Case in point, Apple's ARM chips are huge (and hot) compared to the stock ARM chips and that is because they are throwing transistors at the problem.

Would you have a particular reference for this? I have read that the Apple ARM chips are more power efficient than comparable ARM chips powering Android devices.

SD835 was 72mm^2[1], A10 was 125[2]. A11 and SD845 are actually very similar in die area[3]. However Qualcomm integrates their modem on the SoC and Apple does not, and Apple's CPU cores are still significantly larger as can be seen from die shots.

Phone SoC makers don't really publish TDPs and there is a lack of good data about it, but Apple clearly has high peak power draw (and very good idle efficiency). Battery life and thermal throttling observed under a sustained heavy workload is probably the best proxy for measuring SoC power. For example, see GFXBench battery life/throttling results in Anandtech's review[4] of the iPhone 7/plus. Much higher power consumption (and performance, but this is resolution-dependent because it's a graphics benchmark) than the competition.

[1] http://www.techinsights.com/about-techinsights/overview/blog...

[2]https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/236091-new-apple-a10-tear...

[3] https://i.imgur.com/KBw8K8N.jpg

[4] https://www.anandtech.com/show/10685/the-iphone-7-and-iphone...

This is a great answer, thank you.

They idle really well. In particular the software layer around suspend is really first rate when compared with the Linux BSPs from vendors, which tend to be somewhere between glitchy and awful (c.f. all those times when your off-brand Android phone turned red hot in your pocket, or the fact that a RPi is running a "mobile" SoC that never manages to draw less than 3W).

The power under load is quiet high, apocryphally. No, I don't have numbers.

The Broadcom SoC used in the Raspberry Pi hasn't aged terribly well, there is a pretty good thread comparing the various boards out there on the Armbian Forum[1], in it they discuss how much power boards use with different parts enabled. Some Allwinner boards (like the PC2) can use just 1w at idle without disabling anything. Further savings is possible if you disable gigabit ethernet, GPU, etc. More info is in the 2nd link!

1 - https://forum.armbian.com/topic/1748-sbc-consumptionperforma... 2 - https://docs.armbian.com/Hardware_Allwinner-H3/

Oh sure. It was more a point about software polish. All these SoC's have hardware support for clock gating and separable power domains and deep idle states, etc...

But in general, making all junk work is a huge rats' nest of complexity. And in practice, except for a tiny handful of devices from top-tier manufacturers, it just doesn't. Maybe it works "most" of the time. Maybe there are tuning tricks you can use that get the power down but break two or three devices in crazy ways.

But Apple has the smarts and resources to ship a power-hungry part and guarantee that it sits at a clean idle reliably. And Qualcomm isn't far behind as long as they have an integrator like Google or Samsung breathing down their neck. But all the other junk? Yeah, junk.

All parties that run Linux on these devices should be forced to mainline their kernel patches. The patchwork of shitty BSPs that both Google and Samsung have created were shipped, resulting in hundreds of millions of insecure, poorly supported devices that are actively used.

Look at what Armbian has done with these bespoke chips in spite of limited resources, had Google and Samsung put in a minor amount of effort, akin to what Sony has done, the Android landscape would have many more users running fully patched, slightly less buggy software today.

light up the cpu, get the work done fast, then shut down. that is typically the energy efficient thing to do.

Apple uses a six wide decoder where as there is only a 4 wide decoder on the ARM stock chips.

But isn't it easier for AMD to close the gap due to their multiple dies on a package design instead of a large monolithic design like Intel? If they make the cores larger the cost for the entire CPU doesn't increase as much as Intels.

Even though Zen+ (cache optimization) is probably not as much of a improvement as Zen2 ("improves Zen in multiple dimensions") over Zen will be, the single threaded gap did shrink quite a bit:

https://i.imgur.com/dpfu5K3.png

But I guess some of these improvements come also from the faster memory that is supported. The benchmarks sadly were not made with the same memory.