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Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

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Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. Having worked with the Jetson platform extensively, the TK1 was equivalent to a 5422 (because they're both built on the vanilla A15 architecture). However, the TX1 and TX2 ("Denver" cores) are closer to (though, still slighty behind) the current SD 835: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6y4atVl-mc And when it comes to GPU compute, it's much more powerful than all the alternatives.

I'll correct to "comparable", as it's more appropriate. However, it's not a "clearcut no" or "very powerful in comparison", due to the number of cores (no doubt about the GPU, I had made this explicit in the parent post). I've run the Phoronix test suite (which uses a set of real-world applications)[⁰], and, excluding the outliars for both parts (Redis/OpenSSL), we're talking about 10 to 40% advantage for the TX1, an…

The TX2 is a dual-core chip (ignoring the 4 "littles" since they're unused in benchmarks). The 5422 is a quad core. And even then, it's outperforming the 5422 by a decent margin in most tests. Even c-ray, an intrinsically multithreaded application is close.

So you're correct, they're "comparable" in that if you take twice as many 40%-as-powerful cores, you might shrink the gap. But for any fundamentally single threaded tasks, a massive gap exists. And if/when you leverage the GPU (which can't be ignored, despite your handwaving), it becomes a canyon.

Re: Apple's 7nm A12 chip could be the best feature in the 2018 iPhones

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple really needs to fix the laptops and give up the goods on the Mac Pro machine. Apple just needs to give up on Macs. They obviously don't care about the product much anymore. License the OS and let OEMs and regular people build machines that can deliver the value that Apple can't or won't.

Apple’s Mac lineup is the most profitable PC business in the world, AINEC.

It's still a blip in their bottom line compared to their mobile devices. It's been pretty clear for years where their priorities are, and I say this as someone who's been an Apple fan since grade school. They've been riding their laurels hard for the last five years when it comes to PCs.
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