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A Closer Look at Apple's CPU Improvements for iPhone 7 and Apple Watch
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Apple manages to produce a better and better chip year after year, that's amazing. The new Snapdragon can't even beat the A9 and now they have the A10 to try and catch.
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.
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Good article. A lot of people don't understand the benefits of a quad core design when it comes to power efficiency, battery life, and thermals, and focus solely on speed. The dynamic voltage and frequency scaling is key to effective power management. Transmeta pioneered this technology 15 years ago with their LongRun system. It's good that Apple did not try to move to smaller semiconductor process since there's a lot of risk and little benefit due to leakage issues. Looks like Apple is finally catching up with the competition in terms of processor technology.
Now if only they could put the headphone jack on the iPhone 8.
Now if only they could put the headphone jack on the iPhone 8.
For those who are interested in how Apple became such a power in chip development, here's an excellent story about Johny Srouji, the individual who heads that effort in Cupertino. Another case of Apple hiring the best talent...
If you're going to mention big.LITTLE then you should talk about the penalties if you place a thread on one core and want to move it to another core. It's not pretty.
Which is why I doubt Apple went with anything resembling big.LITTLE or an ARM core. Why have the world's most advanced custom designed ARM compatible cores and saddle them with something like the A53 or the architecture behind ARMs performance controller? Apple even mentioned their own custom performance controller, which is a big hint they've overcome the issues with big.LITTLE.
Which is why I doubt Apple went with anything resembling big.LITTLE or an ARM core. Why have the world's most advanced custom designed ARM compatible cores and saddle them with something like the A53 or the architecture behind ARMs performance controller? Apple even mentioned their own custom performance controller, which is a big hint they've overcome the issues with big.LITTLE.
It's not what the end user gets, it's what Apple gets by putting $5 worth of their own silicon into a machine instead of $50 worth of Intel silicon. With a big thermal solution they might be able to crank up the speed and power consumption enough to build an entry level Mac Mini.
Also, games have to be specifically coded to take advantage of Apple's architecture. Some of the big game companies prefer to write games for the established platforms like Xbox and Playstation first, and then do a simpler port of the game over to iOS or Mac. But by doing that, the game isn't optimized and misses out on a lot of the power and graphics capabilities that iOS (and Macs) can offer.
Since Javascript depends a lot on single thread performance and large data caches, Safari should be faster.
They are waiting (and waiting) for enough customers who are willing to pay premium XBox game prices for an iOS app. People don't just finance and hire the 100's of the programmers and designers it takes to do top tier console games unless they can guarantee very high odds that lots of customers will plunk down big money.
It will be interesting to see what these "minimal" core are. Watch being Cortex-A7, that's ARMv7, 32 bit. The Apple A Cores are 64 bit, so the low power version of his is the Cortex-A35, to maintain 64 bit compatibility. There is the Cortex-A32, which is an ARMv8-A architecture, but only supports the 32 bit mode. The Cortex-A32 is the "smallest" ARMv8 core ARM makes. So maybe Apple tweaked the Cortex-A35 to squeeze some extra juice out of it. Waiting for details. . . .
Why? The fundemental choice is OS. Even if android was 100% faster, an apple user would not switch, and vice versa.
On the flip side are macs being buried into oblivion....? Cause performance wise, say the Mac Pro, is humiliated? Nope it's an OS choice.
Kudos for apple form such performance though, they have thier own agenda to push people to buy iPad pros over computers.....more profit, and we should see apple remain ahead in performance for idevices
I don't know much about the different chip architecture...but I was leaning towards games
I don't know what version of OS was in Android phones 6 years ago, but of the phones from that era can any of them run a current version of an Android OS, pokey mode or better?
Let's not have any false Modesty here, by that time, the A11 Chip will be here and most likely smoke Samsungs processor again. Deja Vu.
And like the S7 and Note 7 it'll still be slower than the iPhone from last year.
And as long as we're talking about speed and power, are there any metrics which compare similar software on the best iPhone vs the best Android? Is there really any way to do it considering that even if it's officially the same app on both they may have different features? What if you add in things like wireless speed or wifi connections and the differences there? I really have no idea how tech shops compare systems between phones when there are so many variables, both hardware and software.
You don't want that.
A discrete mobile GPU remains a better choice, that is as long as Apple bothers to put on in there and not one that's centuries old.
Add to that that the games you're looking at would then be limited to what developers will go out of their way to port for an OS with a rather small market share as it is, for ARM, for Metal or OpenGL (doubt Apple cares about Vulkan, especially with their proprietary Metal around) and that the likeliest you'd get would be iOS game ports (very similar code base) with lackluster execution (there are countless examples on the App Store today already).
ARM adds nothing to a stationary Mac and I'd like to think it's not that great of an idea for portable Macs either.
It'd also mean that we either have macOS in both x86 and ARM flavors or a move towards ARM-only, which would be insane and one of the biggest mistakes they could do.
Nah, stick to x86, it's a great platform, at least until something genuinely better comes along, but it's not ARM.
Glassed Silver:mac
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And yet no matter what CPU they release or what process is used to manufacture the chip, 1 year old iPhones beat current model Samsung phones in all major benchmarks. Go figure. There's no point designing a CPU that isn't being used to it's full capacity by the OS. That's something Apple do and why lower spec phones perform better. Samsung just quotes numbers, more CPU, more RAM, more pixels, more more more, but in the real world it's less less less.
Wake up, stop thinking about it in terms of more specs and start thinking about it as how the whole offering works in real life.