How Apple CPUs shocked the world twice, and where they stand now
The year is 2012:
Pretty tit-for-tat: both phones use SoCs with ARM CPUs [1], the S3 (4G LTE) and iPhone 5 both use two medium size cores (3-wide), and the S3 (3G) uses four little cores.
Now for 2013:
In September Apple shocked the world with the CPU inside the iPhone 5S: Apple called it a “desktop class architecture”, it was the first 64 bit CPU in a phone, and the iPhone 5S ran apps faster than any other phone, because most apps were frequently limited by single thread performance. But more than the 64 bit, it was the large size of the CPU (6-wide) that made it so powerful; for reference, Intel desktop CPUs [2] of the time were 4-wide, but ran at much higher clockspeed (GHz). “Desktop class” indeed.
Apple has kept evolving their big cores, and shocked the world again in 2020 when they moved their MacBook line from using Intel processors to their own “Apple Silicon” processors, which were just scaled up versions of their iPhone processors:
Now architecture width isn’t everything, there’s also clockspeed, power efficiency, etc., but the Apple Silicon MacBooks were more powerful than Intel based laptops of comparable thickness / power usage. Apple Silicon seemed to come out of nowhere, but it used the same CPU cores as the iPhone 12, at higher clockspeed.
Now, in January 2023, where do we stand?
Again architecture width isn’t everything, and op caches make things muddy, but it looks like the rest of the ARM world is catching up to Apple: iPhones have topped the benchmark charts for a long time, but Samsungs have been catching up, and Qualcomm/Nuvia have a big core coming up for both phones and laptops. It’s an exciting time for ARM CPUs.
Footnotes:
[1] All CPUs listed here are ARM CPUs, they use the ARM instruction set (except for Intel). An instruction set is like the “language” the CPU speaks. Software that is written for the ARM instruction set will run on all ARM CPUs.
[2] Intel CPUs are listed here for comparison purposes, but because they don’t use the ARM instruction set (they use x86), things like decode width aren’t an apples to apples comparison, but are roughly comparable.
[3] Arm Ltd is the company that owns the ARM instruction set, and licenses it for use by other companies. They also design their own complete CPU cores, and license them for other companies to integrate into their chips.
