Gotta remember that all these previous ARM chips have been designed in the context of the phone. If you suddenly tell the chip designers they have 10x the power and thermal headroom, theres a lot you could do.

Sure, but "could do" isn't remotely the same thing as "already faster" now, is it?

Apple's A CPUs are already the best in their category, by far.

Knowing Apple had Intel Macs running in the background for years before they announced the jump to x86, I wouldn't be surprised if they already have the chips and know how well it performs.

And I also wouldn't mind if they did another demo like they used to: https://youtu.be/oxwmF0OJ0vg?t=24m45s

The current A11 chip is faster single-core than the current MacBook Pro.

The Intel chip you mention isn't in any Apple machine at all. (Except maybe the iMac Pro? Is it even in that?) So you be real. I don't think you've actually looked at the benchmarks. You should do so. I think you'll be shocked at just how much overlap there is, just like I was.

>I don't think you've actually looked at the benchmarks.

What benchmarks? Geekbench? That's the only one I've ever seen where the fight is close, and Geekbench (like everything that boils performance down to one number) is nearly completely useless.

If you see a two-watt phone CPU beating a 45-watt actively-cooled laptop CPU, you can either conclude that the phone is alien technology decades ahead of anything else on the market or that the benchmark is broken. Which is more likely?

https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...

Does Linus not realize that Intel processors also have hardware assisted SHA?

Geekbench may not be the best tool for determining the power of a processor, but at the least it gives you a general idea of power across devices in a consistent set of tests, which can be extrapolated.

They didn't at the time he wrote that.

That post is pretty outdated. It's about old hardware and an old version of Geekbench. But people still use Geekbench 3 and old x86 hardware, so it's not totally irrelevant.

We are talking about the MacBook, IE passively cooled Intel Core m3 running at 1.2 GHz on something like 8 Watts TDP.

that's because apple is fixed on choosing the intel parts with the least tdp power they can get away with. it's their choice to make the mbp slow, up and including the numerous thermal issues that force the cpu out of the nominal turbo mode for the longer workloads

Those are valid points, but it's still shocking that Apple's own CPUs can outperform Intel laptop CPUs with far higher TDP.

Benchmarks aside, because they can and are gamed, the only real way to see this, is loading a big workload such as Photoshop, Kernel compilation, ect., that professionals do every single day. I very much doubt that A11 is even remotely close to a mid range quadcore Intel cpu, and let's not forget that we're in the middle of moving to 6-8 core cpus.

The 8700k which the previous poster mentioned is a hex core with 12 Threads!