Geekbench is an indication of performance. And you can read what was being tested in the individual test. So theoretically speaking if you have the application using the same optimization in both ISA, they should be very similar to the results show in Geekbench. Especially when LLVM is a major pieces that many vendors are working on. But there will be Apps that may be better suited to Intel's Core, not because of x86 ISA but how Intel optimize its uArch. Just the same as ARM64 or Apple's ARM implementation.
Anandtech use Javascript as a benchmarks, and JS benchmarks, both on macOS and iOS safari are being heavily optimized by Apple. That is another indication of performance.
Apple last said 20% of their Mac sales are Desktop, that is everything from iMac to Mac Pro. ( Which is actually higher then a lot of people expected. ) To put this in real number, that is roughly 5M unit / year.
If we assume the normal price of $200M development cost of 7nm HP from TSMC, that is roughly $40 per unit.
I doubt Apple pay anywhere near that number. And there should be a lot of synergy (cost) between 7nm LP and HP, but the numbers are too small for Apple to spend time to invest into. Remember these 5M CPU unit spends from 45W to 100W+, different number of cores, ECC memory support etc. It would make much more sense to use something like Qualcomm Centriq, which has a roadmap to decent single Core performance by 2020.
There was another rumours that Intel will have a new x86 out in 2019/2020. A cleaned up x86 that does not provide 100% backward compatibility.
Anandtech use Javascript as a benchmarks, and JS benchmarks, both on macOS and iOS safari are being heavily optimized by Apple. That is another indication of performance.
Apple last said 20% of their Mac sales are Desktop, that is everything from iMac to Mac Pro. ( Which is actually higher then a lot of people expected. ) To put this in real number, that is roughly 5M unit / year.
If we assume the normal price of $200M development cost of 7nm HP from TSMC, that is roughly $40 per unit.
I doubt Apple pay anywhere near that number. And there should be a lot of synergy (cost) between 7nm LP and HP, but the numbers are too small for Apple to spend time to invest into. Remember these 5M CPU unit spends from 45W to 100W+, different number of cores, ECC memory support etc. It would make much more sense to use something like Qualcomm Centriq, which has a roadmap to decent single Core performance by 2020.
There was another rumours that Intel will have a new x86 out in 2019/2020. A cleaned up x86 that does not provide 100% backward compatibility.
Last edited: