I mean duh, it’s in a phone, and a phone chip that has less area devoted to MT than would be if they made a laptop chip, both in terms of big cores and cache, and so the perf/W would actually improve at say 10+W if QC made an X4 + A720 laptop SoC.
At any rate it uses that at it’s peak, so what? The individual performance per watt curves for ST performance — and with the whole platform — blow anything from AMD and Intel out of the water. ~ 1680 GB5 ST at roughly 4.5W of active power? AMD can do more, but only at 15-25W (likewise Intel even with Meteor Lake) and iso-performance I am skeptical they’d be able to match that power consumption. The X4 in spite of the power bloat is still a fantastic core closer to Apple than it is AMD/Intel’s bloat for obvious reasons but still.
Likewise AMD and Intel have nothing with the power *and* area footprint of an A720 at the same performance, much less Apple on energy (albeit at greater area cost.)
So it is still pretty interesting to me how competitive “even” generic Arm core is in a 64B, cut down phone chip.
Imma do some math.
We are gonna use GB5 Multi-core, since GB5's multi-core scales properly compared to GB6.
My goal: To attempt to guess how powerful Phoenix-M, the efficiency core of the 8 Gen 4 is.
Let's take the Apple A17 Pro.
GB5 MC: 6500 points
We know that the P core in the A17 Pro has 3x the performance of the E core. (Source Geekerwan SPEC2017).
From that we can write an equation
E-core = a
P-core = 3a
2 P-cores + 4 E-cores = 6500
2 (3a) + 4 (a) = 6500
10a = 6500
a = 650.
Therefore,
P-core = 1950 points
E-core = 650 points
Now I'll tell you the reason why I did all this calculation for A17 Pro. It is because the P-core in A17 Pro and P-core in SD8G4 are very similar, judging by the leaked benchmarks.
Hence we'll assume that the SD8G4 P-core (Phoenix-L) has the same score as A17 Pro P-core.
SD 8G4
GB5 MC : 9000 points (leaked)
2 (Phoenix-L) + 6 (Phoenix-M) = 9000
2 (1950) + 6 (Phoenix-M) = 9000
3900 + 6 (Phoenix-M) = 9000
6 (Phoenix-M) = 5100
Phoenix-M = 850
It's some rough math, but we ended up with Phoenix-M = 850.
That means Phoenix-M is about 30% faster than A17 Pro E-core.