Early Looks Inside Apple Watch's S1 Chip Confirm 512 MB RAM, Unexpected Suppliers

[ZCT]

Nice break down. Watch is a great device, but absolutely redundant! Not interested in buying one.

You may not want one, but you don't get to claim it is 'absolutely redundant.' Such a charge would imply that no one could possibly find any use for one.

My wife already has hers and I saw her Apple Pay twice with it. As a woman she would normally have to fish in her purse for her phone, unlock it, find the app, do Apple Pay.

She just double tapped the button, held her wrist by the scanner and boom, done.

That's not redundant, that was actual functionality, something she used it for.

She's liking the health stuff which you can't do with just the watch alone, I think I'm going to like that too. In fact her work place has some sponsored walk thing going on next week based on steps. If she didn't have the Apple Watch she'd have had to buy or borrow some pedometer of some kind to participate.

So great that YOU don't want one, but it is inaccurate to claim it is redundant in general.

For me I travel a lot so I'm going to be looking forward to time zone syncs, boarding passes, flight delay information, hotel check ins, weather and other travel related applications.

I've honestly never seen a product launch where so many people take to the Internet to bash something, often times before ever using one, seeing one, and many people were doing this even before reviews.

You don't want it, don't buy it, I'm not sure it needs any further comment.

I don't seek out a Ducati forum to let them know I'm not into bikes. I don't troll WWF forums to tell them wrestling is silly. I don't go on Amazon.com and post on products I'm not going to buy, explaining why.

Just seems odd.

 

[patent10021]

So the watch has 1/2 of what the iP6/Plus has? Ridonkulous. This just proves how cheap they were on the RAM for the iP6. iPhone 6s is obviously going to have 2GB.

 

[NT1440]

So the watch has 1/2 of what the iP6/Plus has? Ridonkulous. This just proves how cheap they were on the RAM for the iP6. iPhone 6s is obviously going to have 2GB.

The two have nothing to do with each other....

Unless of course you're saying its "ridiculous" that a WATCH in 2015 has the same power as a full fledged desktop (from a specs standpoint) from the early 2000's...that is quite a ridiculous feat of modern technological engineering.

 

[redman042]

That's been nothing but a pipe dream since the first person dreamt it up. To squeeze the amount of hardware in an apple watch down into that size of package requires far more precision (not to mention judicious use of adhesives) than your run of the mill "genius" bar employee is capable of.

Just getting into the casing requires special equipment, since there aren't any screw holes in the casing. From the moment we knew it would be a screwless design it meant it's basically not serviceable, at all.

Well we didn't know just how hard it would be until iFixit got one and opened it. The fact that the S1 was so modular gave some credence to the theory. But it turns out the internals are just as packed and glued in as an iPhone. But it's hard to understand why someone would spend $1k for the top-end SS model or $10-17k for the gold if it was going to become obsolete in a few years. The answer could be that the S1 has LOTS of headroom to handle big upgrades to the OS over the years. It appears that way.

 

[macduke]

But we keep hearing that 512MB is more than adequate and Apple consumers should stop whining.

If the iPhone 6S gets 2GB of RAM and iOS 9 is optimized like the rumors suggest, that's going to be one hell of a combination! Maybe we'll even see RAM compression from OS X ported over to iOS? One can dream.

 

[Tech198]

Why is a separate signal booster chip needed ?.. Can't the power be done in a single controller?

 

[kdarling]

Maybe re-reading the quote would help. Nowhere in the quote is he saying what you think he is. Basically, all he said was the S1 has the look of a component with cellular connectivity. The look, as in similar.

True, it doesn't look that much different from say, a Kickstarter engineered smartwatch project that actually did have cellular capability (the Omate board below).



All smartwatch circuit boards look pretty much the same these days.

... But it's hard to understand why someone would spend $1k for the top-end SS model or $10-17k for the gold if it was going to become obsolete in a few years. The answer could be that the S1 has LOTS of headroom to handle big upgrades to the OS over the years. It appears that way.

Yes, they packed in a lot of stuff for the first model (NFC, WiFi) which helps make it more future proof.

But there's always going to be better hardware possible in a next model.

Perhaps standalone GPS like the Sony Smartwatch 3, for example, which runners seem to love. Or yes, maybe cellular capability some year. A compass would be nice, too.

 

[t0mat0]

Doing a quick comparison to the tear down of the iPhone with BCM4334 -
If the BCM43342 is the same chip, it looks smaller, so on smaller nm fab?

Anyone think SIP might come more to iPhone, iPad soon?
Curious to see the S1 vs Moto 360, TrueSmart at scale - are they similar sizes?

 

[69Mustang]

True, it doesn't look that much different from say, a Kickstarter engineered smartwatch project that actually did have cellular capability (the Omate board below).

View attachment 548033

All smartwatch circuit boards look pretty much the same these days.

All of them do look fairly similar. So does this mean I can dip the other two in resin, call them "chips", and give them names? If so, I'm calling the Omate board the Maximus chip. And the Moto360 board? Yeah, he'll be the Skippy chip. Much better than S1 chip. Sounds so made up.

 

[redman042]

Yeah.....but!!!

I think you are about to say goodbye to 1gb of Ram on iPhone this year, while I am almost certain you will be stuck with 512mb of ram on the apple watch for quite good few years.

Which is fine, because it's a watch. There is probably no point in the future where we will be editing photos and videos or browsing the web on a watch, like we do on the phone.

 

[mrcobra92]

Where is the secure element for Apple Pay?

 

[mi7chy]

Here we go again. Yes, there is reasonable justification that has nothing to do with money and comes in the form of battery life.

Anyone making that claim has no clue what he's talking and just making things up to apologize. The Galaxy Note II from 2012 has 2GB DRAM and has six day standby time while keeping browser tabs and apps in memory without reloading. And, that's only LP-DDR2 whereas 2015 Galaxy S6 ships with even more power efficient LP-DDR4. There's no reason a flagship in 2014/2015 has only 1GB DRAM. Apple is so profitable they can afford to spend an additional $3 or so to add another gig to improve the experience.

 

[Keirasplace]

Didn't the A5 have 512MB of RAM? That lends credence to the idea that this is a shrunken down A5. If they can move this to a 14nm process, they might be able to squeeze out more battery life, but the processor itself is smaller than I thought, so it doesn't leave much more room for a battery.

----------



iPhone 4S/iPad 2/iPad Mini

I doubt that its a A5, because it is probably 64 bit; why on earth create a brand new 32bit chip when very soon you'll move everything to 64 bit. My feeling it that this is a underclocked one core A7 variants.

 

[MacBH928]

wow...
My top of the line iMac which I paid for $2000 in 2002 came with 265mb ram.

 

[Marx55]

3D flash storage (8 GB)?

 

[doctor-don]

512 RAM is a lot for a watch! I think the 1st version of the watch is a lot more capable than the first iPad. That means it will be able to run independent apps once Apple open that out later this year!! The hardware is ready, just waiting for watch OS to catch up!

But does it come with a magnifier?

That ought to be enough for anyone.

Enough? Then the Macintosh Classic should have been the end of the progression for personal computers.

----------

Yes, they packed in a lot of stuff for the first model (NFC, WiFi) which helps make it more future proof.

But there's always going to be better hardware possible in a next model.

Perhaps standalone GPS like the Sony Smartwatch 3, for example, which runners seem to love. Or yes, maybe cellular capability some year. A compass would be nice, too.

The 'next' model has already been specified - as well as the model after that and the model after that. Adding one hardware item / improvement at a time / version means more revenue.

 

[mi7chy]

It's useless for me if it doesn't have built in cellular call and data capability to operate in stand-alone mode without being tethered to phone. In stand-alone mode 512MB is deficient since it needs to somewhat mirror the phone's capabilities such as being able to run Hangouts Dialer for making calls over data, Hangouts for messaging and SMS, navigation, other apps, etc. simultaneously so I'd say a minimum of 1GB.

 

[Keirasplace]

It's useless for me if it doesn't have built in cellular call and data capability to operate in stand-alone mode without being tethered to phone. In stand-alone mode 512MB is deficient since it needs to somewhat mirror the phone's capabilities such as being able to run Hangouts Dialer for making calls over data, Hangouts for messaging and SMS, navigation, other apps, etc. simultaneously so I'd say a minimum of 1GB.

Man, you have no clue about programming and systems capacity, if you think any of these need 1GB.

I developed servers serving 5000 calls an hour with 64 digital lines going in and each running their own voice script, voice prompt, recording, text to speach, and being able to create conferences, transfers, etc, with 128MB of ram. All of this in 1998 on Unix machines running SCO Unix.

If it takes 1GB to run a low resource app like theirs, the programmers might as well retire, because they're incompetent.

I still have a old mid range Athlon machine with Windows XP from 2004 with 256 MB which can open 15 tabs in firefox, run photoshop and Visual studio and loads of other crap.

The biggest memory users on the Iphone are the web browser, AA like games and video editing apps, none of those will ever run directly on the watch; because it would be stupid to do so. The screen is smaller than the phone, which means it will use less GPU and memory no matter what it does.

As for standalone cell, well buy that big ass Samsung watch that is 110% bigger (and has otherwise less capacities) and you'll get what you want.

 

[kepler20b]

Apple watch has 512mb ram and the iphone has 1gb?

awful

 

[packageengr]

ELPIDA is now Micron. Get your facts straight

..

 

[mi7chy]

Can the Apple Watch emulate a Macintosh II?

https://youtu.be/u6Y3aTYe9dw