>In the mobile space, there’s really no competition as the A13 posts almost double the performance of the next best non-Apple SoC. The difference is a little bit less in the floating-point suite, but again we’re not expecting any proper competition for at least another 2-3 years, and Apple isn’t standing still either.
Last year I’ve noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still roughly 15% behind.
That's pretty astonishing.
>In the face-off against a Cortex-A55 implementation such as on the Snapdragon 855, the new Thunder cores represent a 2.5-3x performance lead while at the same time using less than half the energy.
It seems Apple's little cores are no longer so little.
That's how you get to charge an arm and a leg. Release a product that's twice as fast as anybody else's, and support it for three times as long. I'm a loyal customer since iPhone 1, and as much as it hurts forking over reams of cash for my own and my wife's iPhones every couple of years, there's just no serious alternative. I also have a Pixel3 issued by one of my customers. It feels like a cheaply made toy next to my iPhone 11 Pro: oversaturated screen, camera sucks, app store is full of garbage, scrolling stutters sometimes (albeit less than it did 5-7 years ago) etc. And Pixel 3 is a phone that's one of the best in the Android ecosystem wrt at least camera and screen. Most other phones are worse.
- Pixel 3/3XL had best camera in phones until 11/11 Pro were released (yeah even better than XS).
- Pixel 3 didn't have best screen in Android phones. Not even close. 3XL had good screen, was not oversaturated. Samsung in general have had the best screens overall.
- Lot of people actually don't think Pixel 3 looks like a cheaply made toy. Look for reviews.
- iPhones won't be supported 3 times as long compared to Pixel 3s.
- App store is not full of garbage.
Source: I use a Pixel 3XL.
Disc: Googler but nowhere close to the Pixel/phone teams.
> iPhones won't be supported 3 times as long compared to Pixel 3s.
As someone who bought the very first Nexus phone (Nexus One, 2010), and several after that until the Nexus 5, I don’t believe this one bit and it’s why I moved to an iphone and never looked back.
Google’s long term hardware support commitments are worth less than their human technical support commitments. Apple has demonstrated their commitment to long term hardware support. My 2013 MacBook Air still runs the latest version of MacOS (Catalina) six years later.
Pixel XL (3 year old) was just updated to Android 10 (full update, not just security update). I don't think 9 year old iPhones are still getting full updates.
AFAIK, all old update issues on Nexus were due to lack of driver support from Qualcomm[0]. Some of those have been mitigated in recent Android versions.
Is it really reassuring that you don’t know in advance whether your phone will get updated? For comparison, Apple just released a bug fix update for the iPhone 4s - released in 2011 - in July of this year.
Companies such as Sony and Samsung have enterprise programs where they commit to much longer update periods (5 years?).
I don't think using a 4s in 2019 with the latest os and apps is a pleasant experience.
While I appreciate apples commitment to iOS updates, I think 5 years of updates is a more realistic goal.
A quick read on Specspeed gives no indication that it accounts for power consumption. Does that mean you could make a 65W A13 part and completely murder everything?
This is 100% what you can do today with a Galaxy S9/S10, https://www.linuxondex.com, plug in your phone to a USB-C dock and get a full ARM64 Ubuntu environment
Is there a typo in the article? The table shows the iPhone 11 Pro with the 3046mAh battery but the article article says the iPhone 11 Pro has a 3110mAh battery (from the iPhone 11 column).
Google assistant is miles better than Siri. Processor speed matters but having an actually usable voice control interface is simply a gamer changer. I've had iPhone since 3GS. Now I'm a pixel convert, and I'm not turning back to iPhone just because it's faster.
"Actually usable" seems to be going a bit too far for rhetorical purposes. I use Siri probably two dozen times a day-
-messaging people
-setting alarms
-setting reminders
-taking notes
-weather queries
-occasionally some informational thing like the time of a game (e.g. "When do the Lions play next")
-set timers
-query on the status of alarms and timers
-occasionally sunrise, sunset
-volume up/down / next / previous / skip
-phone people
It operates at close to perfect effectiveness for the real-world usage that I have. I don't expect it to ever be as good as Google as it operates on a tiny fraction of the data that Google has on the average user, but it's perfectly effective for that.
It's pretty hard to use Google assistant on an iPhone. The integration just isn't as good, and I suspect different speech models are used given that on device models depend a lot on hardware. It'll be nice to try it on a pixel phone and feel the difference yourself, but I don't know how you can do that without buying a new phone :) I switched to Pixel 3a initially for its camera and also I'm holding off a premium phone purchase until 5G comes about. I'm impressed with what Pixel 3a does with camera via better software. But what's genuinely surprising is the google assistant speech model quality and integration. I ended up buying a home mini and am planning to buy a smart display to get more of that. I'm unusual in that I don't really care about data privacy issues with Google. The convenience is worth it for me personally. But my main point is the processor benchmark matters, but it's not the only thing that matters :)
Last year I’ve noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still roughly 15% behind.
That's pretty astonishing.
>In the face-off against a Cortex-A55 implementation such as on the Snapdragon 855, the new Thunder cores represent a 2.5-3x performance lead while at the same time using less than half the energy.
It seems Apple's little cores are no longer so little.