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New iPad Pro Has Comparable Performance To 2018 15" MacBook Pro in Benchmarks (macrumors.com)

Posted by msmash on from the child's-play dept.

A series of benchmark results have shown up on Geekbench for the new iPad Pro, and its new eight-core A12X Bionic chip is truly a powerhouse. From a report: The new iPad Pro achieved single-core and multi-core scores of 5,025 and 18,106 respectively based on an average of two benchmark results, making it by far the fastest iPad ever and comparable even to the performance of the latest 15-inch MacBook Pro models with Intel's six-core Core i7 chips. We've put together a chart that compares Geekbench scores of the new iPad Pro and various other iPad, Mac, and iPhone models.

That the new iPad Pro rivals the performance of the latest 15-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.6GHz six-core Core i7 processor is impressive, but even more so when you consider that the tablet starts at $799. The aforementioned MacBook Pro configuration is priced at $2,799, although with 512GB of storage. Even the new 11-inch iPad Pro with 512GB of storage is only $1,149, less than half that of the Core i7-equipped MacBook Pro.

33 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Convergence is Coming by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Apple already did PPC to Intel on the current architecture and a good number of people believe the Mac will go Apple ARM soon.

    Then it's simply a matter of having a Mac Mode on the iDevices that offers a KVM experience.

    Looks like that day is getting closer.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    1. Re: Convergence is Coming by jonnyj · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Mac on ARM makes a lot of sense for Apple.

      From a business perspective, they have always believed in vertical integration. Using their own CPUs will also leverage their existing investments in A-series CPUs. If ARM Macbooks can sell for the same price as Intel Macbooks, Apple's profits will increase sharply and they will better control their own destiny.

      From a user perspective, ARM Macbooks will likely be quieter, lighter and need to be recharged less often. Old software will need to be recompiled, but all major software packages (Office, Adobe stuff, etc) will become available immediately and smaller software houses will have no option but to offer ARM versions of their code. Besides, most things are done in the browser these days.

      The only losers will be people who want to dual boot Windows. Maybe Microsoft will rescue them with ARM Windows, but I doubt Apple cares very much.

    2. Re: Convergence is Coming by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 2

      Mac on ARM makes a lot of sense for Apple.

      From a business perspective, they have always believed in vertical integration. Using their own CPUs will also leverage their existing investments in A-series CPUs. If ARM Macbooks can sell for the same price as Intel Macbooks, Apple's profits will increase sharply and they will better control their own destiny.

      From a user perspective, ARM Macbooks will likely be quieter, lighter and need to be recharged less often. Old software will need to be recompiled, but all major software packages (Office, Adobe stuff, etc) will become available immediately and smaller software houses will have no option but to offer ARM versions of their code. Besides, most things are done in the browser these days.

      The only losers will be people who want to dual boot Windows. Maybe Microsoft will rescue them with ARM Windows, but I doubt Apple cares very much.

      MS already has an 64 bit ARM Port of Windows 10, and it even provides for x86 Application compatibility through a JIT Compiler scheme.

      https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...

      "The WOW64 layer of Windows 10 allows x86 code to run on the ARM64 version of Windows 10. x86 emulation works by compiling blocks of x86 instructions into ARM64 instructions with optimizations to improve performance. A service caches these translated blocks of code to reduce the overhead of instruction translation and allow for optimization when the code runs again. The caches are produced for each module so that other apps can make use of them on first launch."

    3. Re: Convergence is Coming by martinX · · Score: 2

      Might make running VM difficult

      --
      When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
    4. Re:Convergence is Coming by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 2

      Apple's done this multiple times.

      68k -> PPC -> X86

    5. Re: Convergence is Coming by nine-times · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I just hope that if they have "convergence" between the iPad Pro and Macbook, it keeps the relative openness of the Macbook. I can't use a computer that requires I get all of my apps from their app store. I can't use a computer that refuses to give me access to the terminal.

      I'm a bit annoyed right now with Apple, the way recent versions of MacOS keeps making scripting, automation, and administration more difficult. They're increasingly blocking access to the OS itself, requiring manual user intervention to grant access to various functions of the OS.

    6. Re:Convergence is Coming by Gordo_1 · · Score: 2

      Yup, totally agree. The real story here is that Intel's notebook and desktop CPU dominance are soon to be challenged. They've stumbled around with x86 desktop performance for close to a decade now. If Apple is able to drive 90% improvements from last year's iPad to this year's version and nearly equal Intel's ultrabook chips in the process, what do you think they pull off with a move to ARM on Macbooks with 1-2 years of further development and the luxury of a heatsink and fan to boot? I would be shaking in my boots if I owned shares of INTC.

    7. Re: Convergence is Coming by Tough+Love · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Apple should believe its own bought and paid for hype comparing different processor generations on limited benchmarks, published on highly reputable site "Macrumors". Apple should transition all its high end laptops and PCs to ARM, I'm hoping for it. Can't wait to see the sadfaces.

      BTW, with no fan? Seems legit.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    8. Re: Convergence is Coming by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 2

      ... yeah
      Once they switch to their own ARM CPU's they'll totally open all that shit up.

      you know, cause they do that so you can run Android on iPhones and iPads....

      Like who in the FUCK would want to do THAT?!?

      And BTW, Apple is first and foremost a HARDWARE Company; they would likely not even MIND if you did that, as long as you keep buying their HARDWARE.

      Check, and Mate!

  2. Forget MacBook Pro.. ARM A12X as fast as Corei7!?! by igor.sfiligoi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The MacBook Pro prices are inflated, so the comparison between IPAD and MacBook is not that interesting.

    But an ARM CPU on par with the (relatively) high end Intel Core i7!?!?!
    This is big news!!!

  3. Selective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I am betting that the benchmarks chosen were very selective and probably software bound. Not a lot of detail here.

    1. Re:Selective by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Apple has a long history of exactly that.

      Remember when the PPC supposedly outperformed x86? They never said it was only on integer math.

      They ran on-stage demos of doing complete photoshop editing workflows and there are minutes of difference between the Intel and PPC outcomes. Those were real world examples of the PPC creaming the intel at that time. Of course eventually intel won back the crown as the ppc development went off-track.

      The same sort of thing goes on with the AMD ryzen vs intel right now too.

      --
      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    2. Re:Selective by Mark+of+the+North · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I remember those on-stage demos and seeing them repeated on one of the local tech TV shows. The big gains were on a few filters (one was lens flare) which were optimized for the PPC architecture. The difference on the optimized filters was stark, but the rest of the comparisons were pretty...comparable.

      But tech is a horse race...without a finish line. Intel's MMX came out, and that was that.

    3. Re:Selective by Ecuador · · Score: 2

      Eh, they were effectively cheating. They had Altivec-optimized filters running against non-optimized ones on Intel (yeah, Intel being a different architecture didn't have Altivec obviously, but they did have SSE which was conveniently not used). Also in the P4 era it was quite easy to find tasks where a PPC was faster than Intel, just as long as you did not throw in an Athlon 64 in the comparison.
      The funniest thing was when Apple was switching to Intel, for a while they were selling both Intel and PPC so they had, at the same time, a section of their website showing how PPC is faster than Intel and another section showing how Intel was faster than PPC!

      --
      Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
  4. Re:Forget MacBook Pro.. ARM A12X as fast as Corei7 by timholman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But an ARM CPU on par with the (relatively) high end Intel Core i7!?!?!
    This is big news!!!

    Big news for Apple, and very bad news for Intel. The last thing they need is yet another indicator of how stagnant the Intel processor line has become.

    Lots of people have speculated that the next generation of Apple laptops will drop Intel entirely. If Apple can fab a 7nm A12X variant at TSMC that runs Mac OS, the switch could happen as early as next year. TSMC already has at least a one-year lead over Intel. Intel's 10nm fab (comparable to TSMC's 7nm fab) won't ramp up until late 2019.

    And if Apple abandons Intel for ARM / TSMC, how long will it take for other companies to do the same?

  5. This is really news! by goombah99 · · Score: 2

    Well this is really surprising. I wonder what spec they gave up to get that. My understanding,perhaps wrong, is the A12 is an ARM, probably some derivative of an ARM cortex 64 bit. Is it true that Arm I liscences the basic instruction system but people are free to tweak the silicon?
    if not you'd think other makers using the ARM design would be reporting the same specs already.
    if so it's possible I guess that apple found a way to make the ARM processor as fast as a flagship Intel processor.

    But ARM has always been known for being low power. So did they give up some low power spec?

    Perhaps the benchmarks used are register or in-cache calculation not memory fetches?

    Anyhow if we can credit these benchmarks as being indicative of number crunching performance this is rearranges my world view of ARM versus Intel. Need to start paying attention and not assuming that ARM processors are slow.

    I suspect this also puts a wrench into microsofts gears. Have microsofts ARM based tablet based OS caught up with their x86 based OS yet? 5 years ago the RT models were crippled.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:This is really news! by amp001 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ARM licenses the instruction set and their implementations of it independently. Apple licenses the instruction set, but their A-series chips are custom implementations of that architecture as far as I know. One of the differences is that the recent A-series chips no longer include support for the 32-bit instruction set –only 64-bit (iOS can't run any 32-bit code any more). This is important because the older 32-bit instruction set had some unpleasant aspects when it came to performance (barrel shifter in the data path, conditional execution bits taking up instruction encoding space, 16 architected registers, etc.; that's just from memory). The 64-bit ARM instruction set is pretty clean (I remember thinking it looked more like MIPS or Alpha when I looked at it briefly), and that helps when you're trying to go fast. Meanwhile, Qualcomm has to continue to support the older 32-bit instruction set (and maybe even the ancient "thumb" stuff) on the same die as the newer 64-bit mode. Intel is in the same boat (only with even more –and even older –baggage). There's another difference between Apple's processors and the ones on Android phones that goes unnoticed by most. Apple's APIs are all non-blocking / event-driven. Want to run an HTTP server on the same thread as your UI? You can, and it's easy, and it even works pretty well. Android APIs are almost entirely blocking, because of the Java legacy. So, on iOS, you see lots of apps with only a few threads doing most of the work, while on Android, you see dozens of threads, and the work is spread across them. This is why Apple focused early on optimizing single-core performance while Qualcomm was busy adding lots of slower cores to their chips. Both companies were doing the right thing for the platforms they were targeting. But, now that Apple has those highly optimized single cores, and a machine like the big iPad Pro that can dissipate more heat, then can put 4 of those fast cores in there and get some impressive numbers.

    2. Re:This is really news! by amp001 · · Score: 4, Informative
      Sure. Blocking APIs are things like "reading this file and wait until the bytes are actually read before moving on to the next line of code". But, even though reading a file doesn't take long, the kernel still has to do something with your thread while it's waiting on the IO. So, it has to put that thread to sleep and find another thread to run. Now, imagine this was a network IO over a cellular network instead of just reading from a file. Those network IO calls are often blocking-style, too. You definitely don't want to stop the UI thread from responding to inputs or updating the screen while you go do that kind of thing. So, you need to put all your IO on a non-UI thread. That means you have to communicate across threads, which means thread-safe data structures with locks, etc. The code ends up a bit more complicated.

      Non-blocking APIs look more like "start reading this file and call this other function when you're done, but return immediately". Your code ends up being structured differently, since everything is an event. Once you're used to it, it's pretty nice. Closures and lambdas make everything really simple, so your code even starts to look more like the linear/blocking style. So, if you do need an HTTP server in your app, it just looks like a few IO event handlers that you set up along with all your UI event handlers. Putting it on your UI thread is a judgment call at that point. You can make sure the HTTP event handlers never take enough time to impact usability, and in return you get to avoid having to deal with inter-thread communication, etc. Or, you can go ahead and create a thread and give it its own event loop to run the exact same non-blocking style code. I've done it both ways, and couldn't tell the difference in the UI (this was on an old iPhone 3GS back in the day).

    3. Re:This is really news! by Wraithlyn · · Score: 2

      Android APIs are almost entirely blocking, because of the Java legacy.

      Why is that?

      Java has had non-blocking IO since 1.4, which was released in 2002.

      --
      "Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
    4. Re:This is really news! by amp001 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Why is that?

      Java has had non-blocking IO since 1.4, which was released in 2002.

      Java has had NIO for a long time. But, the Java world was pretty mature already by the time those APIs were introduced, and a ton of libraries had already been written that used threads and blocking calls, including some that were included in Android. That momentum just made it easier for Android to adopt the blocking call model for a lot of the new stuff they added. There's a bit more to it than that, if you're interested, going back to the creation of OpenBinder at Be, Inc. (& then at Palm), followed by Google hiring one it's key developers (Dianne Hackborn). Binder is how Android makes blocking calls work across processes without incurring a bunch of overhead (gross oversimplification of Binder; read up on it if you're interested in it, though – distributed objects, RPC with thread migration, etc.).

    5. Re:This is really news! by gnasher719 · · Score: 2

      Apple has a license that lets it do _anything they want_ with ARM. The new iPad Pro has four 2.5 GHz cores and four 1.5 GHz cores. Massive L1, L2 and L3 caches and another 16MB cache between CPU and anything looking like a memory access. 10 billion transistors.

      But that's Apple ARM CPUs. Others are quite a bit behind (like 50%).

    6. Re:This is really news! by gnasher719 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, wrong. Android uses more threads than I-os because the Linux scheduler is a lot more efficient than the Mach scheduler. On Linux there usually is no benefit to writing complex, fragile non-blocking code just to avoid the scheduler, only drawbacks. So with threads you get to have nice clean code and high performance too. On Linux.

      I use Grand Central Dispatch, and you can stick your Linux threads wherever you prefer them.

  6. Geekbench is Shit by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wilco, geekbench has apparently replaced dhrystone as your favourite useless benchmark.

    Geekbench is SH*T.

    It actually seems to have gotten worse with version 3, which you should be aware of. On ARM64, that SHA1 performance is hardware-assisted. I don't know if SHA2 is too, but Aarch64 does apparently do SHA256 in the crypto unit, so it might be fully or partially so.

    And on both ARM and x86, the AES numbers are similarly just about the crypto unit.

    So basically a quarter to a third of the "integer" workloads are just utter BS. They are not comparable across architectures due to the crypto units, and even within one architecture the numbers just don't mean much of anything.

    And quite frankly, it's not even just the crypto ones. Looking at the other GB3 "benchmarks", they are mainly small kernels: not really much different from dhrystone. I suspect most of them have a code footprint that basically fits in a L1I cache.

    Linus Torvalds, Transmeta Engineer

    1. Re:Geekbench is Shit by imgod2u · · Score: 2

      https://www.realworldtech.com/...

      Geekbench 4 (used here) gets Linus's seal of approval.

    2. Re:Geekbench is Shit by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 2

      interesting. It seems that Torvald's conciliatory statements are much less remembered than his epic rants.

  7. Too expensive for average person. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The performance might be fine, but the price isn't. The iPad Pro costs as much or more than a gaming laptop. The new Mac Mini is twice as expensive as basic i3s from PC OEMs.

    On top of it all, they are almost impossible for the average person to repair. You're paying top dollar just to get screwed when it breaks.

    1. Re:Too expensive for average person. by goombah99 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Macs are not for average people. They are for people whose time is valuable and thus who want computers that they don't have to screw around with. These people also are not concerned about repairing or putting win-modems or sound-blaster cards in their computers and having to screw around with choosing non-conflicting interrupts. Yes, I know those interrupt nighmare days are long past and windows isn't a joke anymore. But I'm just making the point there's always been a market for people who want their computer to be a reliable appliance not an experiment in itself. Macs are not overpriced for what they deliver. You just may not want one yourself.

      --
      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  8. Re:Forget MacBook Pro.. ARM A12X as fast as Corei7 by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    TSMC already has at least a one-year lead over Intel. Intel's 10nm fab (comparable to TSMC's 7nm fab) won't ramp up until late 2019.

    And if Apple abandons Intel for ARM / TSMC, how long will it take for other companies to do the same?

    Depends on who can supply them. Apple isn't going to sell its ARM chips to competitors; and until someone makes an ARM chip that is as powerful as an x86 and can run x86 emulation well so existing programs can run out of the box, there will be little reason to dump Intel.

    --
    I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
  9. Yeah, cause geekbench numbers are good by viperidaenz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I looked on http://browser.geekbench.com/p... and it says "Geekbench 4 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 4000 (which is the score of an Intel Core i7-6600U). Higher scores are better, with double the score indicating double the performance."

    I scrolled down to 4000 and couldn't find the 6600U.
    If you scroll down further you can see Intel Core i7-6600U 2.6 GHz (2 cores) 3438

    They're also saying, for example, a 16 core Threadripper 1950X is slower at multi-core than a 10 core Intel 6950X. Everyone else puts the 1950X at ~50% faster - it has more cache, more cores, more mhz, consumes more power and is a year newer.
    If that's how they compare two x86's I'd hate to see how bad ARM vs x86 is in their tests.
    They'd have you believe an iPhone XS is about a fast at single core tasks as a Mac Pro boosting to 4.something GHz

  10. Wait... what? by berchca · · Score: 2

    "Apple would not be forced to wait on new Intel chips before being able to release updated Macs."

    Is that what's been happening? I guess it took Intel 4 years to update whatever processor was in the Mac Mini...

  11. Re:Apple becomes its own grandpa by martinX · · Score: 2

    Newton didn't fail. We failed to appreciate its awesomeness.

    --
    When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
  12. Re:Now if only an iPad had a real OS by EMB+Numbers · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm confused. iOS is OS X. I can compile the same code base for both systems with the press of a button.

    There is lots of Open Source software already running on iOS:
    https://github.com/dkhamsing/o...

    If a full blown Unix like programming environment with full support for C and C++ isn't enough, xamarin is there and provides "Single shared codebase for Android, iOS, and Windows" available under the MIT license.
    https://visualstudio.microsoft...

    There is also no requirement to use Apple's App Store as long as you have physical access to a device and a free developer account. I expect most people who want to build and develop open source will probably have physical access to an iOS device if they want one.

  13. New fakenews from the orchard by nastyphil · · Score: 2

    Over priced tablet has same performance as shitty laptop.

    --
    Dialectician. Archology.