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  • peevee - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    12s Pro Max looks fine. Too bad they refuse to switch to USB-C.

    Oh, wait, I am not supposed to use the built-in time machine yet?
  • ikjadoon - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    I don’t know about power consumption with the 5th GPU core and ProMotion. GPU peak power is getting high, Apple is still too stingy with the batteries, and TSMC N5P isn’t *that* big a leap. Think this needs a few generations more in the oven.
  • blanarahul - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    1. More GPU cores running at lower clock speeds delivers better performance/watt and thus better sustained performance (useful for Promotion).

    2. ProMotion is most likely going to be adaptive. I have a 144 Hz laptop and I switch often between 60/144 and I observe differences when - scrolling, moving mouse cursor and gaming. No difference observed while I am typing in word or typing this comment or when I'm watching a video.

    If it's implemented well, ProMotion should be active only when screen contents are in motion like scrolling on a webpage/feed/home screen. It should switch to 60 Hz (maybe 48/50 Hz for 24/25 fps videos) for video playback/typing/stationery content.
  • ikjadoon - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    To note, I am specifically talking about GPU *peak* power.

    Running stressful 3D applications now with a 5th GPU core + ceiling now raised to 120 FPS = GPU power consumption looks to make a big leap.

    Battery life will suffer (you cannot get around 120 FPS 3D content taking much more power) as Apple will refuse to make the battery size large enough.

    I think you're discussing idle / low-stress usage where the FPS average is much closer to 30 or 60 FPS. I'm discussing peak / high-stress usage where the FPS is 120 FPS continously.
  • blanarahul - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    ... you seriously expect high fidelity 120 fps gaming on a phone without throttling/excessive skin temperatures?
  • blanarahul - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    iPhone GOT ADAPTIVE SYNC??

    According to Apple: "With ProMotion, there are no settings. Refresh rates are tied to whatever’s happening on the screen. If your game drops to 30 fps, ProMotion dips to 30 fps too. If you’re watching a video that was filmed at 24 fps, it plays at 24 fps."
  • Zizy - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    Considering 10-120 Hz and adaptive refresh it seems plausible they have full adaptive sync. But it doesn't guarantee it. Say the phone might be able to set framerate to 24 or 30 FPS, but not to 26. Or it might require many frames to switch refresh rate. All of that is not adaptive sync yet still consistent with their promises (as far as I know).
  • Wrs - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    A15 got an underwhelming presentation. They stopped comparing to their last gen, instead this time it's vs. the competition. But then it's all super fast already, so maybe one needn't care too much.
  • Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    So I take it the A15 is just a barely warmed over A14, huh? The new iPad Mini has the A15 (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/apple-unvei... According to the press release, it has "a 40 percent jump in performance." The old iPad Mini had the A12. Well, we already know that according to Apple that A14 "offers a 40 percent higher CPU performance than the old A12 in the iPad Air 2019" (https://www.notebookcheck.net/A14-vs-A12-Bionic_12... Translation: the A15 is a gap year for Apple. This sort of complacency will hurt them majorly in the long run if they don't return to strong annual performance increases, which have been very small for the last three years anyways.
  • Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    EDIT: (Fixed links) So I take it the A15 is just a barely warmed over A14, huh? The new iPad Mini has the A15 (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/apple-unvei... ). According to the press release, it has "a 40 percent jump in performance." The old iPad Mini had the A12. Well, we already know that according to Apple that A14 "offers a 40 percent higher CPU performance than the old A12 in the iPad Air 2019" (https://www.notebookcheck.net/A14-vs-A12-Bionic_12... ). Translation: the A15 is a gap year for Apple. This sort of complacency will hurt them majorly in the long run if they don't return to strong annual performance increases, which have been very small for the last three years anyways.
  • Wrs - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    There are physical and logical limits to design without a process node improvement. I would guess they grabbed some efficiency from N5P over N5, as efficiency was actually a weak point of A14/M1 as evidenced by phone throttling. Kind of a relief too that they wouldn't further embarrass the architects at Qualcomm/Intel/AMD and push everyone toward hotter/throttling chips.
  • Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    So you are admitting they could not improve their microarchitecture any further? We already all know everyone is stuck node-wise, but that is no excuse to not stopping feverishly searching after low hanging fruit and pushing the boundaries. And if anything, they are embarrassing themselves by showing how they are going to be left in the dust if they keep up on the low 10% annual performance increases and (now) 0% performance standstills. I can already tell you ARM, AMD, and others are pushing for 20% and above annual performance increases and that is what Apple needs to be looking out for or they will be in a world of hurt.
  • Wrs - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    Improving a microarchitecture is a subjective and contextual thing. Sometimes one needs that light bulb moment. Other times one simply needs manufacturing advancements. The laws of physics are immutable, from one year to the next.

    One does not simply pursue speed at the cost of all else. Remember Netburst? That's when one keeps extending a core pipeline to satisfy a steady increase in gigahertz and single-thread instruction throughput, oblivious to the impracticality of removing a kilowatt of heat from a CPU socket. The low hanging fruit in that case was caching, and really scrapping the long assembly line paradigm altogether, going with multiple shorter lines. A15 has a ton of cache; if there is low hanging fruit it would be elsewhere.

    I won't even call Intel designers complacent during their Skylake stall. The fault was clearly on the fabrication side and probably a great deal on management for not outsourcing or even seeing the mobile threat opening.

    Until we run benchmarks we won't see the efficiency gain on A15 - though I'm sure it's there as 1.5/2.5 hours of extra battery life didn't come purely from a more efficient screen and rearranging the internals for battery space - and then we'll probably attribute that to TSMC, anyway.
  • ammaterasu - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    They did push more transistors into the chip. I think the improvement will be more weighted in the GPU/AI processing department. Once they move to 3nm next year, performance gap vs competitor will likely widen once again
  • name99 - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    More likely, I suspect, is that they have hit the limits of an annual CPU redesign cycle.
    An alternative would be to switch to a biannual cycle, something like
    - odd years (starting with 2021) Mac gets new "extreme" core
    - even years (like 2022) that core gets optimized and whatever didn't work as well as hoped for (mac is a much more forgiving power environment!) is tweaked

    Most Apple products are on a two year cadence; look at eg aWatch or iPads or aTV.
    It can still look like annual updates for iPhone (and perhaps even for Macs) via improvements to the SoC (just not the core).

    In a way this makes Apple's life much easier. It decouples the riskiest part of the design, ie new core (and associated complex IP) from the forced schedule of iPhone, since new Macs ship when they ship. We all want to see what the M2 looks like and its associated iMac and Mac Pro; but no-one has any expectation that it's in Nov this year or May next year -- Apple can be more aggressive in future core designs if they have two years to work on the changes, and can slip a month or three with no serious consequences.

    We always assumed new cores would debut on iPhone, and till this year that made sense; but going forward it actually makes a lot more sense to have the newest most performant core debut in the devices for which they are most desired, ie iMac Pro and Mac Pro.

    This may be too optimistic, of course; but I'd keep it in mind as a theory until the M2 disproves it (which it will if the M2 is not a substantially new core).
  • Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    It's zero improvement in CPU performance over the last generation A14 using Apple's own numbers. That's complacency at its finest.
  • Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    A15 got the underwhelming presentation it rightly deserved. This looks like the stereotypical Intel-style rehashing of Skylake, only worse. At least Intel bumped up the clock speed so we got some single-digit improvements. There's nothing here! It's a literal standstill here on the CPU performance front.
  • Wrs - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    Intel's Skylake-rehashing was more an indication of process node stall. I wouldn't be so fast to judge Apple's chip architects as complacent not even a year after they wrecked everyone else. I feel their A14 went too far as throttling was severe enough in some cases to lead to performance regression vs. A13. N5 is still a decent dense node; it's just not as mature as the 7nm+/N7P immediately preceding it.
  • lemurbutton - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    One last thing: Tim Cook pulls out the MBP 16" featuring an A15-based M2X SoC with 8/2 big.Little cores that are 50% faster ST than 5950x in SPEC, 32-core GPUs that does 10.4 Tflops, 120Hz miniLED display, ultra thin, and 30 hours of battery life.
  • blanarahul - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    I just want to see M1X using only its 8 big cores and being compared against 8 AMD Zen 3 / Intel Tiger Lake cores. If M1X does well, who knows maybe we can have the next generation of consoles use ARM v9 instruction set instead of x86.
  • lemurbutton - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    8 big M2X cores would destroy 8 Zen3 cores even if the Apple SoC runs at 1/3 the wattage.
  • WaltC - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    Yes, and we could travel at Warp 9 if only we could break the FTL barrier...;)
  • lemurbutton - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    One is impossible. One is certain.
  • goatfajitas - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    "8 big M2X cores would destroy 8 Zen3 cores even if the Apple SoC runs at 1/3 the wattage."

    LOL. Waiting on that one. I am sure it would win in alot of multimedia applications, but raw power just isnt there. Its good for these mobile toys though.
  • Speedfriend - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    I really hate how apple always twists marketing stuff when they don't need to

    "6x faster than the best selling Android tablet"

    The best selling Android tablet is probably a $80 Fire tablet, not really a valid comparison. So why do it, it is so childish
  • Alistair - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    I wanted to barf while watching the stream. It was 50 percent word salad "now you can see pixels in real time" that made no sense and hurt your brain trying to untangle, and 50 percent taking photos of yourself.
  • Speedfriend - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    50% faster than the nearest competitor in CPU performance. Given the A14 was already 43% faster in MC and 62% faster in SC than the fastest Android processors, what the hell does this mean? Barely any improvement? Surely not?
  • Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    With last year's iPad Air, the A14 was a 40% improvement over the A12. The iPad Mini's A15 is also a 40% improvement over the A12. Answers: zero performance improvement. No improvement except in efficiency, but they also increase battery size, so that is likely minimal as well. Sounds like A15 is a gap year for Apple, and that is never a good look or a good choice no matter how well you think you now are doing as a company.
  • goatfajitas - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    20% smaller notch? Are they being serious? LOL
    - the rest of planet Earth moved away from the notch 2+ years ago and Apple come out with a 20% smaller notch in 2021? hehehe
  • Silver5urfer - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    Where is Johnny Srouji ? Well I can see the pattern already. Anyways the A15 is meh, nothing ground shattering. Surprising to see Apple now talking about nothing on iPad processors and their useless 50% faster bs metrics, esp without any generational comparisons within their own HW portfolio. It exists in battery life lol.

    Also the price is not increased, which is kinda not expected either. Basically it's a rehash just like since the 11. On top Notch is smaller lul. They have the touch ID on the side why not just keep the same on iPhone and save this planet from display mutilation FFS ?

    I think they are going to hit wall in silicon engineering, more pompous claims and all that smoke and mirrors are slowly running out of tricks which is the prized aspect of Apple hardware. Now I think they are more into an ecosystem and luxury / hype fashion brand. Well Google is not special anymore the days of Android are now numbered as an open OS. It was until 8. With 9 the iOS copying started and now with 12 it's worse than iOS in UX and awful Filesystem problems.

    Uninteresting.
  • ABR - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    People sure are hard to please. For years Apple has been belting out massive yearly performance improvements, and we hear that no one needs this much power in a phone, the phones are too thin, and the batteries don't last long enough. Now they've been steadily making thicker and heavier phones ever since the 7, this year they pause on performance to focus battery life, and they've doubled down on thickness to support better cameras. Yet all I see are "Meh" and "Apple's SOC team is complacent and doomed". Come on!
  • Tams80 - Friday, September 17, 2021 - link

    Because the improvements are very small and you can't see most of them. It's just not exciting.
  • CoreLogicCom - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link

    So is the battery life improvements now mainly with Apple's move to their own internal 5G chips? I heard somewhere that they had battery issues with the 12 because the 5G was first-gen, inefficent and made by someone else (Broadcom?) They were moving to inhouse to get that integration and the efficiency up, plus support the newer 5G spectrum.
  • Tomatotech - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link

    Battery life is a big one that will improve life for a lot of people. For the average person these might become charge-once-every-two-or-three-days phones.
  • eastcoast_pete - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link

    Hi Andrei, I wonder if you as the resident ARM and SoC expert had a chance to look at this deep dive into the M1 design; https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WrMYCZMnhsGP4o3H3...
    Would like your thoughts on it if you have a chance; now, it's a 350 page document, so not exactly a quick and easy read.
  • GeoffreyA - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link

    By the way, I believe it's our very own name99! Hats off to him.
  • eastcoast_pete - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link

    My guess is that you may well be correct, but the only way to know is if name99 would step forward. However, I am not sure if I would do that in a similar situation. There is some comfort in staying behind the curtain; if it's about Apple, that company has a long memory (and a large legal department) if someone spills the beans or says something critical.
  • GeoffreyA - Friday, September 17, 2021 - link

    You're quite right. I didn't think about that.
  • jennifer21 - Monday, September 20, 2021 - link

    Considering 10-120 Hz and adaptive refresh it seems plausible they have full adaptive sync. But it doesn't guarantee it. Say the phone might be able to set framerate to 24 or 30 FPS, but not to 26. Or it might require many frames to switch refresh rate. All of that is not adaptive sync yet still consistent with their promises (as far as I know).
    https://surveyuncle.com/disney-hub-login/

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