This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
A20 Pro vs Intel Ultra 7 Series 3
It's honestly amazing what these chips can do.
Unfortunately it's stuck behind the Apple ecosystem.
Linux is inevitable
Apple will fight it with everything they can. Latest MacOS27 hides linux partitions from the bootpicker so it is blocked in firmware.
Not exactly, the bootpicker just won't show partitions that are not flagged as bootable. This is a departure from previous versions, that would check to see whether partitions were bootable without looking at the flag, and took a little bit of investigating to figure out this undocumented behavior, but it is an easy fix:
All of this performance is wasted on Apple's closed hardware and OS. What a shame.
More cats in my dwarf fortress are never wasted.
Honestly, DF was the last time i thought about single core performance.
On the iPhone, sure, but it would be equally wasted on Android phones because who needs this much performance in a phone anyway. However, I expect them to also use it in next year's Macbook Neo, which is a surprisingly capable laptop for its price with even the A18 Pro chip. It also bodes well for the next generation of their M series chips if the A20 Pro is this fast... and there are TONS of people using Macs for real work. Code compilation in particular got super fast with the M1 Pro and I believe it's great for creative applications too, though I haven't really used those much myself. Creatives types gravitated towards MacOS even before Apple Silicon, especially video editors because of Final Cut Pro.
I believe the power can be used with Android's Desktop Mode, or even Android's current multitasking capabilities like multi-window and pop-up window.
And yet, it can't (be made to) run a full desktop OS or play AAA games. But you can personalise the Siri voice (older phones can do the conversational stuff)... maybe edit photos faster.
Apple went and made a phone you could use for ten years, but next year they'll be telling you why their new phone is so much better than the last one. They don't expect you to upgrade every year, but they expect you to want to, and after a couple of generations, they want you to think that you have to.
I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max (2024), and the 18 Pro/Max presentation definitely gave me a bit of phone envy. But I also have a Galaxy S10 (2019), and that does a few things better than the iPhone, even though it's 5 years difference between them. Apple's keyboard likes to hallucinate weird results (like changing out common words for names of people I don't even have in contacts) and edit after the fact. Gboard just works. When it doesn't, the mistake makes sense (if and of for example). Also, I've used the same wallpaper on both phones. It always looks better on the Samsung. Sharper colors and contrast. Hold both up and ask anyone which looks better, they're gonna point to the Samsung, even if you turn the iPhone's brightness up all the way.
Phone manufacturers are desperately trying to convince you that you need the latest and greatest. You don't — unless you want to do AI stuff. And even then, they're going to charge you for it. And they're sure you'll pay, because you've already shown your hand by opening your wallet again.
I'm doing just fine by not looking at new phones as long as my current one works - ignorance is bliss.
I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max (2024), and the 18 Pro/Max presentation definitely gave me a bit of phone envy.
I have a 16 base… and I didn’t raise an eyebrow. What kind of app running can a 18 do that a 16 can’t, other than whatever is self inflicted with software bloat?
A LOFIC camera would have gotten me interested, but they didn’t ship that.
Actually insane they are beating desktop processors with a phone CPU.
Not that crazy to beat a desktop CPU in specific category like this. This article went off the deep end when they made the comparison to the Huawei CPU. If you actually put one of these in a phone and spent any amount of time getting the kind of performance they're claiming it would almost immediately thermal throttle or cook itself. These comparisons are pointless.
Exactly what I wanted to say. On paper my pixel 1 was significantly faster then my pc at the time, an ancient core2quad q8400. In a lot of ways the phone did feel faster, then I tried to decompress a large 7z file on both of them and,despite using a mechanical hard drive, my pc took just over half as long.
Now overall, there were a lot of things that chip could manage better than my desktop but the point is that using a single benchmark or benchmark suite that leans into the strengths of the hardware is pointless.
These "benchmarks" are great for marketing, so not pointless. Just pointless for users.
Core Ultra 7 355 is a mobile (laptop) CPU, with a nominal power draw of 25W and a base clock speed of 2.3GHz.
Eh, it's 2 years newer than the AMD architecture, on a better node, and has better memory packaging. I mean it's great they're getting this performance, but wait until Zen 6 for a contemporary architecture and node comparison.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time Apple releases a CPU. Their designs are good but most of it is the new TSMC node they use. When others get access to the node the difference is not that large but then the cycle starts again.
Except they aren't, outside of synthetic geekbench benchmark that is designed to produce this exact result...
I hope everyone reading this realizes that score chart is misleading at best.
They failed to point out clearly in the posted image in OP that the scores are for burst compute. As in, if the chip sustained that workload for more than a few seconds it would fry itself.
Taken out of context, everything can be impressive. That title is really, really misleading.
They're also comparing arm to x86. Both can do exceptionally well in specific category. I still remember how disappointed I was initially in M chips because of advertisement like "FASTEST CHIP THERE IS, BEATS ALL INTELS", but then I try to play the only cross platform game I know (Minecraft) and it plays worse than on a decade+ older Intel CPU.
Don't worry guys, we'll get a RISC-V device that blows Apple ARM out of the water any second now.
Annnnyyy second now...
They probably optimize for the benchmark.. It's not uncommon
The benchmark itself measures burst compute.
For any sort of sustained workload it's nowhere near laptops, let alone near desktops.
The whole post, and especially the title and image, are misleading.
The comparison that matters is always left out. Computing performance by dollar cost.
They always do this comparison and it is always misleading. They are the first to get a processor on the new TSMC node, so of course the processor will be faster.
They’re the first to get the fastest chips, so saying their chips are the fastest is… misleading? But also “of course” it’s true?
I’m confused.
I don’t think anybody was misled into thinking it meant this chip would always be the fastest on the market.
Saying the first new CPU on a new node is fastest is uninteresting from a technical standpoint, as there isn’t any competition yet, even if it is not inaccurate.
Okay, but that Intel CPU was part of the first family of CPUs on Intel's equivalent node (18A) too. If nothing else, it serves as an interesting Intel vs TSMC lithography comparison. Which one would expect TSMC to win anyway, but at least now we have numbers.
I don't really like geekbench. It always feels like it favors apple devices.
Sometimes companies build product to get high scores, rather than to work well in real settings.
Apple has done a remarkable job with their silicon though.
I got an used M1 2020 MacBook Air (base model, no upgrades) back in 2023 and that thing is still going strong. Doesn’t feel slow at all. Not even slightly.
Even as someone who despises Apple for their product philosophy, I gotta admit their new chips are baller... Lots of undeserved hate in this thread
No iCrap gets the hate well deserved. They torpedo their own products.
The chips are good but the company can go fuck itself
but can it run linux and real software? what would I want more powerful cpu for if not linux server?
The phone has been out for 10 days and this article is from 6 days before it was released.
Why are we looking at an "early benchmark" from before release instead of an actual real benchmark of the device. I don't get why Geekbench doesn't have results for iPhone 18, or why this "early benchmark" calls it "iPhone19,2."
If true, the single core performance of this chip is almost identical to the single-core performance of the new M6 chip.
Something doesn't seem right, but I don't know a lot about Geekbench or iOS benchmarks to know if this seems legit or not.
Edit: apparently they haven't shipped yet?
