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SmoMo

macrumors regular
Aug 20, 2011
218
21
I've never felt that I need more CPU power on my iOS devices thus far while using iPhone 5 and iPad Mini Retina. I couldn't care less about the CPU performance since it will be more than enough than I'll ever need. I do however feel the need for RAM.

you feel you don't need this, you feel you need something else.
I was reading on the other thread about people who feel they don't need thin phones, and people who feel they need more battery life.

Do you really look at life in terms of needs, and notneeds, instead of things like wants/notwants, or interesting/notinteresting, or opportunities/nonopportunties, or futuristic/oldfashioned etc..

Personally I've always found needs are pretty boring things, and don't seem to have much to do with either what Apple designs, or what Apple consumers end up buying.
 

longofest

Editor emeritus
Jul 10, 2003
2,925
1,688
Falls Church, VA
Other than a 20nm die shrink, I'd like to know what other ARM architecture-level improvements are in store. If there are no architecture improvements, I'm wondering if instead of being called an A8, it will be called an A7X. There is precedent for that, though the X has in the past referenced a graphics improvement, Apple has not in the past incremented the processor series for a speed improvement alone.

A4 = Cortex A8 (Single Core)
A5 = Cortex A9 (Dual Core), various clock speeds depending on iPad vs iPhone
A5X = Cortex A9 Dual Core... 2 additional graphics cores.
A6 = Custom instructions loosely equivalent to Cortex A15 (Dual Core)
A7 = 64 bit Dual Core, various clock speeds depending on iPad vs iPhone

It is of course pure marketing, so Apple can do whatever it wants to. But I do think that A7X is a possibility based on this rumor.
 

Moonjumper

macrumors 68030
Jun 20, 2009
2,740
2,908
Lincoln, UK
I think we're at the point where iOS hardware is outpacing the software. A8 will be wicked fast (approaching Macbook Air speeds in terms of raw processing power), but there are very few apps that can even use the A7 to its full potential.

More apps could be made to use the full potential of the A7, but then they won't work well on the older devices. As the A7 becomes one of the older devices, then apps will be making the most of it, because the majority of the marketplace will have devices at least that fast.

Also 32-bit to 64-bit will be seen as a line in the sand for developers, like armv6 to armv7 was.
 

crsh1976

macrumors 68000
Jun 13, 2011
1,571
1,753
I've never felt that I need more CPU power on my iOS devices thus far while using iPhone 5 and iPad Mini Retina. I couldn't care less about the CPU performance since it will be more than enough than I'll ever need. I do however feel the need for RAM. Please Apple, get with the times and give us at least 2GB of RAM so Safari doesn't have to crash all the time.

This. Oddly enough my trusty iPad 2 with its lowly A5 chip still do the job, my main issue is RAM as apps don't stay cached after switching because there's too little of it and iOS keeps getting hungrier every version.
 

SmoMo

macrumors regular
Aug 20, 2011
218
21
I am not a familiar with CPU tech, but have some though about it.
PS3's chip was said to have so much power that not even the latest games take full advantage of the computing power of the chip.
On the other hand, frame rate drop when a horde of zombies chase after me. Clearly, PS3 system had bottle neck somewhere.
How many cores, 64 bit, how much ram, system overhead, such and such are all ear candies.
I would say, it seems apple is making a wise movement to stay with 2 cores, thinner fabrication, and probably more RAM.
The important key is, zombies can chase after me without making short distance teleportations.

I think its even more fascinating when you see how the performance of the game (or App ) and the development-time are related.

I've been in the video games industry since 1996, back in the Playstation 1 days, and it seems to me now that pretty much every program, or function, or algorithm can be optimised to some degree.
If we did nothing but spend enough time on one small aspect of the code then getting it to run twice as fast would not be extraordinary.
I've often seen optimisations lead to speed ups of 10 times. And the most remarkable was a rewrite of an offline conversion algorithm that went from taking 11 hours ( and 2GB of RAM ) to 0.1 seconds and 100KB of RAM.

Anyway, this isn't just a crazy ramble, specifically to address your point of 'people say even modern games don't take full advantage of the PS3' there is two ways of looking at it.
If everyone spent huge amount of time optimising and reoptimizing their code then I'm sure we'd see your zombie problems diminished.
But that could be said of any platform, and most of the time we're only guessing about what the full potential of a system is, until people start finding ways to do things it hasn't done before its just guesswork isn't it?

There was a definite texture bottleneck on the PS3 (at least when compared to the XBOX), it was a problem when I was working on the game LA Noire, and some of the programmers considered it a definite mistake that Sony had made. I'm not sure if developers found a way around it eventually, or not.
 

iMacmatician

macrumors 601
Jul 20, 2008
4,249
55
Faster dual-cores are pretty much what I expected for this year (although I expected clocks below 2 GHz). I wonder if there will also be a turbo boost type feature.
 
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Truthfulie

macrumors regular
Dec 18, 2013
248
0
you feel you don't need this, you feel you need something else.
I was reading on the other thread about people who feel they don't need thin phones, and people who feel they need more battery life.

Do you really look at life in terms of needs, and notneeds, instead of things like wants/notwants, or interesting/notinteresting, or opportunities/nonopportunties, or futuristic/oldfashioned etc..

Personally I've always found needs are pretty boring things, and don't seem to have much to do with either what Apple designs, or what Apple consumers end up buying.

You are blowing things way out of proportion here. Of course I do not view life in that way. But apps of current state of things will not take advantage of faster CPUs. Perhaps the bigger screen will require more power thus requiring faster processor. I don't know. My point being, I'd like to see improvements that will benefit me in actual usage, not some number games in benchmarks. (and with current state of apps, higher processor doesn't mean much) And many will agree that current iDevices have limited amount of RAM available, which does affect day to day usage for users.
 

iOSaddict

macrumors regular
Jun 3, 2014
198
0
This make me feel so funny inside when I hear android phones sporting quad and octa cores and still inefficient as hell. I'm not saying android phones are slow. I'm saying they're very inefficient in their use of resources and try to make up for it with too many cores!

Everything Android fanboys boast about is a joke.
 

SmoMo

macrumors regular
Aug 20, 2011
218
21
You are blowing things way out of proportion here. Of course I do not view life in that way. But apps of current state of things will not take advantage of faster CPUs. Perhaps the bigger screen will require more power thus requiring faster processor. I don't know. My point being, I'd like to see improvements that will benefit me in actual usage, not some number games in benchmarks. (and with current state of apps, higher processor doesn't mean much) And many will agree that current iDevices have limited amount of RAM available, which does affect day to day usage for users.

I agree with you, lets be friends.

Perhaps one of the CPU cores can just be dedicated 100% to the NSA, and at least they won't slow down our Apps then with all their data/location analyses.
 

Bhatu

macrumors regular
Apr 1, 2013
171
86
With 2Ghz I would love if they put 2 wheels also in iPhone so that I can drive from LA to SF on my iPhone! LOL!!
 

Gherkin

macrumors 6502a
Apr 9, 2004
675
305
just got a 5C recently which is the A6. I never, ever have encountered slow performance. Some complex websites scroll a bit choppy, though not sure if that really has anything to do with the CPU.

it's super impressive though how much power Apple packs into their phones.

----------

Everything Android fanboys boast about is a joke.

oh so there's literally nothing good about Android? It's just a joke OS?

nah. Both iPhone and Android are amazing. Get off your high horse.
 

SmoMo

macrumors regular
Aug 20, 2011
218
21
just got a 5C recently which is the A6. I never, ever have encountered slow performance. Some complex websites scroll a bit choppy, though not sure if that really has anything to do with the CPU.

it's super impressive though how much power Apple packs into their phones.

----------



oh so there's literally nothing good about Android? It's just a joke OS?

nah. Both iPhone and Android are amazing. Get off your high horse.

oh so there's literally nothing good about high horses? They're just joke horses?

nah. Both high horses and low horses are amazing. Get off your slimy croisant.
 

Truthfulie

macrumors regular
Dec 18, 2013
248
0
I agree with you, lets be friends.

Perhaps one of the CPU cores can just be dedicated 100% to the NSA, and at least they won't slow down our Apps then with all their data/location analyses.
NSA-Certified phones? :D
 

jrswizzle

macrumors 603
Aug 23, 2012
6,107
129
McKinney, TX
You mean the MBA from 2009, right? Yeah, it is definitely approaching those speeds.

A7 is on par with Core 2 Duos from 2009. My guess, if the A8 can continue the doubling, it'll be on par with Intel Core i3s from late 2011 (Roughly 4500 geekbench 3 score). Potentially, could catch the MBA's from 2013 (roughly 5000 geekbench 3 score) running the Core i5-Us

With processor increases on the desktop and laptop side slowing down, it could only be another 2-3 years before ARM chips catch and pass "desktop class" chips of the same year.
 
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