Tom's Guide: A11 Bionic is the real deal (iPhone 8 review)

[Sniperfox47]

9 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

Your argument against geekbench is that it's lightly threaded even on the multi threaded test. If you look at the single threaded performance of each CPU and then scale it up to the number of available cores, then you eliminate that issue. (Of course, that creates a whole bunch of other issues, but regardless, it is another datapoint to estimate multithreaded performance)

Umm... Not really... Multithreading has other factors that come into play than just "cores x single threaded performance". And that's not even considering that you're looking at CPUs with different kinds of cores inside them... The single threaded performance might *might* give you an idea of how a Monsoon core compares against a modified A73 core, but it says absolutely nothing about how 2 Monsoons and 4 Mistrals, compare against 4 modified A73s and 4 A53s...

[Trixanity]

1 hour ago, dexT said:

That's what happens, pyo, when something is overused or put on display. Pyo. Somethings, pyo, have more impact and personal meaning if not flaunted. Pyo...

 

Something something Cultural Appropriation

 

Seriously: it should be a bannable offense to be so edgy.

 

30 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

SD835 has 8 full power Kryo cores.

 

And the A11 only has 2 Big (high power) cores and 4 little (efficiency) cores. So even the Exynos 8895 has twice the Big cores.

 

Geekbench isn't just a cpu benchmark though, and Apple also has kick-ass storage. It's also a pretty lightly threaded test, so the fewer but more powerful cores in the iPhone do better.

SD835 has 4 x A73 and 4 x A53 cores. That's not full power.

 

And it doesn't really matter when Apple makes much wider and more powerful designs. Apple has passed by each and every ARM SoC design by a large margin and I don't think the competition has any intention of competing. Whether they can or not is uncertain but I don't think they want to complicate matters or spend the cash to do so; their current method works, so why bother? The R&D and production costs for Apple must be much bigger (if not staggering) aside from probably having more talented people. Although it seems like Apple's advances might be slowly halting as they'll probably need a vastly different design to get more (which is unlikely as their current design is probably the best we can achieve within the current paradigm). I think we'll soon start to see them do Intel-like improvements. That's probably also why they've decided to go big.LITTLE to achieve better MT performance and make apps scale with cores so as to get some easy gains now and down the line.

 

And from what I've heard Geekbench's entire workload fits within cache, so it doesn't really test the full capabilities of any given chip. Not that I doubt Apple will still be better than the rest of the ARM SoC market.

[Sniperfox47]

13 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

SD835 has 4 x A73 and 4 x A53 cores. That's not full power.

Umm... The official spec sheet would disagree with you: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/processors/835

Quote

CPU Clock Speed

• Up to 2.45 GHz

CPU Cores

• 8x Qualcomm® Kryo™ 280 CPU

CPU Bit Architecture

• 64-bit

Specifically, in the default implementation you have 4 Kryo 280 (Custom based on A73) at 2.45 GHz and 4 at 1.9 GHz, though those speeds can be further tweaked by a device manufacturer.

 

Edit: P.S. the slower Kryo cores also have half the cache, but they're still the big fat Kryo 280 arch.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, mawv said:

What's this whole pyo thing

On topic, Apple does it again.

No idea but it's annoying. 

[Trixanity]

18 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Umm... The official spec sheet would disagree with you: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/processors/835

Specifically, in the default implementation you have 4 Kryo 280 (Custom based on A73) at 2.45 GHz and 4 at 1.9 GHz, though those speeds can be further tweaked by a device manufacturer.

 

Edit: P.S. the slower Kryo cores also have half the cache, but they're still the big fat Kryo 280 arch.

Kryo is a brand name. It's re-branded cores. I will guarantee you that it's A73 and A53. Clocking A73 down to 1.9 GHz is unlikely to give them the power efficiency they desire. They're just trying to hide the fact that it's essentially tweaked ARM designs.  It's all marketing.

[The Sloth]

something seems off, this is from an MKBHD video. also keep in mind this is geekbench, so not exactly the best benchmark in the world. 

 

 

[ScratchCat]

1 hour ago, Sniperfox47 said:

SD835 has 8 full power Kryo cores.

 

And the A11 only has 2 Big (high power) cores and 4 little (efficiency) cores. So even the Exynos 8895 has twice the Big cores.

 

Geekbench isn't just a cpu benchmark though, and Apple also has kick-ass storage. It's also a pretty lightly threaded test, so the fewer but more powerful cores in the iPhone do better.

The 835 actually has two types of cores , the large cores based off the A73 and the small cores based of the A53. For some reason they gave them the same name , following the trend of poor naming schemes in the tech industry. They are not only heavily modified and distinct from each other, they also have frequencies differing by 0.5+ Ghz. 

Furthermore , I doubt they could fit 8 A73s in without it being an 810 like disaster , a HiSilion 960 with 4 A73s throttles harder.

[PCGuy_5960]

27 minutes ago, nerdslayer1 said:

something seems off, this is from an MKBHD video. also keep in mind this is geekbench, so not exactly the best benchmark in the world. 

Geekbench? Please, ban this benchmark. It sucks 

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, Trixanity said:

Kryo is a brand name. It's re-branded cores. I will guarantee you that it's A73 and A53. Clocking A73 down to 1.9 GHz is unlikely to give them the power efficiency they desire. They're just trying to hide the fact that it's essentially tweaked ARM designs.  It's all marketing.

Kryo is not just a brand name.

The first Kryo was a custom architecture, and Kryo 280 is a tweaked A73 design (heavily based on A73, but with some tweaks).

 

3 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

The 835 actually has two types of cores , the large cores based off the A73 and the small cores based of the A53.

I can not find any evidence that supports this, so [Citation Needed].

You might be right. Found a die shot of the 835 and the LITTLE cluster is significantly smaller than the big cluster.

 

The original Kryo just had one design. So in the Snapdragon 820 but the LITTLE and big cluster were roughly the same size (seems to be a difference in cache size though).

[mrchow19910319]

On 9/21/2017 at 6:42 AM, nerdslayer1 said:

not really taking advantage of all the performance on the phone, seriously only a 1080p screen, no proper multitasking support overall meh, i still hope they do something to take advantage of the performance. 

Same thought. 

 

On 9/21/2017 at 6:41 AM, crysilis said:

the one thing Apple will always do better than android.

androids greatest feature is its biggest flaw.

its too customizable to be optimized to apple levels

apple products are optimized and made to be as user-friendly as possible

I think android as a whole is a huge success. 

Google's original plan wasn't "creating a phone that out sell iphones" it was to create a mobile platform so that all the data are going to chrome/google instead of apple/safari. Their target goal is to using those data to provide ads for the user, us. 

 

And apple is a "nice walled garden" as long as you are in, and have deep pocket, we will make you happy.... 

[Trixanity]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Kryo is not just a brand name.

The first Kryo was a custom architecture, and Kryo 280 is a tweaked A73 design (heavily based on A73, but with some tweaks).

So... A brand name. Kryo was a brand name then and a brand name now. What they have done is diluted the brand so it no longer refers solely to their custom architecture. And considering Kryo (as a custom architecture) only made it into one product (two if we're being generous), I don't really think you can herald it as having a strong association with custom architectures.

 

Qualcomm calls both their big and small cores Kryo 280. It's stupid marketing. All diagrams and die shots depicting SD835 will tell you it's big.LITTLE yet marketing is ambiguous and trying to imply it's 8 big cores (and apparently some have fallen for that marketing ploy).

 

And yes, it's a 'tweaked' design but there is very little Qualcomm can do to the core design. At best they've messed around with caches, interconnects and memory controllers. That's where they can make meaningful changes. The cores themselves perform pretty much identically to a standard A73 which hints at how little Qualcomm can do to the core.

 

In either case, I don't think Qualcomm has any intention of pushing for the performance crown. It doesn't matter that Apple is essentially teabagging them every round since Qualcomm has a very large slice of the Android pie and Apple doesn't compete in the same market. So we'll see Qualcomm continuing with their Kryo BS that will most likely be tweaked ARM cores going forward. I'm sure they'll be happy to hit the brakes on spending R&D money on doing custom especially when the results have been lackluster, Apple is so far ahead and other ARM chip designs are essentially the same.

[Zodiark1593]

30 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

So... A brand name. Kryo was a brand name then and a brand name now. What they have done is diluted the brand so it no longer refers solely to their custom architecture. And considering Kryo (as a custom architecture) only made it into one product (two if we're being generous), I don't really think you can herald it as having a strong association with custom architectures.

 

Qualcomm calls both their big and small cores Kryo 280. It's stupid marketing. All diagrams and die shots depicting SD835 will tell you it's big.LITTLE yet marketing is ambiguous and trying to imply it's 8 big cores (and apparently some have fallen for that marketing ploy).

 

And yes, it's a 'tweaked' design but there is very little Qualcomm can do to the core design. At best they've messed around with caches, interconnects and memory controllers. That's where they can make meaningful changes. The cores themselves perform pretty much identically to a standard A73 which hints at how little Qualcomm can do to the core.

 

In either case, I don't think Qualcomm has any intention of pushing for the performance crown. It doesn't matter that Apple is essentially teabagging them every round since Qualcomm has a very large slice of the Android pie and Apple doesn't compete in the same market. So we'll see Qualcomm continuing with their Kryo BS that will most likely be tweaked ARM cores going forward. I'm sure they'll be happy to hit the brakes on spending R&D money on doing custom especially when the results have been lackluster, Apple is so far ahead and other ARM chip designs are essentially the same.

The odd thing about Cortex A73 is that it is a narrower core than A72 (and certainly more so than Kryo), but it performs better (in integer that is, gets ROFL stomped in floating point though). Android and many commonly used apps pike Chrome are also really, really good about multi-threading. Even A53 based chips are reasonably responsive. Many core chips are very common, while truly wide designs are seldom seen in the Android world (Kryo?, Denver, Mongoose M1), and those that exist don't see dramatic gains over the A72. Based upon this, I hypothesize that building a wider cpu is of limited benefit for Android, and in fact, may be detrimental to power consumption if not fully utilized. Kryo may be a good example, actually. 

 

Of course, unless I or someone else can prove the above, it remains just a hypothesis, little more than a guess.

[Sniperfox47]

2 hours ago, Trixanity said:

Qualcomm calls both their big and small cores Kryo 280. It's stupid marketing. All diagrams and die shots depicting SD835 will tell you it's big.LITTLE yet marketing is ambiguous and trying to imply it's 8 big cores (and apparently some have fallen for that marketing ploy).

Yeah, because the "little" cores have half the cache and a bunch of power management stuff removed since they don't clock up as high. They're still using the Kryo 280 microarch which is based on A73.

 

2 hours ago, Trixanity said:

And yes, it's a 'tweaked' design but there is very little Qualcomm can do to the core design. At best they've messed around with caches, interconnects and memory controllers. That's where they can make meaningful changes. The cores themselves perform pretty much identically to a standard A73 which hints at how little Qualcomm can do to the core.

It's more a matter of how little they were allowed to do. It's licensed as one of ARMs new "Semicustom" chip designs which limits them on how far they can take their modifications of it. So they mostly tweaked power and cache to make it suitable for both core types.

 

Compare the performance of the "little" cores vs an A53 core and you'll see pretty big differences. They are still the Kryo 280 uarch.

 

 

[79wjd]

4 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Compare the performance of the "little" cores vs an A53 core and you'll see pretty big differences. They are still the Kryo 280 uarch.

So the new "LITTLE" cores or more powerful than the old ones? That's odd.

 

Regardless, SD835 still uses big.LITTLE in that there are powerful cores and weaker more efficient cores. 

[RGProductions]

Cool I dont care a snapdragon 625 is fine for me

[ScratchCat]

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Kryo is not just a brand name.

The first Kryo was a custom architecture, and Kryo 280 is a tweaked A73 design (heavily based on A73, but with some tweaks).

 

I can not find any evidence that supports this, so [Citation Needed].

You might be right. Found a die shot of the 835 and the LITTLE cluster is significantly smaller than the big cluster.

 

The original Kryo just had one design. So in the Snapdragon 820 but the LITTLE and big cluster were roughly the same size (seems to be a difference in cache size though).

Here is source to back it up anyway:

From the anandtech article on the 835

Spoiler

Qualcomm did not disclose which ARM cores serve as the foundation for Kryo 280, but the Cortex-A53 is the obvious choice for the efficiency cores, while the performance cores are likely based on the A72 or A73.

It wasn't explicitly disclosed , however as you mentioned the die size of the individual clusters shows they cannot all be A73 based.

[GooDBoY920]

12 hours ago, nerdslayer1 said:

Spoiler

 

something seems off, this is from an MKBHD video. also keep in mind this is geekbench, so not exactly the best benchmark in the world. 

 

 

 

 

Is the inconsistency of Geekbench really this big? or it's something else could cause this big of a difference? 

[LAwLz]

32 minutes ago, GooDBoY920 said:

Is the inconsistency of Geekbench really this big? or it's something else could cause this big of a difference? 

Seems like something was wrong with MKBHD's test. The iPhone 8 should be hovering at around 10K multicore score and 4K single core score.

[Trixanity]

6 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Yeah, because the "little" cores have half the cache and a bunch of power management stuff removed since they don't clock up as high. They're still using the Kryo 280 microarch which is based on A73.

 

It's more a matter of how little they were allowed to do. It's licensed as one of ARMs new "Semicustom" chip designs which limits them on how far they can take their modifications of it. So they mostly tweaked power and cache to make it suitable for both core types.

 

Compare the performance of the "little" cores vs an A53 core and you'll see pretty big differences. They are still the Kryo 280 uarch.

 

 

Where do you get the idea it's all A73 cores? Unless these stripped out A73 cores perform identically to A53 (where you claim they're much faster). All benchmarks I've seen show identical performance to Kirin 960 and Exynos 8895 which both use A53s.

 

Since they have done so little what makes you believe they can achieve efficiency close to A53 through "down clocking, cache and power management"? There is a reason everyone else including Apple design different cores. In fact just that's it's out of order increases power consumption.

 

Seriously. Please give me your source because no one else has discovered what you have - probably not even Qualcomm.

[ZackBarletto]

Didn't they mention something about the a11 being x86 or x64 capable?

 

Does any other mainstream phone do that? or is this one of the first? If it is one of the first ones that might be why it is so powerful? IDK just guessing.

[LAwLz]

1 minute ago, ZackBarletto said:

Didn't they mention something about the a11 being x86 or x64 capable?

 

Does any other mainstream phone do that? or is this one of the first? If it is one of the first ones that might be why it is so powerful? IDK just guessing.

It's not x86 compatible. 

[The Sloth]

19 hours ago, GooDBoY920 said:

Is the inconsistency of Geekbench really this big? or it's something else could cause this big of a difference? 

yup, overall a garbage app, it shouldn't be used for performance analysis.  

[abazigal]

On 22/09/2017 at 12:07 AM, Sauron said:

Further increases... like what? Give me one reason for the OS to require more power in the next 5 years. Or a reason to buy this hoping it will "last" longer when for that price I could buy 3 phones over those 5 years and end up with a faster handset in the end.

 

-edit-

and by the way, in the last few years android performance degradation has been much less of a problem. For example, my oneplus x has barely lost any performance in the 2 years I've had it despite a full os upgrade and a relatively older chip. The only real difference I could detect was in boot time, but I almost never turn it off like most people.

 

An iPhone from 5 years ago would be the iPhone 5, which nowadays is outdated in pretty much everything. Sure, you can still use it, but 5 years later you're not really getting much value from the 800$ you may have spent on it in 2012.

Well, iOS 11 places a lot of emphasis on AR, which is supposedly quite taxing on the processor. I tried a few AR apps on my 6s+ (sporting an A9) and it got very warm after just a short while and lost a whole lot of battery). 

 

Only Apple knows their own product roadmap. If they know they will be supporting some major tech standard in the near future, they can start to support it now so that years down the road, they just need to flip a switch and hundreds of millions of existing devices will support it. Which is huge when you want strong developer support. 

 

Sometimes, Apple does things like this which seem innocuous right now but whihc will make sense in the future when all the cards have been revealed. 

[Verne Arase]

On 9/21/2017 at 2:06 PM, PCGuy_5960 said:

Geekbench? Please, ban this benchmark. It sucks 

Wow ... what a thoughtful, insightful post.

 

I especially liked your detailed analysis and meticulous evidence chain.

[Verne Arase]

On 9/21/2017 at 12:36 PM, Trixanity said:

And from what I've heard Geekbench's entire workload fits within cache, so it doesn't really test the full capabilities of any given chip. Not that I doubt Apple will still be better than the rest of the ARM SoC market.

True, but not to put too fine a point on it, but it should fit in all their processor caches.

 

Well, that's true for the MacBook Pro.

 

Not sure how Android apps work nowadays. Is it binary, OpenJava, or some JIT cross-compiled mess? (Dear God, think of the opportunity for memory leaks).

 

That's one problem Android has ... it was architected in the old-style mid-2000s feature/smart phone way - like parent-company Danger's offerings - with a linux kernel and code running in Mobile Java (even if you pronounced it Dalvik to avoid licensing). That's why it's not as instantaneously buttery-smooth on initiation. You have to instantiate a virtual machine environment or cross-compile landing page tokens to initiate execution. (And lord knows how that infiltrates into processor cache).

 

Unfortunately, when the top-secret iPhone launched in 2007, they had to totally redo the UI, and had no time to analyze (copy) the iPhone's biggest advantage - that it was a totally binary down-on-the-metal platform.