How do new Arm designs compare to M1 & M2/A15 & A16?

[izzy0242mr]

"The Cortex-X3 is the third generation X-series high-performance CPU core from Arm, following up on the Cortex-X2 and X1. As such, peak performance is the aim of the game. Arm boasts that the Cortex-X3 provides an 11% performance uplift over the Cortex-X2, when based on the same process, clock speed, and cache setup (also known as ISO-process). However, this gain extends to 25% once we factor in the anticipated gains from the move to upcoming 3nm manufacturing processes. Arm expects that the core’s performance will be extended even further in the laptop market, with up to a 34% performance gain over a mid-tier Intel i7-1260P. The Cortex-X3 won’t catch Apple’s M1 and M2 but looks to close the gap."

From https://www.androidauthority.com/arm-cortex-x3-cortex-a715-3178608/

Anyone familiar enough with Arm chips to do a proper comparison between these new stock designs and Apple Silicon chips? Also not sure if this is the best place to post this or if I should post it in the iPhone forums, since both platforms (Mac and iPhone) use Apple Silicon now, yet we don't have a dedicated "Apple Silicon" subforum for everything to be discussed together. Mods feel free to consolidate as you see fit.

 

[Gnattu]

I think it explained itself in your quote?

The Cortex-X3 won’t catch Apple’s M1 and M2 but looks to close the gap.

 

[izzy0242mr]

I think it explained itself in your quote?

Well I mean yeah, obviously it's not as good, but I'm curious how much exactly it's gotten closer.

 

[Gnattu]

Well I mean yeah, obviously it's not as good, but I'm curious how much exactly it's gotten closer.

It is too early to say, but from the slides (+25% flagship android phone) and using very bad benchmark Geekbench 5, it would get you around 1400 single core performance, and an A13 Bionic scores around 1300, an A14 can easily score more than 1500, an A15 is about 1700.

 

[Xiao_Xi]

WikiChip has written an article explaining the Cortex X3 in great detail.

Arm Unveils Next-Gen Flagship Core: Cortex-X3

Arm announces its next-generation flagship core: the Cortex-X3.

fuse.wikichip.org

It is an invaluable treasure for microarchitecture enthusiasts.

 

[UBS28]

The iPhone & iPad chips (the M1 and M2 are basically the A14X and A15X) have been dominating it’s ARM competitors for decades now. So I doubt anyone is going to beat Apple at their own game all of a sudden.

 

[leman]

Well I mean yeah, obviously it's not as good, but I'm curious how much exactly it's gotten closer.

I'd expect the Cortex-X3 at 5nm to be somewhere around Apples A13 at 7nm both performance-wise and power consumption-wise. Maybe X3 will be faster in FP/SIMD workloads.

 

[wonderings]

Can you really compare other ARM chips? The specs alone are only a portion of the bigger picture. How the OS and software use the CPU and all hardware makes a big difference. There have been studies comparing the iPhone RAM to RAM on Android phones and you can't do a direct comparison as iPhoneOS is very well made to work with the hardware and gets more out of less RAM then you would on Android.

 

[haralds]

Major parts of Apple's SoC are not just ARM cores.

 

[leman]

Can you really compare other ARM chips? The specs alone are only a portion of the bigger picture. How the OS and software use the CPU and all hardware makes a big difference. There have been studies comparing the iPhone RAM to RAM on Android phones and you can't do a direct comparison as iPhoneOS is very well made to work with the hardware and gets more out of less RAM then you would on Android.

Of course you can. Software is software. Some OS-level components might be more or less efficient than others, but the effect on software performance where it matters is minimal. Like my number-crunching code or C++ compiler won't magically work faster under macOS just because some features of macOS are better optimised for the hardware.