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Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

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Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#21

Post by scarface74 »

arendtio wrote: post #16
scarface74 wrote: post #2

Even though the average Android phone doesn’t compare performance wise to an iOS device and really sucks when it comes to running complicated web apps, it’s mostly Android users here who claim that progressive web apps are the future and that Apple is holding them back.

I run my own PWA on a 2012 Samsung Galaxy S3 and the only performance problems I have, are due to bad decisions as a developer (e.g. loading all elements of a list isn't such a great idea when the list grows over time and you use the app for 3 years (so far)). So if you are serious about building PWAs you shouldn't have performance issues. Yes, they are a bit slower than native apps, but with today's devices that sho…

That’s actually a good thing. If every website could store data indefinitely, it would be abused. By only allowing long term storage for websites that the user “installed” on their phone by adding it to the home screen expresses intentionality.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#22

Post by Macha »

Jonnax wrote: post #17

This is essentially Qualcomm vs Apple in the mobile market. But the question I've got from looking at the the Geekbench site: iPhone 11: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611448 AMD 3900x 12 Zen 2 12 Core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611445 The iPhone has higher single core performance than a desktop CPU with a 105W TDP. Of course it has more cores. But am I missing something here? Is this test actually…

Geekbench is not measuring raw performance in terms of operations per second. It's measuring very specific use cases (their current blurb mentions AI and ML, in the past mentioned synthetic tests to approximate browsers). Because thermal constraints would prevent Apple from competing in a brute force approach, Apple have been more willing to include specialised hardware for tasks like AI/ML as in the A12 CPU. Of course, single core AI/ML perf is a bit of a silly metric but it's one thing geekbench is claiming to measure here that Apple probably wins at. I think in the past encryption/decryption similarly had acceleration sooner on Apple platforms, and Safari is able to make better use of the GPU with less varied hardware to support, and I think real web browsing is another component in geekbench tests.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#23

Post by voodootrucker »

ge96 wrote: post #12
nicoburns wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it's not performance that's holding back PWAs. With a bit of work, perf was good enough for web apps on an iPhone 4S or earlier. iPhone 4s was released in 2011, so if low-end android devices are not hitting 2012/2013 iPhone performance levels, then they're also good enough for PWAs. It's the lack of platform APIs for things like offline storage and push notifications that are holding back web apps, not…

Yeah regarding no filesystem, not sure if it is dumb but I was using Dexie(IndexedDB wrapper,) to store images as base64 strings. It works but what can suck is the time to turn it back to an image to be displayed. Which using small thumbnails it's not bad but without pagination(seems obvious you should) but it's so much data it throws a chromium-level error so idk ... But was faster to reach MVP than RN for me with m…

I'd be curious about the performance difference storing them as blobs https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/02/storing-images-and-files-i...

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#24

Post by flagada »

Jonnax wrote: post #17

This is essentially Qualcomm vs Apple in the mobile market. But the question I've got from looking at the the Geekbench site: iPhone 11: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611448 AMD 3900x 12 Zen 2 12 Core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611445 The iPhone has higher single core performance than a desktop CPU with a 105W TDP. Of course it has more cores. But am I missing something here? Is this test actually…

> Does the whole RISC Vs CISC of X86 and ARM make a difference?

Not really. Arm hasn't been RISC for quite a while now (there's a "Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero" instruction(!), SIMD, etc etc).

The difference can be explained partially by the memory model: x86 has total store ordering, which can be slower than Arm's weak memory model (it allows the hardware to be more creative).

> running native compiled code

There's more to it than 'running native code'. It depends a lot on what code is running (any CPU implementing the above javascript instruction would be much faster on a web benchmark for example). It also depends on the compiler. If the code is control-flow heavy, there isn't much to do except having large cache sizes and wide pipes, which most high-end, out-of-order CPU do already.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#25

Post by w0utert »

Jonnax wrote: post #17

This is essentially Qualcomm vs Apple in the mobile market. But the question I've got from looking at the the Geekbench site: iPhone 11: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611448 AMD 3900x 12 Zen 2 12 Core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611445 The iPhone has higher single core performance than a desktop CPU with a 105W TDP. Of course it has more cores. But am I missing something here? Is this test actually…

I don’t think comparing Geekbench scores directly between completely different processor architectures tells you that much about real world application performance. It’s a synthetic benchmark that may be affected disproportionally by factors that aren’t very significant for ‘normal’ use cases, e.g. specific optimizations (compiler, hardware, etc) that hit the happy flow for some part of the benchmark on one architecture, but not the other.

But the main difference is thermals and performance under sustained load. So far none of the Appple SoC’s have been shown to handle sustained workloads at heir highest frequency. The CPU in the most recent iPhones is known to throttle under load quite fast, and nobody but Apple knows how it would perform in an active cooling setup.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#26

Post by jiggawatts »

huffmsa wrote: post #3

What do you iPhone users do with all of your power?

Well, for example, I recently used my iPhone X to edit a 4K 60fps video using iMovie. This was quick, easy, and all playback was silky smooth. I did this while sitting at the airport lounge waiting for my flight, and it didn't use too much of my battery.

Meanwhile, my very high-end gaming PC struggles to play the video files from my iPhone at 60fps for some mysterious reason.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#28

Post by fulafel »

Symmetry wrote: post #20
altmind wrote: post #5

geekbench have unreliable perfromance stats that've been favoring iphone for a looong while. check your conclusions - 90% of articles with rocking iphone performance cite geekbench.

There was a version of Geekbench a while ago for which you could make a good argument for that but Geekbench 5 seems to tell the same story that Spec, web tests, etc all tell. Apple's cores really do seem to be that good though they benefit from running at the clock speed they were designed for, unlike an Intel U-series which has more pipeline stages than it needs to hit its clock. And Apple also benefits from being…

Where can I see these SPEC results for Apple CPUs?

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#29

Post by stefan_ »

What is even the hypothesis here? Websites are slow because Android devices are slow?

Lest we remind our web developer friends of the cache hierarchy, the slowest part of all here is still fetching the fricking page over the internet. On this mobile Twitter page alone two spinners are spinning simultaneously.

If, after all the network stuff, you are still taking a second to render in a world where smartphones can play Doom 3 at 60 fps - you are just taking the piss.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#30

Post by endorphone »

Jonnax wrote: post #17

This is essentially Qualcomm vs Apple in the mobile market. But the question I've got from looking at the the Geekbench site: iPhone 11: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611448 AMD 3900x 12 Zen 2 12 Core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611445 The iPhone has higher single core performance than a desktop CPU with a 105W TDP. Of course it has more cores. But am I missing something here? Is this test actually…

"Assuming core count was equal. Would a desktop CPU and an Apple SoC run at equivalent performance if it was running Ubuntu and running native compiled code?"

Yes. Of course there are going to be edge conditions where one or the other are going to shine particularly well, but overall the performance is going to be close, if not giving a nod to the Apple device.

This is the reason there have been wide expectations that Apple would move their desktop/laptop platforms to their own chips, and if rumors are true that will be next year. In a situation where their own chips had credible heat dissipation and wouldn't be subject to thermal throttling, it would be very impressive. I mean it's already spectacularly impressive, but it would be quite dominant with real cooling.

Apple needs to be careful, though, explaining their patience. There has always been the potential that Intel comes out with a game changer.

Of course in such discussions everyone is going to discount whatever benchmarks are used. Yet we've seen this in benchmark after benchmark, at generalists tasks that annihilate any trick instruction. Out of curiosity I just ran JetStream 2 -- it yields a 81.6 score on my i7 laptop, and 153 on my iPhone 11. The iPhone with incredibly poor heat dissipation.

The ARM / x86 / x86_64 / CISC / RISC things are all abstract higher level notions now and aren't the reason. Apple's team has just proven astonishingly good at designing chips. Which quite honestly I thought would turn out otherwise, and Apple would end up begging the industry for whatever the new hotness was.

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