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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday June 15 2017, @03:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the where-is-that-non-compete dept.

Google has hired key chip designer Manu Gulati from Apple to work on future Pixel models. Manu Gulati has been working at Apple since 2009 helping develop the custom CPUs used in iPads and iPhones and has now moved on to Google as lead chip architect. Pixel and Pixel XL have so far relied on Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm which lag considerably behind Apple's SOCs. Googles appears to be reconsidering this strategy in an effort to better integrate it's software and hardware improving performance and battery life. Android makers have long foregone the lead to Apple in mobile performance but this may signal a turning point in this strategy.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:05AM (7 children)

    by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:05AM (#525882) Journal

    Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm ... lag considerably behind Apple's SOCs.

    No, they don't; in fact, Apple's processors sort of suck in comparison to Snapdragon. See here: http://www.androidauthority.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-821-versus-apple-a10-fusion-730146/ [androidauthority.com]

    Although at first glance it looked like the A10 was better, the difference was most likely due to benchmarks using Java (slow) on Android and Objective C (fast) on iOS. Custom, identical benchmarks written in C on both platforms resulted in the Snapdragon winning by a considerable margin.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:20AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:20AM (#525884)

    Almost all of the general purpose benchmarks in that article show the A10 to be faster than the SD 821. One by as much as 126 percent. The only ones that contradict this is the C test which is so specific and tuned in favor of the Snapdragon as to be completely worthless. The bottom line is that the all-around performance of what Apple has right now destroys the rest of the ARM market, including Qualcomm, Samsung's Exynos, HiSilicon's Kirin, etc. There are many reasons for this and it has been discussed by Andandtech, etc. Your attempt at denial using this article is frankly laughable.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday June 15 2017, @11:15AM (3 children)

      by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Thursday June 15 2017, @11:15AM (#525947) Journal

      "Tuned in favor of Snapdragon"? WTF do you mean? How? The benchmarks were C code to do stuff like SHA1. The guy didn't write optimized assembly for the SnapDragon pipeline; there are probably only 15 people or so in the world who would even know how to do that.

      I was a little surprised by the results, too, but the C benchmarks seem pretty irrefutable. Normally, compilers could have made a difference, but, happily, Apple and the Android NDK both use LLVM in their toolchains.

      Now, as to the other benchmarks: those aren't CPU benchmarks. Those are phone benchmarks. Like, how responsive the system is, how it does graphics (which is GPU not CPU), all that. A lot more than the CPU goes into the performance of the whole system, including, as one easy example, whether the whole thing is written in f*ing Java. I don't doubt iPhones can be more responsive than Android phones under heavy load. Assuming competence by the systems programmers for both platforms, Objective C will beat Java every time. I'm not sure why someone would be stressing a phone enough for this to matter, but, yeah, Objective C would win.

      However, we're talking about just the CPUs here, so those benchmarks are really irrelevant. You want to test just the CPUs; you try to make everything else as close to the same as possible. That means you use the system C compiler to do something like factor SHA1, and that's what this guy did.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @11:25AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @11:25AM (#525951)

        Look, I don't care what your benchmarks say. Especially benchmarks from an Android site. Every single other respected review and hardware site on the net including Anandtech says the cores in the A series are far beyond the rest of the industry in overall performance and IPC. Personally, I've used an iPhone and I'll believe my own eyes before anything else. Claiming that a Snapdragon 821 is faster than an A9 or A10 is prima facie laughable. It's this attitude of head-in-the-sand fanboyism that got us in this state in the first place. Google appears to finally be doing something about it and I say kudos to them.

        • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday June 15 2017, @12:19PM (1 child)

          by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday June 15 2017, @12:19PM (#525962)

          You don't seem to be reading the actual words in the post above yours. Of course if you're saying "I don't care what your benchmarks say" I guess it's irrelevant.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @12:34PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @12:34PM (#525970)

            Then how do you explain the overwhelming superiority of the A10X in single core Geekbench scores? Yeah, I know "Geekbench doesn't count yadda yadda". Except it does though.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:25AM (#525885)

    Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm ... lag considerably behind Apple's SOCs.

    No, they don't

    Your denial is about as laughable as that time Diane Hackborn tried to pretend a Nexus S running Gingerbread scrolled as smoothly as an iPhone [google.com]. She was ridiculed as people have enough sense to believe their own lying eyes over mealy-mouthed bs spouted by fanboys. I guess that just goes to show, never trust an Android user and their green bubbles.

  • (Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday June 15 2017, @07:11AM

    by Mykl (1112) on Thursday June 15 2017, @07:11AM (#525898)

    No, they don't; in fact, Apple's processors sort of suck in comparison to Snapdragon. See here: http://www.androidauthority.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-821-versus-apple-a10-fusion-730146/ [androidauthority.com]

    So it's an article from Android Authority. Gee, that's an awfully nice unbiased article source for something like a chip comparison you've got there...