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AnandTech Calls A12 Bionic in iPhone XS 'Just Margins Off' Best Desktop CPUs in New Review
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- Display driver IC
- Out-cell touch layer
There's more to the display power consumption than just the type of panel.
Working fine for me in Mojave - who says it isn’t?
Oh, but it doesn't. Every OLED smartphone (that I'm aware of) uses a pentile display so there are approximate five sub pixels for every two (or three) actual pixels. That's the big reason Apple HAD to go 3x. So yeah, in RAM there's more pixels but with an black screen would it idle at 3X the power? Seems off.
That has nothing to do with panel power consumption.
People forget about the OLED display driver and the touch layer. Those are active components that draw power regardless of the state of the display panel.
Tap to Wake requires power even on a blank screen.
Come on. You know iOS already has multitasking. What's needed for users is a suitable interface, which doesn't exist on a phone-sized display. What do you propose?
^This ^
However, there are some benchmarks from the A11: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-benchmarks-fastest-phone,review-4676.html
Frankly, with those numbers it's not a question if but rather when OSX will transition from x86. I think the only big deal right now might be how to preserve backward compatibility. The expensive option would be adding in a cheap x86 CPU as co processor, but if Apple manages to hardware accelerate the x86 emulation that might be a good way. Microsoft tried that too, but in software called x86 on ARM, which works (with limitations) but is rather slow. But even software emulation may still be enough for some low performance apps.
I wish we knew more about how the Ax chips were designed. Back in the old PowerPC/Intel wars, we'd get detailed reports about how architecture changes improved performance in different ways-- now it's just a black box to benchmark.
I'm sure there's a ton of innovation happening to achieve these levels of performance/efficiency, but somehow it's less exciting without being able to see behind the curtain.
I'm sure there's a ton of innovation happening to achieve these levels of performance/efficiency, but somehow it's less exciting without being able to see behind the curtain.
No, it doesn't. And it can't because it would need at least double the RAM.
You can have exactly 2 Apps running in foreground, everything in the background is halted -and what you see is only a screenshot until the App fully loads and refreshes.
That certainly would be a way to get the transition off to a flying start
I've no doubt they could ship something truly mind blowing given 10s of watts rather than >10!
Simply not true. iPads have had true multitasking in split view for years with the same amount of RAM as these phones.
The reason these “phones” are $1000+ Stop complaining about the price it’s a high end computer in hand, don’t like it. Pick yourself up a Walmart senior citizen flip phone for $59 bucks.
New Mac Pros and Mac Minis are coming. I think the iMac Pro was made to hold people over. There is no reason they shouldn't have been able to upgrade the Mac Pro and Mac Mini by now unless they were overhauling the architecture. Then there is the marzipan convergence in 2019 to make it easy to bring UIKit to macOS. Why both in 2019? Everyone just wants to focus on the performance of this one chip. But we may be looking at this all wrong. What if this A12 beast is more equivalent to a wimpy i3 and Apple has a version for the Mac Pro that's more equivalent to an i9 or Threadripper, except even more powerful? Think about what you could do with these kind of TDPs on desktop. Holy balls!That certainly would be a way to get the transition off to a flying start
AnandTech, known for in-depth reviews of new Apple products, today published a lengthy review of the iPhone XS and XS Max, Apple's newest flagship iPhones.
AnandTech's review takes a deep dive into the A12 chip in the two smartphones, which is the first commercially available 7nm silicon.
According to AnandTech, the A12 chip features a major revamp of the neural accelerator, a redesigned system cache that features the "biggest change since its introduction in the A7," significant changes to the CPU core, and memory compression for the GPU, all of which has led to impressive performance improvements.
Image of A12 SoC via TechInsights with labeling by AnandTech
Based on SPECint2006 benchmarking, the A12 performed an average of 24 percent better than the A11 in the previous-generation devices. When it comes to power efficiency, the A12 improved by 12 percent, but with memory heavy workloads, power consumption was up, for an average power usage of ~3.36W on the A11 to 3.64W on the A12.
SPECfp benchmarking saw average performance gains of 28 percent, and again, workloads with major improvements also resulted in increased power consumption.
AnandTech's benchmarking tests suggest that the A12's Vortex cores and architectural improvements offer a "much higher performance advantage than Apple's marketing materials promote." Apple's A12 beat the best Android SoCs both in performance and power efficiency.
AnandTech says that it's "quite astonishing" how close the A12 and the previous-generation A11 are to desktop CPUs, with "very small margins until Apple's mobile SoCs outperform the fastest desktop CPUs in terms of ST performance."
As part of the review, AnandTech also offered a look at how Apple has improved performance in older devices by tweaking scaling performance. The A9 in the iPhone 6s, for example, took 435ms for the CPU to reach maximum frequency, but that time was cut to 80ms in iOS 12 for a "great boost to performance in shorter interactive workloads."
Similar improvements were made to the A10 (going from a 400ms ramp up time to 210ms), but there was little change to the A11.
All in all, AnandTech said the iPhone XS and XS Max are a "big shift" for Apple's lineup with a "beast of an SoC" that's offering performance improvements of up to 40 percent.The full iPhone XS and XS Max review from AnandTech is well worth checking out for those who would like to get a deeper technical look at the components inside the two new devices. It goes into much greater detail on the CPU and GPU in the iPhone XS and XS Max, while also taking a look at the camera, battery, display, and other components.
Article Link: AnandTech Calls A12 Bionic in iPhone XS 'Just Margins Off' Best Desktop CPUs in New Review
Wwdc next year would be the perfect time for them to release a mac pro with both a beefy ass intel x86 cpu and an a12 that would act as a coprocessor and development environment for mac os marzipan and native arm apps of the future
In Geekbench 4, it scores ~4790 in single-core and ~11000 in multi-core (using six cores).
For comparison, the 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro's i7-8750H does 4635 in single-core, and the 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro's i7-6700HQ did ~11700 in multi-core (using four cores).
As much as these benchmarks seem impressive and undoubtably the A12 is... Has anyone ever used an iOS app that is "jaw dropping" or requires the need of such CPU performance?
It seems that now, the limitation to the iPhone & iPad isn't hardware, it's software.
It seems that now, the limitation to the iPhone & iPad isn't hardware, it's software.
I mean… my 2002 iBook ran OS X with 128 MB RAM, and it sure as hell did multitask.
As does an iPhone. It has literally dozens of processes running at any given time.
Yes, this is true, but it's largely a deliberate design decision in the UI, not a hardware limitation.
Now, obviously multiple simultaneous GUI apps will require more resources, but it won't require "double the RAM".
No. You don't put two parallel System-on-chips in a device.
More likely would be an A12X with more high power and GPU cores.
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Err, what?
Performance wise yes!
Practically: No. At least not yet.
While the A11 already achieved >10k in geekbench, an i5 7th gen scores less than 10k.
However, these CPUs are optimized for phones and tables. Not sure how much changes will be necessary to add 32GB of RAM, PCIe, SATA, USB,... Anyway, ARM CPUs are getting faster a lot quicker than intels, not just Apples Axx.
If you quote me, please do it right. I literally wrote below that statement:
You can have exactly 2 Apps running in foreground, everything in the background is halted -and what you see is only a screenshot until the App fully loads and refreshes.
iOS can't minimize Apps properly. I have an iPad Mini 4 and running split screen easily pushes the iPad to its limits. Granted, the Mini only has 2G RAM, the XS already 4, so will do the job better, but even 4 likely isn't enough. There's a reason Safari on iOS unloads unused tabs.
For now it'd be great if the XS Max would finally get landscape mode and some other tablet style features... The strongest hardware is useless if it's crippled by the software.
It always amuses me how much these macro shots of CPUs look like floor plans.
As nice as the A12 is, it's missing a decorative peice that pulls the whole thing together, like a fountain.
As nice as the A12 is, it's missing a decorative peice that pulls the whole thing together, like a fountain.
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