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Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

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Re: Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

#41
post #15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite possibly faster in the CPU department than the PS4/Xbox One, though those both have 8 (slower) cores. But the PS4, Xbox One and possibly even the Wii U will have much faster GPUs.

The PS4 and XBox One also have four times as much RAM as the iPhone 7. In fact I was kind of shocked when they announced it would only have 2GB, considering you can get a Nexus or OnePlus with 6GB this year.

Oh. I didn't even notice. Everyone was busy talking about the headphone jack.

Re: Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

#42
post #15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite possibly faster in the CPU department than the PS4/Xbox One, though those both have 8 (slower) cores. But the PS4, Xbox One and possibly even the Wii U will have much faster GPUs.

The PS4 and XBox One also have four times as much RAM as the iPhone 7. In fact I was kind of shocked when they announced it would only have 2GB, considering you can get a Nexus or OnePlus with 6GB this year.

There is one price you pay for more RAM on an SOC and that is higher power consumption, which is probably why.

Considering my iPad Air has only 1gb of RAM an performs acceptably, despite having to render at 2560x1600 - it shows that iOS is surprisingly light on ram usage. 2gb will do well for the phone. iOS is also very quick to relaunch apps and the iPhone has very fast flash memory and fast CPU to do that.

Re: Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

#43
post #19

Perhaps relevant. Linus Torvalds' opinion on GeekBench: http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curposti... > So basically a quarter to a third of the "integer" workloads are just utter BS. They are not comparable across architectures due to the crypto units, and even within one architecture the numbers just don't mean much of anything. >And quite frankly, it's not even just the crypto ones. Looking at th…

If these phone processors are that amazing why don't we see them being used outside phones and tablets? I mean take the A10 Fusion give it four cores instead of two and put it on a server mainboard with all the usual things like PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet and SATA. Basically do what AMD did with their A1100 except with a good processors and actually sell more than a dev kit. The lack of total raw processing power per ser…

After Apple left the server space when they shuttered the Xserve, I don't think they are really interested into getting involved into that space. I think they view themselves as a consumer goods company that makes good products and uses technological innovation to serve those goals, rather then create that innovation and figure out how to productise it later.

Re: Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

#44

It's just a matter of time before we see ARM's in Macbooks. I wonder if we'll see Rosetta make an appearance for binary backward-compatibility again.

I'm thinking it's more likely that MacBooks (and probably Macs) are killed off altogether (or merged into iPads). I think we're about 2 iOS iterations away from the iPad being a complete Macbook replacement (and we're there for a vast majority of consumers right now). I'm assuming Xcode for iOS arriving next year, along with loosening the restrictions on running locally-developed code. Then one more year to clean things up. Couple that with a few little hiccups in iOS self-sufficiency (read: System restores, another year for the software ecosystem to fill out), and we're there.

Re: Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

#45
post #15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite possibly faster in the CPU department than the PS4/Xbox One, though those both have 8 (slower) cores. But the PS4, Xbox One and possibly even the Wii U will have much faster GPUs.

The PS4 and XBox One also have four times as much RAM as the iPhone 7. In fact I was kind of shocked when they announced it would only have 2GB, considering you can get a Nexus or OnePlus with 6GB this year.

Why in the world you would need 6GB in a phone today? And the nexus can have all the ram in the world but will always be painfully slow. I am really surprised that I didn't throw my Nexus 5 against the wall out of frustration in the end. The real surprise was when my friend bought the nexus 6x or whatever is called and it was even slower than the nexus 5. Just to sum up, RAM is the most useless thing if all the rest sucks.

Re: Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

#46
post #44

It's just a matter of time before we see ARM's in Macbooks. I wonder if we'll see Rosetta make an appearance for binary backward-compatibility again.

I'm thinking it's more likely that MacBooks (and probably Macs) are killed off altogether (or merged into iPads). I think we're about 2 iOS iterations away from the iPad being a complete Macbook replacement (and we're there for a vast majority of consumers right now). I'm assuming Xcode for iOS arriving next year, along with loosening the restrictions on running locally-developed code. Then one more year to clean thi…

As much as I like iOS for my iPhone, for replacing a "Computer" Apple would need to introduce some kind of file system, where data can be shared between apps, and lift most restrictions about what apps can do. A linux VM running on an iPad would be a game-changer for me.

Re: Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel will be ok, Apple don't sell that many chips. And it is not going to affect anyone else. And Intel are looking at helping Apple out with the next versions of their chips, possibly fabbing them.

It would be a powerful statement that Intel is not the given choice for the CPU in a "real" computers (as opposed to smartphone/tablet) anymore.

It's not that Intel's not given the choice -- that would still be very far away. It's that Apple's move would be the first real example of overlap in computing space. Others can follow and eventually claw at Intel's market share in laptop/desktop market.

Re: Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

#48

It's just a matter of time before we see ARM's in Macbooks. I wonder if we'll see Rosetta make an appearance for binary backward-compatibility again.

Rosetta worked, because the Intel chips were much faster than the PowerPcs back then. I doubt that the ARMs would have a sufficient large lead in performance. And there are plenty of reasons to run x86 code on Macs, be it older programs which might not be ported to ARM, or all the Windows and Linux stuff running in VMs. As much as I would like an ARM based laptop, it would be much less practical than an x86 one.

Re: Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

#49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably iPhone will be faster in every day usage with 2GB of RAM then these 2 phones with 6 GB.

yep. the fact that iOS apps typically don't use GC and that multitasking is much more restricted both reduce the amount of memory that iOS needs. (though more is always better!)

more computing means less battery life. rather have more efficient setup than larger one if there is no difference in perceived performance other than battery life.

Re: Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread

#50
post #13

I imagine in near future, we will use smartphones as our personal computer in every situation. In the office, one can then interact with a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse/touch pad and use a big monitor. Probably, one of the next iOS will come with a macOS UI as well (under the hood the iOS is based on macOS anyway) - so if you connect it to a huge monitor, you have the desktop UI of macOS, and otherwise the iOS UI. The sa…

The idea that we'll want to plug our smartphones into a dock and use them as desktops reflects really poorly on modern operating systems. The driver for this seems to be so that settings and files are always applied and accessible in every context. Sharing data between machines on a local network requires a lot of setup, is easily broken and is never seamless, but I don't think is has to be like that.

Personally, I want the opposite of "settings and files ... accessible in every context"—I don't want my personal data or configuration touching a corporate network, or vice-versa. I want the "bring your own machine" philosophy to be taken to its fullest extent: where there's no such thing as a workstation any more, because everyone just owns a PC (their phone) that they bring to work, which maybe contains a sandbox/VM with their work stuff in it, or acts as a thin client for a corporate shell-server, but is ultimately their machine.

This enables you to e.g. set up your own VPN for host traffic, to securely access whatever you want during work hours, completely opaquely to packet-sniffing on the corporate network. The "work sandbox" can ignore that VPN and just use the corporate network (maybe through its own VPN) like normal. Whereas with a shared workstation + LAN, all your personal data and traffic and ability-to-use-software is completely at the behest of corporate IT policies.

Oddly enough, this is already pretty much what the experience is like for iOS with a MaaS360-managed profile installed and Exchange ActiveSync-based accounts set up. Translate that to a desktop UI while keeping the isolation metaphor and it'd be perfect.

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