Anyway though, it's still _very_ impressive from Apple, but much more believable. Looks like they've got very good engineers working on it. I hope they can scale it to the laptop requirements.
Well, if the iPhone was also on a battery, that was a fair comparison.
I also have benchmarks of Haswell-era hardware which the XS is also very competitive against-- including my personal desktop, which the XS beats in single-core and matches for multi-core. But that one's probably not an entirely fair comparison, given that it's older hardware and the machine wasn't intended to be particularly high-end when I built it.
I'd like to see some more comprehensive benchmarking against Intel... I'd be inclined to do some myself, but I don't have a good benchmarking suite that isn't Geekbench. If only the SPEC benchmarks weren't so stinking expensive...
Granted, this probably wouldn't hold up for a more sustained workload since the fanless iPhone's going to hit its thermal limits much more quickly than the full-size laptop, but it's pretty impressive that they're edging this close to Intel anyways (in a much smaller, much lower-power package). It'll be really interesting to see what happens with the more unconstrained A12X that'll likely go into the iPad Pro this year.
[1] https://ark.intel.com/products/97496/Intel-Core-i7-7820HQ-Pr...