“It was only a few months ago that Apple unveiled what was at the time Apple’s fastest ARM processor in the iPad Pro, the A10X Fusion,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “Now, results have appeared on Geekbench that appear to correspond to the A11 Bionic processor of iPhone X and 8.”
“I fully expected that the A11 would continue to advance performance, and it has, even bettering the already superior A10X,” Hibben writes. “Even more remarkable, the A11 pulls past the Core i5-7360U in the base 13-inch MacBook Pro in multicore results.”
“Apple threw in a few surprises. It included its own Apple designed graphics processing unit,” Hibben writes. “It was unclear that Apple would be ready to do that after the news in April that it was breaking away from Imagination Technology. This shows that it has indeed been working on this for some time, and I’ll be interested to see how well Apple’s GPU compares to competitors once 3rd party testing of iPhone 8 and X comes out.”
“The other major surprise was the inclusion of the rumored Apple Neural Engine. Since reports emerged that Apple was working on a hardware accelerator for machine learning, I have wondered whether it would be included in the A11, and indeed it has,” Hibben writes. “Apple has been leading the charge in smartphone-based AI as opposed to cloud-based AI for privacy reasons. The on-chip Neural Processor allows Face ID to be completely self-contained in the device, thus protecting the privacy of the user.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: And the peddlers of Android dreck fall further and further behind.
As we wrote earlier this week: With each passing year, and especially with iPhone X, it becomes increasingly clear – even to the Android settlers – that the competition has no chance of even remotely keeping up against Apple’s unmatched vertically integrated one-two punch of custom software and custom hardware. The Android to iPhone upgrade train just turned onto a long straightaway, engines stoked, primed to barrel away!
“Vertical integration – hardware + software – trumps off-the-shelf conglomerations every single time. See: Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc.” — MacDailyNews, May 31, 2017
Furthermore, a smartphone is only as good as its ecosystem and the fragmented-by-manufacturer Android “ecosystem” is an unfunny joke. For example, Samsung’s phones, when they don’t explode like their washing machines, are, at best, a collection of off-the-shelf parts, inferior mobile processors, and an off-the-rack operating system best known for fragmentation, insecurity, and privacy-trampling user tracking/data vacuuming from an online banner ad company that masquerades as a search engine. Anyone who regards a South Korean dishwasher maker’s latest iPhone knockoff as “the best phone ever” is a painfully myopic moron.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s A11 Bionic chip in iPhone X and iPhone 8/Plus on par with 2017 MacBook Pro – September 14, 2017
Looks like the fools on Wall Street are just now starting the wrap there tiny brains around the announcements.
I don’t think the tools are impressed with processor speed. They’re more impressed with things like brighter displays, higher pixel counts, greater amounts of RAM and less-expensive smartphones. Whatever Apple goes for, the tools will look at it with skepticism. Apple can only depend on consumers to appreciate their products. Trying to impress pundits and analysts are a waste of time and energy.
Two iPhone Xs, please. I’ll also take a new MacBook Pro with the Apple designed A11 chip, to go, please.
… And there won’t be any software to run on your A11 MacBook Pro, including macOS.
The usual reason: CISC vs RISC processor programming.
With a fairly straightforward path for developers, a simple recompile and your app would be ready for an ARM powered Mac. It’s not about whether it CAN happen or not (looking at some of the developer focused initiatives Apple has taken over the last years shows they have the ability), it’s just wether or not Apple feels there’s a business need to do it.
Straightforward, you say? Then what would have stopped Apple from dropping 10 or 20 A series chips in a Mac years ago, with all iLife apps ready to impress?
It just ain’t that simple.
Quoting another post, “it’s just whether or not Apple feels there’s a business need to do it.”
The business need is obvious, Apple has never been shy to proclaim they want to control all aspects of their products. The CFPU is one of the few thongs they don’t do in-house, depending on intel.
It seems pretty obvious and reasonable that if they are wanting to control everything, doing the CPU is inevitable.
Apple has already proven they can switch an OS from CISC to RISC and back again, changing CPU platforms in the process.