[dcip6s]

Don’t forget that the current gen A processors are designed to run in something with a tiny battery compared to a laptop. It’s likely that any MacBook bound Apple CPU won’t have such a limitation and will be able to run much faster as a result.

Also if you look at the performance trajectory of A-series in the last five years, 2020 sounds about right for where the crossover will come even between iOS based A-series processors and the fastest of what Intel has to offer, provided they can keep up the pace of performance improvement.

[imtringued]

> It’s likely that any MacBook bound Apple CPU won’t have such a limitation and will be able to run much faster as a result.

Geekbench is based on the unthrottled peak performance of the CPU. Increasing the TDP headroom eliminates throttling but Geekbench doesn't measure throttling.

You can perhaps increase performance by overclocking but this requires the CPU to be designed for higher frequencies. AMD's Ryzen CPUs usually top out at around 4 GHz. Intel's CPU can be overclocked up to 5 GHz. The maximum clock speed is limited by the slowest component of the CPU. If the slowest operation takes 0.25 nanoseconds to complete this limits your frequency to 4GHz. If Apple had enough foresight to design their chips with this in mind then maybe but in reality they probably optimized the chip entirely for mobile TDPs.

[jerrysievert]

but the question would be:

will apple up the battery requirements for their own cpu/gpu, or would they simply drop battery while striving for a thinner laptop?

this from someone who's been buying/using Macs for a long time - I'd love to see some very fast arm competition, but is that what it'd really turn out to be?

[michaelmrose]

Why would Intel stand still while arm improves dramatically?

[rayiner]

Apple has been gaining on Intel while both have been improving. He’s projecting where those lines cross.

[kllrnohj]

> Apple has been gaining on Intel while both have been improving.

Have they really, though? What lines are actually crossing? Intel's mobile CPUs have continued to shed power, so how much of this is actually Apple "catching up" to Intel vs. Intel just optimizing for power at the cost of performance? As in, is there any performance gap that's actually shrinking, or are phone SoCs just getting more power hungry while laptop ones are getting less power hungry?

Because phone SoCs have gotten rather monsterously power hungry compared to years past. They are actually 5w under real world load parts now, with devices just letting them thermal throttle rapidly to achieve higher burst rates. Laptops, by contrast, are ~10w TDP, vastly less than they were a decade ago.

This would probably make a fascinating in-depth analysis, but the singular data point of a 5w SoC being within spitting distance of a 10w SoC is hardly a revolutionary story. It's pretty much what you expect.