How Apple A-series chips stack up against Intel Macs
Apple Macs are moving away from Intel and to Apple Silicon. To understand what that means for Mac performance, it's helpful to look back at past A-series chips and compare them to Intel CPUs.
Apple Macs are moving away from Intel and to Apple Silicon. To understand what that means for Mac performance, it's helpful to look back at past A-series chips and compare them to Intel CPUs.
Following Apple's A12 Bionic powering iPhone XS and iPhone XR models, Huawei has released its own custom 7nm ARM System on a Chip. But despite using the same fab process, Huawei's Kirin 980-powered Mate 20 Pro flagship lags far behind Apple's iPhone XS A12, turning in performance scores well below last year's A11 iPhone X.
Apple's share price dropped about three percent during pre-market trading going into Thursday on word that TSMC — the manufacturer of A-series processors for iPhones and iPads — is expecting about $1 billion less revenue for the second quarter than Wall Street forecasts.
With the Galaxy S9 and S9+ now in the hands of tech reviewers, some are beginning to evaluate how Samsung's latest handsets stacks up against Apple's flagship iPhone X. One head-to-head shows the S9's Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 CPU, while speedy, is easily bested by Apple's A11 Bionic power plant.
Over the years, Apple has amassed personnel and materials to become a chip design juggernaut, with a new report claiming that Apple is including the T-series chip in forthcoming Mac models including a laptop refresh and a new desktop model, and has its eyes on replacing Intel as the supplier of the Mac CPU.
Following the news that both Intel- and ARM-based processors can be susceptible to various hacks, Apple issued a statement on Thursday announcing that it has already implemented some fixes in the latest iOS and macOS releases, with more still to come. However, there are not currently any known exploits taking advantage of "Meltdown" and "Spectre."
In a move that would follow Apple's usual strategy, it's expected that new iPad Pros due in 2018 will feature a beefed up version of the A11 Bionic chip found in the iPhone 8 and iPhone X lineups, adding two more processing cores into the mix.
Apple was originally expecting to ship the technologies in the iPhone X in 2018, hardware engineering head Dan Riccio revealed in an interview published this week.
Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams spoke at TSMC's 30th anniversary celebration, and not only praised the company for an "intense" relationship with Apple developing the A11 Bionic processor, but also noted that the iPhone will be a driving force to advance artificial intelligence in the future with implications for the world.
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