A Closer Look at Apple's CPU Improvements for iPhone 7 and Apple Watch

[magbarn]

Not really. Modern processors are much more powerful while consuming less power than previous versions. The smaller the fabrication nodes allow for less power consumption and heat generation.

It's not that simple.
The most likely reason for Apple to going BIG.little is that they were stuck with 16nm with the A10. They had to give up some power efficiency (the big cores likely 'leak' more power at idle) to make them more powerful than the A9 2 cores. The 'little' cpus had to be added so they can do the work while you're listening to music/taking a phone call etc. while being more efficient than the A9 while doing those tasks. The only disadvantage is the bigger die space is more expensive for Apple to make.

Higher performing cpu's like Core i7's perform really well at high clockspeeds, but still consume too much power at slower speeds as they were optimized for the higher end of the spectrum. Vice versa, you can't just take an A9/A10 and clock it to 4.5ghz and expect it to lay waste to Skylake as it was optimized for power savings.

 

[Gooberton]

The Galaxy S7 international version has a similar processor architecture.

Hhahahhhhhahaahaha.

 

[wigby]

I just find it so sad that we have all this power and almost no one is doing anything with it.

They keep saying, iPhone has the power of an Xbox360, or even better now.
So where are all the XBox 360 quality games for the iPhones?

Plug in a big screen, and play Xbox 360 or better titles from your phone.
But what do the App Devs give us?
Crossy Road, or some sad mario side scroller, or some other pointless game that are hardly above the old flash based web page games.

Why are people not making PROPER decent full games for these devices?
It's such a waste.

2 points here. First of all you're wrong. Some of the best titles look great and run smooth. You cannot say that about many console games that downrez just to maintain the frame rate or run at 720p in order to stay at 60fps.

Secondly, there's no market for big titles requiring a lot of GPU horsepower on a phone. No one wants to stare at a 5" screen for more than a few minutes at a time. Do you see many amazing looking games on Android phones? No. Beaming games to a tv introduces latency, requires extra hardware in the form of game controllers and set top boxes. The market for those people is just too small for developers to care. The only chance of seeing many console quality games using A series chips will only happen if/when Apple bundles game controllers with ATV and upgrades the A processor in a new (4K perhaps) ATV. Until then, don't expect developers to jump on board with great looking games.

 

[Populus]

Damn, this feels like AnandTech on the good old days.
Good article, MacRumors.

 

[iMember]

Oh boy I feel sorry for those Android manufacturers that will have to catch up with that beast, that won't happen in the next year that's for sure.

I guess you haven't heard Samsung announcement? they about to release Galaxy S8 with 10 nanometer processor

 

[citysnaps]

I guess you haven't heard Samsung announcement? they about to release Galaxy S8 with 10 nanometer processor

And sales will be HOT!

 

[Born Again]

wow - way to get drawn into the marketing machine.

it's faster - got it

 

[macduke]

This reminds me of those old semi-technical articles that Apple Insider used to do, which I loved. Keep doing these, please!

I've wondered for a long time if Apple would ever design their own GPUs. It makes sense. The wireless thing too. If you're going to own A-series which is the best mobile processor by a long shot, why not just do it all and custom integrate every part of the iPhone with iOS and get the most performance and battery life possible? It's a huge advantage over the competition that can further set the iPhone apart. This is evidenced by the latest Samsung phones not even keeping up with the year old 6s.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with all the power in this iPhone. It blows my mind. I wish they had iPad cases for the iPhone. It would just be a display (w/Apple Pencil support), bigger battery, bigger speakers, and a slot for an iPhone to run it all. This is MacBook-level speed. I can't wait to see what the A10X Fusion chip has to offer. Or maybe it won't even be fusion since the iPad doesn't have many people complaining about battery life. Maybe it will just be a full-on quad-core chip with speeds on-par with low-end MacBook Pros. Now that would be pretty interesting!

 

[xsdeus]

Since Apple mentioned that the low-power cores run at 1/5 the power, back-of-the-receipt calculations suggest the high-power cores are 1.4 billion transistors each, and the low-power cores are 0.3 billion transistors each.

 

[nagromme]

I just find it so sad that we have all this power and almost no one is doing anything with it.

They keep saying, iPhone has the power of an Xbox360, or even better now.
So where are all the XBox 360 quality games for the iPhones?

Plug in a big screen, and play Xbox 360 or better titles from your phone.
But what do the App Devs give us?
Crossy Road, or some sad mario side scroller, or some other pointless game that are hardly above the old flash based web page games.
...

Really? Hardly above Flash? I'll consider the question when I'm done playing Vainglory and The Room series and the Riptide series.

 

[dampfnudel]

Next year's 10nm A11 should be phenomenal...in a phenomenal looking iPhone 8!!!

 

[iTom17]

I'm very impressed with what Apple has shown us lately in the area of chip architecture. They keep improving speeds while maintaining efficiency. A 40% increase in CPU performance, and even 50% in graphics performance... that may not sound like a lot when you would compare the A4 to the A5 in terms of Geekbench numbers. But the A9-chip was already the fastest chip out there (and it still is!). I think it's great to see what Apple is doing.

And you know, we're not even talking about the A10X Fusion here. I mean, how fast is that one gonna be? Hope Apple will continue this and show the competition how it has to be done. They just prove how 8 friggin' cores won't change anything to the real-world performance. Good chip architecture, that's what counts. And of course software optimisation, let's not forget that. But still, Apple is doing perfectly well right now.

 

[citysnaps]

Hold on a second...

Where are all the "Greedy Apple beancounters/execs don't give a damn about their customers and instead use last year's sub-par components to maximize profits" commenters?

 

[Piggie]

Really? Hardly above Flash? I'll consider the question when I'm done playing Vainglory and The Room series and the Riptide series.

There are a few odd cherries on the tree I grant you.
And at Apple's keynotes, they show off something amazing, which I always hope IS going to become the norm for the new quality for whatever year it happens to be.
I mean the 99.5% of other games.

I look at games even on a PS2 or Xbox, let along an PS3 or Xbox360 and they are just amazing compared to 99.5% of what's on the iPhone.

I suspect the problem is money, No one is going to write high end games for 4.99 or whatever price people will pay.
They would want, $49 for a game of that quality.

Price/cheap apps, whilst great had just served to give us this, which is sad.

I don't know how they will break out of this loop they are stuck in.

 

[Karma*Police]

Lot of praise for Apple's chips... But wait a couple of months and we'll get another angry wave of impatient users who'll say that Apple hasn't innovated since Steve Jobs.

 

[segfaultdotorg]

TL;DR.

I like how the new Fusion chip enables Apple to offer greater storage capacity on iOS devices by using a small amount of flash memory plus a conventional hard disk:

I hear the iPhone 7 models equipped with this optional feature may be slightly thicker, but really, it's a small price to pay for more storage capacity.

 

[sdornan]

I just find it so sad that we have all this power and almost no one is doing anything with it.

They keep saying, iPhone has the power of an Xbox360, or even better now.
So where are all the XBox 360 quality games for the iPhones?

Plug in a big screen, and play Xbox 360 or better titles from your phone.
But what do the App Devs give us?
Crossy Road, or some sad mario side scroller, or some other pointless game that are hardly above the old flash based web page games.

Why are people not making PROPER decent full games for these devices?
It's such a waste.

Sadly, it's probably because no one seems to be willing to pay more than $4.99 for an iOS app.

 

[XxEagleGreenxX]

The old adage "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away" has for the most part been true with Apple OSes too. Every increase in CPU power is eventually gobbled up by a newer and more demanding OS. While iOS 10 doesn't look like its gunna turn our phones into slugs, future OSes inevitably will.

Enjoy the A10 on iOS 10 while it lasts, because a few years down the line with a future OS, it's gunna be just as unusable and pokey slow as an iPhone 4 is using iOS 9 today.

The iPhone 4 is not a few years old...its six years old. Despite it being pokey slow 6 years is a long time to support a phone..

 

[DotCom2]

Can't wait for the embargo to lift possibly tomorrow but than likely Wednesday to read about real life reviews.

 

[Piggie]

Actually, I just looked at those games you mentioned.

Vainglory is another one of those very pretty from above games that I don't really rate as those games are generally for low end systems that's can't do that in a proper 3D viewpoint.

And the Room. Really, zooming into some puzzled and some pre rendered movements, that's again for something of low power.

I'm sure they are both very entertaining, and "The World Of Goo" I loved.
But I stand by my view that it's a great shame, most games look like something a NES would not struggle with.

 

[TimWillz]

At last Wednesday's media event, Apple introduced two new processors - the A10 Fusion for iPhone 7 and 7 Plus and the S2 for Apple Watch Series 2. Although Apple only briefly covered the S2 during the presentation, it did spend a good deal of time talking about A10 Fusion. The 'Fusion' suffix refers to the heterogeneous architecture that the A10 features, which has two high-power, high-throughput cores and two much smaller cores that are more power efficient.

Apple also introduced another very important piece of standalone silicon in its new AirPods, dubbed the W1 chip. In total, this represents a great deal of engineering work done by Apple over the last year, and the A10 is the most significant to Apple's system-on-a-chip (SoC) line since the company's transition to 64-bit.

Apple unveiled the biggest technical changes featured in the A10 at the very beginning, boasting a four-core CPU with 3.3 billion transistors. While Apple never disclosed a transistor count for the A9, it very likely fell somewhere in the middle between the 2 billion count on the A8 and the 3.3 billion of the new A10. A transistor count well under 3 billion seems probable for the A9; otherwise it would have been worth boasting about on its own.

The 3.3 billion number for the A10 is well over 50 percent larger than the A8, and the large jump is likely mostly thanks to the addition of two new, albeit small, CPU cores along with a greatly enhanced image signal processor (ISP). Apple also disclosed that the GPU remains a six-cluster design, while benchmarks suggest that the L1 and L2 cache sizes remain unchanged.


Click here to read rest of article...

Article Link: A Closer Look at Apple's CPU Improvements for iPhone 7 and Apple Watch

App,e really did do a great job here... bravo.

 

[Pakaku]

I just find it so sad that we have all this power and almost no one is doing anything with it.

They keep saying, iPhone has the power of an Xbox360, or even better now.
So where are all the XBox 360 quality games for the iPhones?

Plug in a big screen, and play Xbox 360 or better titles from your phone.
But what do the App Devs give us?
Crossy Road, or some sad mario side scroller, or some other pointless game that are hardly above the old flash based web page games.

Why are people not making PROPER decent full games for these devices?
It's such a waste.

It takes a lot of work to make a big game, then it takes time to learn Xcode, and how to port games over to iOS. And then there's the whole issue that an iPhone's very own input is a bottleneck in itself. Meanwhile most established game developers are already comfortable making what they do on platforms they currently release on. Especially Nintendo's case, as it looks like they're intentionally making the game as light as possible as a marketing strategy and for sort of making a statement. So it's probably not the most ideal situation for iOS gaming, but that's not exactly surprising either.

I think the computer power will be better taken advantage of in actual productivity apps, like Procreate and Pixelmator.

 

[TimWillz]

Apple really did do a great job here... bravo.

 

[blco02]

So does this mean I can play Pokemon Go on it?

 

[gnasher729]

Enjoy the A10 on iOS 10 while it lasts, because a few years down the line with a future OS, it's gunna be just as unusable and pokey slow as an iPhone 4 is using iOS 9 today.

iPhone 4 doesn't run iOS 9. iPhone 4s runs iOS 9 just fine.
[doublepost=1473719335][/doublepost]

Not really. Modern processors are much more powerful while consuming less power than previous versions. The smaller the fabrication nodes allow for less power consumption and heat generation.

That misses the point: With every process, the faster processor built in that process takes a lot more energy than the slower process. We're not comparing the A10 with the chip that was in the iPhone 4. We compare the fast cores in the A10 with the slow cores in the same A10, built with the same technology.