Stefan Mileschin

AnandTech's iPhone XS review and benchmarks have been published, and it looks like Apple is leaping even further ahead in performance compared to Qualcomm's offerings.

The Apple A12 is a beast of a SoC. While the A11 already bested the competition in terms of performance and power efficiency, the A12 doubles down on it in this regard, thanks to Apple's world-class design teams which were able to squeeze out even more out of their CPU microarchitectures. The Vortex CPU's memory subsystem saw an enormous boost, which grants the A12 a significant performance boost in a lot of workloads. Apple's marketing department was really underselling the improvements here by just quoting 15% - a lot of workloads will be seeing performance improvements I estimate to be around 40%, with even greater improvements in some corner-cases. Apple's CPU have gotten so performant now, that we're just margins off the best desktop CPUs; it will be interesting to see how the coming years evolve, and what this means for Apple's non-mobile products. On the GPU side, Apple's measured performance gains are also within the promised figures, and even above that when it comes to sustained performance. The new GPU looks like an iteration on last year's design, but an added fourth core as well as the important introduction of GPU memory compression are able to increase the performance to new levels. The negative thing here is I do think Apple's throttling mechanism needs to be revised - and by that I mean not that it shouldn't throttle less, but that it might be better if it throttled more or even outright capped the upper end of the performance curve, as it's extremely power hungry and does heat up the phone a lot in the initial minutes of a gaming session.

Say about Apple, the iPhone, and iOS what you will, but there's no denying that Apple is cranking out absolutely stunning SoCs that run circles around the competition - and it's been doing that every single year. We're at the point where one really has to wonder what, exactly, Qualcomm is doing - or is not doing - to be as far behind as they are.

http://osnews.com/story/30774/AnandT...hone_XS_review