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Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of i9-13900K, 7950X in Single-Core Performance

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Re: Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of i9-13900K, 7950X in Single-Core Performance

#11

Post by gary_0 »

I find articles like this really vexing because this isn't a general-purpose CPU, it's just a chip meant to run the software that Apple allows on the App Store. Most of the software I use day-to-day can't run on it by design.

It's kind of depressing that the most advanced mobile CPU technology (that can only be fabbed by a single company in a far-away country) is monopolized by a company that heavily restricts the software you can run on it, and will never sell it to me with documentation and let me plug it onto my own motherboard--which is ironically how Apple first started, by buying and making full use of the MOS 6502. But the days of the garage hacker getting their hands on cutting-edge parts are long gone.

Re: Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of i9-13900K, 7950X in Single-Core Performance

#12

Post by nomel »

m3kw9 wrote: post #6

“ There is a catch though: Apple's A17 Pro operates at 3.75 GHz, according to the benchmark, whereas its mighty competitors work at about 5.80 GHz and 6.0 GHz, respectively.” This is why numbers like this don’t matter when you say the performance is within 10%

Could you expand on that?

Why does GHz matter? Performance should be measured as a black box, with the metric being the time it takes to accomplishing some task.

Re: Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of i9-13900K, 7950X in Single-Core Performance

#15

Post by jwells89 »

edude03 wrote: post #2

This is super impressive on paper, but it feels like there aren't really many applications that can take advantage of this power on a phone due to thermal and (battery) power constraints. Is the idea that mobile workloads are spiky so it can boost to full speed to render a webpage for example then go back to sleep? Are there / can there be any applications that sustain high clock speeds?

As far as I’ve gathered, race to idle has definitely been a focal point for Apple when it comes to power management along with coalescence of CPU and antenna wakeups — the system batches up work, powers up components, burns through the work as quickly as possible, and then returns components to idle/sleep.

This is also why on iOS, apps that become known for abusing or mismanaging background processing are penalized and have their background processes run less often. Even just a couple of processes waffling around instead of completing their tasks and quitting can keep the system from idling and have a big negative impact.

Re: Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of i9-13900K, 7950X in Single-Core Performance

#16

Post by yakz »

gary_0 wrote: post #11

I find articles like this really vexing because this isn't a general-purpose CPU, it's just a chip meant to run the software that Apple allows on the App Store. Most of the software I use day-to-day can't run on it by design. It's kind of depressing that the most advanced mobile CPU technology (that can only be fabbed by a single company in a far-away country) is monopolized by a company that heavily restricts the so…

It’s depressing right now maybe, but at least it probably means we’ll have this level of performance inexpensively in some years. The tech is still getting better quickly.

Re: Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of i9-13900K, 7950X in Single-Core Performance

#17

Post by satvikpendem »

nxobject wrote: post #10
satvikpendem wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they're bringing AAA games like Resident Evil 4 Remake and Assassin's Creed Mirage to the iPhone, complete with raytracing support, so it looks like it'll be a golden age of Apple gaming soon enough.

So, it looks like Apple will be taking the console path to gaming, instead of the PC way.

They'll be available on all Apple Silicon devices including Macs, as the processors are so similar.

Re: Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of i9-13900K, 7950X in Single-Core Performance

#18

Post by nomel »

robotnikman wrote: post #9
MBCook wrote: post #8

What’s really embarrassing is how it compares to the Snapdragon. Is the gap expanding at this point?

Qualcomm is just happy lazily sitting back and collecting licensing fees while putting out mediocre products at this point.

That's not fair at all. Snapdragon 8 gen 2 was ahead of Apples best offering, just a few days ago [1], in gaming. That's not "mediocre". That's much closer to "head to head". Thermal throttling is also a significant problem with iPhones, for anything real world [2]. A new snapdragon will come out shortly, and the battle will continue.

[1] https://beebom.com/snapdragon-8-gen-2-vs-apple-a16-bionic-be....

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSzwefx_TXU

Re: Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of i9-13900K, 7950X in Single-Core Performance

#19

Post by Aloha »

gary_0 wrote: post #11

I find articles like this really vexing because this isn't a general-purpose CPU, it's just a chip meant to run the software that Apple allows on the App Store. Most of the software I use day-to-day can't run on it by design. It's kind of depressing that the most advanced mobile CPU technology (that can only be fabbed by a single company in a far-away country) is monopolized by a company that heavily restricts the so…

Just because you can't run whatever software you like on it, does not make it non-general purpose CPU.

Re: Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of i9-13900K, 7950X in Single-Core Performance

#20

Post by r00fus »

m3kw9 wrote: post #6

“ There is a catch though: Apple's A17 Pro operates at 3.75 GHz, according to the benchmark, whereas its mighty competitors work at about 5.80 GHz and 6.0 GHz, respectively.” This is why numbers like this don’t matter when you say the performance is within 10%

These numbers are a harbinger of what to expect when Apple brings 3nm tech to the M-series, especially the Ultra with 24+ cores and much more lenient thermal envelope (not to mention active cooling).
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