Strictly speaking, Qualcomm Snapdragon and Apple A-series chips adopt ARM architecture/instruction set level authorization instead of simply using the IP core of ARM.
This level of authorization can greatly transform the ARM architecture, and even expand or reduce the ARM instruction set. Apple is a good example. Based on the use of the ARMv7-A architecture, it has expanded its own swift architecture.
since they are all authorized at the architecture/instruction set level, why is the performance difference between Qualcomm Snapdragon and Apple A series chips so great?
in fact, from the point of view of running points, the multi-core performance of Snapdragon is comparable to that of A-series chips. However, Apple adopted the strategy of "less cores and more performance", which increased the core area and efficiency at no cost in exchange for power consumption and performance.
Not only that, the chips designed by Apple never skimp on pipeline efficiency, channel, bandwidth and L2/L3, in order to improve the performance of a single core.
This design is very advantageous for daily applications and games, because the CPU in these scenarios is more single-core (or dual-core) work.
Another reason that makes us feel that the performance of A-series chips is better is that iOS optimizes Apple chips. It is precisely because Apple not only has the ability to develop chips by itself, but also forms a closed loop on the operating system, which makes the experience of iOS with Apple chips more than that of Android+Qualcomm chips.
from the technical point of view, the Java virtual machine used by Android leads to the Android system occupying more resources than Apple's iOS, which has always made the Android phone experience less smooth than Apple's mobile phone.
However, with the continuous improvement of chip performance and memory capacity in the past two years, the experience of Android phones has been closer to that of Apple phones. Snapdragon's GPU performance is better than that of A-series chips, so the gap between them is not as huge as expected.
The subject's question is actually a pseudo-question.
from the processor point of view, Qualcomm's high-end processors (8XX series) have similar performance compared with Apple's A series processors.
here are the performance evaluation data of Xiaolong 835 and A1 I found online.
In terms of single-core performance, Apple is superior, mainly because the single-core area of Apple A1 is larger than that of Snapdragon, and the number of integrated transistors is superior.
Apple A1 has four cores and Snapdragon has eight cores (the latest Apple A11 has six cores). In the multi-core performance comparison, Snapdragon is dominant. In fact, most of our applications run on a single core, so Apple's A1 is still dominant in the actual user experience.
Snapdragon is the dominant part of GPU.
On the whole, Snapdragon has a slight advantage.
but why, in our actual experience, is Apple's mobile phone significantly smoother than Android's? This actually has a lot to do with the operating system architecture.
Google's Android system is based on linux, on which a Java virtual machine is added, and all applications actually run on this virtual machine. This ensures that the application is cross-platform. At the same time, the number of programmers who use JAVA as the development language is the largest in the world. Google also made full use of this part of resources, so that the Android platform quickly gathered the most developers to develop applications for it.
the problem lies in this java virtual machine, which is known to all friends who know about Java virtual machines. The advantage of virtual machine is that programmers don't have to care about the problem of memory resource recovery when developing programs. The memory recovery mechanism of virtual machine will help you deal with these problems, which greatly reduces the development burden of programmers. However, the disadvantage also exists, that is, during the re-running of the virtual machine, it takes up a lot of system resources.
This is the main reason why the memory of Android flagship phone is larger than that of Apple phone, but the running effect is far less than that of Apple phone.
Apple's IOS system evolved on the basis of its private UNIX system, and there is no virtual machine mechanism. At the same time, ios is a closed-source system, and Apple has done a lot of optimization and adaptation to its hardware and ios system. Ensure the efficient operation of IOS applications. Android system is an open source system, and the system version is fragmented, which leads to many compatibility problems between hardware and software, and finally reduces the running efficiency.
So, Samsung, as a typical example, uses heap hardware to solve the running efficiency problem of android.
In the long run, people think that the performance of Android phone is not as good as that of Apple phone, and then think that Qualcomm is not as good as Apple A processor.
by the way, let's talk more about it. In the response priority of Apple's IOS system, the screen response is the highest level. This is also one reason why people think that Apple runs fast.
The topic owner is right. Both Qualcomm Snapdragon series chips and Apple A series chips use the instruction set of ARM, but due to different design ideas, the CPU performance of the two chips is very different.
We know that Apple is the first mobile phone manufacturer to use a 64-bit processor. In order to explore the most powerful performance, Apple has made its own CPU very powerful. As a result, the unimaginable A7 processor was born.
A7 Cyclone is a very broad architecture, and it can decode, transmit, execute and retrieve up to 6 instructions/micro-operations at the same time in each clock cycle. In comparison, A6 Swift of the previous generation has no more than 3 instructions/micro-operations. On the other hand, the reordering buffer of A7 reaches an astonishing 192, which is more than four times that of the previous generation, and coincidentally, it is exactly the same as the Intel Haswell architecture. The penalty of branch prediction error has also increased, but the magnitude is not large, and it is in the same range as Intel Sandy Bridge and its subsequent architecture. In other words, the size of A7 can almost be compared with the desktop version of the core processor.
In this case, A7 shows a huge single-core performance improvement, which Qualcomm can't compare with until the release of Xiaolong 652 processor.
Qualcomm's Opteron processor has always been a public architecture of magic change's ARM. The scale of the public architecture is quite small, and the performance of the public architecture is only half that of Apple's A series at the same frequency. Therefore, the single-core performance of Qualcomm processor is relatively weak, but the smaller-scale architecture can stack more cores, so the multi-core performance of Qualcomm processor is still good. We can see that the single-core performance of Snapdragon 845 is still not as good as A9, but the multi-core performance is close to A11.
It's ironic. Although Qualcomm is killing most mobile phone manufacturers in China, in terms of profit, Qualcomm is not as good as Apple ...
In fact, the profit of iPhone is higher than our imagination. Now Apple is not going to sell chips. They mainly sell mobile phones. You know, the performance of IOS is an important selling point. With the support of high profits, Apple has the ability to make high-performance and high-cost core chips with large chip area, and it can also recover the cost quickly.
on the other hand, in Qualcomm, the core technology and commodities are chips, in which case the key is to maximize the profit of chip business. So how can a wafer with the same size achieve more chips and less rejection rate? Then the chip area can only be as small as possible and the core architecture should be as close to the public version as possible.
Another reason, of course, is that Qualcomm is now living on its laurels, and there is no or no need for a CPU architecture research and development team that can compete with Apple.
Why is this? The reason is that after the development from generation to generation, the degree of perfection of the ARM public version has been very high. In this case, unless there is a considerable strength and a huge amount of money, it is possible to hit a better architecture than the public version. Since Qualcomm has already achieved the status of chip leader, there is no need to spend a lot of money to study the new architecture.
Anyway, for Qualcomm, his position in the field of Android chips is obvious to all, what's more, he also has a huge domestic market to protect him.
Apple, on the other hand, has its own design ability and a complete system from factory to supplier, engineering team and consumer. Simply put, it is willful. Anyway, no matter how much it is invested, it can be recovered. Then, let it go ~
Qualcomm and Apple both use ARM architecture of ARM company. Why is there such a big performance gap?
Let's take a look at why Apple processors are far ahead of other manufacturers.
design ability
ARM company has built the basic framework, and how to further design depends on the research and development strength of each company.
Everything is as inseparable as Apple's high profit model. Large-core design
Apple's processor chip area is large, and there is no integrated baseband chip, which saves some space. System reasons
One uses Android and the other uses iOS.
What other situations can make Apple processors far superior to Qualcomm?
Wen/Xiao Yiping Technology
The design of SOC architecture is a very profound knowledge, including such things as bus bandwidth, cache, number of transistors, structure, etc. These things are very profound, and even I have only a superficial understanding, so we will not discuss these profound things in this article. Let's explain why Apple's A-series processors are so powerful from other aspects. I will list several factors directly, and everyone will know why Apple's A-series processors are so powerful at a glance. 1 adhere to the self-developed architecture
Looking at the current mobile phone market, there are only five companies capable of producing high-end mobile SoCs, namely Apple, Qualcomm, Huawei Hisilicon, MediaTek and Samsung.
among these five companies, only Apple's A-series processor still insists on using its own micro-architecture in CPU, while other companies, including Qualcomm and Samsung, have basically given up their independent research and development architecture and adopted the Cortex architecture of the ARM public version. For example, Snapdragon 865 used the core of CortexA77 this time.
In addition, the author would like to say that in the Android camp, apart from Samsung's mongoose architecture, which is a veritable self-developed architecture (it performed poorly and was abandoned long ago), Qualcomm's Kryo architecture is actually for Cortex magic change, while Huawei and MediaTek used the public version of Cortex microarchitecture from the beginning.
In terms of architecture execution efficiency, Apple's A-series processors have always been recognized as better than the public architecture of ARM, and ARM barely caught up with Apple in core execution efficiency until the latest release of A78/X1.
It can be said that a strong core architecture is the cornerstone to ensure the performance of Apple A series processors. 2 strong talent pool
Jim Keller once worked for many top semiconductor companies, such as Intel, AMD, Apple, etc. He once led the team to design the famous K7 series, pulled AMD back from the brink of bankruptcy, and then made the K8 series, which beat Intel to the ground in the consumer market. Recently, the Zen architecture of AMD Ryzen series, which has been talked about by many PC enthusiasts, is actually from Jim Keller's hand. It is such a soul figure that was dug by Apple to design Apple's A4 and A5 processors, laying a solid foundation for Apple's A series chips.
And the core team of Apple's chips is far more than that, including Yale Patt (author of Introduction to Computer Systems), Tse-Yu Yeh and so on, all of whom are top players in the field of chip design without exception.
with the support of top talents in the world, it is not surprising that Apple's A-series processors have a strong performance balance. 3 No need for built-in baseband
The reason why Apple A-series processors can have powerful performance far beyond other SoCs is that they gave up the built-in baseband. Since there is no need for built-in baseband, Apple A-series processors can leave more resources to CPU and GPU on the premise that other conditions are basically similar. After all, the performance of a SOC is directly proportional to the number of transistors.
Apple's lack of built-in baseband has something to do with its lack of experience in the communication field. After all, the entry threshold in the communication field is very high, and it can't be piled up in a short time with money.
On the other hand, several other semiconductor design companies have built-in baseband chips in their SoCs, and Huawei is even the first company to integrate 5G baseband into SoCs. These companies are all settled in the communication industry without exception.
In other words, the integration of Apple's A-series processors is actually not as good as that of Qualcomm and Huawei, which may be the core reason why Apple's A-series processors shine brilliantly in performance.
The performance of Apple A-series chips is better than that of Qualcomm chips. One of the most important reasons is that Apple A-series chips are not integrated with baseband, only composed of CPU and GPU, and even have no WiFi chip. Therefore, under the same volume and process, the area of Apple A-series chip CPU is larger, and the number of transistors that can be integrated on it is more.
Qualcomm was originally in the communication industry. Compared with the mobile phone processor, the baseband chip is its best place. Therefore, one of the main features of Qualcomm chip is to integrate the baseband chip into the processor. The advantage of this is that the baseband chip also uses the most advanced technology like CPU and GPU, thus reducing power consumption and heat generation. However, the size of the mobile phone chip is so small that the space left for CPU and GPU is relatively small after the Qualcomm processor inherits the baseband, WiFi and other modules. Therefore, Qualcomm chips in the same period are not as good as Apple A chips in performance.
But the mobile phone is not a game machine, and there are many aspects besides performance that determine the use experience of the mobile phone, including the package.