Yes, the arm Mac developer transition kit which runs a much wider variety of software with the same chip (including x86 SW) answered that.
At IDA Pro, the DTK is actually faster than a 16 inch MBP in practice... (and that's with an x86_64 copy of IDA... as an arm64 one doesn't exist yet, workload being tested was loading an iOS kernelcache)
I was too lazy to collate the numbers together, so I found this comparison chart https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/9lup3m/iphone_xs_sp.... The A12 looks faster in some cases, but not by much overall. It definitely doesn't support the claim that it has "considerably more grunt" than an i7.
Now if you do any video processing on the ipad, it'll chunk through 4k like my Ryzen 3700X does if it's HEVC and barely even get warm, but that's the T2 ASIC in it.
The point being, if you compare a modernish "professional laptop" with an i7 in it, to an iPad, the iPad will rip it a new orifice.
ARM + ASICs for other functions (ML/security/codec) run rings around any general x86 CPU on performance per watt for sure.
Comparing as you did to a Xeon with 165W TDP is comedy but illustrative yes.
My original question: "but has this claim been backed up by benchmarks that's not geekbench?"
>Now if you do any video processing on the ipad, it'll chunk through 4k like my Ryzen 3700X does if it's HEVC and barely even get warm, but that's the T2 ASIC in it.
>ARM + ASICs for other functions (ML/security/codec) run rings around any general x86 CPU on performance per watt for sure.
Comparing hardware accelerated HEVC performance to software cpu performance isn't fair and is shifting the goalposts. If you're going by that logic you can also say that a snapdragon 865 (hardware rendering) has "considerably more grunt" a 64 core threadripper (software rendering). While we're at it, we can also compare A12 to intel/amd in other aspects, such as memory support, floating point performance, and sustained performance, all of which I'm confident A12 wouldn't do well in.
>Comparing as you did to a Xeon with 165W TDP is comedy but illustrative yes.
So? The xeon cpu also has 28 cores and 56 threads, whereas the A12 only has 2 "big" cores (the ones being benchmarked). Dividing 165 by 28 gets you to a more reasonable TDP of 5.89W per core.
This review[0] has SPEC2006 scores for the A12X in the iPad Pro 2018. The same review estimates the per core power at around ~4W.
This review[1] compares the SPEC2006 score of the A13 to high end modern desktop chips. The A13 is very close despite its power consumption being much lower.
Your iPad doesn't have a T2 in it. That's the name for the ARM coprocessor inside of newer Macs (2018+), which IIRC shares some similarities with the A10, including (probably) the media block.
The 3700X contains its own encoding blocks which would make a better comparison.
I know this meme gets brought up a lot, but has this claim been backed up by benchmarks that's not geekbench?