The Evolution of Apple Silicon: How iPhone Processors Caught Up to MacBook Performance
By
etothet
2mo ago· 17 min readenInsight
100/100
Golden Brown
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Crisp on the outside, thoughtful on the inside. A keeper.
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Summary
The article analyzes the evolution of Apple's silicon performance over the past decade, tracing how iPhone processors have caught up to and surpassed MacBook performance. Starting with the 2015 iPhone 6S's A9 chip benchmarking comparably to MacBooks, the piece examines the trajectory that led to Apple's transition to its own silicon for Macs. The analysis highlights how mobile processors have closed the performance gap with traditional laptop CPUs, culminating in Apple's current M-series chips that now power both mobile devices and Mac computers.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledThe A9, in 2015, benchmarked comparably to a two-year-old MacBook Air from 2013.
More impressively, it outperformed the then-new no-adjective 12-inch MacBook in single-core performance (by a factor of roughly 1.1×) and was only 3 percent slower in multi-core.
Just over a decade ago, reviewing the then-new iPhones 6S, I could tell which way the silicon wind was blowing.
Year-over-year, the A9 CPU in the iPhone 6S was 1.6× faster than the A8 in the iPhone 6.
May the MacBook Neo live so long that its name becomes inapt.
