A10 fusion, do we give Apple enough credit?

[FrozenInferno]

Apple's chip design is world class, and keep in mind they are coming out with newer, faster, more efficient chips every single year. That's impressive enough for a specialized processor company like Intel but for Apple to do it is incredible. And they make these chips exclusively for their own products. Imagine the money they could make if they sold Apple designed chips to other phone manufacturers. Even older processors like the A7 or A8 would be improvements in a lot of the non-Apple hardware out there.

 

[rui no onna]

Even older processors like the A7 or A8 would be improvements in a lot of the non-Apple hardware out there.

Probably not. These perform very well mostly because iOS is designed to work well with the hardware. I've used Android devices whose CPU had good raw performance but suffer from lag due to bloated manufacturer skins.

 

[janeauburn]

As an Apple Watch 1 user for just over a year now, I am jealous of the AW2. I wear the thingsmorning to night every day without exception. From my viewpoint, AW2 with AW OS 3 looks to fix most of what I don't like about the AW1. And I really love my AW1 more than any other technology I own. This is what I want to see with the iPhone. Leverage the power and capacity.

I've always thought the Apple watch was uber ugly! Seriously, can't see the fascination. It's way too thick, for one thing, and I heard they made the latest one THICKER! Great. And then I saw a friend use it. SLOW! How stupid that thing is.

For me the coolest thing about computers/phones over the last 15 years is that they obviated the need for a watch! I never wear one. What's the point? Another piece of crap on my body?

 

[ClutchThese]

I've always thought the Apple watch was uber ugly! Seriously, can't see the fascination. It's way too thick, for one thing, and I heard they made the latest one THICKER! Great. And then I saw a friend use it. SLOW! How stupid that thing is.

For me the coolest thing about computers/phones over the last 15 years is that they obviated the need for a watch! I never wear one. What's the point? Another piece of crap on my body?

Dang... Someone poop in your cereal?

The new Apple Watch is the same thickness as the first... They said this in the keynote. I do somewhat agree that the phones removed the need for a watch. But in all honesty, watches are more than timepieces these days. It's like saying you don't need headphones when your phone has a speaker. There are always situations where a smart watch is welcomed.

 

[maflynn]

The new Apple Watch is the same thickness as the first..

Actually it is thicker: Apple Watch Series 2 is Slightly Thicker and Heavier Due to Larger Battery

 

[ClutchThese]

Oh snaps.

 

[LovingTeddy]

It is basically ARM'a Big.Little design. Qualcomm, Huawei, MediaTek, Samsung etc has been doing it for years.

We have no real world idea about how well A10 performed. The impressive benchmark number also could mean it is just software is well customized for the hardware.

But anyway, like always, it is the iOS limiting factor, not the hardware.

 

[Zimmy68]

The problem with relying on Anandtech is that it takes 3 months for them to review the iPhone. Most people have made their decision by then.

 

[chabig]

I've always thought the Apple watch was uber ugly! Seriously, can't see the fascination. It's way too thick, for one thing, and I heard they made the latest one THICKER! Great. And then I saw a friend use it. SLOW! How stupid that thing is.

For me the coolest thing about computers/phones over the last 15 years is that they obviated the need for a watch! I never wear one. What's the point? Another piece of crap on my body?

It's actually not thick on your wrist. It just looks thick in photos. I'd venture to say that an average analog watch is the same thickness.

 

[janeauburn]

There are always situations where a smart watch is welcomed.

If you say so.

Honestly I see the apple watch as a stigma. When people see others wearing one, there's a silent rolling of the eyes going on. I saw a colleague the other day squinting at the tiny icons on his apple watch, scrolling left and right needlessly, just to see the icons fly by, I suppose. I thought, "how silly." I wouldn't hire someone who came to an interview wearing an apple watch. "Dumb" and "follower" would be my immediate thoughts. I want people who come to get work done, not folks who need to be notified via the phone in their pockets that a new text message has come in. STUPID!

 

[br0adband]

... do we give Apple enough credit?

Nope, but people sure do give 'em a helluvalot of cash.

 

[marcociccone]

If you say so.

Honestly I see the apple watch as a stigma. When people see others wearing one, there's a silent rolling of the eyes going on. I saw a colleague the other day squinting at the tiny icons on his apple watch, scrolling left and right needlessly, just to see the icons fly by, I suppose. I thought, "how silly." I wouldn't hire someone who came to an interview wearing an apple watch. "Dumb" and "follower" would be my immediate thoughts. I want people who come to get work done, not folks who need to be notified via the phone in their pockets that a new text message has come in. STUPID!

You should be such a great employer! I use my Apple Watch to get notified of my work emails and appointments. So what's the problem?

 

[jgelin]

I wouldn't hire someone who came to an interview wearing an apple watch. "Dumb" and "follower" would be my immediate thoughts.

Let's just hope you aren't in charge of actually hiring real people because your outlook on a piece of technology some enjoy, like, and use is quite piss poor tbh.

 

[JulianL]

It is basically ARM'a Big.Little design. Qualcomm, Huawei, MediaTek, Samsung etc has been doing it for years.

Yeah, but the devil is in the detail (the implementation). How much can it reduce the power consumption on the big cores when the small cores take over? How quickly can it do the transitions, particularly from small back to big? How effectively can it judge when to make those transitions and with how little latency? How much useful state if any on the previously active core can be used by the core being transferred to?

I read that the first Samsung 4+4 big.LITTLE implementation was a bit of a disaster in terms of achieving what it was supposed to (power savings) for various reasons which some magazine (EE Times I think but not 100% sure) went into in some detail.

It might be yet another case of something where Apple is not the first but doing it well is a very difficult task and Apple's processor design team are probably well placed to do this really well. I am excited that Apple has adopted the big.LITTLE concept and look forward to seeing how much they can get out of it.

 

[KillaMac]

Its an A9X with 2 Slower Cores there was Really No Innovation here, thats it. Problem is due to the iPhones tiny space heat and small battery it has to "throttle" to keep from Over heating so real world performance will be slower than an A9X in the 9.7 and 12.9 iPad Pro

Further people will hate the Sluggishness of Email and Texting on the Slow speed cores and Apple will have to Give an Option Forcing Main 2 Core performance at the Risk of Battery life.

And No Word if All 4 Cores Can Work Together like SnapDragon or Exynos Apples A10 sounds like its 2 Normal Cores and 2 Slow Cores never all 4.

Look for the A11 or A11X to Really show new Features

I hate people assuming. We don't know this yet till it is out.

 

[Jimmy James]

Power and efficiency and more important than anything else in this release and, IMO, more important than anything else they could have done. I give them credit for this.

 

[Elisha]

Yeah, but the devil is in the detail (the implementation). How much can it reduce the power consumption on the big cores when the small cores take over? How quickly can it do the transitions, particularly from small back to big? How effectively can it judge when to make those transitions and with how little latency? How much useful state if any on the previously active core can be used by the core being transferred to?

I read that the first Samsung 4+4 big.LITTLE implementation was a bit of a disaster in terms of achieving what it was supposed to (power savings) for various reasons which some magazine (EE Times I think but not 100% sure) went into in some detail.

It might be yet another case of something where Apple is not the first but doing it well is a very difficult task and Apple's processor design team are probably well placed to do this really well. I am excited that Apple has adopted the big.LITTLE concept and look forward to seeing how much they can get out of it.

If you are referring to the Exynos on the S6 and Note 5, it had nothing to do with the CPU itself. It had to do with the fact that Samsung used an external Shannon radio chip. It wasn't part of the SoC so it drained more power.
Qualcomm has the radio built in to the SoC so it drains less power. Also TouchWiz was very demanding on CPU cycles.
If the little cores just took care of all Push notifications and background app refreshes, it would be a win already!

 

[galahan]

It was interesting to see how it beat out the Macbook in its Geekbench score. It's not hard to imagine a future where mac's use Ax chips and Apple can stop relying on Intel. It will be easier to differentiate macs if they can build their own optimized chips. I don't know how far we're off from that but I'm imagine that's where Apple wants to get.

 

[JulianL]

If you are referring to the Exynos on the S6 and Note 5, it had nothing to do with the CPU itself. It had to do with the fact that Samsung used an external Shannon radio chip. It wasn't part of the SoC so it drained more power.
Qualcomm has the radio built in to the SoC so it drains less power. Also TouchWiz was very demanding on CPU cycles.
If the little cores just took care of all Push notifications and background app refreshes, it would be a win already!

No, I was referring to the earlier Exynos 5410 on the Galaxy S4. I found a bit about it on Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7164/samsung-exynos-5-octa-5420-switches-back-to-arm-gpu)...

The Exynos 5410 saw limited use, appearing in some international versions of the Galaxy S 4 and nothing else. Part of the problem with the design was a broken implementation of the CCI-400 coherent bus interface that connect the two CPU islands to the rest of the SoC. In the case of the 5410, the bus was functional but coherency was broken and manually disabled on the Galaxy S 4. The implications are serious from a power consumption (and performance) standpoint. With all caches being flushed out to main memory upon a switch between CPU islands. Neither ARM nor Samsung LSI will talk about the bug publicly, and Samsung didn't fess up to the problem at first either - leaving end users to discover it on their own.

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Power and efficiency and more important than anything else in this release and, IMO, more important than anything else they could have done. I give them credit for this.

IMO too. I so agree with you on this. I really hope this shows a shift in attitude from Apple in terms of where on its priority list it puts significantly increasing (rather than just maintaining or slightly increasing) battery life. Based on all the leaks I was expecting to be quite underwhelmed by the 7/7s announcement but I ended up being pretty excited about it just because of it maybe being a turning point re battery life really mattering to Apple.

Apple might have some challenges on that front next year though because edge-to-edge screens with no bezels are likely to mean more screen area sitting in front of the same sized batteries, or the same screen size now sitting in front of a reduced battery area because the case width and maybe also height has shrunk. Unless Apple makes the phone thicker next year, which I don't see happening, the power drain challenges coming from a higher screen-size to battery-size ratio is going to have to be addressed by more power efficiency savings elsewhere, the screen being the obvious area but also hopefully also better big.LITTLE power savings with each generation going forward. Maybe with the new W1 chip under its belt next year might also be the year when Apple in-house radio chip designers do more custom stuff. There could be exciting times ahead.

 

[Nozuka]

We can expect a die shrink next year. This should help with the efficiency.

Also, new battery tech might be ready. But i doubt, that they can produce enough for apple next year..

 

[JulianL]

We can expect a die shrink next year. This should help with the efficiency.

Also, new battery tech might be ready. But i doubt, that they can produce enough for apple next year..

I agree about the die shrink.

Is there any particular new battery tech that you have your eye on? There have been so many candidates coming out of research labs but nothing has made it to production yet. I saw something a few weeks ago about something that looked promising, as in having some possibility of getting into production in the near future, because it was based on existing Lithium ion technology with the enhancements being at the anode I think and they were saying that maybe even existing L-ion production facilities could be adapted to make it. They were talking about at least doubling charge density.

If and when new battery tech does make it into production that will be a game-changer. It will be nice for wireless ear buds too now that Apple is pushing us that way.

 

[kevink2]

You should be such a great employer! I use my Apple Watch to get notified of my work emails and appointments. So what's the problem?

It would be nice if I could tie my work appointments to my phone other than manually entering them into the phone. Can be easy to miss the Outlook reminder if away from desk.

 

[Nozuka]

I agree about the die shrink.

Is there any particular new battery tech that you have your eye on? There have been so many candidates coming out of research labs but nothing has made it to production yet. I saw something a few weeks ago about something that looked promising, as in having some possibility of getting into production in the near future, because it was based on existing Lithium ion technology with the enhancements being at the anode I think and they were saying that maybe even existing L-ion production facilities could be adapted to make it. They were talking about at least doubling charge density.

If and when new battery tech does make it into production that will be a game-changer. It will be nice for wireless ear buds too now that Apple is pushing us that way.

The MIT / Solidenergy tech is close to production. It's supposed to have double the energy capacity.
"SolidEnergy plans to bring the batteries to smartphones and wearables in early 2017, and to electric cars in 2018. But the first application will be drones, coming this November."

http://news.mit.edu/2016/lithium-metal-batteries-double-power-consumer-electronics-0817

But knowing apple, they might just make a smaller/thinner iphone with the same runtime

This would be great for the apple watch too.

If a manufacturer can get a timed exclusive deal on this tech, he will have a great advantage.

 

[chrizzz09]

Also for those who keep saying that the A10 4 core CPU is big.LITTLE, it is not:

https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/773591146681380864
https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/773591957234851840

Also quite interesting read:

http://www.xda-developers.com/a-widening-gap-the-a10-fusion-puts-a-chokehold-on-qualcomms-prospects/

 

[AbSoluTc]

If you say so.

Honestly I see the apple watch as a stigma. When people see others wearing one, there's a silent rolling of the eyes going on. I saw a colleague the other day squinting at the tiny icons on his apple watch, scrolling left and right needlessly, just to see the icons fly by, I suppose. I thought, "how silly." I wouldn't hire someone who came to an interview wearing an apple watch. "Dumb" and "follower" would be my immediate thoughts. I want people who come to get work done, not folks who need to be notified via the phone in their pockets that a new text message has come in. STUPID!

I'm getting the AW2 - my first watch from Apple as I wanted the kinks worked out from the first gen. The AW is nothing more than an extension of your phone. It allows you to quickly see an email, text, notification and the information at a glance. All without having your phone sitting out, constantly lighting up or looking at it. I look forward to getting seeing work emails and the like at a glance and then choosing which ones I feel a need to respond too. Plus the fitness tracking is great. I also go to NYC a lot and having maps right on my wrist with Apple pay is excellent! Don't have to keep my phone out with people bumping into me and risk dropping it or getting stolen.

Everyone has their own scenarios. Just because you may not see value in the AW, doesn't mean others feel the same.