I'm not sure if you guys know what I know.
Lets take a look at a truly difficult benchmark. One that takes over 20 seconds so that "Turbo" isn't a major factor.
Why buy an expensive desktop computer when your iPhone is a faster SMT solver?
www.cs.utexas.edu
Though 20 seconds is slow, the blogpost indicates that they continuously ran the 3-SAT solver over and over again, so the iPhone was behaving at its thermal limits. The Z3 solver tries to solve the 3-SAT NP Complete problem. At this point, it has been demonstrated that Apple's A12 has a faster L1, L2, and memory performance than even Intel's chips in a very difficult, single-threaded task.
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Apple's chip team has demonstrated that its small 5W chip is in fact pretty good at some very difficult benchmarks. It shouldn't be assumed that iPhones are slower anymore. They're within striking distance of Desktops in single-core performance in some of the densest compute problems.
You're echoing Apple marketing and are desperately finding talking points to make it worth our while. Its admirable. But don't sell it as a lack of understanding from others, because its really not. There is no magic in CPU land, contrary to what you might think. Its a balancing act and Apple has specifically made its own SoC to get its own specific, required balance on a chip. That balance works well for the use case Apple has selected it to do.
Its like
@theoneandonlymrk says, again, eloquently... these highly specific workloads say little about overall CPU performance. Having a CPU repeatedly do the same task is not a real measure of overall performance. Its a measure of its performance in that specific workload. If you do that for different architectures, the comparison is off. You need a full, rounded suite of benches to get a real handle on ovevrall performance between different CPUs. Its irrelevant the chip can repeat that test a million times over. Its still a burst mode, specific workload-based view, and not the whole picture.
Its just that simple. Apple isn't smarter than the rest. They have specialized themselves to very specific workloads, specific devices, with specific use cases. That is why any sort of advanced user / system modding stuff on Apple is nigh impossible and if it IS, Apple has carefully prepared the path you need to walk for it. This is a company that manages your user experience. On most other (non mobile) OS'es, the situation is turned around: you get an OS with lots of tools, have fun with it, the only thing you can't touch is kernel... unless you try harder.
The new direction for Apple, and I've said it as a joke, but its really not... terminals. ARM and the chip Apple has created is fantastic for logging in, and getting the heavy lifting done off-site. Cloud. Apple's been big on it, and they'll go bigger. They are drooling all over Chromebooks because imagine the margins! They can sell an empty shell with an internet connection that can 'feel' like it is a true Apple device, barely include hardware, and still get the Apple Premium on it.
That is what the ARM push is about, alongside another step forward in full IP ownership of soft- and hardware.
