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3GS vs iPhone 4 (Speed.... pleasantly surprised)

A

AndyDel

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 9, 2009
51
0
So..

Been looking at iOS 4 Gold Master Release reviews, either from youtube reviews or bigger tech news sites.. It appears it's as snappy on the 3GS as the iPhone 4 was when they got their hands on it at WWDC, which is slightly surprising.. But then not so much..

I've been reading some info about this A4 chip, as i wondered why Steve Jobs didn't coin "1GHZ CPU!" every other word like he did the iPad.. My personal guess.. Down-clocked for battery performance.. Equally though i read that the A4 is actually based on the A8 Cortex which the iPhone 3GS already has, so it's almost to the point where it's just a custom version of that:

http://www.hirdyman.co.uk/2010/03/01/ars-apple-a4-cpu-is-a-feature-stripped-arm-cortex-a8/

In the iPads case, it's just a stripped down A8

So from where i'm standing and what i've read.. iPhone 4 really isn't going to feature any sort of bump in speed over the 3GS, which is good i think for allot of people waiting for their upgrade date.

I'm personally letting the dust settle and until T-Mobile UK bring out pay as you go options, which will see me get rid of my 3GS for the iPhone 4.. But until that day arrives, i'm pretty chuffed that the only major upsides to the iPhone 4 is new design, screen and camera.. And that we won't see any speed reduction.

Any thoughts chaps?
 
Disagree. I think with the higher resolution of the Iphone 4 it will need a faster CPU for some Iphone 4 specific games and apps.

No way is this phone the same speed as a 3GS, if I'm reading your post correctly.
 
gloss said:
I'm thinking it's got as much to do with screen real estate (pixel-wise) and the ability to shoot 720p video as anything else.
Click to expand...

Have to agree - plus i think they're keeping back iMovie as one of those "iPhone 4" only features to sell it, would make sense.. Personally though, i'm never gonna use iMovie for iPhone..

Whenever i take a picture or a video with my phone, yeah it'll look great on my phones small screen.. On my iMac, it may be another case when viewing it full size.. So i'll often put all pictures / vids on my iMac first, before i decide whether to use them.. And well if i'm doing that, i may aswell use iMovie on.. My iMac :)

Only reason the iPhone 4 is tempting me over the 3GS is the screen and slight bump in camera quality, facetime is really a non issue for me.. I'll use it once, go "oh thats cool".. Then never use it again.

Ferris23 said:
Disagree. I think with the higher resolution of the Iphone 4 it will need a faster CPU for some Iphone 4 specific games and apps.

No way is this phone the same speed as a 3GS, if I'm reading your post correctly.
Click to expand...

It's possible, but the A4 actually has the same GPU in it that the iPhone 3GS has.. At least if you go by the iPad A4 anyway. It's just obviously the iPad has a 1GHZ bump CPU wise, problem is.. You'd think jobs would of hammered that little bit of information home during the keynote if it was the case for the iPhone 4, in very much the same way he did the iPad.
 
gloss said:
I'm thinking it's got as much to do with screen real estate (pixel-wise) and the ability to shoot 720p video as anything else.
Click to expand...

I don't think either of those things matter.

Pixel-changes don't matter because they're not making the designs smaller (like you would on a laptop with more pixels) they're just making them sharper.

So a button on a 3GS is going to be the exact same size as a button on a iPhone 4. It'll just be sharper. But all apps should FIT the same on either screen. It's not an issue for any other app, so why would iMovie be different?

And as for the HD, well the program could just work with SD files when on a 3GS. That wouldn't be too difficult.

So I don't think either of those things really matter. I think it comes down to real-time effects and export speeds. Both of which rely on the processor.
 
well the 3GS cpu runs at like 800MHz, but apple underclocked it to around 600MHz for battery life. And the A4 chip runs at 1GHz, so perhaps it is underclocked to around 800MHz or so?

just a thought.
 
Yeah with the 3GS it isn't a big step up in terms of Speed but over the 3G - Wow.

I'm sure when apps are 'optimised', we'll know how nice it is.
 
I have no idea yet what anyone is going to use it for except gaming but the iPhone 4 also has a gyroscope.

With things like this gyroscope I find it fascinating what apps the developers come up with. Many times it is something that you think "I didn't think you could do that with that".
 
pyrodex said:
The 3GS was clocked at like 667 MHZ I believe, it was under clocked from Apple to begin with.
Click to expand...

Correct, downclocked from 800MHz. I bet the iPhone 4 will be downclocked from 1GHz to 800MHz, still a substantial boost. Presumably it's still 256MB of RAM, but no one really knows yet.
 
I beg to differ. Tests run by anandtech confirm the A4 SoC is significantly faster than the 3GS CPU. By almost 1.5x!

Could you provide links to the reviews you referred to?
 
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