 2 more cores.

 

[cmaier]

It's just as untrue as what you said.

How was what I said untrue? Every year since 2015, at least, the A-series processors have increased in performance by about 20%.

 

[LenticularTapir]

God im so happy were not in those times anymore... I was quite good at low level C++ programming back in the days, but the amount of time you basically wasted on doing the most basic things was just ridiculous. It’s not about efficiency anymore, its about getting more stuff done with less money. Or for small teams it means pushing into territories, that were off limits for them couple of years ago, reserved to big studios. And or big studios on the other hand, it doesnt mean they can be lazy, but they can push the limits of what’s achievable even further.

Either way, having power reserves is nothing bad. It gives you more creative room. Every second you dont have to spend on things like pointer arithmetic is another second that can be spent on improving your concept.

Was going to say something along those lines but I think you've worded it better than I would have.

I do also wonder what's with all the negativity behind scripting? For stuff like gamedev, they can save you thousands of collective hours vs manually inputting values into C/C++ files and having to build and re-deploy to hardware each time you wanted to test something?

Yes, you'll come across poorly written, inefficient scripts pretty often but you'll also find really badly written C++ code in some projects. You don't automatically become more efficient just by using a lower-level language or interface.

 

[PsykX]

Ugh. I’m gonna be so tempted to buy 12pro max! These scores are already almost double what my XS Max gets, AND the 12 Pros are supposed to get 2 extra GB of RAM compared to this iPad, so scores will definitely surpass this iPad...... my wallet is telling me wait one more year though 😂

In all honesty, I have the XR and will most likely switch for the 12, but I think not a single time since I owned it have I found it slow. And I'm the one who wines every time I use a slow device or use something that stutters.

At this point, I think a trend is definitely reversing :
In 2020, modestly cheap hardware upgrades do not fix slowness, they accelerate speedness.