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A Closer Look at Apple's CPU Improvements for iPhone 7 and Apple Watch
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Dude you are so far off the mark that it's laughable. What is the alternative you propose that is blisteringly fast? Android. Hahahahaha
Pfft, this is not innovation. The phone still looks the same!
Innovation means changing how the phone looks every year. Get with the program Apple. Oh and who cares about GPU and wireless mumbo jumbo. Number of cores and 6GB of RAM is better! Oh and IRIS SCANNER! That's Innovation!
Apple is doomed. Tim Cook is a big failure.
/s
Innovation means changing how the phone looks every year. Get with the program Apple. Oh and who cares about GPU and wireless mumbo jumbo. Number of cores and 6GB of RAM is better! Oh and IRIS SCANNER! That's Innovation!
Apple is doomed. Tim Cook is a big failure.
/s
That is hysterical. You made my night.
On a serious note: I loved this article! Like someone else said earlier, it reminds me of old-school Anandtech. And that is a very good thing. Please keep these types of articles coming!
Chris Jenkins, great article and have read it with interest. Thanks!
ns,
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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Article Link: A Closer Look at Apple's CPU Improvements for iPhone 7 and Apple Watch
Right. Apple's own software optimization has nothing to do with the speed.
Gee, I wish they upgraded their runtime to something lightning fast like... Java. I can't even type that with a straight face.
A10 is a beast. But I think a A10@2.33 being 40% faster than A9@1.85 is
- ~25% overclock
- ~12% architecture improvements
Still super impressive. But clearly don't expect +25% architectural improvements for each µarch iteration anymore.
Also, this brings concerns about sustained CPU perfs (assuming the A10 is using the same 16nm process), and may explain why we see here the two "little" cores... because those two "BIG" cores may not be suited for background/super light tasks anymore.
- ~25% overclock
- ~12% architecture improvements
Still super impressive. But clearly don't expect +25% architectural improvements for each µarch iteration anymore.
Also, this brings concerns about sustained CPU perfs (assuming the A10 is using the same 16nm process), and may explain why we see here the two "little" cores... because those two "BIG" cores may not be suited for background/super light tasks anymore.
I thought the iPhone 7 will be available only on 9/16 !!! This link shows the whole surgery of iPhone 7 plus Jet-Black
https://tinhte.vn/threads/video-truc-tiep-phau-thuat-iphone-7-plus-11h-30-trua-nay.2641833/
https://tinhte.vn/threads/video-truc-tiep-phau-thuat-iphone-7-plus-11h-30-trua-nay.2641833/
The latest iOS available for the iPhone 4 is iOS 7.1.2 and it can barely handle it. Nevertheless, you couldn't be more wrong. iOS doesn't run much in the background and only allows third-party multitasking under very special circumstances. The system is designed to give the utmost CPU power to the active front-running application and safe energy on everything else.
The A4 is a 32-bit single-core processor running at 800 MHz on 512MB memory in the iPhone 4. Of course it doesn't handle iOS 10 anymore, but that doesn't mean the A10 will be too slow for future iOS versions as well. One day iPhone 7 will be outdated for other reasons than speed. Just like seven year old MacBooks run macOS just fine or even better than they used to, but not with all the newest features who require special hardware, not just fast hardware (e.g. Hands Off, Power Nap).
This is correct. Most perfs pbs with CPU before the A6 are caused by the RAM amount, not the CPU power.
The iPhone 5 and its A6 runs the latests iOS 9.3.5 like a charm. And it will likely handle iOS 10 with no special pb.
At this point, I assume A6 support will be dropped with iOS 11, but mostly because of it being 32bits (and it makes sense to drop support for a product that will turn 5 by the time iOS 11 is here)
Eight equal sized cores on the same chip area would significantly decrease single-core performance. If it wouldn't change anything, Apple would do it and increase multi-core performance at no additional cost. But an octo-core costs you something, much like the headphone jack uses valuable space inside the phone, every additional core uses valuable space on the chip itself. This space could be used for something better like making the two high-performance cores bigger and faster. Better cores instead of more cores.
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.
I imagine it's an economic thing. Everything appears to have shifted towards casual gaming and the freemium model so it'd be very difficult to assign resources to create console class titles because people balk at anything above a certain price.
It's a real shame on all fronts for app development because there's a lot of untapped potential (no pun intended!). The App Store is certainly better than Google Play for premium/paid titles but still not even close to reaching the full potential of the device and associated infrastructure.
Perfect example, because of its 32-bitness the iPhone 5 already doesn't support Night Shift and Content Blocking, but except of these missing new iOS 9 features the OS doesn't run slow and will be able to run new OS versions for years to come. People will want to upgrade because they want the new features, not because their old phone becomes unbearably slow.
So have several of Samsung's previous Exynos chips. None of them has been as good as their A series contemporaries.
Currently I use my Mac mini solely as a Plex/iTunes Media Server. Wouldn't this be ideal for me?
Well, actually, the old iPhones (every single one before the 5) were underpowered and RAM starved. They DID run poorly on newer iOS builds. So people moved to newer phones not only because they wanted but also because their phone basically became useless after two years or so.
And this is what changed with modern iPhones (same is true for Android phones) : they are now powerfull enough and with plenty of RAM to handle virtually any OS (full fledged windows included, if such a thing as an ARM windows existed)
More RAM let's you compute on more data, not faster (that's what faster RAM is for). Every iPhone prior to iPhone 4s was single-core and iOS was adapted to that. Only with iOS 7 on the A7 chip the OS was completely rewritten for 64-bit and new UI. iOS 7 should never have come to the iPhone 4, but people would have revolted if updates would have stopped after two years. This is the only case where the software demanded too much from the hardware.
More RAM let's you compute on more data, not faster (that's what faster RAM is for). Every iPhone prior to iPhone 4s was single-core and iOS was adapted to that. Only with iOS 7 on the A7 chip the OS was completely rewritten for 64-bit and new UI. iOS 7 should never have come to the iPhone 4, but people would have revolted if updates would have stopped after two years. This is the only case where the software demanded too much from the hardware.
No. A not so fast CPU will perform anything you throw at it. A bit slower, granted, but that is nothing compared to perfs issues caused by memory starvation. If a slow CPU operates with a small quantity of RAM, it will have to deal with memory paging management. There is no such a thing as swapping in iOS I am aware of, but there are still a lot of things to be done when you need a free page and you don't have it, like, well, free memory, with a garbage collection like mechanism.
iOS 7 memory usage is heavier than iOS 6, making all <1gb devices slow, even the "fast" 4s, even with disabled features. Same iOS 7 runs super smoothly on the iPhone 5 with its much slower 32bits CPU vs the A7 found in the 5s.
Still, I agree, iOS 7 should not have been made available for 4/4s. Maybe it did because of 4/4s owers possible complaints. Maybe Apple thought they could optimize it better with time. Maybe a bit of both.
But my point is simply that a slow CPU gives you slower perfs while RAM starvation gives you abysmal perfs.
