[teruakohatu]

Incredible work.

> It's a pretty peppy chip, at times coming close to my 8th gen i7...yikes.

Have you got any benchmarks? It is passively cooled right? I am really surprised to hear a ~2016 arm64 CPU can can beat a 2019 Intel i7 in even synthetic benchmarks.

[PragmaticPulp]

Some synthetic benchmarks are so simple that they almost reduce to a measure of CPU clock speed and instruction parallelism. Find a benchmark that uses a unique instruction combination on one CPU and it will heavily disadvantage the other CPU.

Add a real world workload to the mix with heavy memory access and mixed compute workloads and the chips will diverge significantly in performance.

I work with some cross-platform code that has to run on mobile devices and desktop platforms. The advances Apple has made in low power performance are incredible, but the idea that their iPhone chips are as fast as desktop computers is still far from the truth unless you’re measuring specific, heavily optimized workloads.

I’m still excited to see what Apple can do with a full desktop level power budget though.

[saagarjha]

I suspect the "benchmarks are stupid" comments will die down the moment people start running desktop software on these chips, because it will cease to be a convenient excuse. While benchmarks may occasionally be slightly misleading, they are usually a good indicator of performance if done well–and if you've ever actually run desktop-class software on one of these chips you'll see that the divergence is just not there.

[Grazester]

Not to be stickler but he said come close, not beat. Not that it's any less impressive.

[aunali1]

Mostly synthetics and some program compilation (configure+make) tests. Yes, it is passively cooled. To clarify, it does not match the host Intel CPU (i7-8750H @ 2.2GHz) but in some synthetics, i.e. Coremark, the T2 does come close. I would attribute the i7's lackluster performance mainly to thermal throttling issues.

[mceachen]

A ~2017 i7 is only 4% slower than a ~2019 i7:

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700-vs-...

[mcdevilkiller]

Userbenchmark is not a good site to use. Although it is typically the first search result, most hardware subreddits have banned it or issued notices on how biased or even false their content is (eg. An i3 considered better than a Ryzen 9 3900x).

[mceachen]

Thanks for the heads-up, TIL.

[tgma]

T2 was first introduced in 2018 MacBooks. 2016-7 iBridges run on T1