Gary Explains why Qualcomm Get Whipped by Apple

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FrgMstr

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We have seen a lot of news about how blindingly fast the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X phones are in the GeekBench benchmarks, Gary Sims over at Android Authority has put together a video to tell use exactly why this is so. Thanks grtitan.

Check out the video.


On paper, the multi-core result of the hexa-core A11 is 50 percent faster than the octa-core Snapdragon 835. As I mentioned above though, Geekbench doesn’t test other parts of the SoC. Things like the DSP, the ISP and any AI-related functions will influence the day-to-day experience of any devices using these processors. However, when it comes to raw CPU speed, the A11 is the clear winner.

This can be a bit hard for Android fans to stomach. So what is the reason? First we need a bit of a history lesson.
 
Thanks the maker that is not comparing to some intel cpus, which also got trashed.

brb, grabbing some pop corn and securing my door for the angry mob that is coming for that comment! :)
 
better optimized.
full stop, don't need a 20 minute video...android won't be faster unless apple release a disatster chip, or an android manufasturer tailor a cpu for ther phone with a proprietary OS
 
Another W for Apple ( they will keep winning for a very long time guys )


From resale value of the phones to everything else lol. <3
 
alamox said:
better optimized.
full stop, don't need a 20 minute video...android won't be faster unless apple release a disatster chip, or an android manufasturer tailor a cpu for ther phone with a proprietary OS
Click to expand...
8mb lvl 2 cache + larger die size but on a smaller manufacturing process.
No shit its gonna be faster
 
Don't get me wrong I don't care for Apple's business model and I would love to get out of it but god damned does it work. That being said this was basically a 15 minute list of excuses.
 
Ok, so what do we do with all this performance? My snapdragon 820 doesn't leave me lusting for faster performance. Until they can up with a way to cast my phone app to a real screen with real controls so i can play crysis 4 on it, who cares?

The only game I play on a phone is hearthstone, which plays just fine on my even older amazon fire phone
 
faster selfies?

i use a quad core 1.2ghz snapdragon4 slow as fuck chip. But it's fine. You don't need much horsepower to make phone calls.
 
actually things like this is good. It pushes competition and further progress on both sides
 
Kdawg said:
faster selfies?

i use a quad core 1.2ghz snapdragon4 slow as fuck chip. But it's fine. You don't need much horsepower to make phone calls.
Click to expand...
Saddly I think phone calls are the last thing I use my phone for since email is on there and now office (primarily excel) I find myself constantly making last minute revisions or proof reads to other people even though the screen size makes it less than ideal its the fact it is the device already in my hands and getting the laptop open and started to go to the email to open the email to correct the one formula to send back takes almost as must time as just managing to do it on the smaller phone screen.
 
buttons said:
Ok, so what do we do with all this performance? My snapdragon 820 doesn't leave me lusting for faster performance. Until they can up with a way to cast my phone app to a real screen with real controls so i can play crysis 4 on it, who cares?

The only game I play on a phone is hearthstone, which plays just fine on my even older amazon fire phone
Click to expand...


Yeah using it day to day is pretty much the same on iPhone or Android..

I don't know why so many people can't see the disconnect between benchmarks and reality.
 
Here's a personal use case scenario: As a photography hobbyist, I find using the current generation iPad Pro (A10X) a dream come true in conjunction with Mobile Lightroom/Photoshop, especially when traveling. I can make about 90% of the edits I would make in desktop Lightroom/Photoshop, and it feels as fast, if not faster than a laptop does at doing those tasks.
 
You can give Apple a lot of crap about a lot of things, rightly, but they have some absolutely kick ass CPUs.
 
Kdawg said:
faster selfies?

i use a quad core 1.2ghz snapdragon4 slow as fuck chip. But it's fine. You don't need much horsepower to make phone calls.
Click to expand...

My feeling too.

My Pixel using the Quad Core Snapdragon 821 at 2.15Ghz is plenty fast for absolutely everything I do.

Even the comparatively ancient quad core 1.5ghz Snapdragon S4 Pro in my 2013 Nexus 7 has never left me feeling like it was slow. I honestly can't tell any real difference in speed.

I use my phone for:
- Web browser
- Email
- Calendar
- Text messages
- Some Facebook
- Syncing my fitbit

This will run well on pretty much any old chip, just like how I don't need an overclocked Threadripper with a Titan Xp for checking my email and browsing the web.

These numbers are relevant only in benchmarks, or potentially if you play phone games I guess? I've never had a game on any phone I've owned.

I fully realize that Apple has some faster ARM chips, but honestly that is completely irrelevant. It does not matter in any way shape or form. I'm so happy I o longer have to deal with their shit.
 
alamox said:
better optimized.
full stop, don't need a 20 minute video...android won't be faster unless apple release a disatster chip, or an android manufasturer tailor a cpu for ther phone with a proprietary OS
Click to expand...


Why did you type out "full stop"? This is a dictation term to indicate the use of a period. It is not used in text or verbal discussion. It most definitely isn't used to indicate any kind of strength to a statement.
 
The only area where I thought these numbers actually mattered was on the 4K transcoding. Huge difference!

Oh well, my FREE Note 8 does just dandy.
 
alxlwson said:
Why did you type out "full stop"? This is a dictation term to indicate the use of a period. It is not used in text or verbal discussion. It most definitely isn't used to indicate any kind of strength to a statement.
Click to expand...

What th...

Agreed though, until someone tailors the cpu to the os and vice versa it can’t compete, I daresay apples vs grapples! One is general use case the other very specific.
 
I really find threads like this confusing with the "eh, who needs that! My <X> is fine!"

Yeah, my Ivy Bridge still does things pretty well. But I kinda do want AMD and Intel to just go ahead and keep making faster stuff, eh?

We're enthusiasts! We overclock not because we have some business case to do so - we do it because this is our hobby, what we nerd out on, and it's cool. People here have cooling systems which may be a little more effective than the one in my car. Need? F no. But it's awesome.

So hey, Apple makes an unholy fast mobile chip - that's cool. AMD makes a desktop processor with more cores than you can shake a stick at - badass!
I'm not buying either. But I think both are pretty cool as far as tech goes.

And last but not least, please don't discount how important race-to-sleep is for having a responsive device with great battery life. Using a bit more power but finishing faster and turning off - it's a good thing.
 
PhaseNoise said:
I really find threads like this confusing with the "eh, who needs that! My <X> is fine!"

Yeah, my Ivy Bridge still does things pretty well. But I kinda do want AMD and Intel to just go ahead and keep making faster stuff, eh?

We're enthusiasts! We overclock not because we have some business case to do so - we do it because this is our hobby, what we nerd out on, and it's cool. People here have cooling systems which may be a little more effective than the one in my car. Need? F no. But it's awesome.

So hey, Apple makes an unholy fast mobile chip - that's cool. AMD makes a desktop processor with more cores than you can shake a stick at - badass!
I'm not buying either. But I think both are pretty cool as far as tech goes.

And last but not least, please don't discount how important race-to-sleep is for having a responsive device with great battery life. Using a bit more power but finishing faster and turning off - it's a good thing.
Click to expand...


Is that what she tell you? Lol :)
 
PhaseNoise said:
We're enthusiasts! We overclock not because we have some business case to do so - we do it because this is our hobby, what we nerd out on, and it's cool. People here have cooling systems which may be a little more effective than the one in my car. Need? F no. But it's awesome.
Click to expand...

When the [H] only had Kyle and we used leaky Tupperware and home made water blocks with heater cores from an auto parts store. When I was salvaging fridge compressors to break 1GHz.

If we had to make a business case for the endless piles of deceased hardware we produced we'd have been in some kind of trouble.

We do this shit because we want to, not because we need to.

I don't even over-clock much now, I build SFF systems. I can fit a lot of plumbing in a very small space (shut up, all of you).

A lot of plumbing in a small space... Teehee..
 
Twisted Kidney said:
When the [H] only had Kyle and we used leaky Tupperware and home made water blocks with heater cores from an auto parts store. When I was salvaging fridge compressors to break 1GHz.

If we had to make a business case for the endless piles of deceased hardware we produced we'd have been in some kind of trouble.

We do this shit because we want to, not because we need to.

I don't even over-clock much now, I build SFF systems. I can fit a lot of plumbing in a very small space (shut up, all of you).

A lot of plumbing in a small space... Teehee..
Click to expand...


Moar lies. haha!
 
What's to stop Apple from astro-turfing/"optimising" the CPU/GPU for geekbench exactly? We've seen that before...
 
Benchmarks are really good at showing devices optimized for benchmarks. But, since I don't use my phone to run benchmarks full time, I'm not sure it's particularly relevant. ^.^
 
Kdawg said:
faster selfies?

i use a quad core 1.2ghz snapdragon4 slow as fuck chip. But it's fine. You don't need much horsepower to make phone calls.
Click to expand...

Can you honestly not figure out more applications for a smart phone than making phone calls? You honestly don't see the value in faster mobile processing? Qualcomm being markedly slower than Apple isn't ok just because everyone likes to hate on Apple.
 
Last edited:
Benchmarks aside, that 4K video transcode speed is amazing. Destroys everything
 
Twisted Kidney said:
When the [H] only had Kyle and we used leaky Tupperware and home made water blocks with heater cores from an auto parts store. When I was salvaging fridge compressors to break 1GHz.

If we had to make a business case for the endless piles of deceased hardware we produced we'd have been in some kind of trouble.

We do this shit because we want to, not because we need to.

I don't even over-clock much now, I build SFF systems. I can fit a lot of plumbing in a very small space (shut up, all of you).

A lot of plumbing in a small space... Teehee..
Click to expand...

speak for yourself, my Tupperware never leaked. But I did buy waterblocks, the heatercore did come form autozone.
 
opfreak said:
speak for yourself, my Tupperware never leaked. But I did buy waterblocks, the heatercore did come form autozone.
Click to expand...

Canadian Tire carries a line of really sharp looking very high quality heater cores, they still outperform any store bought PC radiator and they're far more robust. They still look way better as well.

My first chips in a machine shop were making my own copper water block. I made it in my grandfather's basement machine shop in Mississauga. He learned his trade in the Royal Engineers in WWII.

Even now thinking about it gets me all misty.
 
buttons said:
Ok, so what do we do with all this performance? My snapdragon 820 doesn't leave me lusting for faster performance. Until they can up with a way to cast my phone app to a real screen with real controls so i can play crysis 4 on it, who cares?

The only game I play on a phone is hearthstone, which plays just fine on my even older amazon fire phone
Click to expand...

That kind of horsepower makes sense for Apple because they support their devices for far, far longer than the typical Android manufacturer. For example, the iPhone 5S was released in the US in September 2013 and is still being supported today, having received iOS 11 in September 2017. If we assume 4 years as a baseline, you want to plan for a device to have enough horsepower to support any possible new software features that might be coming down the pipe during that period. So you overload it with performance now in the expectation that it'll be put to practical use later.
 
King of Heroes said:
That kind of horsepower makes sense for Apple because they support their devices for far, far longer than the typical Android manufacturer. For example, the iPhone 5S was released in the US in September 2013 and is still being supported today, having received iOS 11 in September 2017. If we assume 4 years as a baseline, you want to plan for a device to have enough horsepower to support any possible new software features that might be coming down the pipe during that period. So you overload it with performance now in the expectation that it'll be put to practical use later.
Click to expand...

My 2013 Nexus 7 is still plenty fast.

It is a bummer that it no longer receives security updates though, but there is always LineageOS.
 
King of Heroes said:
That kind of horsepower makes sense for Apple because they support their devices for far, far longer than the typical Android manufacturer. For example, the iPhone 5S was released in the US in September 2013 and is still being supported today, having received iOS 11 in September 2017. If we assume 4 years as a baseline, you want to plan for a device to have enough horsepower to support any possible new software features that might be coming down the pipe during that period. So you overload it with performance now in the expectation that it'll be put to practical use later.
Click to expand...
As long as you replace the battery every 2 years, which gets significantly harder with every generation. I miss removable batteries.
 
bizzmeister said:
Another W for Apple ( they will keep winning for a very long time guys )

From resale value of the phones to everything else lol. <3
Click to expand...

But you are still stuck using an Apple product in Apple's walled garden. Wouldn't care if it was 10x as fast.
 
Logan321 said:
As long as you replace the battery every 2 years, which gets significantly harder with every generation. I miss removable batteries.
Click to expand...

I have 3 older iPhones, oldest being the 4S and I haven't needed to replace the batteries yet.
 
nutzo said:
But you are still stuck using an Apple product in Apple's walled garden. Wouldn't care if it was 10x as fast.
Click to expand...

Yes but their walled garden can be very useful to avoid malware long as you give up being able to run every single app you want/customize. I run android and I do not bother rooting as I have learned to be satisified with 99% of what an OS can do without being customized (Easier when it comes to upgrading phones and less pain overall).
 
grtitan said:
Thanks the maker that is not comparing to some intel cpus, which also got trashed.

brb, grabbing some pop corn and securing my door for the angry mob that is coming for that comment! :)
Click to expand...

These benchmarks are optimized for short burst speeds which the phones do very well on. A intel cpu is optimized for long term speed. Huge difference.
 
King of Heroes said:
That kind of horsepower makes sense for Apple because they support their devices for far, far longer than the typical Android manufacturer. For example, the iPhone 5S was released in the US in September 2013 and is still being supported today, having received iOS 11 in September 2017. If we assume 4 years as a baseline, you want to plan for a device to have enough horsepower to support any possible new software features that might be coming down the pipe during that period. So you overload it with performance now in the expectation that it'll be put to practical use later.
Click to expand...

And yet we hear iPhone owners complaining about this, because they cannot get security updates without updating the whole OS, and the OS updates make currently usable phones less usable?

I realize that you'd probably rather have the OS updates than have no security updates at all, but it sounds like the same kind of either/or situation you have with nearly all computing devices.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
And yet we hear iPhone owners complaining about this, because they cannot get security updates without updating the whole OS, and the OS updates make currently usable phones less usable?

I realize that you'd probably rather have the OS updates than have no security updates at all, but it sounds like the same kind of either/or situation you have with nearly all computing devices.
Click to expand...
You hear it from who? Apple has only borked one phone in the past and even then they allowed you revert back.
 
alamox said:
better optimized.
full stop, don't need a 20 minute video...android won't be faster unless apple release a disatster chip, or an android manufasturer tailor a cpu for ther phone with a proprietary OS
Click to expand...
While optimization and writing software around a specific CPU and/or hardware architecture makes a definite improvement, that isn't the only thing making their CPUs faster.

Look at the AMD Jaguar x86_64 CPUs used in modern consoles.
They are optimized to hell and back, and yet 8 Jaguar cores at ~1.8GHz are roughly equivalent to 2 Ivy Bridge cores at ~3GHz.

Point is, optimization helps, but it isn't everything, and not only are their CPUs faster core-for-core and clock-for-clock, they are also optimized as well, making a strong one-two punch against off-the-shelf ARM CPUs.
I'm not supporting Apple or doing PR or anything, this is just a rough look at both sides of the hardware and what it is all capable of.

Also, many individuals not only use their phones for playing 3D games, but also more serious tasks such as photo post-processing, video editing, transcoding, and rendering.
All of the above tasks require raw processing power, nearly regardless of other software optimizations, and take advantage of the FPUs rather than the integer processing units in the CPUs which optimized software normally uses, proving that Apple's CPUs/SoCs are in the performance lead for power users with mobile devices (smartphones/tablets).
 
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