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Apple's A6 Chip Confirmed to Carry Triple-Core Graphics

I'm not one to care too much about raw specs but I can't help but feel a little surge of geeky joy at knowing that the mobile device I picked up today is so utterly kick-ass powerful. I mean, I'm no expert but these scores look amazing to me.

This really is insanely great.

Now, is anyone still worried that Apple is losing its edge? 😉
 
Sixtafoua said:
whaaaaaaaattt doesn't the A5X have quad core graphics?
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Yes, and its die size is huge and would be hard pressed to fit into a phone.

Number of cores doesn't necessarily mean better - just like back in the day when we were saying clock frequency doesn't necessarily mean better. The designs are generally getting better at being more efficient at getting performance per clock cycle and performance per watt, which is why you see Dual-core Cortex A15's beat the pants off of Quad-core Cortex A9's. While Apple customized their chip extensively, for all intensive purposes they are on the level of being a Cortex A15 it seems with the A6.
 
Sixtafoua said:
whaaaaaaaattt doesn't the A5X have quad core graphics?
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The point is that the iPhone 5 isn't driving as many pixels as the Retina Display iPad and thus doesn't need the same level of graphics performance.

It would just be an excessive drain on energy and require a larger die size. The latter results in higher costs and more constraints on size.

It would be like dropping in a Formula One engine into a Honda Fit.
 
applefan289 said:
How are current game consoles stacking up to these graphics?
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If we look at just one measure, GFLops, the PowerVR SGX 543 MP3 clocked at 266MHz should (in theory) perform 25.5 GFlops. (there are 3 cores x 4 SIMD units per core x 4 MADDs per clock x 2 flops per MADD x 266 Mhz).

XBox 360 GPU can do about 96 Gflops (there are 48 shading units x 4 floating point operations per cycle x 500 MHz)

So by that measure you could see about 1/4th the graphics performance of an XBox 360.
 
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striker33 said:
They are still superior by quite some distance.

It'll still be a couple of years before you get Uncharted 3 levels of graphical power on iDevices.

Not that graphics matter.
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I think the iPhone is closer than that....

Already EA is saying the iPhone is reaching "console quality graphics" (during the Real Racing 3 demo).

Certainly some games make better use of a powerful graphics processor than others but Apple is getting close.

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holmesf said:
If we look at just one measure, GFLops, the PowerVR SGX 543 MP3 clocked at 266MHz should (in theory) perform 25.5 GFlops. (there are 3 cores x 4 SIMD units per core x 4 MADDs per clock per SIMD x 2 flops per MADD x 266 Mhz).

XBox and PS3 GPUs are somewhere around 240 GFlops.
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Hmm very interesting, thanks for the post! I was curious about this myself seeing as the EA rep made the comment that Real Racing 3 had been developed to console-quality graphics and that the iP5 showed those graphics.
 
I can't see Apple making a bluetooth controller or a couple, for the different devices just because they don't really make accessories, but I wish someone would make one... One in which you can slide an iPhone/iPod into, an iPad mini, and possibly a standalone for the iPad. They NEED a great controller with analog sticks, etc. and then we need developers to start porting/developing good, more complex games to them. That is what I'm waiting for, just think how much they would destroy mobile gaming then.. I mean they already do, just based on user base of iOS devices, but when they have a great controller and developers start bringing the good games to these devices, they will really be amazing.
 
o0jelly0o said:
I can't see Apple making a bluetooth controller or a couple, for the different devices just because they don't really make accessories, but I wish someone would make one... One in which you can slide an iPhone/iPod into, an iPad mini, and possibly a standalone for the iPad. They NEED a great controller with analog sticks, etc. and then we need developers to start porting/developing good, more complex games to them. That is what I'm waiting for, just think how much they would destroy mobile gaming then.. I mean they already do, just based on user base of iOS devices, but when they have a great controller and developers start bringing the good games to these devices, they will really be amazing.
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Such a controller does exist (though with the longer iPhone 5 is now obsolete) - can't remember the name but as there weren't a ton of games that supported input from analog sticks I don't know how popular it was.

It's a lot like the electric car dilemma. Companies won't produce electric cars because there aren't enough charging stations. Conversely they won't build more electric charging stations because there aren't enough electric cars to warrant it.
 
striker33 said:
They are still superior by quite some distance.

It'll still be a couple of years before you get Uncharted 3 levels of graphical power on iDevices.

Not that graphics matter.
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Indeed, fiddly, wonky, broken touchscreen controls are what matter.
 
zbarvian said:
This thing has a better GPU than the iPad 3? What?!
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Its not necessarily a better gpu, i doubt that it is, but the new ipad has to push 4x as many pixels as the iphone. In tests like these yes it performs better than the new ipad.
 
holmesf said:
Yes, but considering the Samsung Galaxy S3 uses an ARM Mali based GPU and the iPhone 5 uses a PowerVR SGX 543 based GPU the number of cores cannot be directly compared -- they are different architectures.

The Samsung Galaxy S3 (with its 4 core GPU) barely beat the iPhone 4S (with its dual core GPU) in OpenGL ES performance: it will lose to the iPhone 5.
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You can't say it wont lose. It has already lost. I want to see all those android fanboys who claim they're "power users" swallow this.
 
nick_elt said:
Its not necessarily a better gpu, i doubt that it is, but the new ipad has to push 4x as many pixels as the iphone. In tests like these yes it performs better than the new ipad.
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Offscreen tests should remove the screen difference. BUT, the CPU portion of the chip has to do work as well in these benchmarks, so that's probably what pushes the iPhone 5 over the 3rd gen iPad (and maybe the GPU has a higher clock in the iPhone 5).
 
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