Apple A9X Geekbench

[witeken]

Still in denial? Will SPEC 2006 scores convince you, or will you keep the same stance?

I wonder if someone at Intel has been able to put Windows or Android on that chip to make sure the scores are a legit comparison .

Also, I wonder when Intel's 10B R&D program since 2012 is going to kick in in the market place (even 12B in '14). Even though Intel is number 3 R&D spender in the world, we don't see much besides incremental improvements and delays.

 

[Arachnotronic]

I wonder if someone at Intel has been able to put Windows or Android on that chip to make sure the scores are a legit comparison .

I guarantee you that people at Intel are buying up several iPad Pros right now and they are running just about every benchmark that you can possibly imagine, including SPEC and much more.

Also, if you look at GB3 results for Intel processors on Windows and Android, the differences between the performance on those two platforms is negligible. The difference between GB3 scores for Intel Core series processors on MacOS and Windows is also negligible.

GB3 is a pretty low level benchmark so the impact of the OS is likely minimal.

There will continue to be those in denial, but it is pretty obvious at this point that Apple's CPU /SoC teams are world class. This is what being the richest computer company on the planet, highly focused on a handful of extremely high value products, allows you to do.

 

[nvgpu]

The A9X GPU config absolutely murders Intel's GPUs in performance while using less power. Maybe Intel will finally step up to the plate when it comes to graphics.

 

[Nothingness]

I wonder if someone at Intel has been able to put Windows or Android on that chip to make sure the scores are a legit comparison .

Oh I'm pretty sure Intel has a few engineers playing with Apple toys :biggrin: Of course they won't say anything publicly.

Everybody in the CPU industry does competitive benchmarking and typically in a more fair way than what marketing uses.

 

[Thanatosis]

Wow, now it's just getting embarrassing for intel. Their core design now has substantially lower IPC and performance than even lower-clocked Apple offerings. Who is going to drop $2600 on surface book when they can get an ipad pro for half the price that has better GPU and CPU performance, is thinner and lighter and looks better to boot?



Nvidia has to be scared too, their GPUs are also looking very poor in light of PVRs 7XT series.

 

[witeken]

There will continue to be those in denial, but it is pretty obvious at this point that Apple's CPU /SoC teams are world class. This is what being the richest computer company on the planet, highly focused on a handful of extremely high value products, allows you to do.

I guess. They only have to worry about the CPU core, memory and integration. GPU and comms they don't need to invest R&D dollars in.

 

[Arachnotronic]

I guess. They only have to worry about the CPU core, memory and integration. GPU and comms they don't need to invest R&D dollars in.

Apple invests significantly in graphics; Apple's GPU drivers are excellent.

Apple also has a very substantial in-house GPU effort which I expect to see in either the A10/A10X or A11/A11X.

 

[witeken]

Okay, so here's Intel's R&D spending for 2014, although there's got to be a mistake somewhere since it was...

R&D spending was $11.5B, up 9% from 2013

An amazing, astonishing, mind-blowing >20% of revenue.

http://fortune.com/2014/11/17/top-10-research-development/

Also, tell me if you find Apple somewhere .

 

[Nothingness]

Also, I wonder when Intel's 10B R&D program since 2012 is going to kick in in the market place (even 12B in '14). Even though Intel is number 3 R&D spender in the world, we don't see much besides incremental improvements and delays.

I wonder if they are not doing what would IMHO be the wisest thing: invest in becoming a major foundry player (on top of their Core/Xeon line of course). But that's not the place to discuss this

@Arachnotronic: Isn't Apple GPU team also changing ImgTec IP? I heard that multiple times.

 

[Sweepr]

Wow, now it's just getting embarrassing for intel. Their core design now has substantially lower IPC and performance than even lower-clocked Apple offerings. Who is going to drop $2600 on surface book when they can get an ipad pro for half the price that has better GPU and CPU performance, is thinner and lighter and looks better to boot?



Nvidia has to be scared too, their GPUs are also looking very poor in light of PVRs 7XT series.

Pretty sure $2600 Surface Book is still quite a bit faster.

https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/3898326

Also iOS is still a joke next to Windows when it comes to productivity. Waiting for SPEC, javascript and the rest of the tests. As to graphics performance mobile devices are not running the same GFXBench benchmark as Windows devices but yes, it's pretty obvious Intel needs to step up if they don't want to be left in the dust by these 2x performance increases every year.

 

[witeken]

That Speed Shit increase, though.

 

[dahorns]

Really impressive stuff from Apple. Is this still a 4-5ish tdp chip?

As to graphics, it would be really nice if GFXBench and the like were run at the same precision for both PCs and mobile devices so the scores were a bit more comparable. Ideally, you'd run the same bench at fp16 and fp32.

 

[dahorns]

That Speed Shit increase, though.

It'll be interesting to see what effect, if any, it has on Geekbench.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Okay, so here's Intel's R&D spending for 2014, although there's got to be a mistake somewhere since it was...

An amazing, astonishing, mind-blowing >20% of revenue.

http://fortune.com/2014/11/17/top-10-research-development/

Also, tell me if you find Apple somewhere .

Apple's R&D spending is publicly available information. It was $6B in its fiscal 2014 and $8 billion in fiscal 2015.

 

[Leo9]

Apple invests significantly in graphics; Apple's GPU drivers are excellent.

Apple also has a very substantial in-house GPU effort which I expect to see in either the A10/A10X or A11/A11X.

Wouldn't it be better to just buy Imagination Tech?

Also, tell me if you find Apple somewhere .

Here http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Apple+R&D+

 

[Thanatosis]

edit: read graph wrong

 

[Arachnotronic]

Wouldn't it be better to just buy Imagination Tech?

Apple is ImgTec's largest shareholder.

 

[Nothingness]

That Speed Shit increase, though.

Yes, and on WebXPRT, a benchmark that was designed with Intel cooperation. What a coincidence

Has Speed Shift shown huge gain on any other benchmark?

 

[dahorns]

Those benchmarks either show the iphone 6s as very close or don't show it on there, and indicate that in fact surface book would probably lose in webxprt (an intel sponsored benchmark) and maybe even the others.

Uh, am I missing something? We have Webxprt scores for both the SB and the Ipad Pro. What is missing?

 

[Sweepr]

Edit: Thanatosis changed his post so nevermind.

Would you like to try again and provide actual evidence that surface book is faster than A9X? Nothing you posted there comes close to indicating that.

Surface Book's Geekbench score and WebXPRT with SpeedShift results are better.
It's the top-notch tablet SoC right now and Intel/NVIDIA have reasons to be worried, but it's not replacing their notebook chips just yet.

 

[Sweepr]

Edit: Nevermind.

 

[dahorns]

Yes, and on WebXPRT, a benchmark that was designed with Intel cooperation. What a coincidence

Has Speed Shift shown huge gain on any other benchmark?

The others we have seen are between 0 and 5%.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9751/examining-intel-skylake-speed-shift-more-responsive-processors

The time to complete the Kraken 1.1 test is the least affected, with just a 2.6% performance gain, but Octane's scores shows over a 4% increase. The big win here though is WebXPRT. WebXPRT includes subtests, and in particular the Photo Enhancement subtest can see up to a 50% improvement in performance. This bumps the scores up significantly, with WebXPRT 2015 showing an almost 20% score increase, and WebXPRT 2013 has a 26% gain. These leaps in performance are certainly the kind that would be noticeable to the end user manipulating photographs in something like Picasa or watching web-page based graph adjustments such as live stock feeds.

So, it looks like it may depend on the type of test? Although, obviously something is happening in that photo enhancement subtest that is out of whack with the other results. Someone should dig into it more.

 

[coercitiv]

Who is going to drop $2600 on surface book when they can get an ipad pro for half the price that has better GPU and CPU performance, is thinner and lighter and looks better to boot?

Just about any professional out there who needs anything more than a pad to take notes on. In it's current iteration, iPad Pro is a (very) advanced toy.

 

[JoeRambo]

Great numbers, hopefully they will force Intel into "mobile Core2".

But looking at specs, they are expected. Apple had great core, now they have 1st class memory subsystem, 2nd to none. Cache sizes/latencies/bandwidth, memory bandwidth are awe inspiring. On top of that clock is very respectable 2Ghz+. End result is world class performance.

Sure some might argue that things are easier for Apple since they target ~2Ghz, not 4Ghz as Intel, but customers care about what they have in hand, not some esoteric gate delays.

 

[Sweepr]

Yes, and on WebXPRT, a benchmark that was designed with Intel cooperation. What a coincidence

So what? The difference between Skylake-U and ARM tablet chips we see in this benchmark is similar to Kraken and Octane (SP4 Review). Actually it's even smaller.