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First benchmarks of Apples A14 appears online

Spindel

 

Summary

So the first benchmarks from Apples A14 chips has surfaced, as the title states. And they seem to offer an performance increase of just under 20% compared to the A13 from last year.

 

Quotes

Quote

 

The 6-core chip reportedly has a base frequency of 2.99GHz and 3.66GB of memory, achieving a score of 1,583 in single-core and 4,198 for multi-core.

Screenshot-2020-10-03-at-16.36.11.png?lo

This is markedly higher than the 1,336 in single-core and 3,569 in multi-core for the A13 Bionic. Compared to the A12Z chip from the 2020 iPad Pro, the A14 does better than the A12Z in single-core at 1,118 and slightly lower than in multi-core at 4,564. The A12Z has a extra GPU core compared to the A12x.

 

My thoughts

While I personally don’t care that much about performance increases for tablets and phones these results make me fillied with anticipation for the up coming Macs with apples own chips. You can always get into the debate about synthetic benchmarks and while they don’t tell the entire picture they sure are a good indication of what is to come.

 

Sources

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/03/a14-ipad-air-benchmarks/

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2 minutes ago, mahyar said:

personally i think apple switching to arm is because the want close their ecosystem so its all proprietary and kill hackintosh   

apple has said nothing about doing arm imacs and mac towers afaik. just arm macbooks.

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1 minute ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

apple has said nothing about doing arm imacs and mac towers afaik. just arm macbooks.

they will eventually do that its just a matter of time

if it was useful give it a like :) btw if your into linux pay a visit here

 

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3 minutes ago, mahyar said:

personally i think apple switching to arm is because the want close their ecosystem so its all proprietary and kill hackintosh   

No, it's not that. Real reason is not being dependable on 3rd parties. It sucks to depend on Intel and whatever they release. It would suck to depend on Qualcomm to release whatever they release. And since they also make their own OS, making chipset and OS themselves entirely puts them in unique position to tailor it their way and not like with x86 on Intel (or AMD) where they depend on bunch of pre-set things that are entirely out of their control. With ARM, they can make custom chips with custom API's, custom instructions logic etc. They can turn ARM into whatever they want from now on. And that's what they really want. That's the perk of having own independent ecosystem that's fully under your control. The rest are just goodies that happen to come along with it.

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1 minute ago, RejZoR said:

No, it's not that. Real reason is not being dependable on 3rd parties. It sucks to depend on Intel and whatever they release. It would suck to depend on Qualcomm to release whatever they release. And since they also make their own OS, making chipset and OS themselves entirely puts them in unique position to tailor it their way and not like with x86 on Intel (or AMD) where they depend on bunch of pre-set things that are entirely out of their control. With ARM, they can make custom chips with custom API's, custom instructions logic etc. They can turn ARM into whatever they want from now on. And that's what they really want. That's the perk of having own independent ecosystem that's fully under your control. The rest are just goodies that happen to come along with it.

thats what i said! they just want to close their ecosystem even more

if it was useful give it a like :) btw if your into linux pay a visit here

 

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36 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

apple has said nothing about doing arm imacs and mac towers afaik. just arm macbooks.

No apple have said the full mac lineup will switch to arm by the end of the 2 year transition. 

 

 

40 minutes ago, mahyar said:

so its all proprietary and kill hackintosh   

Apple do not care about people hackintoshing or not hackintoshing. they know those people would not otherwise be buying a mac. Also like ever dev they know that it is pointless trying to stop people cracking your software. If someone is willing to run software that has been modified there is literally nothing they can do to stop you from doing it. We will have ARM64 devices running macOS (not from apple) very soon. The only thing moving to apples inhouse cpus will do is make it that if you want the best perf/$ you will instead buy from apple so yes that might `kill` hackentoshing but not through making it harder (people these days modified the macOS kernel, that is open source, to run on AMD Zen cpus so we will have people do that same for other ARM64 cpus and since it is modifying the kernel there is nothing at all apple can do about it so apple does not waste even a second trying to)

 

 

35 minutes ago, mahyar said:

want to close their ecosystem even more

Apple want to make use of the MASIVE investment they have put into TSMC. (this is how apple now has exclusive access to the 5nm node from TSMC for at least 6 months if not a full 12month period). And as part of that they do not want to be stuck with another companies missed deadlines (how many years have we been waiting for intel to ship 10nm cpus?...) when apple already have the needing in house teams to disgned the chips they need and they have already paid for access to a better fab.  

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44 minutes ago, mahyar said:

thats what i said! they just want to close their ecosystem even more

But think about it.

 

The type of customers that Apple really wants are those who don't care about this crap. The people who will buy a MacBook because they want a MacBook, and couldn't care less whether MacOS can be installed on any other system (which, for the record, is against license terms, but lol apple bad pc good so who cares amirite 🙄)

 

This is why they keep closing their ecosystem. They don't care about appealing to people who want freedom, because their entire business model relies on the ecosystem. And there are enough people who don't care about all this to entirely sustain their business.

 

Apple are big enough that they can be selective about their customer base; only serve the people they want to serve. Not openly (that would be considered discriminatory), but by making changes to their product lineup and explicitly not offering something for everyone.

 

So, from a business perspective - why would they do anything else?

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pythonmegapixel

into tech, public transport and architecture // amateur programmer // youtuber // beginner photographer

Thanks for reading all this by the way!

By the way, my desktop is a docked laptop. Get over it, No seriously, I have an exterrnal monitor, keyboard, mouse, headset, ethernet and cooling fans all connected. Using it feels no different to a desktop, it works for several hours if the power goes out, and disconnecting just a few cables gives me something I can take on the go. There's enough power for all games I play and it even copes with basic (and some not-so-basic) video editing. Give it a go - you might just love it.

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7 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

This is why they keep closing their ecosystem. They don't care about appealing to people who want freedom, because their entire business model relies on the ecosystem. And there are enough people who don't care about all this to entirely sustain their business.

 

This is a good point however it is worth remembering that macOS is much more `freedom` than windows due to being based on a fork of FreeBSD (and apple still publish thir upstream source changes even through legally they are not required to do this).

 

However much of the freedom in macOS expects (like many *nix systems) you to go a little deeper into the system that you might expect so for the default user macOS is closed but if you are willing/interested you can be very free with it but you do need to actively opt into jumping off the rails (you can turn off all the protections and lockdowns, and in fact with the move the apple silicone apple is making this more granular so you no longer need to fully turn of all security if you just want to fiddle a little but still want security were you need it). 

 

 

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10 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

But think about it.

 

The type of customers that Apple really wants are those who don't care about this crap. The people who will buy a MacBook because they want a MacBook, and couldn't care less whether MacOS can be installed on any other system (which, for the record, is against license terms, but lol apple bad pc good so who cares amirite 🙄)

 

This is why they keep closing their ecosystem. They don't care about appealing to people who want freedom, because their entire business model relies on the ecosystem. And there are enough people who don't care about all this to entirely sustain their business.

 

Apple are big enough that they can be selective about their customer base; only serve the people they want to serve. Not openly (that would be considered discriminatory), but by making changes to their product lineup and explicitly not offering something for everyone.

 

So, from a business perspective - why would they do anything else?

well arm chip as we saw has a very bad multicore performance so for those people who use mac for video editing this transition has a great performance loss

if it was useful give it a like :) btw if your into linux pay a visit here

 

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1 minute ago, hishnash said:

This is a good point however it is worth remembering that macOS is much more `freedom` than windows due to being based on a fork of FreeBSD (and apple still publish thir upstream source changes even through legally they are not required to do this).

 

However much of the freedom in macOS expects (like many *nix systems) you to go a little deeper into the system that you might expect so for the default user macOS is closed but if you are willing/interested you can be very free with it but you do need to actively opt into jumping off the rails (you can turn off all the protections and lockdowns, and in fact with the move the apple silicone apple is making this more granular so you no longer need to fully turn of all security if you just want to fiddle a little but still want security were you need it). 

 

 

well the freedom aspect can also be found in linux and linux is as reliable as macos

if it was useful give it a like :) btw if your into linux pay a visit here

 

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2 minutes ago, mahyar said:

well the freedom aspect can also be found in linux and linux is as reliable as macos

It can, however for many users it lacks software support, the ecosystem. But for those users that are looking for freedom they can use linux (or run macos with SIP disabled, just like how linux ships by default, you can turn on the equivalent of SIP on some linux distros and then end up just as longed down)

 

 

4 minutes ago, mahyar said:

well arm chip as we saw has a very bad multicore performance so for those people who use mac for video editing this transition has a great performance loss

No they don't have bad multicore performance at all? where do you even get this idea? I hope you are not comparing the `little` arm cors (that draw less than 2W of power under max load) to full fat dekstop cors?  There is nothing about the ARM instruction set that makes it better (or worse) at mutli-core tasks. 

Remember if you're comparing an iPad A12z cpu to a desktop cpu that iPad cpu draws less than 10W under full load (including the gpu) and the cpu dir area on the SoC is less than 1/4 of the SoC so there is lots of space to add many many many many more cores if they have the power budget.

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1 minute ago, hishnash said:

It can, however for many users it lacks software support, the ecosystem. But for those users that are looking for freedom they can use linux (or run macos with SIP disabled, just like how linux ships by default, you can turn on the equivalent of SIP on some linux distros and then end up just as longed down)

linux is loyalty free and open source. software support is getting better by the day

running mac os on non apple hardware is illegal. mac os is way closer that linux over all

if it was useful give it a like :) btw if your into linux pay a visit here

 

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Realistically though, as long as it still runs software at the same performance level than the current Intel chips perform, does it really matter what architecture they're using?

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1 minute ago, yolosnail said:

Realistically though, as long as it still runs software at the same performance level than the current Intel chips perform, does it really matter what architecture they're using?

Absolutely, in fact we can expect the (pro) macs to run significantly better than the current intel counterparts as apple will have a lot larger power headroom to play with. 

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Just now, yolosnail said:

Realistically though, as long as it still runs software at the same performance level than the current Intel chips perform, does it really matter what architecture they're using?

yes because some software developers cant port their software to new architecture and generally speaking heavily threaded workloads run worse on arm

if it was useful give it a like :) btw if your into linux pay a visit here

 

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2 minutes ago, mahyar said:

yes because some software developers cant port their software to new architecture and generally speaking heavily threaded workloads run worse on arm

There is not evidence that ARM Instruction set has any impact on the support for multi threaded tasks.

 

Can you explain your reasoning as to how this would be, what feature of x86-64 instruction set makes it better for multi threaded workloads?  The large vector math operations on x86 (AVX etc) that are not present on ARM are in most cases not worth using if you have a multi threaded task since these end up drawing so much cpu power that the cpu clock speed drops bellow base clock and you end up with worth perfomance than if you did these same tasks with multiple SIMD operations, i know this from experience as a Dev who writes lost of multi threaded code.

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Just now, hishnash said:

There is not evidence that ARM Instruction set has any impact on the support for multi threaded tasks.

 

Can you explain your reasoning as to how this would be, what feature of x86-64 instruction set makes it better for multi threaded workloads? 

being cisc!

if it was useful give it a like :) btw if your into linux pay a visit here

 

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14 minutes ago, mahyar said:

well arm chip as we saw has a very bad multicore performance so for those people who use mac for video editing this transition has a great performance loss

This has nothing to do with my post.

Plus I don't know where you're getting that information from, it's not something I've ever heard.

 

17 minutes ago, hishnash said:

This is a good point however it is worth remembering that macOS is much more `freedom` than windows due to being based on a fork of FreeBSD (and apple still publish thir upstream source changes even through legally they are not required to do this).

Sure, but the final product - MacOS itself - is proprietary as sh*t...

 

Plus, I don't claim Windows is "free" in that sense, because it certainly isn't.

I'm talking about "freedom" in the sense of all of your devices working neatly together, from a variety of different manufacturers. Freedom to switch, basically.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

pythonmegapixel

into tech, public transport and architecture // amateur programmer // youtuber // beginner photographer

Thanks for reading all this by the way!

By the way, my desktop is a docked laptop. Get over it, No seriously, I have an exterrnal monitor, keyboard, mouse, headset, ethernet and cooling fans all connected. Using it feels no different to a desktop, it works for several hours if the power goes out, and disconnecting just a few cables gives me something I can take on the go. There's enough power for all games I play and it even copes with basic (and some not-so-basic) video editing. Give it a go - you might just love it.

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1 minute ago, mahyar said:

being cisc!

CISC is all about doing more in a single instruction. That means more in a single thread... (there are 0 instructions on x86-64 cpus that can use more than one thread to execute)  that has nothing at all to do with mutli-threaded workloads, in fact it has an active downside to multithreaded workloads (see my above comment) for this reason applications were taks can be multithreaded do not even make use of CISC like instructions on x86 cpus due to the downside that these have both on power but also on memory can cache eviction.

Your argument might have some ground if you change it to talk about single threaded tasks but in the multi threaded space there is not CISC advantage at all.

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Just now, hishnash said:

CISC is all about doing more in a single instruction. That means more in a single thread... (there are 0 instructions on x86-64 cpus that can use more than one thread to execute)  that has nothing at all to do with mutli-threaded workloads, in fact it has an active downside to multithreaded workloads (see my above comment) for this reason applications were taks can be multithreaded do not even make use of CISC like instructions on x86 cpus due to the downside that these have both on power but also on memory can cache eviction.

Your argument might have some ground if you change it to talk about single threaded tasks but in the multi threaded space there is not CISC advantage at all.

fair

if it was useful give it a like :) btw if your into linux pay a visit here

 

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1 minute ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Freedom to switch, basically.

Right sorry yes macOS does not provide freedom to switch. However it does provider freedom to do whatever you like with it, if you turn off some of the security protections, most of these are protections that other operating systems just dont have or don't have turned on by default. Some people here seem to believe macOS is like iOS and does not let the user turn the knobs. 

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1 minute ago, hishnash said:

Right sorry yes macOS does not provide freedom to switch. However it does provider freedom to do whatever you like with it, if you turn off some of the security protections, most of these are protections that other operating systems just dont have or don't have turned on by default. Some people here seem to believe macOS is like iOS and does not let the user turn the knobs. 

a lot of other OSs let you do whatever you want

from this point on ios and mac os will be more similar then ever before

if it was useful give it a like :) btw if your into linux pay a visit here

 

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Just now, mahyar said:

from this point on ios and mac os will be more similar then ever before

I think the default mode on macOS yes but apple have been very clear that they need macOS to be open to play with (if you turn of the default) and some of the changes they are putting into the new system arc mean that you will be able to do even more granular configuration of this so in fact it seems that macOS is moving in the direction of being more tweakable rather than less tweakable (if you want to do it and most users will not). 

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Just now, hishnash said:

I think the default mode on macOS yes but apple have been very clear that they need macOS to be open to play with (if you turn of the default) and some of the changes they are putting into the new system arc mean that you will be able to do even more granular configuration of this so in fact it seems that macOS is moving in the direction of being more tweakable rather than less tweakable (if you want to do it and most users will not). 

as i said this might be an advantage against windows but not against linux

if it was useful give it a like :) btw if your into linux pay a visit here

 

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