Apple A15 SoC

Apple is developing its hardware and software platforms in parallel; other semiconductors that use Android are obviously adjusting themselves to current and future Android OS iterations, but it obviously does not give the latter the same flexibility on both river banks (hw/sw).

 

Which could be solved by closer collaboration between Google and Qualcomm which would benefit both. So what is to stop this happening? Nothing that I can see. I.e. there really are few barriers preventing the Android's development from benefiting from most of the advantages that Apple has traditionally benefited from. And as Google move into designing their own SoCs - as they are now doing - there should pretty much be opportunity parity going forward.

 

The point was that QCOM's SoCs aren't necessarily inferior on all fronts compared to Apple's own SoCs. I expect QCOMs CPUs to further improve after the NUVIA acquisition and their Adreno GPUs since their 5xx generation have quite a few benefits. QCOM has the power and resources to hypothetically start it's own OS, but that's not something I'd personally wish for. I am fond of Android or else a common OS for everyone for obvious reasons.

 

I don't know who said that but it wasn't me. I was just responding to your statement that "if Qualcomm would have the luxury of having its own OS I'd guess that things would be quite different.", regards to perceived performance between Qualcomm and Apple. I'm just saying that Qualcomm don't need their own OS (any more than Intel does), there just needs to be better collaboration between Qualcomm and the vendor of the biggest OS that runs on their chips.

The only problem Qualcomm having their own OS would solve is there is just fundamentally a problem with Android is developed and it not being well tuned for the SoCs it runs on. I don't believe this is the case but maybe...

 

GPU drivers are a big issue on Android compared to iOS. If you want to use any modern features you can bet some Android device is going to absolutely explode, whereas things are a lot more predictable on the iOS side.

 

What is the source of the issue? Google's OS, the driver supplier (e.g. Qualcomm) or the phone manufacturer?

 

I think it’s mostly down to Google allowing phone manufacturers to ship with custom drivers (although I think the past few years they somewhat tried to unify things a bit). The problem then becomes that you don’t have a single variation of a single Adreno/Mali GPU, but several based on the manufacturer. The moment you start pushing these devices to their limits you start to see really weird perf cliffs and instability. iOS is more stable and the featureset is, for the most part, exactly as stated in the docs. It’s a lot less hassle.

 

Reading all this, and seeing geekbench scores, its surprising how well android devices are holding up.

 

There's a fair variety in chip capabilities across Apple devices too but the drivers are completely within Apple's control. Android's appeal is the open source and open development for phone manufacturers. I wonder why some are deviating from the reference drives that Qualcomm presumably provide. Why even spend time/effort changing something that your SoC manufacturer has qualified. Weird..

 

That 5700XT was running on a previous generation imac running macOS if i understood correctly. Are those A14 cores anyway, not A15?

 

current generation iMac (of course running macOS, doubt there is metal for windows), yeah m1 max is still a14 cores

 

Sort of, M1 variants have the double rate FP32 (same rate as FP16), which is not present on A14. It's more like A14.5

 

Powerfull for such a small phone.