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iPhone 7 Performance: A10 Chip Smokes Galaxy S7, Gives Intel Problems

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The iPhone 7's new A10 processor is so fast that Intel's newer PC processors are having trouble staying ahead, says a respected chip consulting group.

In an October 16 article entitled "Apple A10 bruises other CPUs," with the sub-heading "iPhone 7 processor uses really big core for top performance," The Linley Group makes it clear that Apple has become one of the world's premier processor design houses.

"The A10 Fusion...contains not one but two custom CPU designs," Linley Gwennap wrote in The Linley Group's Mobile Chip Report, referring to the two separate processor designs within the quad-core A10 processor.  Gwennap provided me with a full-length copy of the report.

"The massive [Apple] Hurricane CPU improves performance by 35% over the previous-generation [Apple] Twister, boosting both the clock speed and the per-clock performance. The smaller Zephyr CPU helps the iPhone 7 extend battery life compared with its predecessor," according to Gwennap.

Apple’s new CPU actually compares better against Intel’s mainstream x86 cores. The current MacBook Air ultrathin notebook, which uses a 2.2GHz Core i7-5650U Broadwell processor, scores about the same as the iPhone 7 on single-core Geekbench...Apple’s CPU prowess is beginning to rival Intel’s. In fact, the new Hurricane could easily support products such as the MacBook Air that today use lower-speed Intel chips, should Apple choose to port MacOS to ARM.

Money is no obstacle: "Part of Apple’s advantage is its ability to spend money. Die area is expensive for a processor built in leading-edge 16 [nanometer] FinFET technology, and Hurricane uses plenty of it," Gwennap wrote. Die refers to the physical chip. FinFETs "are 3D structures that rise above the substrate and resemble a fin, hence the name," as explained here.

"Apple sells phones, not chips, adding a few dollars of die cost is of little importance if the resulting high performance enables it to sell more $600 products," Gwennap added.

"Blows" other chips "out of the water": "Owing to...improvements, Hurricane blows other CPUs out of the water," Gwennap wrote.  For the comparison, the Mobile Chip report used an average of the Geekbench 3 and Geekbench 4 scores "to iron out some anomalies in the newer test."

As Gwennap explains, Geekbench focuses on CPU performance "the single-core result is a good measure of a CPU’s performance, whereas the multicore result combines the performance of all CPUs in the system...Apple’s new A10 leads in single-core testing but trails slightly in multicore owing to its lower core count."

Whereas previous Apple generations have lagged in CPU speed, the A10 is now on par with its competitors in this metric. Samsung’s custom M1 is the fastest at 2.6GHz, but it cannot sustain that speed when three or more cores are running, throttling back to 2.3GHz. By combining its much better IPC with a similar clock speed, the A10 delivers industry-leading performance.

Apple's focus on single-core performance gives it an upper hand. "Apple continues to focus on single-core performance. By designing its own CPUs, the company differentiates from its competitors on this metric. Although these competitors add more CPUs to improve their multicore-benchmark scores, the extra cores don’t help most applications, which run only on one or two CPUs," Gwennap said.

Via Barron's Tech Trader Daily.