Now the only one left to report in is the Spreadtrum that seems to have forced the others to do this. Will be odd to see mid range with 6GB LPDDR4x in the same year as flagships with 4GB LPDDR4. If you talk again with Mediatek, maybe ask them if they don't see a hole in their roadmap between P20 and X20, SD65x and all...
Different OS, different HW. iOS apps are obviously made to use only 2 cores, since iphones only have 2 cores. In turn, since Apple SoCs only have 2 cores, they can afford to make those 2 cores big and fast. The end result is that iphones are fast. Very fast.
Apple is in a position where they aren't competing on price so they have no need to have as many cores as the competition (8 core phenomenon is mostly because you need 8 cores to be seen as competitive in many places) AND they can afford to spend a lot of die area on making big cores and GPUs.
Apple's cores are VERY powerful per Mhz. They are pretty close to Intel's big cores.
People keep forgetting that Apple cores are huge. The reason they can have such power with that level of efficiency. They can put as much optimized logic as they want in the chip, because they also control the OS, thus they don't need to hit higher "sub-optimal voltage-wise" clock rates to get the performance.
They aren't on the top of any multicore score bench.But they are on the top of many single core bench.Apple's a9 houses their own cpu architecture that has higher IPC than its ARM equivalent.Besides apple has higher optimization for their software since they only have to make software for their specific hardware.The benchmark apps are also optimized for running on ios.Thats why iphones has higher single core scores.But since A9 has only two cores, snapdragon 820,exynos 7420 or 8880 blows it away in multicore scores
You mean same memory bandwidth as the Snapdragon 625, Qualcomm's alternative on 14nm? Qualcomm has lower clocks too i might add. Samsung went with 1.7GHz and Mali T830 on 14nm with the 7870. At least MTK has the LPDDR4X option.
Clocks don't mean performance given the same core they can have some tangible metric but even then there are custom interconnects and cache systems that can make a difference. These guys need to stop pushing the CPU arms race and focus on the GPU and memory/storage bandwidth.
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jjj - Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - link
Now the only one left to report in is the Spreadtrum that seems to have forced the others to do this.Will be odd to see mid range with 6GB LPDDR4x in the same year as flagships with 4GB LPDDR4.
If you talk again with Mediatek, maybe ask them if they don't see a hole in their roadmap between P20 and X20, SD65x and all...
hojnikb - Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - link
someone should make a x2 A35+ x2 A72 SoC. A35 cores for light tasks and A72 for demading tasks.8 semi crappy cores just make no sense. Well great for marketing.
nikaldro - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Despite what many know-it-alls say, 8 cores aren't useless.bug77 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
The how do iPhones score towards the top of many multi-core benchmarks while having 2-3 cores?(I'm no Apple fan, but the engineer in me cannot ignore this "oddity")
nikaldro - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Different OS, different HW.iOS apps are obviously made to use only 2 cores, since iphones only have 2 cores.
In turn, since Apple SoCs only have 2 cores, they can afford to make those 2 cores big and fast.
The end result is that iphones are fast. Very fast.
testbug00 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Apple is in a position where they aren't competing on price so they have no need to have as many cores as the competition (8 core phenomenon is mostly because you need 8 cores to be seen as competitive in many places) AND they can afford to spend a lot of die area on making big cores and GPUs.Apple's cores are VERY powerful per Mhz. They are pretty close to Intel's big cores.
theqnology - Monday, February 29, 2016 - link
Do you mean in size? :) Apple cores are also huge.theqnology - Monday, February 29, 2016 - link
People keep forgetting that Apple cores are huge. The reason they can have such power with that level of efficiency. They can put as much optimized logic as they want in the chip, because they also control the OS, thus they don't need to hit higher "sub-optimal voltage-wise" clock rates to get the performance.rednafi - Friday, March 25, 2016 - link
They aren't on the top of any multicore score bench.But they are on the top of many single core bench.Apple's a9 houses their own cpu architecture that has higher IPC than its ARM equivalent.Besides apple has higher optimization for their software since they only have to make software for their specific hardware.The benchmark apps are also optimized for running on ios.Thats why iphones has higher single core scores.But since A9 has only two cores, snapdragon 820,exynos 7420 or 8880 blows it away in multicore scoressseemaku - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
You mean not all 8 are useless? Or did you mean it can be used for scientific applications development!testbug00 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
"Useless" is a false interpretation.I and most people believe that it is better to have few cores with some being higher power.
ddriver - Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - link
Those guys are insane, such lousy core configurations. Would love to see how this performs crippled at 7 GB\s memory bandwidth.jjj - Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - link
You mean same memory bandwidth as the Snapdragon 625, Qualcomm's alternative on 14nm? Qualcomm has lower clocks too i might add. Samsung went with 1.7GHz and Mali T830 on 14nm with the 7870.At least MTK has the LPDDR4X option.
hpglow - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Clocks don't mean performance given the same core they can have some tangible metric but even then there are custom interconnects and cache systems that can make a difference. These guys need to stop pushing the CPU arms race and focus on the GPU and memory/storage bandwidth.SydneyBlue120d - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Is the HEVC encoding real or fake like the Qualcomm chips?monkeynut - Monday, May 2, 2016 - link
What do you mean fake?Ethos Evoss - Sunday, March 6, 2016 - link
am really waiting for helio X20