Beating the laptop is impressive, but the top of the line part was unnecessary and counter productive. More expensive CPUs often have more cores running at a slower speed. For example, the bottom end 16" MacBook Pro comes with a 2.6 GHz CPU and the top end one comes with a 2.4 GHz CPU. Yes, there is Turbo Boost which can in some cases turn off cores in exchange for higher clock frequencies, but good luck getting much out of that given Apple's thermal design.

I don’t think Apple is considering the A13 unnecessarily on the SE2. The A13 will allow for it to be “fast” for like 5 more years. Corporations/governments/non-us lower income counties are going to love this phone especially BRICs imo. This was the absolute best choice Apple could make for a ‘generic’ phone to eat google & androids lunch.

iPhone SE 2020 launching at about 42,500 Indian rupees. OnePlus 8 is launching at 41,999 INR.

iPhone SE is by no means a "budget" phone in our country

Maybe there is a currency/tax issue driving the price up? One plus 8 is starting at $699USD while the iPhone SE 2020 has been available for $199 at Walmart although it is though an installment plan to keep people with att/Verizon. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tomsguide.com/amp/news/hurr...

This also doesn’t include tax, so it ends up being more like $438 for the base model without promotions.

The 16” MacBook Pro definitely has enough headroom to sustain the top turbo speed for at least most of a Geekbench run. Its not a very large benchmark.

Apple is at least a node ahead and isn’t using a 5 year old µarch. Also, Geekbench is a relatively small test and is not be testing the systems to their fullest extent in terms of thermal capacity or memory depth.

Don't forget that the 2020 MacBook Air is faster than the 'top of the line Macbook Pro' in single-core performance. GeekBench scores of 1047 vs 989.

So would it sound as impressive if they said the latest iPhone processor was faster than the $899 Apple laptop?

It's Geekbench results. Take with an extreme grain of salt.

It's baffling because top end x86 CPUs consume significantly more power and run at significantly higher clock speeds. If these benchmarks are actually valid it suggests that we might see ARM ousting x86 on the desktop too sooner rather than later, which would be massive considering PCs have been x86 based for about 4 decades.

Remember though that performance doesnt scale linearly with power though - a 15W laptop CPU is only something like 30% slower in single threaded performance than a 95W desktop CPU (which is what the discussed benchmark is measuring).

ARM is pretty unlikely to oust x86 in Windows PCs any time soon. Even if Intel continues to struggle to catch up to TSMC's fab advantage, AMD is making pretty compelling CPUs using the same fabrication node as Apple. And really, Windows is stuck with x86 largely for compatibility reasons - emulation would be both a performance and power drag. If ARM is destined to defeat x86, its probably going to have to win in the datacenter first, depriving Intel (and possibly AMD, soon) of their highest margin sector.

But relatively few desktop computing applications are single threaded.

With a higher power target I don't see why this architecture couldn't have more cores (but I also have no idea what I'm talking about) - looks like it currently has 2 "big" cores and 4 "small" cores.

the A12X/Z iPad variant already has 4 big cores. I wonder what interconnect they use and whether it could be stretched further than that.

On the contrary, I think far too many are.