Ableton Forum

A11 “BIONIC” CHIP

This chip apparently benchmarks faster than some MacBook Pros, both in single and multi-core. Not recent MacBook Pros — today’s MacBook Pros.

Apple’s A-series chips achieved desktop-like performance in single-core a few years ago. But this level of multi-core performance is new to the A11. The difference is the new Apple-designed “second-generation performance controller”. The A10 chips have two high-power cores and two low-power cores. When the A10 needs high CPU performance, it uses the two high-power cores; when it doesn’t, it switches to the two low-power cores. So with A10 chips, you’re always getting dual-core performance.

Thanks to the new performance controller, on the A11 all six cores are available at the same time. When you need the highest performance, it uses all six cores. The A11’s two high-power cores are 25 percent faster than the A10’s. That would be an impressive year-over-year boost in and of itself. But the low-power cores are each 70 percent faster than the A10’s — and there are twice as many of them, and they’re always available.

Apple barely spent any keynote time on the new performance controller because “speeds and feeds” aren’t what the iPhone is all about. But from a chip design and performance perspective, this is astounding. Apple is pulling ahead of other chipmakers — both Intel and Qualcomm — like Secretariat pulling away from the pack in the Belmont Stakes.

You can’t bring this up in public without a certain segment of Android fans losing their goddamn minds over it. “I thought specs don’t matter?” they say, and point to articles I (or whoever else brings this up) wrote in the past arguing that specs aren’t the only thing that matters. Here’s the thing. I would still want to use an iPhone if Apple were using off-the-shelf Snapdragon processors and Samsung were the company producing these proprietary A-series systems-on-a-chip. It’s the same reason I remained a Mac user even during the years when Mac CPUs were hopelessly behind Intel’s in performance. For me, it’s the overall experience that matters, and that’s largely defined by the software platform.

But Samsung isn’t the company with the proprietary chips that blow away the industry commodity chips, Apple is. So iPhone users get the best in both regards: they get the iOS experience and Apple-designed hardware, and they get the vastly superior CPU and GPU. And Android users who want industry-leading performance are shit out of luck. This is unprecedented in computing history. Windows users who want the best CPUs have always had that option. Android users don’t, because the best chips, by far, are Apple’s, and they’re proprietary.

The specs aren’t what matters — the effects are what matters. But the specs are what we can measure, and the faster the chips are, the better the effects are in the user experience.

mrdelurk wrote:iPhone started acting bricked, but only when not plugged into wall power. So I went to Verizon's store.

Stromkraft wrote:
What the … did you expect going to Verizon? C'mon!

steko wrote:Apple employees can’t stop walking into the beautiful glass doors at new Apple Park campus - The Verge

H20nly wrote:

steko wrote:Apple employees can’t stop walking into the beautiful glass doors at new Apple Park campus - The Verge

1st world problems

LoopStationZebra wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 26, 2019 9:54 pm

Now where was I......?

Oh yes, I remember!