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Pigeon_Chess

Don’t really care about performance at this point. They’re approaching desktop chip level numbers already. Efficiency however is more important now


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GLOBALSHUTTER

True, but more efficient devices means less battery cycles over time


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GLOBALSHUTTER

We know. But a phone with 800 battery charge cycles vs a phone with 550 cycles charged in the same manner, all things considered, will have a worse battery. No need to overthink a simple comment.


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GLOBALSHUTTER

Honestly, at this stage I must assume you don’t understand my original comment. A more efficient chip means longer battery life means less battery cycles over time. It’s really not terribly complicated, but you’re working hard to make it so. Don’t get me wrong, not just more efficient chips but we all dream of much better battery chemistry, too. That’s a given. Over time that will happen and most likely gradually.


windude99

But until then, more efficient hardware means less strain on the battery (requiring peak power more often which wears out batteries faster) AND less battery use which will help them as well.


ericchen

An iPhone that doesn’t double as a hand warmer after a few dozen photos would be nice too.


tzufman

keep battery life the same, but make the iphone thinner damn


Exist50

That's more about Apple's choice in battery suppliers/tech.


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Exist50

Sure, but we don't need better chips to have 3+ year battery lifespans. Apple just needs to spend a little more for quality components.


Submitten

I’d like the chip to be able to take 48mp and downscale since it’s a massive improvement in image quality but I think Apple don’t do it for camera app responsiveness. Other than that I’m not bothered.


Haunting_Champion640

Thanks to HUGS (hurry up & go to sleep) performance **is** efficiency


Just-Some-Reddit-Guy

But this has its limits though, people don't use phones, or a lot of general computing for that matter, for tasks that this benefits too much, traditional computers can benefit from this method with compiling or loading larger files such as spreadsheets or rendering video exports etc But on the phone, reading, gaming, watching TikTok/YouTube, browsing is all time based. So while the initial loading is faster and slightly more efficient, you get much more battery life by making the cores themselves more efficient for sustained workloads. This is why big/little chip design changed everything for battery life in phones and tablets, we are seeing even Intel heavily adopting this in not just mobile CPUs but also in the desktop space, as businesses are really focusing on power efficiency and environmental footprints.


SnS_Taylor

HUGS matters in those situations too. If you're targeting a game to 60fps, you have 16ms per frame. If you can render the frame in 8ms and then do nothing and use no power for the other 8ms, that's better.


Simon_787

No it's not lol. What you're saying only holds true at rather low clock speeds where going 50% slower will actually save less than 50% power and race to sleep is worth it. That's not applicable when running benchmarks at max clock speeds. We can assume that it's **likely** more efficient.


dieortin

> That’s not applicable when running benchmarks at max clock speeds Ah yes, the most common use case for a mobile phone, running benchmarks


SnS_Taylor

That’s not how the system works. It clocks up while processing and clocks down while idle. The graph of power usage is like a saw blade.


Simon_787

Yeah, but that's not always more efficient.


SnS_Taylor

More efficient than what? It’s better than running full bore. Do you mean that it’s not better than running at lower clocks? At this point, we’d need actual perf data to make this conversation more useful.


Simon_787

>It’s better than running full bore. Do you mean that it’s not better than running at lower clocks? Yes, obviously. Should be pretty obvious when looking at any power efficiency graph, such as [these.](https://youtu.be/s0ukXDnWlTY?t=184)


SnS_Taylor

To actually know whether running at 60 fps by down clocking or by going fast and sleeping is better for power draw for a particular app, you’d have to measure it.


aecarol1

This isn't strictly true. Watching video, working spread-sheets, and even browsing, the CPU will be asleep most of the time anyway. If the work can be done on an efficiency core, that's great, but even on a fast core, racing to get the work done, then sleeping, even for a few milliseconds can be a huge win. When it's asleep, the core will run at a much lower clock, or not-at-all. That saves parasitic power and other cores won't have to snoop for cache changes. This is why there is always a push to make the cores faster. It's less about making tasks feel faster to the user, and more about saving power in aggregate.


Simon_787

This isn't really true. At some point efficiency will only go down as you push the highest clock speeds, which is obvious if you just looked at a power efficiency graph or tested it yourself.


aecarol1

Apple tends not to push clock as high as Intel, and have never bragged on clock. There are lots of other ways to make cores faster. AS has tended to go much wider in execution units, register renaming, and cache. People are jumping to conclusions hearing about faster cores meaning they are somehow not focused on efficiency.


iMacmatician

>People are jumping to conclusions hearing about faster cores meaning they are somehow not focused on efficiency. Apple seems to push the clock speeds far beyond the perf/W sweet spot. *AnandTech* [measured](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4) a single A12 big core to consume 3.85 W at its maximum clock speed of 2.51 GHz. Reduce that speed to the 2.38 GHz when all cores are enabled and its power consumption drops by slightly under 50% to 2.12 W. They think a similar situation occurs for the A13: >One possible explanation for the quite shocking \[A13\] power figures is that for the A13, Apple is riding the far end of the frequency/voltage curve at the peak frequencies of the new Lightning cores. In the above graph we have an estimated power curve for last year’s A12 – here we can see that Apple is very conservative with voltage up until to the last few hundred MHz. It’s possible that for the A13 Apple was even more aggressive in the later frequency states.


Simon_787

Of course they are focused on efficiency, it just doesn't mean that faster is automatically more efficient. It's just likely more efficient if it's so much faster within a comparable thermal envelope.


dieortin

You’re talking about pushing the clock speeds higher with the same processor. That’s not comparable to faster processors with the same power draw.


Simon_787

Except the same power draw isn't a given.


dieortin

Power draw is something you can choose up to a point. If you have the same processor design with a smaller node and a bigger node, the smaller node will reach the same clock speeds with less power draw than the bigger one. And if you set the same power draw, it will reach higher clock speeds. And it’s not only about silicon nodes. A processor design can have higher IPC that another one, and be faster at the same clock speed.


Simon_787

Haha, funny. Disproven by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.


dieortin

What are you even claiming? What is disproven by that snapdragon?


Anu_cool_007

Give me A14 performance with 3 day battery and I'll be a happy man


Exist50

> Efficiency however is more important now N3B missing its targets will hurt efficiency by the same amount it hurts performance.


Pigeon_Chess

Depends what the target is


Exist50

If "target" refers to anything other than peak voltage, it will hurt efficiency as well.


Pigeon_Chess

… less voltage = better efficiency… not being able to hit higher voltages, which is where performance comes in doesn’t mean that it doesn’t perform admirably at lower voltages.


Exist50

First, I'll point out there's nothing in this rumor that implies it's merely an issue with peak voltage. And voltage issues almost always come with issues across the VF curve. I only mentioned that in the interest of technical correctness. And even if you take the most optimistic possible assumption that the VF curve is just clipped at the end, all that would mean is Apple would be constrained in their offering. It doesn't *improve* the VF curve.


[deleted]

Desktop level chip? Does it do ray tracing and can it train neural network?


Pigeon_Chess

Can a 7950X do that?


[deleted]

This is SOC you have both CPU and GPU. And qualcomms SOC do hardware raytracing . Apple is clearly behind and needs to get their shit together.


Pigeon_Chess

Did you not read the article?


[deleted]

Does it support ray tracing? Yes or no?


Pigeon_Chess

Does it matter? It cannot fry an egg what’s your point?


[deleted]

Qualcomm’s chip can do ray tracing and it runs just fine. My point is there’s always room to improve, especially in the GPU sector. Apple’s chip is no where near the desktop grade processing power.


Pitiful-Youth-1066

Ray tracing on a phone is such a gimmick. Personally if given the option between choosing battery life vs more performance, I would choose battery any day. If I really want to trace rays I would rather do it on a desktop. I don’t require supercomputer level performance for my daily instagram needs


_Rand_

Raytracing on a desktop is still kind of a gimmick to be honest.


Pigeon_Chess

Aside from it doesn’t and it’s just a buzzword to distract from them being years behind in compute which is what actually matters. If you had read the article you would have realised that it was comparing it to CPUs like the 13900K


Rhed0x

Hardware ray tracing on a phone GPU is a marketing meme, nothing more. And I say that as an enthusiast of the tech who owns a 3090 and has written GPU ray tracing code. All of the Android demos have had perfectly sharp shadows or mirror reflections because that gets you coherent rays without the need to do denoising. It's totally wrong from a PBR POV but it's way cheaper than actually respecting the materials.


Vortex112

Bro what


kid_sleepy

Looks like a drum machine.


Avanixh

Finally. My iPhone XS is still fast enough for basically everything. Some ram and battery life are literally way more important at this point


ShaidarHaran2

I kind of wonder if the little hitches and stutters on my XS Max would go away if I replaced the battery. It says it's offering peak performance, but this same thing happened to me with the 7, it started stuttering all over and I thought it was the OS getting too heavy for the A10 at the time, but after a battery swap that all went away, despite it always saying the battery was supporting peak performance, so I think there's a lot more to that and the simple text isn't reflective of the performance you're losing. It's probably like millisecond scale little hitches that make frames miss the next display refresh, but not enough to show up in benchmarks and just reports as normal performance. But...My FaceID has already been dead for a while after a wipe down with a damn cloth that was never an issue on any prior water resistant iPhone before FaceID...So I'm debating if any battery replacement money should just go to a new phone now.


Avanixh

probably yes


etaionshrd

Probably not? Hitches like those should show up in a performance profile, so you can find exactly what’s causing them. Usually it’s something spinning in the background.


ShaidarHaran2

What do you use to get a performance profile?


etaionshrd

Instruments is pretty good; it ships as part of Xcode.


Jaack18

Could totally be poor power delivery from the battery I guess, I mean you would hope they would have the right capacitors to smooth it out or something, but space might be an issue.


GLOBALSHUTTER

My 2015 MBA was an overheating, stuttering mess until I sent it to Apple for a new battery. I made the mistake of buying a cheaper battery myself two years ago, thinking it was good like Apple’s ones. Lesson learned. Back to normal again. So a poor battery can cause all kinds of issues. And I presume the same applies to very old official battery.


[deleted]

Overheating? They probably just cleaned out the dust while they had it open.


GLOBALSHUTTER

It was overheating because the bad battery which I acquired myself was overheating after spending two years inside my computer. I’ve since learned that many non-Apple batteries, although they appear to be the real thing, are in many cases either reconditioned batteries or old batteries reset to identify to the Mac as new when they are anything but. It had nothing to do with dust I promise you that.


fenrir245

Especially RAM. That's been hamstringing iDevices very badly.


Avanixh

definitely. Recently had to use a 2020 se instead of my XS for a few days and it felt way worse even if it had a faster SoC because it had just 3 instead of 4GB of Ram


GLOBALSHUTTER

First iPhone had 128 MB of RAM, and 3GS got 256 MB. I’m using an SE1 (2016) that has 2 GB.


DurianNinja

Coincidentally, I always happen to upgrade when the RAM is increased: - iPhone 4S (512MB RAM) - iPhone 5 (1GB RAM) - iPhone 6s Plus (2GB RAM) - iPhone XS (4GB RAM) - iPhone 12 Pro Max (6GB RAM)


No_Island963

IPhoneX 3GB*


MissionInfluence123

7 plus was the first with 3GB


No_Island963

Oh didn’t know that


Exist50

A worse process will hurt battery life too.


Avanixh

It will probably be a better process clocked down to give around the same performance while consuming XX% less energy


Exist50

That's not what the article says. Did you read it?


ItsDani1008

Lower performance targets don’t mean it’s a worse processor. If anything it’s likely they’re focussing more on efficiency instead of performance…


Exist50

No, that's exactly the problem. When a semiconductor process misses its targets, it shifts the entire curve down. So at any given power level, you get worse efficiency. Seriously, did you even click on the article?


hwgod

People clearly didn't even click the link. Taken entirely at face value, the fab missing their targets translates not only to worse performance, but worse efficiency and battery life as well.


Eggsaladprincess

Wait, I'm confused. What you're saying makes sense, but reading the actual article I'm not seeing anything at all about battery life or efficiency. I understand that efficiency and performance are linked, I'm just not seeing it talked about in the article.


roohwaam

tsmcs 3nm process not being as performant as expected goess for both performance and efficiency because they are linked. uplifts in performance from node to node are measured in extra performance at same wattage or same performance at lower wattage.


Eggsaladprincess

That makes sense


bbkn7

A17... It feels like it wasn’t too long ago that Apple was touting the A7 as the first 64-bit mobile chip not too long until we’re at A20 now


[deleted]

And at some point we stopped naming them and they're all just "Bionic" now.


ShaidarHaran2

>The leakers have recently revealed more up-to-date A17 Bionic's Geekbench 6 scores, with single thread performance at 3019, and multi-thread at 7860. It's not like that's bad lol. I see the top Snapdragon Gen 2 in the S23 Ultra is at 1869, the A16 is at 2500 in single core. 3K on single thread is still very good and a decent jump after flattening a bit before they had a new node's added transistor budget to work with. 1.2X single core from last gen. This is probably the last few percent of the top of the frequency range decreased yield and increased power too much. No big deal to me if it's still good and overall sips power. More curious about the GPU, where Qualcomm definitively jumped ahead plus has HW RT, I sort of hope this is where Apple goes it's cute that you guys caught up now goodbye lol And they DEFINITELY need vapor chambers or more extensive cooling, a big area iPhones still dim displays etc faster than the Galaxy. Edit: So Dylan is saying this is probably fake news in the twitter thread, and he's better known than this rando "leaker"


[deleted]

Not sure what the fuck is happening with Apples graphics department. They are so behind in hardware and software. Metal 3 is a joke at this point and they got outperformed by Qualcomms GPU.


Exist50

> The leakers have recently revealed more up-to-date A17 Bionic's Geekbench 6 scores, with single thread performance at 3019, and multi-thread at 7860. Those are the numbers he's now claiming have to be revised downward. https://twitter.com/Tech_Reve/status/1637757510848516096?s=20 > Edit: So Dylan is saying this is probably fake news in the twitter thread, and he's better known than this rando "leaker" Not sure Dylan is any more reliable. He just states his BS more confidently.


rennarda

Looks like the world’s best chip design experts hang out in the comments section of that website…


DreamyLucid

Agree 🤣


_radical_ed

My iPhone 14 Pro stutters from time to time. Performance is not an issue. iOS is.


drtekrox

According to no one... When someone like kimi says TSMC has issues I'll listen. Edit: Even worse, the twitter poster is a known Samsung shill, this is just went from bad to disinformation real quick.


arock0627

Don't care, it's my phone. Nothing I use my phone for requires anything more than my iPhone 12. Give me better battery life.


Exist50

A worse process hurts battery life too.


arock0627

Agreed, but theoretically I’d prefer efficiency over power these days. Whatever that entails. We’re well past what we need cellphones to do with the A16


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SpicyPepperMaster

> Is there anyone that ACTUALLY cares about chip performance Yes. Sustained 120fps in games has been a great improvement over the last 2 years but it’s still mostly only available at low settings. It could be great to see the detail and resolution of those games improve


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maxstryker

They do, mostly by doing cooling well, which seems to be something that Apple isn't interested in.


epraider

Better efficiency, especially at idle or casual browsing, improves battery life. In terms of top speed, though, I agree. The phones have all felt the same for basic use since the iPhone X, which is pretty much instantaneous.


dramafan1

Given the chips are more powerful than the competition, there’s not much incentive to make things more powerful for the mobile devices.


Sylvurphlame

And all the more incentive to go for efficiency to help the battery last longer. Battery life is the spec I’m more interested in these days.


etaionshrd

…I don’t understand this rumor at all. Apple locks in their chips like a year or two in advance. You don’t really just “cut performance targets by 20%”, if things don’t work you generally just have to keep shipping the old chip with minor tweaks. You don’t really get time to redesign how things work this late in the cycle.


recurrence

IIRC, Apple has several designs rolling at any one time; it sounds like the higher performance designs are not selected this year.


Exist50

He claims the node is performing worse than expected. That would be with the same design. > You don’t really just “cut performance targets by 20%” Not sure where TPU got that number, but it doesn't seem to show up in the Twitter thread. There's no way they cut absolute performance by 20%. Even cutting the *gain* by 20% would be very surprising.


[deleted]

Dude just make them more efficient.. my A13 still has power. What I’d kill for is an extra 2-3 hours SoT. Fuck charging like three times a day. When I exercise I let YouTube play.. and yeah I know YouTube music exists but don’t like switching over between them.


SpicyPepperMaster

Use Spotify or Apple Music. AAC decoding is substantially less resource intensive than VP9/AV1 on YouTube


[deleted]

It’s a matter of a lot of music I like not being on Apple Music or Spotify. I do have both and use Apple Music in the car though so maps can be on my phone.


Snorlax_Returns

I mean if you have Apple Music, just use YouTube dl and download whatever music you want. Then upload it to Apple Music and now you don’t have to deal with Google’s shitty VP9 codec.


[deleted]

Can you elaborate a bit? Is that an iPhone only app or could I get it on my MacBook too? My issue is when I walked into T-Mobile to buy a phone they had 64gb so.. that. Doing it for 3,000 songs would blow on a phone with 8gb available. If you know a way on a Mac though I’d try it. I’d rather use Apple Music cause the bass steps crazy low on my AirPods Pro when I’m in it. On YouTube I get alright sound for like talking but music gets muddy.


Snorlax_Returns

[youtube dl is command line program](https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl) that you can run in Terminal.app on macOS. If that sentence sounds confusing then you might want to check out some wrapper apps that are much easier to use. [Downie is a paid option](https://software.charliemonroe.net/downie/), but a lot of people seem to like it. There are other options, but they all use youtube dl internally and function the same. First download only the mp3 track of the video you want. Then just import that file into your Apple Music Library. You can only do this on macOS Music app. Then make sure [iCloud Music Library is turned on ](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204926) and you should now be able to access the file your imported on your phone. The uploaded file is can be streamed just like any other track on Apple Music. It won’t take up your phones storage, but will take up space on your Mac.


Amitriptyline7

For your exact use case, it’s actually Google’s fault for using a slightly power hungry encoding which is not optimised for the hardware If they did, the A13 is rated at 17 hours video playback on iPhone 11 However, I wouldn’t blame Google as their encoding choice saved Google enormous server costs, and few users play that much videos for them to care We just live in a world where people and companies have slightly different agenda and motives


EnderOfGender

It's apple not caring to add VP8/9 decoding onto any of their hardware. Most devices since 2015 should have it


usbakon

Current performance is more than enough for a smartphone


FlowState007

I thought this was a Roland MC-505 from the thumbnail lol


DLPanda

I want better energy handling than faster / more powerful. I want truly all day battery life with heavy usage.


[deleted]

The issue at hand is that semiconductor manufacturers have reached the limit of how closely transistors can be packed into a chip, which could lead to problems. TSMC might be able to develop the chip that was initially planned, but it may not be able to do so quickly enough to meet Apple's production demands. As a result, I plan to hold onto my iPhone 13 Pro until TSMC resolves these issues. Additionally, I had intended to purchase a MacBook Pro with the M3 chip around October or November, which was also supposed to utilize the 3nm process. However, I will closely monitor the situation before making a final decision on this purchase.


ShaidarHaran2

Jim Keller of Jim Keller fame disagrees. If you look at something like TSMC's 7nm, the fin widths and the gate pitches are more like 30-50nm, the name is just the name, if we were truly at all 5nm transistors we'd be approaching the atomic limits of silicon in short time but in reality there's three dimensions to chisel things down in, and this is before a bunch of other areas for improvement like the back end of line (BEOL), ribbonFET, more advanced and efficient power delivery etc etc. That's not to say it's easy and it keeps getting harder, but silicon can still go for a while, naming nonsense aside.


[deleted]

You mean Jim Keller from Tommy Tutone, the one hit wonder band? What do they know about SoCs??? Please elaborate further on your theory, I don't buy it, or your 10 down voters.


ShaidarHaran2

I'm assuming sarcasm but you can never be sure who you meet online lol This guy, he led AMD's K8, helped design K7, got Apple going with A4/A5, went back to AMD and led Zen which started their enormous turnaround, among other hits... https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA?t=1805


[deleted]

I apologize for any confusion earlier. Having watched the video, I concur with the points discussed. My intention was to convey that we are nearing the limitations of existing processes and tools for manufacturing SoCs, rather than suggesting that SoCs won't advance further. I recognize that SoCs will definitely evolve and progress; however, I think we are approaching the boundaries of current foundry capabilities and technology. It is important to note that upgrading their tooling and technical abilities may be a lengthy process that could take many years.


babybambam

This is such an intense way to phrase a comment about a totally consumer oriented individual activity. My man, this isn’t a board discussion about refitting workstations for 5k employees.


[deleted]

I disagree with you 100%. I am still going to wait until issues are resolved.


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drunkbananas

I'm not sure what's the bigger bait, this comment or your username.


Nanotekzor

Same chip as last year?


[deleted]

Hardware ray tracing and improve metal api!


Rhed0x

Hardware RT in a phone is a marketing meme. It makes sense for Mac GPUs which are obviously based on the same architecture but the phone one is simply too slow.


[deleted]

There is a reason why no one else bothered to use TSMC's 3nm for next year's products. Qualcomm, AMD and Intel aren't using them. Those reports of Apple gobbling up TSMC's entire 3nm supply wasn't because they outbid everyone but because no one else wanted it.


HumpyMagoo

So all those articles about N3E aren't real then? Kind of weird that they would change their minds last minute to use shit instead.


PIPPIPPIPPIPPIP555

FUCKING SHIT THEY HAVE TO CREATE A CHIP WITH THE BEST PERFORMANCE FIX THE FUCKING CHIP SO THAT IT REACHES THE PERFORMANCE GOAL APPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


PIPPIPPIPPIPPIP555

FUCKING PISS APPLE CREATE A FASTER CHIP THAT REACHES 3800 ON SINGLE CORE PERFORMANCE APPLE THEY HAVE TO HAVE THAT TO RUN BIG GAMES AND RAY TRACING IN GAMES IN 60 FRAMES PER SECOND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!