Many Chinese are superstitious, but it seems to me that the mobile device geeks don't care. They just want m0ar speed!!!1 We're not talking about middle-aged housewives here.I like how Apple got around the whole "4 cores = bad" Chinese cultural thing by choosing three. Perhaps that was not the major motivator, as their cores are quite beefy and therefore expensive, but that should definitely help their sales over there.
Well, people of all ages (even kids...) buy smartphones.Many Chinese are superstitious, but it seems to me that the mobile device geeks don't care. They just want m0ar speed!!!1 We're not talking about middle-aged housewives here.
Also, Apple didn't even bother advertising the number of cores. Triple-core is mentioned absolutely nowhere on their website. Furthermore, they have a ton of quad-core Macs on their site, and they've had a blowout quarter.
It's definitely something we wouldn't have envisioned prior to the A7 coming out. The A8 series bores me though... and frankly it should, being a less radical change. I wonder where Apple will go from here.I'm just impressed this thread even exists.
Never would I have thought people would have been seriously talking about an A8 series chip taking on Core M, regardless of how well this test suite works or doesn't work across platforms.
And there's a reason for that - http://www.primatelabs.com/blog/2013/12/developing-a-cross-platform-benchmark/
The problem with that approach being that it only applies to x86. (Not to mention, this appears to state that in some cases they're re-coding algorithms to avoid compiler optimizations while in others they're working around compiler shortcomings.) What happens for all of the ARM crowd though? Because there basically aren't any alternate OS options there to use for comparison - would be interesting to know if they even attempt to do the same level of leveling the playing field with respect to compiler optimizations or not.
Engadget has Geekbench 3, Sunspider, and 3dmark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmarks listed for A8X in iPad Air 2: http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36831425&postcount=123
IIRC, Core M 5Y70 was demonstrated to have Sunspider scores close to 100ms and 3dmark Ice Storm Unlimited overall score close to 45,000, so it is a very very fast application processor in comparison (and hence why it is priced at a premium).
Anthony's post only covered the automated system he developed for Geekbench 3 which (at the time) was limited to x86 platforms. It didn't cover any of the manual work we did during development.
What's great about the automated system is that it makes detecting cross-platform (or cross-compiler) issues really easy. What's also great is that even though the system runs on a subset of architectures, fixing an issue on one architecture can also fix it on other architectures (e.g., high-level optimizer issues where a compiler doesn't recognize that a loop can be unrolled or vectorized).
We do need to be careful for low-level code-generaiton issues on platforms and architectures not covered by the automated system. We can always fall back on manually examining the generated code, which is straightforward albiet time consuming. We try and use the same compilers for each minor update so this is work we only have to do once during development.
I hope this helps, and I'm happy to answer any questions.
Wake me when we have cross platform benchmarking that isn't terrible.
yes i guess while we compare stupid benchmarks, core m crushes in sunspider.
Three cores is very unlikely.
Sunspider would probably be about 300, maybe a little less.
I'm just impressed this thread even exists.
Never would I have thought people would have been seriously talking about an A8 series chip taking on Core M, regardless of how well this test suite works or doesn't work across platforms.
I like how Apple got around the whole "4 cores = bad" Chinese cultural thing by choosing three. Perhaps that was not the major motivator, as their cores are quite beefy and therefore expensive, but that should definitely help their sales over there.
Which is still far away from Core M, which has 2x less transistors, 33% less cores, a 40% smaller die and 11 times less revisions (yay for apples-oranges comparison). Maybe they'll get there eventually, but they're chasing a moving target.
Which is still far away from Core M, which has 2x less transistors, 33% less cores, a 40% smaller die and 11 times less revisions (yay for apples-oranges comparison). Maybe they'll get there eventually, but they're chasing a moving target.
Engadget has Geekbench 3, Sunspider, and 3dmark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmarks listed for A8X in iPad Air 2: http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36831425&postcount=123
IIRC, Core M 5Y70 was demonstrated to have Sunspider scores close to 100ms and 3dmark Ice Storm Unlimited overall score close to 45,000, so it is a very very fast application processor in comparison (and hence why it is priced at a premium).
Sunspider performance of the Core M is the least surprising and the most obvious improvement for it.
Core M will be fast for web browsing, browser gaming won't be as improved tho, only as much as IPC gains from last gen.