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iPad Pro's A9X Chip Rivals Performance of Intel's Low-End Core M Processors
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We've been over this time and time again. GFXBench for iOS runs a much lighter workload - with significantly reduced precision (16 bit floats instead of 32 bit floats). Regular computer GPUs don't even have dedicated 16-bit floating point units because of how impractical they are. They come equipped with 32-bit (SP) and 64-bit (DP) floating units instead.
And if you're curious on the performance difference between those, a GTX970 has the following scores:
SP: 3494 GFLOPS
DP: 109 GFLOPS
This of course says nothing about the exact difference between HP and SP, but I hope you realise why the test is horribly useless.
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Why do people on here want to ruin the iPad Pro with OS X?
If the main purpose of using a Computer is writing crap into forums and nothing else, then yes, only a small subset is needed.
But tagging Music files? Recording TV movies in the background? Cutting ads of them, exporting to a harddrive/NAS with remuxing from MPEG2 to MPEG4? Fast and useful copy+paste? Writing metadata into PDF and Photo files for A LOT of files? Even organize a A LOT of data isn't possible with an iOS device only... and then imagine a friend who gives you a 32GB USB stick and you have both no Wifi or a bad mobile network, but you want to have some big files transfering from his to your iPad. 1st you need an iPad with more than 32GB...
Because they're geeks and probably quite old compared to the rest of Apple's customer base.
Anyone who thinks Apple is going to switch over to ARM is missing the point.
Apple wants to make their chips and iOS so good that you don't need a Mac. They'll slowly add features to iOS that make iPads as functional as a MacBook. They'll keep selling x86 Macs in the mean time until the iPad and iOS are mature enough to make the Mac irrelevant.
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Is this sarcasm? All that stuff is things that 99.9 percent of users do not do. You're proving his point.
Recording TV shows and Movies? HA. I know of no one who does this. People just watch Netflix these days.
Also, none of those things are things that an iPad couldn't do in theory. You're not looking at the big picture. Over time the functionality will be added to iOS to make all those things possible.
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If the iPad Pro had 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM it would be the same price
Apple wants to make their chips and iOS so good that you don't need a Mac. They'll slowly add features to iOS that make iPads as functional as a MacBook. They'll keep selling x86 Macs in the mean time until the iPad and iOS are mature enough to make the Mac irrelevant.
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Is this sarcasm? All that stuff is things that 99.9 percent of users do not do. You're proving his point.
Recording TV shows and Movies? HA. I know of no one who does this. People just watch Netflix these days.
Also, none of those things are things that an iPad couldn't do in theory. You're not looking at the big picture. Over time the functionality will be added to iOS to make all those things possible.
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If the iPad Pro had 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM it would be the same price
Not my speculation I read it somewhere Google amd custom apu AppleDo you know this of is it speculation?
Sad, but I understand you. What I don't understand is why Apple don't seem to care about this. Because they must see it, right? There is lacking hardware options on the desktop computer side of things in Apple's product line – end of story.
Thanks for the info. I must have missed the past explanations of the substantial differences between desktop and iOS versions of Geekbench, which explains the disproportionate difference.
Although regardless, I do believe the comparisons I dug up that the A8 in the AppleTV is capable of 3D performance in the same general ballpark as a PS3. Some of the best-looking TVOS games aren't appreciably uglier in terms of textures, effects, and onscreen action when running in 1080 than good PS3 titles look at 720, and the framerates are smooth in both.
I hope this means that a full fledged OS X alternative coming to the iPads.
If we are going to be in the post PC era, then the tablets should be able to do just as much as the PC or more.
The iOS is an outdated design they made for the '07 iphone. New OS should be made for the 2015 iPad PRO.
If we are going to be in the post PC era, then the tablets should be able to do just as much as the PC or more.
The iOS is an outdated design they made for the '07 iphone. New OS should be made for the 2015 iPad PRO.
If it ships on time (they already had to shift the roadmap once), Cannonlake will be available in the second half of 2017. If things continue as they have, Apple will likely be releasing the A11 right about that time. Looking at past iterations, single-core performance only at the iPhone TDP level (ignoring iPads, that is), the A5 was only slightly faster than the A4 (though it added multi-core), the A6 was well over 3 times as fast as an A5, the A7 was twice as fast as an A6, the A8 was only (or "only") 15% faster than an A7, and the A9 is a little less than twice as fast as an A8.
Leaving aside the slightly earlier release of the original iPad, overall, the A9 is almost exactly 12x faster than an A4 in single-core performance in a phone, and was released a bit over 5 years later. That's a pretty good curve. (The difference would be 21x faster if you look at multi-core.)
Over the same time period, using a 45W mobile TDP and whatever was the top of the line, Intel went from a Clarksfield 840QM i7 to a Skylake 6920HQ i7. On the same single-core benchmark, the latter is a bit over 2x faster than the former (3x in multi-core).
Point being, year-over-year since its introduction A-series processor performance increases, thus far, have been huge, while Intel performance increase has leveled off considerably in the past few years. There will definitely come a point of diminishing returns, at least in terms of performance-per-watt--something Intel hit years ago--but if Apple isn't there yet there's no telling what the performance of an A11 will be. It could be a modest improvement, or it could be a literal multiple of current A9 CPUs.
If the average exponential rate of improvement over the past five years were to continue for both chip series (which of course isn't a given; 15% increase per year for each new Intel mobile generation, 64% per year for each new A-series), Cannonlake will be about 32% faster (1.3x) than the current top-of-the-line Skylake at 45W, and the A11 will be about 170% faster (2.7x) than the A9. Were that unlikely progression of technology to actually happen, that would make the iPhone 7S significantly faster than a quad-core Cannonlake laptop in single core performance, and getting close in multi-core; a hypothetical iPad Pro 3 with A11X would almost certainly be faster in both.
All that probably won't happen, but if we're going based on history alone, that's the future, and if you told someone in January of 2010 that Apple would ship more devices with its own custom designed CPUs than the entire desktop and laptop PC market, total, in 2015, no one would believe you.
In any case, it's not like Apple's chip design team is sitting around not doing anything while Intel is producing new designs.
Given Apple's way of doing things, you may well be right about that.
That said, given that Apple sold around 5 million Macs--at, relatively speaking, extremely high prices--in the last quarter, and their laptop/desktop sales have been on a consistent upward trajectory for years, they're probably not in any hurry.
I do find it amusing how many people--geeks in particular--make the extremely flawed assumption that because they want a particular capability in a piece of technology, or have some particular use case in mind that is vital to them, personally, everyone else will. Doesn't mean what you want to do isn't valid, but the geeks reading this site are not representative of the average consumer, and the reality is we're vastly outnumbered by people who have entirely different needs and use cases for a computing device.
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I think an ARM based retina macbook would be great because it would be just as portable as an iPad air but with much better battery life than any laptop. It wouldn't work for those of us who need x86 compatibility for work. Since I code Java for OSX/Linux and Window, it wouldn't work
Apple A series chips are good only because they are not like Intel and apple controls every aspect of it. The instruction sets are different in both. If anybody remembers history, the PowerPCs were 64bit multicore machines, yet Apple shifted to Intel 32bit. If they start to compete with Intel again, they'll end up like AMD.
Personal computing?
Pretty much the same as any other general-purpose computing device.
For my mom, an iPad's purpose is to fiddle on Facebook, watch streaming video from PBS and HBO, surf the web, and send the occasional email while sitting on the couch. It works better for those things for her than a desktop or laptop, so it's all she uses now despite owning a Mac.
For my dad, when he was alive, it was a large-print eBook reader, so he could read with failing eyesight, as well as for sending email and web surfing. He still used a Mac for photo editing, but that was all.
For my college-student nephew, with a keyboard case, it's a mini laptop on which he writes papers for school (and prints them--yay AirPrint), sends emails, does chat-type things and video calls, surfs the web, and watches a lot of streaming video. I believe he also uses it for photo management from his web-connected camera via a cloud service. He also had a 15" MBP, but when it broke a few months ago he didn't bother replacing it, because for him the iPad Mini was good enough. I believe he's seriously considering an iPad pro instead of an eventual new laptop.
For my mother-in-law, it's a video phone. Period. She has no idea how to do anything more than plug it in and press the "answer" button for FaceTime when it rings, but it requires no maintenance, takes little space, and she can lift and hold it comfortably. It's changed her life measurably by enabling cheap, international, face-to-face communication with her family.
For me, it doesn't have enough specific use cases to justify the expense, so I don't even own one apart from a hand-me-down I use for eBook testing.
Point being, there are lots of legitimate reasons to own an use an iPad, either as a secondary or primary computing device. The majority--like the majority of all computing these days--is basic social media and content consumption, but there are lots of others, and the list is getting longer.
Sure, some people don't need one at all--either a phone is plenty, or a laptop or desktop is better suited. I'm in that category myself. But that doesn't mean there aren't lots of people for whom such a device is the best choice with what's available.
I'm more thinking why people want to ruin a real mobile device like a rMBP with touch or ARM...
I'll point this out one more time.
ARM/A-series CPUs may or may not do well against Intel in the future, but using PPC or even AMD as a comparison just isn't meaningful anymore.
PPC was not controlled by Apple so they were largely at the mercy of the companies doing the development; at its peak, PPC had maybe 3% the sales of Intel x86 chips, somewhat more if you count IBM Power servers. AMD, at best, might have reached 30% to Intel's 70% market share.
Apple shipped more A-series CPUs last quarter than Intel and AMD shipped x86 CPUs combined. The chips are cheaper, but in bulk consumer and business volume Apple sells more CPUs than Intel does. If you look at the broader ARM architecture, sales of ARM devices are several times greater than x86, and the global installed base is also larger. Further, the ARM market is growing--rapidly--and x86 has been shrinking consistently for a while.
In the entire history of x86, nothing has ever had that kind of comparative strength, either proportionately or in terms of ecosystem.
Intel is not some untouchable juggernaut; Apple is a substantially larger company than Intel now. Both Google and Apple are larger than Microsoft, and iOS sales now outpace Windows and Windows Phone combined; Android is many times more successful than that.
Using what happened with PPC in 2003 to try and make predictions of what the current CPU and computing landscape is like is like trying to use MacOS sales from the same year to make predictions about the current computing device landscape. The numbers are vastly different, so the analogy just doesn't work.
In the mobile space, Microsoft has become a rounding error. Thus far, Intel is as well.
You did not get the point, did you?
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Again, this is not the point. The point is putting the A serie chip in a OSX based laptop or desktop.
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Don't think that Apple intends to put fans in its future products.....They are just getting rid of them.
Desktop OS for the desktops and laptops, a tablet OS for tablets. Keep them separate. Also, why say "real mobile device"?
While that would be interesting I am more interested in having a seamless transition between the two devices, independent of the OS. I'd like to work on a document, view a movies, etc. and have it simply be there when I want to now use my Mac or Apple TV instead. The iPad Pro and MBP are already pretty good at that, but not yet seamless.
I'd also like to see each play to its strengths. For example, developing really good HWR for the iPad so you could write a document, edit it in Word or Pages, and finish it on the MBP.
I personally do not need the same device in a tablet or notebook, rather tools that make use of the inherent strengths of each to make me more productive.
The two may converge as processors get more powerful, batteries last longer, and storage physical size shrinks but until then don't try to make them do things they aren't good at.
History lessons include the IBM-compatible PC winning out against all competition (including IBM itself), because even the best single one company can't compete against a multitude of manufacturers advancing an open industry standard. Because every chipmaker can license the ARM architecture and legally build their own brand of ARM CPUs, Intel alone can't win against the whole semiconductor industry combined. When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel they cited "performance per watt" as the main reason. Laptops are battery-powered computers and will profit from power-efficient ARM chips just as much as smartphones and tablets. Intel is the one who needs to start to compete on efficiency again and they did with the Core M. It fits in a 920 gram fan-less MacBook compared to a 713 gram iPad Pro, but it delivers only 9 hours of battery life compared to 10 hours and it's not any faster anymore. Intels only advantage is backward-compatibility with decades old software and it's biggest disadvantage is it's obscene profit margin investors come to expect. Both don't translate into the future.
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I just don't understand then, why not use a macbook air, or comparable mac laptop as a primary computing device, even for simple tasks? The typing experience is much better on a laptop, the trackpad is superior to touch for writing emails, word processing or surfing the web. You can actually sit the device on a cafe table or desk in a lecture hall without fumbling around with extra cases and wireless keyboards. The ipad pro initially seems easier, but actually becomes more complicated the more you use it. If you want a small media consumption device get an ipad air 2, a giant tablet running ios is a very compromised primary computing machine that doesn't work as an adequate laptop/tablet replacement.
I just don't understand then, why not use a macbook air, or comparable mac laptop as a primary computing device, even for simple tasks? The typing experience is much better on a laptop, the trackpad is superior to touch for writing emails, word processing or surfing the web. You can actually sit the device on a cafe table or desk in a lecture hall without fumbling around with extra cases and wireless keyboards. The ipad pro initially seems easier, but actually becomes more complicated the more you use it. If you want a small media consumption device get an ipad air 2, a giant tablet running ios is a very compromised primary computing machine that doesn't work as an adequate laptop/tablet replacement.
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