Spooky, Spooky, Spooky -- The Apple iPhone 7 -- Nothing About The Bakken -- September 16, 2016

First, a definition of "single-thread" benchmark for comparing computer chips:

The PassMark Single Thread CPU benchmark, like all processor benchmarks attempts to estimate how quickly a processor is able to perform a wide variety of calculations.

The test issues as series of complex instructions to the processor and times how long the processor takes to complete the tasks.

The faster the processor is able to complete the tasks, the higher the benchmark score. The PassMark Single Thread CPU test only runs one stream of instructions rather than multiple parallel streams per core.

The majority of consumer applications (MS World, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and most games) although multi threaded rarely utilize more than one thread at a time, so this test can be seen a a reasonable real world test for typical consumer workloads.

Now, the new iPhone 7 chip.

The new chip in the iPhone 7 is Apple's own A10 fusion chip.  From wiki:

The Apple A10 Fusion is a 64-bit system on a chip (SoC), designed by Apple Inc.

It first appeared in the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus which were introduced on September 7, 2016.

The A10 is the first Apple-produced quad-core SoC, consisting of two high performance cores for demanding tasks like gaming, along with two highly energy-efficient cores for normal tasks in a configuration similar to big.LITTLE technology.

Now the spooky stuff.

How does the A10 fusion chip compare with perhaps the most robust Mac desktop computer?
 

Did you all see that? The new iPhone 7 fusion chip scores higher than the Intel chip used in Apple's $6,500 Mac Pro computer.  That chip is an Intel Xenon chip.

I always come away from Tim Cook's semi-annual presentations feeling a bit underwhelmed. It's a personal problem. I simply cannot keep up with what Apple is doing. Nor do I think I am in the minority on this.

This is really, really spooky.