This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
A20 Pro vs Intel Ultra 7 Series 3
All of this performance is wasted on Apple's closed hardware and OS. What a shame.
Are beowolf clusters still a thing? If yes, imagine one made out of those.
It's honestly amazing what these chips can do.
Unfortunately it's stuck behind the Apple ecosystem.
Linux is inevitable
Apple will fight it with everything they can. Latest MacOS27 hides linux partitions from the bootpicker so it is blocked in firmware.
Evil fucks
The comparison that matters is always left out. Computing performance by dollar cost.
Even higher, since those Apple silicon chips are very efficient.
It does matter but performance per currency alone is also kinda shit of a metric too. Might point you towards getting like 50 atom CPUs but then good luck finding memory for all of them to do anything useful.
Better to show performance between each and then list the cost to let the user decide if it is worth it. Make your charts between hardware in set price ranges is also pretty good.
And yet, it can't (be made to) run a full desktop OS or play AAA games. But you can personalise the Siri voice (older phones can do the conversational stuff)... maybe edit photos faster.
Apple went and made a phone you could use for ten years, but next year they'll be telling you why their new phone is so much better than the last one. They don't expect you to upgrade every year, but they expect you to want to, and after a couple of generations, they want you to think that you have to.
I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max (2024), and the 18 Pro/Max presentation definitely gave me a bit of phone envy. But I also have a Galaxy S10 (2019), and that does a few things better than the iPhone, even though it's 5 years difference between them. Apple's keyboard likes to hallucinate weird results (like changing out common words for names of people I don't even have in contacts) and edit after the fact. Gboard just works. When it doesn't, the mistake makes sense (if and of for example). Also, I've used the same wallpaper on both phones. It always looks better on the Samsung. Sharper colors and contrast. Hold both up and ask anyone which looks better, they're gonna point to the Samsung, even if you turn the iPhone's brightness up all the way.
Phone manufacturers are desperately trying to convince you that you need the latest and greatest. You don't — unless you want to do AI stuff. And even then, they're going to charge you for it. And they're sure you'll pay, because you've already shown your hand by opening your wallet again.
I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max (2024), and the 18 Pro/Max presentation definitely gave me a bit of phone envy.
I have a 16 base… and I didn’t raise an eyebrow. What kind of app running can a 18 do that a 16 can’t, other than whatever is self inflicted with software bloat?
A LOFIC camera would have gotten me interested, but they didn’t ship that.
Battery life is the only thing I’m interested in. Not only does the 18 perform great, but it gets insane battery too.
I’m not buying it because no SIM card slot, but it does have me interested.
I think physical SIM slots are probably done for, why add more hardware that is "unnecessary" now?
Because not all carriers easily support esim. Last I was in Costa Rica maybe 1 carrier supported esim for prepaid lines, but will the employee at the store know how to set that up? Physical sim? Yeah, they'll do it in a minute or two. I guess the 18 will force them to learn, but in some fuck ass small town how many people are rocking an iphone 18 and a prepaid line?
I'd love to get a phone that supports mmwave 5g, but the freedom of physical sim is well worth it. Also I spent a fuck ton importing this 15 pro, I'm not just chucking it willy nilly.
This does indeed get better every generation.
I suppose the 16 hit the point of diminishing returns, for me. It lasts all day, even when busy on vacation or something, though I acknowledge that’s entirely dependent on one’s usage.
I would be so much more interested in phones if I could run Debian on them. Check out my proxmox server rack, its a pile of every phone I could acquire from friends throwing out old phones! Between them they run 20 factorio servers with clusterio.
I got an S22+ in 2022, I bought the flagship thinking I'd keep it for at least five years. As far as I can tell there is still next to no reason to upgrade.
And yet, it can't (be made to) run a full desktop OS
I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but you do realize the MacBook Neo running the desktop macOS is using the A18 Pro, right? The A20 is an iteration on the same design and will likely end up in the next MacBook Neo.
I think OPs point is not that it’s unable to, is that Apple won’t let it
It appears OP wasn't clear they were talking about a phone using the A20 SoC, their message was a direct reply to the article posted which was about the A20 Pro itself and not any particular phone using it. Hence my reply which was also about the A20 SoC and not any particular phone.
I stand behind what I said: The A20 Pro will likely end up in a future MacBook, where it will definitely be running the desktop macOS.
Now, the fact that desktop macOS is becoming more and more like iPadOS/iOS is a discussion for another thread ;-)
I don't really see how you can read that post and not see they were talking about phones, but you are right that the A20 Pro will almost certainly show up in a MacBook Neo successor at some point.
Edit: And what do you think the benchmark was run on? It was a phone.
“Won't let it” by putting it in a Macbook and running MacOS on it?
As in you plug your phone into a monitor and it becomes a fully fledged desktop running MacOS, and you don't have to buy a 2nd device from Apple.
Edit: Like Samsung DEX
Dex is a really neat concept, but ultimately sucks ass.
Maybe the duo will baby step us towards that. But even iPad OS which supports this for years is rough.
I'm doing just fine by not looking at new phones as long as my current one works - ignorance is bliss.
it could be an apples-to-oranges comparison. not sure if that intel core can be inside apple phones.
IIRC an A20 is an SOC rather than a CPU too.
Intel cpus are SOCs too.
Soc is almost a meaningless term these days. It used to mean “a mobile CPU”. But for power reasons laptop CPUs have all become SOCs too.
Actually insane they are beating desktop processors with a phone CPU.
That would be crazy indeed and might be possible, but the CPU they compared against is a mobile CPU (Intel Core Ultra 355 that is).
Not that crazy to beat a desktop CPU in specific category like this. This article went off the deep end when they made the comparison to the Huawei CPU. If you actually put one of these in a phone and spent any amount of time getting the kind of performance they're claiming it would almost immediately thermal throttle or cook itself. These comparisons are pointless.
Toms Hardware is a corporate propaganda op anyway.
Exactly what I wanted to say. On paper my pixel 1 was significantly faster then my pc at the time, an ancient core2quad q8400. In a lot of ways the phone did feel faster, then I tried to decompress a large 7z file on both of them and,despite using a mechanical hard drive, my pc took just over half as long.
Now overall, there were a lot of things that chip could manage better than my desktop but the point is that using a single benchmark or benchmark suite that leans into the strengths of the hardware is pointless.
These "benchmarks" are great for marketing, so not pointless. Just pointless for users.
Core Ultra 7 355 is a mobile (laptop) CPU, with a nominal power draw of 25W and a base clock speed of 2.3GHz.
Eh, it's 2 years newer than the AMD architecture, on a better node, and has better memory packaging. I mean it's great they're getting this performance, but wait until Zen 6 for a contemporary architecture and node comparison.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time Apple releases a CPU. Their designs are good but most of it is the new TSMC node they use. When others get access to the node the difference is not that large but then the cycle starts again.
not really apples to apples (no pun intended) comparison. Apple has designed their silicon chips with the intention of running their operating systems and the OS is certainly optimized for the architecture. Whereas x86 is somewhat generic and the OS performance varies, Windows and Linux not necessarily returning the same results. Linux can be highly optimized, but not Windows.
