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The A7 isn't the piece of engineering you think it to be...

Insofar as OP may be saying "Hardware does not exist in a vacuum," I'd agree wholeheartedly.

Just consider how seamless this transition to 64-bit has been. If one hadn't read the headlines, there would be no way to tell that something so fundamental had changed.

It's amazing what users and programmers had to contend with in, ahem, "some" OSes' transition to 64-bit. As it happens, earlier today I was reading an article whose headline had caught my eye, as it echoed a question that has driven me nuts for several years in the Windows world: "Why Does 64-Bit Windows Need a Separate 'Program Files (x86)' Folder?" http://www.howtogeek.com/129178/why-does-64-bit-windows-need-a-separate-program-files-x86-folder/

...TL;DR version: because it's a mess and the transition was hugely disruptive.

Not with iOS, and that's pretty amazing.

And, these are yet early days. Software has not really begun to exploit the capabilities of this new chip.

So, OP is correct, but I think they're sort of missing the point. This is an important inflection-point in computing, all the more profound for its lack of drama.
 
cirus said:
Apple's A7 is largely seen as a very impressive piece of CPU engineering. However, what you don't see is how much software makes a difference; apple's A7 is impressive (and A6) mainly because they leverage Apple's substantial software advantage rather than great hardware prowess.

It can be seen that a lot of improvements in performance across generations are from software upgrades rather than any sort of hardware...
Click to expand...

Whoa, coding affects performance? So I should actually avoid cartesian products when writing sequel rather than throw more processors at it?
 
I don't care about benchmarks. I'm having a superb user experience and a healthy eco-system. I'm happy with it. ;)
 
So what op is saying, is that Apple actually bothers to write proper code that leverages the hardware they've got, rather then just throwing bigger faster processors at the problem?

What else is new?

-SC
 
So your point is , Software needs to support hardware? Thank you but we figured this out in the 80's.
 
Is like Steve Jobs famously said, A Convergence of Hardware and Software.

What's good is octo-core blah-blah if they throw you bloated software on top? The User Experience, as often mentioned already, the end product doesn't do justice to whatever over-clocked hardware they are selling you.

That's the difference between Apple and Others.

Others just throw you more features wo thinking how useful they are, or how they integrate with the whole.

Apple seems to be the only company which constantly markets, engineers, ease of use, battery mobile saving, a fun interface, a useful interface. While they don't always succeed on every single item, Apple seems to always give us a balanced product.
 
And the A7 and software improvements allowed Apple to reduce the thickness of the iPad (Air) by 20%, reduce the weight by 30% which reduced the battery's capacity by 20%, yet maintain the same run time.
 
Funny, mine is noticeably faster, TouchID works 99.9% of the time, and the camera is a huge upgrade too (ironically there are almost NO "My phone takes purple pictures!" threads... guess people finally realized it was operator error all along eh??).

Besides, everyone knows benchmarks only matter when it's an Android phone that wins them.

If it's not there's always an excuse about how the latest 8 core, battery sucking, RAM explosion of a monstrosity Samsung may be introducing later next year will crush it anyway...

I guess that's why the 5S has been such a collossal flop. Explains why they're so easy to get everywhere too.

:p
 
cirus said:
Apple's A7 is largely seen as a very impressive piece of CPU engineering. However, what you don't see is how much software makes a difference; apple's A7 is impressive (and A6) mainly because they leverage Apple's substantial software advantage rather than great hardware prowess.

It can be seen that a lot of improvements in performance across generations are from software upgrades rather than any sort of hardware improvement. Case in point, the improvement from the iphone 5 to the 5c.

AT release article of the iphone 5
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6330/the-iphone-5-review/10

Image

Image

The difference between these benchmarks is that one was taken with IOS 6 and the other with IOS 7. As you can see, the iphone 5 improved by 40%.

Likewise with Octane

Image

Image

71% improvement from IOS 6 to IOS 7.

Sunspider shows a smaller but still present improvement.

I have no doubt that the user experience from the A7 is every good as the charts indicate but the actual hardware performance isn't nearly as close to the baytrail or S800 as benchmarks indicate. Apple's software optimizations allow them to put a very strong showing with weaker hardware. (Geekbench is not used in this comparison as it focuses too much on encryption and tends to operate on single buffers of data). As shown in other benches, 5s performance is notably higher than 5/5c performance; my point here is that the actual hardware is less powerful in comparison to other hardware than the benchmarks indicate.

This is the problem with using JS benchmarks.
Click to expand...



Let me sum this up: I don't care.

So software has a direct impact on how fast a phone runs? No duh...

The A7 isn't the fastest CPU/GPU on the market? No duh....

Frankly this thread is just silly. The only Android phone I would consider right now is the Moto X so I could have 24hr battery life. It's also only a mid-range in performance. Frankly battery life matters a whole lot more to me than overall processing power.
 
In regards to Android vs. iOS, you have to keep in mind that not every user wants a slim feature set that runs flawlessly, some want far more than what is offered in iOS and Android gives them that.

If you are a gamer a good analogy is Call of Duty vs Battlefield. CoD is a 60fps flawless FPS, but rather limited in what you can do. Battlefield runs at 30 fps, has some glitches here and there, but has a lot more you can do. There are markets for both. Both force the other to continuously offer more to the user.

Additionally on the topic of benchmark cheating, I think cheating is the wrong word. It's not like they are hacking the benchmarks to get a higher score, they are just ramping up to a higher performance power profile. The benchmarks are already synthetic so really I don't see it as a big deal. As been said, user experience is what most people want anyways.

At the end of the day, buy what you want, be happy with it, or buy something else.
 
I agree..There are those that want to get straight to FUNCTIONALITY with their smart phones while others that value things like customization and "options"..I loved my experience with the samsung galaxy s4 running nova prime and the new Note 3 is an awesome gadget in my book, however i keep going back to the iphone for routine use as all i want is a smooth operating system that gives me the best experience doing what i do which is using it as a phone, messages, face time, light browsing, twitter, facebook, music and some light gaming..I love customization however in the long run it takes a back seat to functionality and smoothness and refinement of the OS. I do understand that others may have totally opposite views..These are philosophical differences in the two designs and so far both have plenty of takers. Great thing for options.
 
1f3258b49a635e28caba1be9ec5ec7c98e9f98c.gif


Thats it i'm gonna get the Samsung Superrrr Galaxy S4 LTE-Advance Plus now.
 
cirus said:
Apple's A7

[...]
This is the problem with using JS benchmarks.
Click to expand...

You do realize you are comparing the iPhone 5 in two graphs and the iPhone 5S is the others right?

Both iPhones don't use the same CPU... you do realize this right? You do realize also that anandtech labeled the A7 as a nice hardware update and only Intel mobile/desktop SoC CPU could be beat? You are reading and interpreting the results correctly are you not?
 
cirus said:
If you actually look at what I'm trying to say you would see than i'm mainly talking about intel and Qualcomm and their hardware. And really, someone says something you don't like and this is your response?



My point is that it is wrong to say that Apple's engineering of the A7 is what makes it an amazing chip. Its apple's software integration that can take a chip like the A6 and turn it into a solid S600 competitor. People saying that apple is outengineering Qualcomm, intel, or samsung based on the performance of the A7 are wrong. A7 performs well because of Apple's software integration.


Its well known that AT loves apple (and intel) products.
Click to expand...

If you knew *anything* about software optimization, you would know that it has to be written on a per-instructionset, per CPU design. (register count, caching system, etc.)

it takes great great GREAT hardware engineering for a processor to be optimizable by such a great percentage. You can't optimize all CPUs that much.
 
cirus said:
My point is that it is wrong to say that Apple's engineering of the A7 is what makes it an amazing chip. Its apple's software integration that can take a chip like the A6 and turn it into a solid S600 competitor. People saying that apple is outengineering Qualcomm, intel, or samsung based on the performance of the A7 are wrong. A7 performs well because of Apple's software integration.

Its well known that AT loves apple (and intel) products.
Click to expand...

So the entire reason for you trying to pee in everybody's internet garden on here is you wanted to make a straw man argument? Because I never heard anybody say that (other than Apple, maybe - but naturally they're going to say everything they manufacture is amazing and unique; they're a business and they want us to buy their products.) The only thing I heard about this is that the A7 is the first 64-bit CPU for mobile phones.

I don't know who these "people" you speak of are, but I imagine if they actually exist, you totally proved them wrong. Congratulations, I guess?

The A7 is still an awesome chip but yes, Apple's software is the primary reason why the iPhone runs so well. This isn't news. We go over this every time we have to listen to Android users tell us how much hardware they have packed in their 5 inch phone that they play Angry Birds on. One of the advantages to Apple products is they manufacture (or hand pick) the hardware they want in their products, and then engineer their software to take full advantage of it. We get it.

Also: As others have pointed out, you linked two graphs regarding the iPhone 5 benchmark. What, did you just think if you pasted a bunch of graphs in your post, we'd think "Wow, this guy knows what he's talking about. Look at all the charts and graphs full of proof and stuff!"? When doing research, it actually helps to go over the research before presenting it.
 
sjinsjca said:
It's amazing what users and programmers had to contend with in, ahem, "some" OSes' transition to 64-bit.
Click to expand...
I think it helps that hardware for the iPhone is very limited. No issue of needing to support a printer or scanner from 1999. :p
 
rui no onna said:
I think it helps that hardware for the iPhone is very limited. No issue of needing to support a printer or scanner from 1999. :p
Click to expand...

That really has nothing to do with the horrors documented in that article I linked to. But my main point is that if Apple hadn't made a great big deal out of the 64-bitness of the A7, no one would have been the wiser. And that's a remarkable accomplishment.
 
jav6454 said:
You do realize you are comparing the iPhone 5 in two graphs and the iPhone 5S is the others right?

Both iPhones don't use the same CPU... you do realize this right? You do realize also that anandtech labeled the A7 as a nice hardware update and only Intel mobile/desktop SoC CPU could be beat? You are reading and interpreting the results correctly are you not?
Click to expand...

If you read the OP you can easily see that the graphs are to compare the iphone 5 and 5c (which use the same A6) across ios 6 and 7 (in the case of the iphone 5) and the subsequent massive performance gain.

Shadow%20Mac said:
If you knew *anything* about software optimization, you would know that it has to be written on a per-instructionset, per CPU design. (register count, caching system, etc.)

it takes great great GREAT hardware engineering for a processor to be optimizable by such a great percentage. You can't optimize all CPUs that much.
Click to expand...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7399/...review-iris-pro-driving-an-accurate-display/3

Lets look at the imac playing bioshock on windows 8 vs 10.8.5.

41.9 fps on windows 8, 29.5 fps on OSX. Clearly software plays a major difference when CPU limited.

Terrible hardware can show massive optimizations, it just depends on the time and money you through at it (PS3 -cell-uncharted series).

My point is NOT about user experience or anything like that (which I think nobody is getting). Its about the physical hardware. How much of Apple's A7 prowess is due to software (If I put an A7 in an android phone how would it run?) rather than actual hardware?

My point is to those who say the A7 shows that Apple is solidly out-engineering Qualcomm (etc.) and my answer is that the benchmarks make this unclear due to apple's massive software optimization.
 
cirus said:
Exactly and I agree 100%. Its just the hardware isn't really comparable performance wise. Apple competes through software as well.

Think pc and console.
Click to expand...

Huh?

cirus said:
If you actually look at what I'm trying to say you would see than i'm mainly talking about intel and Qualcomm and their hardware. And really, someone says something you don't like and this is your response?



My point is that it is wrong to say that Apple's engineering of the A7 is what makes it an amazing chip. Its apple's software integration that can take a chip like the A6 and turn it into a solid S600 competitor. People saying that apple is outengineering Qualcomm, intel, or samsung based on the performance of the A7 are wrong. A7 performs well because of Apple's software integration.


Its well known that AT loves apple (and intel) products.
Click to expand...

A couple mistakes
A) The A7 is an incredible chip. A feat (as noted in the article you're not reading correctly) first by an OEM to license the chip and institute their own low level programming to the chip itself with the A8 instruction set. It's all in the article. And it's an amazing feat of engineering. I'm not so sure you're too experienced in either chip design nor SoC production, ARM architecture or what Apple has actually achieved with the A7. An essentially flawless transition to 64bit programming and an update to XCode to allow developers to make the 32--->64bit transition almost too easy!
B) Your claim that Anand and his crew are bias. IMHO you've lost any sense of credibility with that statement. One of the most active, experienced and brilliantly positioned review sites on the web and the engine behind benchmarking programmers to continue to 'better' their tools to test and bench mobile devices and options that work cross platform without the ability to cheat the test. See geekbench 3. To dismiss it is silly.

Past comments of yours reveals your agenda though. Easy to see through. Sorry...the A7 in engineering circles that work SoC design is an absolute grand slam. And the first OEM to license and 'build up' their chip from low level CPU and GPU instructions to the UI.
Samsung has the same option. As does Sony. As does HTC. Android is open source. It's their 'skins', IE 'TouchWiz' that F's everything up.

Matt8045 said:
Numbers don't mean **** when my iphone 5S crashes versus my iphone 5 on ios6 that never did.
Click to expand...

Take it back. It's under warranty. You've got a bad 5s. We've now got 6 in the family and with my employees. No issues. No crashing. No BSOD since iOS 7.01. It's easily the fastest, most fluent and enjoyable experience I've enjoyed from iOS. Just upgraded from the 5 myself. The company and wife from the 4s. Sold the 4s. Handed the 5 to our son. I'm extremely excited for the new iPad lineup. Sorry you got a bunk device but Apple will switch it out for you no charge. Guaranteed.

J
 
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