I said on this week’s Gestalt IT Rundown that Apple’s SoC design dominance is weirdly underreported for a company that rarely struggles for press coverage. They’ve consistently architected silicon that outperforms the best the Qualcomm and Samsung have to offer.
Admittedly, it’s partly because they have complete vertical integration from the chips to devices and OS. That might explain them jumping out to an early lead, but year after year the company’s silicon posts impressive benchmarks.
Now it seems the company wants to lead with that story for the new iPad Pro. I think that’s partly because the company has seen some lukewarm reaction to the 2018 iPad Pro, mostly due to constraints on iOS.
Apple’s Phil Schiller and Anand Shimpi (still weird to type that) gave an interview to Ars Technica, details some of the design decisions around the new A12X SoC. It’s Apple so you still don’t get a lot of technical detail, but seeing some the GeekBench results is impressive. While the 2018 MacBook Pro and iMac Pro still have healthy performance leads, the iPad Pro is now about 20% faster than the 2016 MacBook Pro I’m writing this post on. That’s incredible.
Source: Ars Technica
