Nvidia claimed the Tegra 3 outperforms a Core2, it was pretty widely reported back in 2011.

I posit that phones outperform laptops for a lot of people (possibly because upgrading your phone is more widely encouraged).

Details on that: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/2011/02/21/why-nvidiae28099s...

For historical perspective, Core 2 Duos are from 2006/7. And T7200 is a laptop version, slower than desktop equivalents of the same era.

Desktop CPUs are still much, much faster than phone CPUs. Here's a table with lots of numbers:

http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks...

The iPhone 5s, with the "desktop class" A7 chip, has about 15% of the computing power of an i7 4770k, by this benchmark.

Personally, I don't use mobile devices - neither phones nor laptops - for compute-heavy operations. Everything from compilation to video transcoding takes way longer than on a decent desktop. Phones are not close to threatening that yet, not by a long shot.

Trivial work, like text editing, light photo manipulation, sure. Anything that could be done on a PC 15 years ago, sure. But they're nowhere near one another.

> Personally, I don't use mobile devices - neither phones nor laptops - for compute-heavy operations. Everything from compilation to video transcoding takes way longer than on a decent desktop. Phones are not close to threatening that yet, not by a long shot.

One option is to run compute-heavy stuff on a networked server, which you SSH into from a lightweight phone/tablet/Chromebook. I can definitely see myself working like that, if I could get a phone or tablet with a docking station.

SSH isn't as light as many people think, just because your CISC desktop yawns at it doesn't mean it's not computationally heavy.

Wow, I installed Windows 8 on a T7100 (1.8Ghz) and it runs super smoothly, but some people were complaining of Tegra 3 windows RT tablet being slow? (try googling "tegra 3 windows RT slow") That is weird! Can we really trust those benchmark for real day to day comparison? Or maybe I don't have the same speed expectation as the tablet users?

Is it just me or is that A7 performance crazy impressive? Especially comparing an iphone to the size of an i7 + cooling + power

Yep, I think the A8 (or A7X) could be really close to the performances of entry level CPUs used in MacBook air! An A7 scores 2564 and an i3-3217U 3095. But if you look at the Atom Bay Trail, which scores 2630, you see that Intel did a nice coming back in the mobile segment, at least for tablets.

In the case of a quad cortex A7, like the one in the Moto G, or the MediaTek MT6589 in the bench comparison, we see that the performances are too bad to replace a laptop. With a score of 1258 it is comparable of the best good old netbooks with Intel Atom.

Nvidia claim a lot of things about their Tegras.

I'd actually be interested in some kind of direct comparison of the single core atom in my 2007 era netbook compared to whatever is in this phone as well as to my note 3.

Atom from back then really did suck, though. In-order, etc. This thing has one of the newer Qualcomm ARM cores, which are reasonably wide out-of-order.