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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

#21

Post by kibwen »

satvikpendem wrote: post #5
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?

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.

Games made with a controller in mind are miserable experiences on a touchscreen. Phones are awkward and uncomfortable to hold like a controller, the lack of physical buttons provides no tactile feedback on where to press, the lack of shoulder buttons means overloading your thumbs with even more inputs, and your fingers obscure half the screen.

And if the implication is that they'll port those iOS games to Mac, then I wouldn't count on it if it takes even a single iota of extra effort on their end. There are more Linux gamers than Mac gamers, and yet game devs still can't be arsed to test their games on Steam Deck.

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

#23

Post by nxobject »

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…

If you collect vintage compact Macs, you can literally see the hardware transition from the original Macintosh designed like any other random 68k project within the reach of homebrewer with a PAL programmer, to highly compact gate arrays and “if you don’t have the ability to design and obtain custom silicon, good luck”. VLSI giveth and VLSI taketh.

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

#24

Post by gilgoomesh »

kibwen wrote: post #21
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.

Games made with a controller in mind are miserable experiences on a touchscreen. Phones are awkward and uncomfortable to hold like a controller, the lack of physical buttons provides no tactile feedback on where to press, the lack of shoulder buttons means overloading your thumbs with even more inputs, and your fingers obscure half the screen. And if the implication is that they'll port those iOS games to Mac, then I…

Which is why you can stream your iPhone to a TV and connect a controller. There are also many controllers that clip onto the iPhone itself for a Switch-like experience.

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

#25

Post by ghughes »

nomel wrote: post #12
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.

I think OP meant clock speeds don’t matter, relative performance does.

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

#27

Post by lagrange77 »

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…

> But the days of the garage hacker getting their hands on cutting-edge parts are long gone.

In the context of CPUs i'm with you (still tinkering with things like 6502s).

On the other hand, i just deployed Llama2 70B (with the help of [0]) on my home PC and it was fascinating, when it wrote it's first response.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37492986

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

#28

Post by nixpulvis »

nomel wrote: post #12
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.

The catch is that we can expect better performance when they increase the clock to be closer to the i9. However, it’s never clear how high it go safely.

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

#29

Post by slg »

kibwen wrote: post #21
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.

Games made with a controller in mind are miserable experiences on a touchscreen. Phones are awkward and uncomfortable to hold like a controller, the lack of physical buttons provides no tactile feedback on where to press, the lack of shoulder buttons means overloading your thumbs with even more inputs, and your fingers obscure half the screen. And if the implication is that they'll port those iOS games to Mac, then I…

I don't think they expect people to seriously play Resident Evil 4 with touch controls. I imagine most people who actually complete the game will use either the controllers that attach to the side of the phone like a Switch, controllers that have a mount on top to hold the phone, a normal Bluetooth controls like a Dualshock with their phone in some other dock, or stream everything to an Apple TV.

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

#30

Post by Pufferbo »

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…

I’m glad someone else feels this way. I absolutely hate those YouTube videos talking about the “4K 30min total render” bs. Show me a M-chip MacBook that doesn’t balk when running Docker, or chug when opening a fat codebase in WebStorm.

Sure the chips are fast when they run the stuff Apple designed for it, but they don’t seem any faster to me in my work. I will give them efficiency though. I love not having to carry the charge brick everywhere I go.

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