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strongly agree! Some may complain that Apple is lagging, but this will drive them to further improve. In the end who knows who will have the best but regardless, all key players will provide something yet better than today and so I win.
How exactly is Apple lagging? This chip isn't even out yet and if X Elite is anything to go by (same type of hype, pre-launch) then there's not a lot to worry about for Apple!
 
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When will we see Nvidia or AMD GPU support for ARM? When can you build a tower (or any kind of desktop) with Qualcomm chips and any 3rd-Party add-on? It's nice in a thin and light laptop, but will there be a desktop variant that can push the limits even further? Then of course the server end. When is that coming? As a consumer, what should you buy? As a gamer, there is only one choice and that is X86 for now.
There are external GPU's running with Raspberry Pi 5's now - which is ARM (several people working on it, Jeff Geerling has a web page with details and YouTube videos showing it running stable recently)
 
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Chrono’s example of streaming services. Competition caused higher overall prices, not lower. Cable is cheaper, and that’s insane to say.
Oh ok, I honestly thought you were supporting my statement since you were saying that cable is expensive because it has exclusivity in areas therefore no competition, but then I was confused by “his example checks out” at the end.

But I think I see what you’re saying here—that you need multiple streaming services in order to get all the same channels that you had with cable, so in that way competition (supposedly) increased prices.

But that’s not an example of competition driving up prices, that’s an example of fragmentation. Fragmentation is very different from driving up prices across the board. It just means that there is now potentially tougher choices. This makes it more expensive for those who don’t want choices but want everything, but cheaper for those who do only want specific content. It’s competition that keeps the prices of those individual choices down. (It also keeps the quality of those individual choices up.) And because players in the new streaming market are not only competing with each other but also with players in the old cable market, and vice versa, it probably does keep the prices in both markets from raising as fast as they would without the competition.
 
How exactly is Apple lagging? This chip isn't even out yet and if X Elite is anything to go by (same type of hype, pre-launch) then there's not a lot to worry about for Apple!

Clock-speed is obviously important as is the software running on the device.

Memory is equally important. Speed to that RAM is critical in using this memory and Apple utilises RAM more efficiently than Android. I was just having another scan at some of those claimed benchmarks they are using to tell everyone how great this thing is.

Memory Bandwidth of up to 10.7 Gb/s. The A17 Pro from Apple is 51.2 Gb/s. And that’s last years chip, with less than half the Memory Frequency of the A18. LPDDR5 (3200 MHz) to LDDR5+ (7200 MHz). So the Apple chip still maintains its lead in RAM speed of about 5 times! Apple is definitely not lagging and is still ahead of the market.

But all in all, who the hell needs a faster phone? The only reason I upgrade is to make sure I am on the latest software, or have a better camera. I really don’t think this is going to make a difference to anyone’s life playing Plants v Zombies on the train.
 
Memory Bandwidth of up to 10.7 Gb/s. The A17 Pro from Apple is 51.2 Gb/s. And that’s last years chip, with less than half the Memory Frequency of the A18. LPDDR5 (3200 MHz) to LDDR5+ (7200 MHz). So the Apple chip still maintains its lead in RAM speed of about 5 times! Apple is definitely not lagging and is still ahead of the market.

I think something got lost in translation here. It’s 10.7 Gbps per pin, or 85 GB/s for the 64-bit interface if my math is correct. Apple uses slower RAM in iPhone 16, I believe at 60GB/s.

Still, there won’t be many phones utilizing that RAM. It’s new and not produced in high volumes. It’s only suitable for a flagship phone that is not expected to sell in high numbers.
 
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I think something got lost in translation here. It’s 10.7 Gbps per pin, or 85 GB/s for the 64-bit interface if my math is correct. Apple uses slower RAM in iPhone 16, I believe at 60GB/s.

Still, there won’t be many phones utilizing that RAM. It’s new and not produced in high volumes. It’s only suitable for a flagship phone that is not expected to sell in high numbers.
I wasn’t aware. Thanks. But as you say. It’s not likely a deal breaker anyway. It’s crazy how powerful these phones are already.
 
I’m surprised no one has mentioned iOS 18.1 making substantial differences in benchmarks for the iPhone 16 Pro. Putting both single core and multi core out of reach for the SD8gen4 if their numbers are to be believed.

Based on Geekwan's new youtube video, A18 Pro has lower multi-core score. It was based on a engineering product. So take the results with a grain of salt.

1729638319835.png


The power efficiency of Qualcom's new CPU looks better too.

1729638399751.png
 
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There are external GPU's running with Raspberry Pi 5's now - which is ARM (several people working on it, Jeff Geerling has a web page with details and YouTube videos showing it running stable recently)

Yeah I don't think the discrete GPU support is an architectural limitation, more of an implementation / firmware limitation. Nvidia has kernel drivers for Linux on ARM64, for example. It's likely that MacOS and Windows don't support something that low-level in their ARM versions.
 
How do you know it outperforms it when it’s not even been put in any flagships yet
Those who have access to the documentation for it have run the numbers and provided that as their assessment. Knowing that these are raw metrics, no OS, no apps, it can only perform worse once it’s in a flagship.

It is cheating to compare against Apple’s latest, though, whatever they release will always be behind. They should compare it against Apple’s chips from 2 years ago.
 
Yeah I don't think the discrete GPU support is an architectural limitation, more of an implementation / firmware limitation. Nvidia has kernel drivers for Linux on ARM64, for example. It's likely that MacOS and Windows don't support something that low-level in their ARM versions.
The folks at Asahi Linux have said that there are no GPU commands leaving the SoC for Apple Silicon, so even they can’t get eGPU’s to work.
 
Thank you for your meaningless anecdote.
And thank you for your meaningless trolling, where you failed to provide an anecdote, let alone a citation! 😁

Also, anecdotal observations work fine as a counter to an absolute. If you say cars don’t have 4 wheels, and I say my car has four wheels, that proves your statement wrong. What my statement can’t do is prove all cars have 4 wheels.
The More You Know.
 
The folks at Asahi Linux have said that there are no GPU commands leaving the SoC for Apple Silicon, so even they can’t get eGPU’s to work.

I can't speak to the strangeness of Apple's designs. Apple uses ARM instructions, but the designs are all their own. I would argue A/M series chips are better described as being ARM-compatible rather than ARM-based.
 
Based on Geekwan's new youtube video, A18 Pro has lower multi-core score. It was based on a engineering product. So take the results with a grain of salt. [image omitted]

The power efficiency of Qualcom's new CPU looks better too. [image omitted]
It's highly likely that the GB6 MC score for the SD8g4 will be higher than the A18's. But it's highly unlikely that this will be beneficial to almost anyone. See my recent post about this. SC score is much more important, in any case.

As for power efficiency... color me skeptical. They couldn't do it with the 12-core (SXE), and I don't think they'll manage with the 8. But I guess we'll find out when someone actually ships a phone with this chip, which will be... when exactly?

(Answer: possibly never, since ARM seems intent on pulling their license completely!!!)
 
When Apple market numbers, I find them to be quite conservative. I can’t think of a single advertised claim that has been exaggerated. Happy to be proven wrong. Just can’t think of any at all.
I tend to agree. I should clarify, I am saying that any company’s marketing numbers should be taken with a grain of salt until they can be tested by third parties, regardless of a companies track record on those figures panning out.
 
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The folks at Asahi Linux have said that there are no GPU commands leaving the SoC for Apple Silicon, so even they can’t get eGPU’s to work.


If I remember correctly, wasn’t this something to do about the drivers expecting a certain device memory caching behavior to work that Apple does not support? “GPU commands” are what the driver makes them to be, they are not somehow limited by the platform. But if you can’t make the driver run due to a low-level incompatibility, that’s a problem.

I can't speak to the strangeness of Apple's designs. Apple uses ARM instructions, but the designs are all their own. I would argue A/M series chips are better described as being ARM-compatible rather than ARM-based.

There are multiple layers to ARM. Apple Silicon is 100% compliant with the instruction set and its semantics. It is not compatible with the usual kernel-level interface for ARM however. I am not sure how much of that ARM fully defines and how much is a convention adopted by manufacturers. The point is that you can’t just boot an OS written for other ARM systems without extensive modification.
 
I guess you believe everything Apple tells you, don't you? The thermal management in the iPhone 15 Pro series was woefully inadequate for the chip. It was not a software issue, although Apple tried to gaslight users into believing it was. Like when they made the signal bars a bit taller on the iPhone 4 instead of admitting they designed a faulty antenna system.
No, you got that wrong. The reason was not a faulty antenna system, but users holding the iPhones wrong. The taller signal bars were actually for better readability.
 
Well this is all moot now because ARM just cancelled Qualcomm’s IP license!

Doesn’t matter how fast something is if you can’t sell it.

 
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If all of this is true, we knew it was a matter of time that the competition would catch up. Even Intel is making great strides with moving x86 closer to ARM (although they're still quite a ways off). Apple Silicon truly revolutionized the industry, and Apple should get a lot of credit for it. Although I'm quite critical of Apple in a lot of aspects, the M3 15" MacBook Air is the best laptop I've ever owned, and in my opinion the best laptop ever built.
They did not just catch up..Snapdragon Elite makes A18 Bionic look like last year Technology
 
So, will this chip be in the S25 Ultra? As it stands, the Samsung S24 Ultra (the best performing phone from the Android sales leader in the States) has the equivalent performance of the 12 Pro Max on the single core score and 14 Pro on the multi core. Seems fair to say they are are least a couple years behind. You could argue 4 years behind.
I wish...check Geek Bench 6 and AnTuTu scores for Snapdragon Elite...they are already ahead of A18 Bionic
 
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There are multiple layers to ARM. Apple Silicon is 100% compliant with the instruction set and its semantics. It is not compatible with the usual kernel-level interface for ARM however. I am not sure how much of that ARM fully defines and how much is a convention adopted by manufacturers. The point is that you can’t just boot an OS written for other ARM systems without extensive modification.

If you mean the device tree, Broadcom, Qualcomm and others use one mechanism, and Apple uses a different one (reminiscent of Open Firmware from the PowerPC, SPARC days).

I don’t believe ARM itself makes recommendations on that. It’s more of a convention, whereas on x86, BIOS used to be and now EFI is.

As a result, Windows can boot from Qualcomm and Broadcom (Raspberry Pi) because it knows how to enumerate devices there, and not from Apple, because Microsoft never implemented the HAL for that (though perhaps they could resurrect Windows NT for PowerPC code, but either way, it probably isn’t that difficult to implement).
 
I wish...check Geek Bench 6 and AnTuTu scores for Snapdragon Elite...they are already ahead of A18 Bionic

It’s 10% slower per core than A18 despite 7% higher clock. How does it make Apple look like last gen tech? Mins, they are using the same process and everything.

Sure, 8 Elite is 12% faster in multi core geekbench, it also has more cores that run at considerably higher clock compared to Apple E-cores. Frankly, it is not a good showing for Qualcomm that it’s 8-core complex only barely outperforms Apples 2+4 configuration given that Apples E-cores only offer 1/3 performance of the P-core.

To make it clear, I am not trying to diminish Qualcomms achievements, they made an incredible product. It’s just from the technology standpoint I don’t find Elite 8 very impressive compared to the state of the art. It does not excel in its base architecture and it packs multiple cores to achieve good benchmark scores. You are not buying a phone to crunch numbers, so I never understood the emphasis on high multicore performance anyway. Of course, compared to Intel/AMD these cores are very impressive indeed.
 
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