[jxdxbx]

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.

[trothamel]

Isn't Apple cheating?

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.

[jrs95]

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.

[theresistor]

That's incorrect. The CPUs don't degrade, the batteries do.

[mrep]

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?

[abritinthebay]

Other smartphones either do the same thing (slow down) or just plain crash (most of them do this). It’s a common complaint.

[AtlasLion]

The CPU speed decreases. So doesn't matter if it technically is still able to reach higher clock speeds. In reality it runs slower.

[simonh]

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.

[mrep]

> 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?

[abritinthebay]

Then you have not looked into it. Android forums have been filled with complaints over “random crashes” when doing something CPU heavy for years.