And it seems like there has been something like it on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc about every year since.
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Qualcomm Says New Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC Has 'World's Fastest Mobile CPU'
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funny thing is, if you're actually a fanatic of chip design, you would know how ridiculous that sounds. as in following the progression from the A5 chip to the A6 to the crazy jump of the A7... and all the way to now. It's been quite a ride. That was not just the work of the foundry. The PA Semi acquisition was insanely strategic. as was the Srouji hire.
You don't have to speculate. Samsung DeX just works fine. Apple's answer Stage manager just sucks. This is fact.
I haven’t double check your calculations but why do you care about how many cores CPU have? What difference does it make to you?
I probably know more about this than you (BEng microelectronics and several years actually design digital ICs and compilers). This is totally wrong. There are many factors which aren’t process related and so far Qualcomm hasn’t got near anything viable for mass market. Look at the crapfest that is the windows dev kits for example. They shipped prototype hardware that barely worked, didn’t even pass EMC testing and was abhorrently awful anyway as CL is a ****** compiler.
And we’ve not even got to the compiler and software stack really which is where Apple really shine. Many sins of the silicon can be healed with the optimiser. And Apple pretty much bankroll LLVM behind the scenes.
Let’s also look at the M/A architecture. It’s not the ISA that makes it a killer, it’s the application specific processors attached to the system bus which do heavily lifting. And most of those are quite invisible and undocumented (apart from via the efforts of the Linux folk reverse engineering).
Software optimization is the reason I stay with Apple. While the competitors have really upped their game in recent years, the software never feels on the same level.
The same can be said about Windows 11, its wildly better than previous versions but optimization across various apps and the core experience in general is not quite on Apple's level - even the times when Apple drops the ball they still seem to do it better than competitors.
Most recently Microsofts push to support ARM - the hardware is SOLID but it's quite a sad experience for any early adopter and might never actually be good as Microsoft has failed ARM before and most likely will fail again.
The same can be said about Windows 11, its wildly better than previous versions but optimization across various apps and the core experience in general is not quite on Apple's level - even the times when Apple drops the ball they still seem to do it better than competitors.
Most recently Microsofts push to support ARM - the hardware is SOLID but it's quite a sad experience for any early adopter and might never actually be good as Microsoft has failed ARM before and most likely will fail again.
This is the annoying thing. NT is quite portable but it relies on applications going with it which is a problem because many of them aren’t. Most of the rotten old win32 stuff can’t just be recompiled and work due to the leaky abstractions everywhere. And there’s the history from Microsoft of having about 20 “frameworks” around everything which are sort of part deprecated. And no one trusts them on pulling through on a port so there is no early adoption.
Of course they patch over this with binary translation but did an awful job of it to the point it’s pretty unusable.
But none of that is insurmountable. The real problem is Microsoft are so driven on shareholder performance demands that they forgot about the end user and just shovel garbage that inflates their valuation.
It’s a sad state of affairs. Windows on ARM would be a fine platform.
It probably doesn't make a huge difference, but there are applications (for example games) that only scale up to N cores and adding further cores doesn't really do much.
Of course a synthetic benchmark like Geekbench scales nicely with cores, as do plenty of real-world applications.
When Apple market numbers, I find them to be quite conservative. I can’t think of a single advertised claim that has been exaggerated. Happy to be proven wrong. Just can’t think of any at all.
That's the key point.
Even when Windows had the better processors compared to Mac, there was no way I was going to switch because of... Windows.
It's the same with Android.
But that's just me.
You all do you.
They ran their chip at 4.32 GHz so unlimited power, not on battery. They have more cores so they are not referring to "per-core" speed and this company always overpromises and under-delivers!
I might be the only one but I truly don't care about performance in my phone. I'm still using my 12 Pro since new and see no reason to get a new one, it does all I need.
How about efficiency? Instead of 2x performance, give me 2x battery life. That would make me buy a new one.
How about efficiency? Instead of 2x performance, give me 2x battery life. That would make me buy a new one.
I don’t care which chip it is gonna have, probably will get myself Galaxy S25 in January or February. Sorta underwhelmed by iOS 18 downgrades. They have ruined photos app and photo preview in camera app. It looks worse than Android 10 years ago, ugly and unintuitive.
Also I have seen and tried 16 Pro camera performance in real life and… disaster. I don’t understand why reviewers do not talk about the issues with camera, faces are often washed out and due to excessive sharpening people on the photos look much older, like 10 years older. It is not detail, it is fake sharpening. Much more: it feels like 16 Pro is the WORST camera Apple unveiled in the last 10 years. I have seen a lot: watercolor noise reduction, quirky focus, lifeless color tones, but this? Faces that always look like Wednesday Addams makeup???
Also I have seen and tried 16 Pro camera performance in real life and… disaster. I don’t understand why reviewers do not talk about the issues with camera, faces are often washed out and due to excessive sharpening people on the photos look much older, like 10 years older. It is not detail, it is fake sharpening. Much more: it feels like 16 Pro is the WORST camera Apple unveiled in the last 10 years. I have seen a lot: watercolor noise reduction, quirky focus, lifeless color tones, but this? Faces that always look like Wednesday Addams makeup???
Personally, I am user of lower end SoC (the Tensor G3) and honestly I feel like a Nintendo Switch user. Missing the latest and greatest SoCs but still getting an awesome smooth experience where everything works fine, in my case I run stuff at 120Hz in almost all the apps I use, so I don't really need more performance (in general, Firefox needs to step up like Chrome and other browsers here). However, I don't game nor I record very long videos, or tasks that could hit the performance or thermal limit of this SoC. So this is important to clarify.
Battery life: I think nowadays, it depends in lot of stuff, not just the CPU efficiency, but the display efficiency (especially with all the HDR content and high nits), the modem, storage and all the other components. Unless you run constant high load processes where the CPU power consumption could become more critical.
The contra with Qualcomm SoCs is that you don't get 7 years of guaranteed major OS updates (if it was installed in my phone at least, Pixel 8).
Apple can do whatever they want with their own SoC and this is a huge advantage, as Qualcomm does not sell end products and the companies selling a phone with Qualcomm SoC do not own as much as Apple with the iPhone.
Anyway. I'm happy that Qualcomm keeps innovating their mobile SoCs. But I'd be more happy if other mobile SoC got better. Qualcomm and Apple do not directly compete because they built stuff to be used under different OSs.
Qualcomm, in the mobiles segment, competes mainly with other Android SoCs. And if Qualcomm is the only one getting better, then there is still low competition.
Only a very minor group of people would switch between Apple and Qualcomm silicon just because of the CPU benchmarks. There are much more important aspects to consider than this. People that game mainly using a phone definitely would fit this group.
Battery life: I think nowadays, it depends in lot of stuff, not just the CPU efficiency, but the display efficiency (especially with all the HDR content and high nits), the modem, storage and all the other components. Unless you run constant high load processes where the CPU power consumption could become more critical.
The contra with Qualcomm SoCs is that you don't get 7 years of guaranteed major OS updates (if it was installed in my phone at least, Pixel 8).
Apple can do whatever they want with their own SoC and this is a huge advantage, as Qualcomm does not sell end products and the companies selling a phone with Qualcomm SoC do not own as much as Apple with the iPhone.
Anyway. I'm happy that Qualcomm keeps innovating their mobile SoCs. But I'd be more happy if other mobile SoC got better. Qualcomm and Apple do not directly compete because they built stuff to be used under different OSs.
Qualcomm, in the mobiles segment, competes mainly with other Android SoCs. And if Qualcomm is the only one getting better, then there is still low competition.
Only a very minor group of people would switch between Apple and Qualcomm silicon just because of the CPU benchmarks. There are much more important aspects to consider than this. People that game mainly using a phone definitely would fit this group.
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That is a questionable statement. Qualcomm packs more FP16 ALUs in their GPUs which makes it faster in mobile games with simple shaders. But this approach fails for more complex workloads. Apple takes a more balanced approach, they have fewer ALUs but more complex schedulers and memory hierarchy, which makes their GPUs better at complex stuff. From the technical standpoint, Apple GPUs are much more sophisticated and work-efficient. This is why I am very curious to see how Qualcomm intends to go forward with their GPU tech.
Hmm, interesting. So would that mean that (in theory) some of these recent AAA ports of Resident Evil or Assassin's Creed run significantly better on an A18 Pro compared to the Snapdragon 8 Elite?
I wouldn't make this kind of judgement without having more information, especially since Qualcomm claims significant GPU improvements. Where you see these effects most is in compute workloads. Previous generations of Qualcomm GPUs did not have good performance there.
Also, games are difficult to compare because Android and iOS versions often have different levels of quality and details. An average Android is rather slow, which is why developers tend to reduce the shader complexity on their Android ports.
I pretty much ignore anyone who claims things have "thermal issues". People think a device getting warm is overheating when it's just natural operation because they don't realize how intensive some mundane tasks actually are.
All the evidence you need to know that the iPhone 15 Pro series had thermal issues is to look at how much time Apple spent in their keynote, touting the "totally re-engineered" thermal system of the iPhone 16 Pro series.
It is par for the course for Apple to ignore an issue, gaslight their users, and fix it in the next rev. Antennagate, jelly scroll, touch disease, you name it.