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iPhone 5 A6 Processor - Neither Cortex A9 nor A15
- Thread starter KPOM
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Not this year because too many new iPad owners would whine - but I certainly expect to see an A6X with a graphics bump to drive the retina 16:9 screen on the new "new" iPad I will buy next spring/early summer. I'm kind of geeking out just thinking about what a beast that thing will be, knowing what we do about what is dropping this Friday.
Finally. Apple is going to harvest fruit after about 5 years. Apple spent gogillian dollars to purchase PA Semi on 2008 & Intrinsity on 2010. 
You know i have no idea what this news means.
The a15 architecture is ment to be a piece of heaven, a piece from the future.
Ive seen the comparisions of a15 vs a9.
So is this apple design better? Its based of a old design?(armv7 sounds old)
If its better....then why? Some newbie friendly explanation please.
The a15 architecture is ment to be a piece of heaven, a piece from the future.
Ive seen the comparisions of a15 vs a9.
So is this apple design better? Its based of a old design?(armv7 sounds old)
If its better....then why? Some newbie friendly explanation please.
We don't know, the Borg. But it will be real geeky fun finding out the answers to those questions. I would also like to see it compared with a krait, which is also custom SOC from qualcomm which sounds similar. And then there is real world performance. Given the 4S still largely holds its own after a year, this should be very interesting.
No doubt there will be trade offs, with some aspects superior, and others not.
Meanwhile, the little people with normal lives will never know.
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Wow, I've never seen an article go out of its way to praise Apple for being behind in tech. No A15? Instead we get a tweak of what sounds like old arm technology, ARMv7. Isn't that older than A9? There's a reason so many OEM licenses the Arm architecture. They know what they're doing. But apparently Apple thinks it knows better.
what the
The A9 is an ARMv7 processor
So is the A15.
Every iPhone since the 3GS has used an ARMv7 processor.
Apple have licensed ARM's architecture to do this tweaking, if they hadn't, it wouldn't be ARMv7 and then no current apps would work on it. And of course Apple thinks they know better, they're Apple. (And so far it doesn't seem to be a bad thing at all)
So cool it and stop pretending to be offended by a piece of plastic and silicon you will never even see, nor would have known anything about had it not been for this article.
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Yes guys, Apple does have engineers and they don't just design a pretty case for off the shelf hardware.
This is great and certainly an indication that the 'P.A. Semi' and 'Intrinsity' aquisitions are starting to pay off. The A6's DOUBLING of CPU and graphics performance while retaining good battery life - in one generation - is a pretty significant achievement. If you have any doubts about that, watch Anandtech's video of 'iPhone 5 Hands On'; it's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ynBpKpjq5Oo#! Yes, they are obviously also running 4G/LTE, but still amazing!
Being able to completely customize those ARM processors they use in their iOS devices, giving them a technological 'edge' over the competition, is a huge advantage for APPLE in the long run. And who knows, perhaps all this experience and know-how will one day lead to an all in-house chip solution, making their iDevices and products in general even more attractive. And that can only lead to more competition in the marketplace, which is usually good for the consumer.
I read engadget and a bunch of other tech site too. So I would have found out about it even without macrumors. Also check them out yourself as they're not too Apple bias. They don't try make Apple seem so amazing for going the middle road by forgoing A15.
So then the article praised Apple for doing nothing new at all because they're all armv7?
edit: And can we all agree out of armv7, the A15 is top of the line? Apple is forgoing the A15, and implementing their own design which will likely be better than A9, but worst than A15. So yeah, behind in tech.
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Try reading the article before posting. You're like giving a review for a movie before watching it. Don't post before you read the article. Please do us and yourself a favor. Stop trolling.
The Cortex A15 was not originally designed for smartphones at all, but for servers.
original design goal for ARM's Cortex A15 was servers, and it's only through big.LITTLE (or other clever techniques) that the A15 would be suitable for smartphones. Given Apple's intense focus on power consumption, skipping the A15 would make sense but performance still had to improve.
They designed their own because they felt that the A15 didn't meet their performance and power goals. Used too much power, and was not powerful enough at lower frequencies. They basically improved on the design. So it is likely much more advanced than the A15, or they would not have designed it in the first place.
Apple is forgoing the A15, and implementing their own design which will likely be better than A9, but worst than A15. So yeah, behind in tech.
Why would it be worse than A15? When there aren't any benchmarks for it. Try reading the article. Stop posting before you do.
I don't know what you consider hard, but designing your own custom architecture is much harder than just making a SOC based on a design, ala cortex A15, or A9. They improved upon the design. They will be one step ahead of the pack because of the custom design. Same as Qualcomm is one step ahead with the S4 over the Cortex A9 offerings.
So yes, for not being a chip company like Qualcomm, Samsung, Intel, designing your own architecture is a feat in itself.
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Exactly. I also think that it's great, and I give credit to Anandtech for some great reporting, but I don't see why everyone is so surprised. Apple swallowed up two entire semiconductor design companies (the ones mentioned above) in 2008 and 2010 both of which had CPU design groups doing very interesting work with CPU power efficiency (e.g. Intrintity's Fast14 technology: http://www.iqmagazineonline.com/IQ/IQ23/pdfs/IQ23_pgs18-19.pdf). Clearly this has now got to the point of some of these teams' ideas, designs and intellectual property getting into silicon that Apple is about to ship.
And to those people saying this is still based on ARMv7 and so is not innovation, that's about as dumb as saying that there is no innovation in a formula one car vs a family saloon because both are based on a chassis with four wheels, a steering wheel and brakes or that Einstein was as dumb as <pick the dumbest person you know> because both have two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth. As stated in earlier posts, ARMv7 is the instruction set and does not define how it's implemented (i.e. to link back to the two analogies just given, it doesn't define the engine in the car, or the brainpower of the person).
- Julian
Nope.
That honor goes to IBM's Power 7+ and ZNext series processors, or maybe Fujitsu's Sparc64, for a slightly different power envelopes (for buildings with their own power substations and cooling towers).
The A15 is also a trade-off targeted at servers, so may not be optimal for thin mobile devices. To get better battery life for pure mobile, Apple might have an improved trade-off.
Awaiting some new, perhaps very competitive, MIPs/mW numbers.
Seriously, anyone who claims Apple has stopped innovating ought to read this first.
Innovation goes beyond skin deep. Simply slapping a larger screen and changing the design of the casing is extremely superficial; any company can do that. The harder thing is to spend all that money and resources on 'under the hood' improvements that serve an important purpose, even if they don't receive any screen time.
I like that Apple is actually investing all this resources into ensuring that its hardware and software continue to play well together, rather than simply throwing in better specs and whatever tech buzzword is the flavour of the month. They have taken great pains to redesign the screen to make it thinner and less power-intensive, made the processor smaller and more power-efficien and actually improved the durability of the casing, all while making it lighter.
When you consider that the iphone5 is taller yet thinner, this means the internal volume isn't any different (or actually smaller), yet Apple has managed to cram all these improvements inside, without being suckered into using a larger shell instead.
If this isn't innovation, I don't know what is.
Specs bump is not equivalent to innovation.
Only innovation I see in iphone5 is thinner display screen...
twixt is seriously looking at a galaxy note 2???
I would be embarrassed to have that thing as a phone.
I would be embarrassed to have that thing as a phone.
Couldn't care less about Benchmark. Real world usage is only what matters and from what we saw in the video it's super fast already. The question is will the battery life be better? If it is then this is one hell of a package.
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LOL. For real? Typical Android user. (Read: not so bright.)
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LOL. For real? Typical Android user. (Read: not so bright.)
Direct comparisons might not work or even make sense in this case.
The A6 was most likely built from the ground up for the best performance in the iPhone 5.
So let's say in theory the Krait is faster for android, but would run like crap in iPhone 5, with bad battery life and user experience than the A6 is still the better solution.
Game console CPU's are a good example because on paper their specs are usually way behind PC's but because they designed from the ground up for specific performance in that device than that argument becomes irrelevant.