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HomePod A8 vs. S7 chip in new Homepod
- Thread starter w4rm
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"The S6, S7, and S8 are based on Apple's A13 Bionic chip from the iPhone 11 lineup and are manufactured using TSMC's 7nm process. Apple transitioned to TSMC's 5nm process starting with the A14 Bionic chip, and the iPhone 14 Pro's A16 Bionic is the first Apple chip to be fabricated with a 4nm process."
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/09/12/apple-watch-s8-chip-features-same-cpu-as-s6-and-s7/
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/09/12/apple-watch-s8-chip-features-same-cpu-as-s6-and-s7/
It should be much better. But I do have my reservations about the sound quality, I have a feeling Apple may have cheapened out in that department.
Hopefully no more, one minute, on it lol
The main thing is that it should run cooler, so hopefully HomePods stop baking themselves to death.
But S8 consists only of the two efficiency cores of A13.
Oh interesting. I never knew it was minus the performance cores but that makes perfect sense considering the tiny battery.
Do you need the performance cores for audio playback? Most of the time with your phone you are only using the efficiency cores until you do gaming or some photo editing perhaps.
I don’t think the chip would ever be the bottleneck for music performance. Much slower chips have been decoding music codecs for years. And the heat issues I would suspect were related to the amplifier section of the original HomePod.
I think the chip is more likely to come into play with voice recognition and the like. Though I suspect its choice is probably more a matter of what’s easiest/cheapest to produce at the moment.
I think the chip is more likely to come into play with voice recognition and the like. Though I suspect its choice is probably more a matter of what’s easiest/cheapest to produce at the moment.
If my experiences having both a pair of HomePod OGs (A8) and HomePod minis (S5) are any indication, S7 on the 2nd generation HomePods should provide much more responsive handling of Siri requests.
S7 also has enough muscle to handle tasks like sound recognition and other future unannounced enhancements (on-device Siri would be my guess).
S7 also has enough muscle to handle tasks like sound recognition and other future unannounced enhancements (on-device Siri would be my guess).
Of course audio playback doesn’t need power but especially Siri processing needs powerful cores. I am not sure S7 is more powerful than a whole A8 chip.
It's impossible to grasp how the Apple A8 SoC and the Apple S7 SIP compare. There is no worthwhile benchmarking tool on the Apple Watch, so we can't get any Apples to Apples comparison between the two. Apple doesn't specify much regarding the Apple S-series SIPs either, so it becomes pure guesswork. All we really know is that the Apple S6 and S7 are the same chip, and they feature two cores with the same architecture as the efficiency cores of the Apple A13 SoC. This doesn't really tell us much either, as there is no way to benchmark only the efficiency cores on the Apple A13 / iPhone 11 so we have no benchmark on how the efficiency cores of the A13 perform. The S7 only has two of these efficiency cores, while the A13 has four. We have no information on the transistor counts, and we don't really know what the S7 package contains. Does it features a neural engine like the A13 or not? How is the memory controller compared to the A13? We have to remember that the Apple S-series SIPs are designed with ultra-low-level power consumption in mind. It's a different class of CPU compared to the Apple A-series.
I would think the Apple A8 SoC is better performing overall. But pure processing power isn't all that important and meaningful for the HomePod. I think the Apple S7 contains some encoders and capabilities the A8 lacks that make for some significant improvements for Siri due to its ability to do additional hardware acceleration. This is most likely more important than raw computing power for a device such as the HomePod. But with so few specifics on the Apple S7 SIP it's impossible to tell.
I would think the Apple A8 SoC is better performing overall. But pure processing power isn't all that important and meaningful for the HomePod. I think the Apple S7 contains some encoders and capabilities the A8 lacks that make for some significant improvements for Siri due to its ability to do additional hardware acceleration. This is most likely more important than raw computing power for a device such as the HomePod. But with so few specifics on the Apple S7 SIP it's impossible to tell.
While the limited benchmark (mostly browser tests) for Apple Watch Series 7 might suggest significantly slower performance to A8 (iPhone 6), due to vastly different thermal and energy headrooms on the HomePod, S7 will probably operate closer to the full 1.8 GHz clock speed, vs 1.4 GHz on A8.
Just look at how much faster HomePod mini is to HomePod OG. The difference is a night and day.
And as you indicated, S7's more modern instructions allow for features like Sound Recognition.