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Android Power Apple Hardware Technology

Apple's A11 Bionic Chip In iPhone 8 and iPhone X Smokes Android Handsets In Early Benchmarks (hothardware.com) 332

MojoKid writes: Many of the new releases of Apple's iPhone bring with it a new A-series SoC (System on Chip) and Apple is keeping that tradition with the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X. Each of those handsets sports a custom ARM-based A11 Bionic processor with six cores -- four high performance cores and two power efficiency cores. The two power efficiency cores will perform the bulk medial chores to maintain battery life, which Apple says will be 2 hours longer than the iPhone 7. However, for heavier workloads, the chip is capable of not only firing up its four high performance cores, but also all six cores simultaneously. If early leaked benchmarks are any indication, the A11 Bionic is going to be a benchmark-busting beast of a chip. A set of just-posted Geekbench scores reinforces that notion. Just prior to Apple announcing its newest iPhone models, Geekbench's database was updated with a new entry for an "iPhone 10,5" which we assume to be the iPhone X. Based on the scores recorded, in this one benchmark at least, the A11 CPU powering the iPhone X appears to be 50 to 70 percent faster than any Android handset on the market currently, even those powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 835.
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Apple's A11 Bionic Chip In iPhone 8 and iPhone X Smokes Android Handsets In Early Benchmarks

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  • eh geek bench bs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @05:46PM (#55199217) Journal

    It's a geek bench result.
    That means it's crap. They're closed source and completely unverified and always give insanely high scores to iOS, even compared to maxed out server cpus.

    Non news.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      Benchmarks are all useless so far as I'm concerned, they gave note slow note 2 a good score and my fast cubot a lower score.

      What matters is how snappy the apps I use are, I don't care about stupid synthetic benchmarks on phones. How quick does gps get a lock is a good metric, how fast does the phone start or reboot is another good metric. How quick can a photo be taken - another good metric that actually matters for a phone.

      Just measuring the CPU speed is pointless.

      And test internet reliability, the

  • ... in terror, but will never be silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

  • by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @05:47PM (#55199233) Homepage Journal

    New iPhone is launched:
    Apple Fanbois: New iPhone is faster than the Samsung!
    Android Fanbois: It doesn't matter. So many other things are more important the processor speed!!!!

    New Android phone is launched:
    Android Fanbois: New Samsung is faster than the iPhone!
    Apple Fanbois: It doesn't matter. So many other things are more important the processor speed!!!!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      FWIW your second case does not happen very often.

      Like it or not, Apple's single core performance usually kills anything on the market running Android, and typically the multicore performance of Android phones has not been enough to match the interactive speed of iOS either; responsiveness and smoothness usually lag behind.

      I speak as someone who would actually be happy if this was not the case. And if Android vendors were remotely as focussed on end-user security. There's no way I'll purchase a Samsung thing

      • "There's no way I'll purchase a Samsung thing for my house for a while." ...

        Me neither they spend too much time trying to copy Apple (Except in facial recognition I think Samsung actually bagged that one first),I wouldnt buy any Apple products either because cost and vendor lock-in, and the fact that i like to make choices on merit rather than following fashion like a sheep.

        • Samsung only did facial recognition from a 2D photo. iPhone X does a lot more. It projects a grid of dots onto the face, and photos with 2 cameras, giving 3D information. That helps prevent spoofing with photos.

          And one of the cameras is IR so is looking for heat patterns, which would help to reject mannequins.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @07:31PM (#55199785) Homepage

      Well, just recognizing that Apple does some innovative hardcore engineering seems to be hard for some. There are always those that claim Apple's business model is wrapping things others have created in white plastic, marketing it to hipsters and selling it at double price. Which is occasionally true but they do have some pretty impressive home brew like the CPUs, Secure Enclave (when the FBI whines they've done something right) and they've fronted some technology like high DPI displays and fingerprint scanning making it mainstream. By the time it's passed through Apple's marketing machine nerds seem to hate it no matter what.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      Well I'll tell you one thing that's more important than CPU speed: battery. If your battery doesn't last the day then you're carrying a piece of expensive glass in your pocket.

    • Your ironic analogy no longer holds because I believe ever since iPhone 5S, the iphones have been smoking the Android hardware in raw CPU performance.

    • No android phone has been faster than an iPhone, for the simple reason of Java. Hardware itself is often superior on android, yet the software always drags it down. Current iphones are no slouchs either. And i say this as an android owner.

    • Actually I think you'll find most people don't give a shit.

      Hurrah I can switch to Safari in 0.1seconds faster than previously. Whoopdefuckingdo. It's a phone.

    • For the next release, Apple fans wonâ(TM)t need to do that anymoreâ"the A11 will still be faster than next yearâ(TM)s Qualcomm release. Itâ(TM)s already partly true right now; the iPhone 7 does those âoereal worldâ speed loop tests than the most modern android phones already.

      Now is any of this meaningful? Probably not. But itâ(TM)s a metric of comparison that Apple owns.

  • Been long speculated that Apple will at some point move from Intel to their own CPUs for at least some of their mobile computer line.
    • Take the difference between an A10 and A10X - 3332 vs 3882 or ~ 1.165. This demonstrates the speed improvement obtained with reduced thermal constraints - iPhone vs iPad. Apply this multiplier to this latest CPU to get a rough estimate of how a A11 powered laptop would perform. In single threaded benchmarks it is faster then the fastest MacBookPro - 4731 vs 4648.
    • There would have to be an equivalent of Rosetta involved - and one of the main reasons Rosetta was successful during the Power-Intel shift was because Power was lagging so badly behind the Intels, so there were few performance related issues cropping up. Apple would have to also create the same disparity between their Intel offerings and any new ARM offerings and I don't think they can, just yet.

    • If the benchmark scores are not fake, then it totally makes sense to move ALL of Apple's PCs, desktops and laptops, to the Apple ARM line, not just some of them. I can guess it would make sense to keep a line of high end workstations using Intel chips for a short time just to give users and developers some transition period.

      I think Apple can do it. Intel has been a joke since they released the Sandy Bridge line of processors what, in 2011? Since then their cores improved maybe 0, 5, or 10 percent between re

  • Next year Samsung will have a faster phone with better specs. The year after that Apple will.
    In general if you are happy with your mobile and you want to upgrade. Wait for the next model and it will be sufficiently upgraded for the times.
    Feel free to feel happy about your purchase. As you have purchased a product with the features you wanted and performance you needed at the price you were willing to pay.

    Just don't expect everyone to want the same thing. It is a freaking phone not a major life changing

  • by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @06:04PM (#55199345)
    The most impressive aspect of Apple's ARM chips is in their single-core performance, which is arguably a more useful, real-world metric since many common tasks in apps are principally single-threaded. By that measure Apple is more than 2x faster than Samsung's S8.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Single core performance on a phone isn't very useful... What really affects performance is available RAM and flash memory speed. The iPhone X only has 3GB of RAM, kinda low for a flagship from a couple of years ago. Flash memory performance (with encryption enabled) seems competitive though.

      The UI is the other thing that massively effects performance. iOS and it's one-button/no-button design is rather slow.

      • I gotta say, this was a truly uninformed comment. For one, Apple devices use memory far more efficiently than Android. Let's not start again the discussion about all the pros and cons of Java applications, but the truth is that Java runs slower and devours more memory than native built apps. An apple device with 2GB of RAM can perform just as fine as an Android phone with 4GB. On the other hand, an Android phone with only 2GB of RAM can barely multitask. True story.

      • And PS: you're dead wrong to say that single-core performance is not that important. It's probably still the MOST IMPORTANT metric. That's because there are whole lot of algorithms that inherently are impossible to run in parallel. Moreover, even if your algorithm can be parallelized, there is a limit to how much multiple cores can be useful. To find out, look up the concept of Amdahl's law on wikipedia. This is why for the past decade or so, four core Intel chips smoked AMD's eight core chips, and Intel's

    • real-world metric

      Speaking of real-world I'm still trying to figure out if my Galaxy S7 is actually faster than my S5. I mean they seem about the same in my world. Mind you I don't spend much time diving the 3D web, playing FPS games, mining bitcoins, or doing any of that other stuff on my phone either.

      Actually I'd be far more interested seeing this chip in a different device. I wonder how it would perform in a little pocket computer with a full OS.

      • Seems like you are one of those people who has not bought into the hype. Indeed, the Galaxy S5 is still a fine device for 99 percent of uses, even though three years old.

  • by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @06:18PM (#55199423) Homepage
    Can be seen here [geekbench.com]. And here's a comparison [geekbench.com] with the Intel Core i5 2500 which is still considered a wonderful desktop CPU.
    • Mind that the x86 CPU in this comparison has 95W TDP, while the Apple A11 consumes less than 5W. Now, that is real progress. Intel should be ashamed.
    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Geekbench is generally considered wildly inaccurate.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The Core i5 2500 you compare to is six years old. It was released in 2011. So what you are saying is that the latest Apple ARM CPU mostly performs worse than a six year old, mid range desktop CPU with modern code and much faster RAM.

      Even with this comparison, the ARM CPU gets trounced where it really counts: memory latency and bandwidth. That's the main limitation on phone CPUs, due to using low power RAM and memory controllers, as well as having to share some bandwidth with the GPU.

      • The Core i5 2500 you compare to is six years old. It was released in 2011.

        Are you saying that the 2017 Core i5 is any faster, or the ones that are still somewhat affordable at least? Please. You test a Core i5 from 2011, and a Core i5 from 2017 and then realize that Intel made barely any progress except for that which can be attributed to shrinking the manufacturing process. Most people who built their PCs using Sandy Bridge Core i5 have not upgraded CPUs to this day, except for cases where they needed a m

  • does it get me better signal? Because my $225 LG runs everything I throw at it except the Dreamcast & PS2 emulators and those don't run on Apple w/o a jail break anyway. So a faster processor on an iOS device doesn't seem like it matters much. And I can't think of any other reason to have a super fast processor on a phone. Wake me if they get OSX and all it's software running on it and it becomes a desktop replacement...
  • Maybe instead of focusing on a new chip every year they (apple, samsung, etc) could focus on, ya know, making the phone actual do something new that is actually useful and solves problems? I have an iPhone 6. If I compare it to iPhone X or Samsung S8 what is really different. And by different I mean actual valuable differences that solve real world issues vs. just saying I have the latest shiny thing?

    3D touch - didn't solve any issues other than caused a lot (i.e. the technical failures)
    Facial recogni
    • Indeed, we all know this argument. In fact, Apple shamelessly sold the same iPhone for three years. The 6, the 6S, the 7 were basically the same brick with minor internal tweaks. And the iPhone 8 doesn't look much different. I am seeing a whole lot of people still using phones like iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S5, which makes sense since they still work fine for most uses.

      I don't know what keeps this bubble going. 6 in 10 Americans don't have $500 in savings [cnn.com]. I guess it's all those carrier installment plans o

    • I too was somewhat disappointed by the new iPhones. I have a model 6 as well, and I don't see any truly compelling reasons to upgrade. Wireless charging is nice, and the fact that it's water-resistant is very nice as well (though I've never actually dropped my phone in water). The new AR features might be nice, and I suppose Apple as usual will cripple or deny use of these features on older phones even if they could sort of pull it off performance wise. The new iPhone 8 looks like a fantastic phone, but
      • I think if something brings down the iPhone 6 eventually is the fact that it has only 1GB of RAM (6s went with 2GB, the only relevant change)

    • wireless charging solves the problem of having those awful extra thin sockets for charging breaking.

      Those things are very fragile (USB micro is worse than lightning, but lightning isn't exactly robust). Buying a wireless charger means I don't have to get my phone repaired.

    • I think you're missing the applications.

      - Wireless charging isn't about saving 2 seconds, it's about not fucking around with cables.
      - Better screens have opened up a world of VR applications in the past few years.
      - Apple Pay (or any pay really)... well I often don't carry my wallet around anymore.

      • by Bongo ( 13261 )

        A contactless card can be dropped in the street, and where I live, you can spend $50 on it. Apple Pay does solve that part of a problem.

  • Android still has a better headphone jack. As does what's left of Windows Phone.
  • by MyDixieWrecked ( 548719 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @08:31PM (#55200029) Homepage Journal

    I see a lot of comments on here calling these benchmarks artificial and fake or whatever, but can we take a moment to think about the power of these devices that we have in our pockets? They're pushing more pixels and flopping more teras than our top of the line gaming pcs were 10 years ago. And they fit in our pockets. Couple this with the fact that these devices are getting faster and smaller and battery life is still improving generation over generation.

    Slashdot has always been a tinkerer's haven and relatively anti-apple, but their year over year feat of pushing the envelope is impressive. Honestly, all the competition really needs to get the lead out. There's more engineers not at apple than at apple and they're sitting on ass.

    So stop blaming Apple for taking the talent or improving on what's there. And stop treating this shit like some religious war. You don't need to bash something to make yourself feel better about what tech you use. Different people value different things. Chill the fuck out and be happy you're around for all this amazing tech, from Samsung, huawei, apple, and the future underdogs that wil become the next number one. Shit is only gonna get better, maybe you can be a part of it. Do your best work and make the world a better place.

    • by trawg ( 308495 )

      Yup. I realised after seeing the iPhone X specs that its screen resolution is better than that of my 23" desktop monitor. It is amazing how far these things have come.

  • Wow. So this thing that is just about to be available for purchase in a few weeks is faster than the things that are already out on the market for months.. Incredible. Note it is also faster than all of the existing Apple phones too so I guess those are also all crap now.
  • by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @11:39PM (#55200615)

    I stopped caring about scores past when iPhone 5s or Snapdragon 800+ android phones hit the market. There is plenty of performance there to do any task that +95 percent of users need on their phone. 99% of the time, your smartphone is still just a fancy messenger and a web browser (because most mobile apps are just a wrapper around a web site).

    It's of course nice that Apple gives you so much performance, but these days Chinaphones that cost under 250USD and carry the specs that are sufficient for most uses out there are just too seductive for a lot of people

  • I haven't seen any case on any phones lately where performance has been an issue. I think by this point in time, I'm walking around with (an iPhone 6S Plus) and I would imagine that by now, it's quite slow. I of course can't tell. In fact, when I upgraded from the iPhone 5S I didn't see any difference in performance. I don't know whether I have 3D touch... I do know that I can tap the screen and watch movies, play games and do work.... oh and phone calls are reasonably good these days.

    I have a Samsung Andro
  • That's so great! A closed-source product will outperform an open-source one and the reviewer is so so smart he can limit it to one chip.
    WITH ZERO EVIDENCE.
    WITH ZERO DOCUMENTATION.
    I mean yes one is faster than the other overall in specific tasks... but nothing in the way of science.

    Wow. That is one smart reviewer. Not. Or maybe supersmart and paid by Apple.

    No credible science based reviewer would dare risk his reputation by making such an absurd proof-free claim.
    Unless Apple paid for it.

    E

  • by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Friday September 15, 2017 @05:58AM (#55201497)
    So if I drop a stupid amount of money on a phone it can be one which packs a CPU way in excess of anything required of it. Great.
  • by ledow ( 319597 )

    I stopped caring about the specs on my personal devices (including PCs) years ago. Maybe even a decade.

    Screen res / megapixels? Don't really care, I watch SD movies with the screen inches from my face, and I only see MPEG artifacts, not resolution deficiencies.

    RAM? Don't really care unless things start dropping out of RAM (if that's visible as crashes / particular slowness only, really).

    Cores? Can't say I sit and count them. I know multicore performs better than single-core generally as it's not trying

  • Benchmarks, the last bastion of stupidity. It's like buying a 100,000 sports car, and ONLY driving it within the city limits, with a speed limit of 35mph. The last few years, except for battery saving features, are FAST ENOUGH for what people use them for. Good lord, it's not like people are trying to do quantum physics equations, or solving for Pi. How much processing power is needed for snapchat, youtube, facebook, instagram? Faster and faster processors, the makers tout benchmarks because people are STU

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