We've heard many rumors about the newest iphone...screen size, LTE, dock connector, etc. But has anyone heard anything about a new processor? I remember reading (before the 4S was released) that Apple was working on a new A6 processor. What do you guys think? Will there be a new one or are they sticking with the A5X in the newest phone?
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iPhone 5 processor?
- Thread starter gardettos
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Looking at the battery (that was leaked), they'll probably settle with a 32 nm A5 chip (with 1 GB of RAM).
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Might be a noob question but...
When the One X and S3 came to the US, they had to drop their quad cores due to limitations with 4G/LTE. If the new iPhone "5" is quad-core, what would Apple do in order to make it LTE capable?
When the One X and S3 came to the US, they had to drop their quad cores due to limitations with 4G/LTE. If the new iPhone "5" is quad-core, what would Apple do in order to make it LTE capable?
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It seems like they would at least have 1 GB of Ram since the new iPad did... The iPhone 4S followed the specs of the iPad 2 with an A5 and 512 MB of RAM... so maybe they will do an A5X with 1 GB of RAM?
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I think this is pretty reasonable. We definitely should be getting 1 GB of ram...
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for how expensive apple stuff is they always put in dated hardware or sub par hardware,it gives them room to make next years model.
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I see a lot of these types of comments, and when I worked at best buy, I heard how powerful some of the Android phones we and how much better they were than my iPhone.... Yet, my iPhone has always run smoother and better than any Android phone I have ever used.
So even if your comment is true, it has never seemed to create issues, not for me at least.
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That doesn't matter. It's not like they need the A5X for 1 GB of RAM. They use three different A4 chips:
1) First generation iPad, 1 GHz, 256 MB RAM
2) iPhone 4, 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM
3) iPod touch 4th generation, 800 MHz, 256 MB RAM
As you can see, there are three different A4 chips used for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and the second generation Apple TV. I was not able to find out to which category (1, 2 or 3) the second generation Apple TV belongs.
A5X is over-kill for the next-gen iPhone: the iPhone pushes less pixels (even when they are settling with a 1136 x 640 resolution) and the current GPU in the iPhone 4S is underclocked.
I think they'll settle with an energy-efficient (32 nm) A5 chip with 1 GB of RAM. It's possible, though, that they'll go for slightly higher clockspeeds (think between 900 MHz to 1500 MHz (1.5 GHz), up from 800 MHz).
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I could see that, I was just guessing anyway. We wont know until they show it, or some more leaks/rumors come about.
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Most people look as specs as the "standard" to compare phones. This is 100% the wrong way to go about it. I would be completely fine if the next iPhone ran just as quick as my current 4S. The .05 seconds faster it would be doesn't kill my day. Sometimes people are too caught up on "specs" and don't realize most times they aren't even that important.
The best example are people who buy the top of the line computers only to use them for web browsing, email, office and streaming video. You can do all those things on a $499 laptop.
I hope Apple focuses less on specs and more on user quality. Who cares if Android phones have better specs when they have x5 more bugs and crash x5 as often as iOS.
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How can this be correct? You are saying we'll see an A5X chip with dual core graphics. It just happens to be that the A5X is practically identical to the A5, except for the graphics: the A5 chip is dual-core, the A5X is quad-core (GPU).
I think what you are trying to say is a 32 nm A5 chip with 1 GB of RAM, because a 32 nm A5X chip with only 2 GPU cores is exactly that.
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Agreed, the computer comment is ALL too true...
I use my computer to a decent degree because my of my graduate classes being online, and the engineering programs I have to use for class (most of which I have to use Bootcamp to launch Windows 7)... AutoCAD, SolidWorks, RISA-3D, etc...
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Hardware specifications are important. They are really important. Why do you think Apple is playing the hardware game. Yeah, that's correct: Apple is playing the hardware game. They act like they don't care, but they put a lot of attention to their hardware.
Let's just look at the iOS device announcements since 2010:
1) iPad (first generation)
2) iPhone 4
3) iPad 2
4) iPhone 4S
5) iPad (third generation)
I'm ignoring the iPods here, but let's not forget they also got big hardware upgrades in 2010.
1) iPad (first generation)
- Spending a lot of time on what a high-quality display the iPad had (1024 x 768, "high-end IPS technology")
- Spending a lot of time on the multi-touch technology
- Spending a lot of time on the A4 chip
-- Details about how Apple designed it
-- Details about other specifications (like clockspeed, they never did that before)
- Battery life (10 hours)
- 'Just' 13 millimetres thick
- LED backlight
2) iPhone 4
- Retina Display, highest pixel density at the time (326 ppi)
- Highest resolution display at the time (960 x 640)
- IPS technology and LED backlight
- Camera (5 megapixel)
-- Talking about lenses
-- Talking about the LED flash
-- Talking about 720p HD video recording and how magical it was
- Noise cancellation and how advanced the technology was
- Gyroscope
- A4 chip and how revolutionary it was to put this thing in a mobile device
- MicroSIM adaption
3) iPad 2
- A5 chip
- Most powerful GPU in a mobile device
- Dual core CPU, new architecture, 1 GHz
- Double RAM
- 10 hour battery life, yet much thinner
4) iPhone 4S
- A5 chip
- Most powerful GPU in a smartphone
- Dual core CPU
- Talking about the camera (8 megapixel)
-- Talking about how advanced the lenses are
-- IR filter
-- 1080p video recording
-- Video stabilisation
5) iPad (third generation)
- 2048 x 1536 display
-- Highest resolution display in a mobile devi
-- Colour accuracy near 100%
-- Talking about how advanced the pixel set-up is (to avoid interference)
- 5 megapixel camera
-- Same lenses as iPhone 4S (which are advanced)
-- 1080p with stabilisation
- LTE (which is noteworthy, since there is currently only one real market: the United States - yet they're shipping iPads with LTE everywhere).
- A5X chip
-- Most powerful GPU in a mobile device (not beaten yet)
-- 1 GB RAM
-- Talking about how advanced the technology is
And than we haven't even started about the new Macbook Pros.
I agree with you that you can't iOS hardware vs Android hardware (because we're talking here about the different operating systems), but hardware is important. And it is really important to Apple. For example, that GPU in the iPad 2: it was not necessary at all to improve the GPU, but yet they put in the best GPU available at the time.
Apple is very much about hardware. The trick is that they act like they don't care.
Remember the first generation iPad? Remember the iPhone 4? The iPhone 4 runs a thousand times smoother than the iPad, yet the GPU of the iPhone 4 is clocked lower than the GPU in the iPad. And the CPU in the iPhone 4 is also 20% slower than the one in the iPad. The problem here is the amount of RAM: 256 MB (iPad) vs 512 MB (iPhone 4).
As you can read, this extra amount of RAM has made the difference between a still reasonably good user experience (iPhone 4) and a just-about-sufficient user experience (iPad 1).
Apple is all about hardware.
Conclusion
People think they aren't playing the hardware game because they haven't shown a quad-core CPU, or a CPU clocked at 2 GHz or something like that. That's not where you must look: higher clocked CPUs won't always be better. Higher clocked CPUs use significantly more battery, but the extra power isn't always as much as expected.
Quad-core CPUs sound nice, but at this moment it's quite hard for developers to fully utilise quad-core CPUs; most developers still have problems with dual-core CPUs. So you'll only see advantages in apps from big companies (think Apple (like Pages, Keynote) and Google (Google Earth)) and in the OS itself. I believe Apple will make the move to a quad-core CPU, but I think they have other priorities right now.
What they'll do is looking for architecture improvements. We're currently using the Cortex A9 architecture. The next-gen architecture is Cortex A15. I'll tell you something: a 800 MHz Cortex A15 dual-core CPU is significantly faster than a quad-core Cortex A9 CPU clocked at 1.3 GHz.
I think Apple is better of moving to the Cortex A15 architecture first: everything will benefit from it (the OS, all apps, rendering, loading, etc.). They're also looking to improve the sleep-wake time (so if the CPU needs to calculate something, the time it takes to go from 'active' to 'stand-by'). Or like they're doing with the A5 and A5X chips: putting in really powerful GPUs - which the competition aren't able to match at this time.
Apple is all about hardware. They're just not (immediately) following the trend of higher clock speeds and adding more cores. Why? Because that's not where you must look for real improvements.
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iOS is awesome but why would you not want the best hardware in your phone?
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The retina macbook pros are a fine example of this,for $2000+ you get a majorly under powered machine,they needed to have used the 2gb card version of the graphics chip currently in it but they went with the 1gb,and it shows the retina struggles to use facebook with a fair amount of pictures at 1800p.
the card simply cant handle running simple tasks when the resolution is at its max.
I returned mine 2 days after i got it and dont regret it.
As for the iphone the 4s indeed runs smooth for a phone,but compared with androids it lacks in almost every spec, cpu is too slow its clocked at 800mhz while every droid i can think of is 1ghz and above,
It has 512mb of ram while every android i can think of has over a gig.
Apple does this so the iphone in 2013 and mac refreshes will seem like a good bump in power when in fact they were too weak to begin with. Simple marketing and people still line up like dogs to buy the products so why change?
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If by "the best hardware", you mean either clocking higher the same Cortex A9 everyone use, or just throwing in 4 cores, then it's a tradeoff since you'll lose battery life.
I've seen way more people complain about battery life of the 4S than its CPU speed. I think it would be more beneficial for the average user to simply use a smaller die of the A5 and get better battery life than clock it higher and get less.
Number are just numbers and the geeks who brag about their phone's specs is not the market Apple is going after. The "best hardware" is the one that makes your phone actually more useful, it's not just numbers.
The only way to get significantly better performance without trading off battery life would be to change architecture (Cortex A15), but it's unfortunately probably too soon to expect that.
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Well, you have the idea. But I say A5X b/c I think that's how Apple will market it. The dual core graphics will be faster than the 4S's and slower than the iPad's. So yea, it will be an A5 with improved dual core graphics but called an A5X. It will be "modified" for the phone.
That'll be how Apple explains it I'm guessing.
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Time for an A6X chip, which will also be seen in the next coming iPad. iPhone is their best product. It could be upgrading. 1GB of RAM.
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