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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

#51

Post by gary_0 »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #43
gary_0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My definition of "general purpose" is that that you can "run whatever software you like on it". If you can't run whatever on it, that restricts the CPU to a "specific purpose", no?

if I write a bit of software and target ARM64 and it cannot run on x86. Does that mean that x86 has a specific purpose now and is no longer a general purpose CPU?

That's not the same thing. An instruction set is an inherent aspect of a CPU; you can't have a CPU without one. Also, you can emulate or translate instruction sets between general-purpose CPUs, or in most cases just recompile the higher-level source code. The underlying logic will be executed regardless.

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

#52

Post by belltaco »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #43
gary_0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My definition of "general purpose" is that that you can "run whatever software you like on it". If you can't run whatever on it, that restricts the CPU to a "specific purpose", no?

if I write a bit of software and target ARM64 and it cannot run on x86. Does that mean that x86 has a specific purpose now and is no longer a general purpose CPU?

An ARM64 emulator will run that software on x86.

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

#53

Post by vlovich123 »

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.

CPUs in a mobile form factor are thermally constrained. Consider that the 13900 will have a heat sink and dedicated fan. If Apple made a laptop version, they’d be using essentially the same chip at a higher clock frequency. If Apple put it into a Mac Pro, they’d run it higher frequency yet still.

of course there’s more than just thermals. The CPU has to actually be designed to run at a high clock.

I could be wrong but my understanding is that all their CPUs share a good amount of commonality and the major differences are more around packaging (IO connectors etc)

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

#54

Post by bottlepalm »

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.

iPhone could be a legit game console if developers wanted it to. Pair a Bluetooth game controller with screen mirroring and there you go. There are so many games on Steam I wish they would port to iPhone. It's like having this incredibly powerful device in your pocket and you can't actually use it for anything.

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

#56

Post by FPGAhacker »

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.

Clock speed correlates pretty closely to power consumption within a given family.

It correlates less directly between families, smaller process nodes tend to allow for high frequencies at the same power consumption.

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

#57

Post by satvikpendem »

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…

> 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

The games will come to all Apple Silicon devices as the architectures are very similar if not the same (M1 iPad vs M1 Mac). Apple also released the Game Porting Toolkit and I can already play games at decent framerates with Whisky [0] which utilizes GPTK. Keep in mind this is basically beta software that's not even for the end user to use but as a developer tool to help port their games over.

And obviously the games when on iOS won't be played with touch controls, it's for playing with a Bluetooth controller.

[0] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky

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

#58

Post by bpye »

nixpulvis wrote: post #32
Aloha wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

True. But it does make it functionally a non-general purpose CPU. I suppose you can load your own programs if you have a dev account or jailbreak right?

Unless it’s changed again you don’t need a dev account to deploy apps to iOS - but it is somewhat limited. You can have at most 3, the signing lasts for just a week and IIRC the entitlements you can use are limited as well?

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

#59

Post by wmf »

brokenmachine wrote: post #39
TradingPlaces wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think people understand what a big leap this going to be for their CPU cores.

Why's that? Will they run Windows? Linux?

Yes, the 8cx Gen 4 will be used in laptops running Windows and (unofficially) Linux.

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

#60

Post by 015a »

iPhone 13 Pro, with A15 Bionic, scored around 2250 Geekbench 6 single core. M2 Max, more-so around 2800. These two chips are comparable because they use the same microarchitecture, and it indicates a ~20-25% uplift in single core mostly just through pushing more power through the chip.

If they can drive the same increase with an M3 chip based on the A17 Pro microarchitecture, a single-core score of 3500 is within reach. For a laptop.

Comparison: the i9 13900KS, the current stock single-core performance champion, can push 3100 with excellent cooling; and it reaches this blistering performance (~10% faster than an M2 Ultra) by, singularly, drawing upward of 220 watts from the wall [1]. The Ryzen 7900x isn't far behind, in both metrics. An entire M2 Max SoC peaks at around 90 watts, and there's evidence that the CPU in isolation draws closer to 35 watts [2].

It cannot be understated how far ahead Apple is.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-13900ks-c...

[2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M2-Max-Processor-Benchma...

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