Performance and features. In single threaded performance, Apple's A chips are way ahead. That's because Apple highly customizes and optimizes their core designs, while Qualcom and Samsung use largely vanila ARM reference designs with maybe a few tweaks. Apple chips also have considerably more cache. That's difficult for the competition to counter because they are very price sensitive and cache size eats up expensive die space.
The counter argument is that the other systems make up for this by having more cores, which is really a cop out. Single threaded execution has a far more direct effect on user experience, gaming performance, etc. They can't compete in core engineering so make it up by slapping on more fairly generic cores. It does appear that Samsung is responding to this and investing in more advanced core designs.
The final area is custom features like the neural engine behind real-time face recognition, real time 3D face lighting effects and such. The competition don't really have these at all, so we don't know how far behind they are.
There's a pretty good article on this linked below.
>That's because Apple highly customizes and optimizes their core designs, while Qualcom and Samsung use largely vanila ARM reference designs with maybe a few tweaks
Here's the Anandtech article on the "few" tweaks Samsung has made to its 6 wide decode custom M3 cores in the upcoming Exynos 9810.
Yep, it does look like Samsung may be in a position to catch up soon. That could make a real problem for Qualcom the other Android manufacturers. Samsung are the biggest manufacturer of high end Android phones. If Qualcom can't sell high end CPUs to them any more, it might make manufacturing any truly high end CPUs uneconomical, or at least drive up costs even further.
Watch out for what comes out of ARM Austin. Their last core was the A72 from a couple of years ago. Rumour has it they've been working on a big core to better compete with Apple and Samsung.
Looking back, it makes sense that Qualcomm discarded their underperforming custom design efforts (at least for the mobile market). If ARM can deliver a competitive design, why not fully commit to their roadmap and save significant amounts on R&D costs?
I sometimes wonder how much of It Just Works was influenced by having slower machines. When doing everything takes longer, if you do it right the first time then it’s still faster than doing it twice.
Apple's CPUs win benchmarks, but a lot of this is more down to economics. They're making CPUs for a single client, themselves, mostly for the high end, and they don't need to make a profit on them.
Qualcomm probably could make better CPUs...but it needs to sell them for a profit, and they might not fit into all phone's physical size or power budget.
So, Qualcomm ends up making somewhat lowest-common-denominator chips. Economies of scale make it difficult to make a run of super good chips when Samsung uses its own in many markets, Apple uses its own--the world of high-end smartphones outside of Samsung and Apple is just too small.
They're taking their CPUs and clocking them at speeds the device can't support, except when brand new, then letting the device slow down over the corse of its usable lifespan.
It would be interested to compare an Apple and Qualcomm CPU after a year and a half, to see how the benchmarks have changed.
It takes quite awhile for the battery to degrade to the point it can’t run the CPU at max capacity anymore. And it still could, but it would be potentially unstable.
You're completely ignoring the question. Do other smartphones start out fast due to new batteries and slow down due to the battery degradation like Apple or do they account for the battery degradation and keep performance stable?
Right, as an alternative to random crashes. Bear in mind this is not an Apple problem, its a battery problem. All the other manufacturers have this problem, they just dont attempt to detect battery power fluctuations and mitigate it with throttling. They just eat the system crashes. Its got nothing to do with the CPU design, otherwise replacing the battery wouldnt fix the problem.
> All the other manufacturers have this problem, they just don't attempt to detect battery power fluctuations and mitigate it with throttling. They just eat the system crashes.
Really, because I have not heard of any other manufacturer with this problem?
Uh nope, single threaded performance is the key parameter. It’s what made intel (et al) blow up with Meltdown and Spectre. It’s what they’d still be pushing if it weren’t for physics.
It is, in the age of ubiquitous multi-core hardware.
I don't remember when it was the last time any of my applications only had a single thread of execution on them, beyond shell and Python scripts.
Maybe around 2000.
And even then, the OS is juggling processes across all cores every few ms, so outside any benchmark winning game, there isn't much real world value in single thread performance.
Are you serious? Multithreadjng is not Parallelism. It’s not about processing an image in the UI thread, it’s about making that processing faster on the background thread that picks up the work. Don’t get me wrong but lots of people still write iterators, for loops and single threaded functions. Parallel algorithms are hard
The counter argument is that the other systems make up for this by having more cores, which is really a cop out. Single threaded execution has a far more direct effect on user experience, gaming performance, etc. They can't compete in core engineering so make it up by slapping on more fairly generic cores. It does appear that Samsung is responding to this and investing in more advanced core designs.
The final area is custom features like the neural engine behind real-time face recognition, real time 3D face lighting effects and such. The competition don't really have these at all, so we don't know how far behind they are.
There's a pretty good article on this linked below.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4138071-apple-cpu-advantage...