Possible Benchmark for A12 Processor From 2018 iPhone Surfaces Featuring 10% Faster Speeds, 4GB RAM

[Scottsoapbox]

A 10% speed bump is GOOD NEWS!

The new process is giving an estimated 30% efficiency boost that can go towards speed or battery life.

I'd love a new iPhone with 10% more speed and 20% longer battery life.

 

[reallynotnick]

I think focusing on GPU power is smart for this generation, the CPU got a pretty big bump last gen but the GPU didn't get that big of an improvement. Also tossing in a little extra RAM is nice too.

 

[alpi123]

Hey! I just edited a screenshot from my iPhone X GeekBench. Increase my Twitter presence by reposting this everywhere.

Seriously, why would Apple make a new CPU for 10% gain? Plain ridiculous.

MacRumors must think we are all fools...

The benchmark is literally visible on the site lol, it's not a manipulated screenshot.

 

[SteveNoJobs]

Why just can't apple adopt OLED screens to all their phones? it's 2018 cmon, and we still see cheap LCD screens on 700$+ smartphones, even cheap phones from china come with OLED. My wife's 8 plus screen looks like sh*t compared to my ipX.

 

[gnomeisland]

Let's not overlook the 30% increase in GPU. If I'm not mistakes the A11 was Apple's first entirely in-house GPU and it wasn't a big improvement over the A10(x). Looks like the reverse may be true here—Apple's GPU is finally getting competitive with their CPU prowess.

Previous rumors have also said that Apple is developing the A12X at the same time. It could be that the 'X' variation is more CPU heavy (more core, higher clock) since A11 powered phones are still largely untapped/uncontested leaders in CPU speed.

 

[Falhófnir]

Why just can't apple adopt OLED screens to all their phones? it's 2018 cmon, and we still see cheap LCD screens on 700$+ smartphones, even cheap phones from china come with OLED. My wife's 8 plus screen looks like sh*t compared to my ipX.

Really? I still think the iPhone plus LCDs are just about the best I have seen including the Xs oled - the pentile subpixel matrix gives the X an odd grainy appearance if you know what you’re looking at. There’s also the PWM screen dimming that gives a lot of people headaches (touch wood I seem to be ok on that one but doesn’t help those who suffer from it).

 

[cobracnvt]

Why just can't apple adopt OLED screens to all their phones? it's 2018 cmon, and we still see cheap LCD screens on 700$+ smartphones, even cheap phones from china come with OLED. My wife's 8 plus screen looks like sh*t compared to my ipX.

I had an OLED screen on a Samsung phone and it really faded after a couple of years. I haven't noticed the same fading on the LCD screens.

 

[EdT]

Remember when they said the 6 Plus had enough memory at 1Gb?

Yes. I also remember when Microsoft’s Bill Gates allegedly said that 64k was enough memory for anyone, sometime around 1985. He now denies it but it was quoted by a number of reputable sources at the time.

Times change and so do requirements.

 

[chrmjenkins]

What’s odd about this result is the giant L1 Instruction and data caches. Those are 4x A11 Bionic and 4x even modern desktop CPUs.

 

[apolloa]

RAM uses battery because it needs to be refreshed every few ms. More ram = more power usage = less battery life. I suppose iOS could disable unused RAM on the fly, but I'm not sure they've optimized to that level.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_refres
[doublepost=1530557464][/doublepost]

Apparently the new OS is substantially spiffier, performance wise, than the last couple. We'll see.

Yeah but iOS 13 will probably slow it down again.. I hate being negative on this but history has kinda shown it as true. At least 4GB RAM would be an improvement.

 

[gkarris]

A12X's in the new Macs.

You heard it here first...

You're welcome...

 

[thekeyring]

A 10% speed bump is a bit disappointing honestly.

But I’m here for 4gb of ram

It makes me wonder what the new features will be. Almost nothing has leaked (other than the new sizes).

 

[theheadguy]

10% of 10,000 is 1,000
20% of 2,000 is 400
In absolute terms this is still 2.5 times the jump of the A7 to A8...

It's ironic that you move away from a % only to return to it in the same sentence when comparing it to the jump from the A7 to A8. It's a poor comparison that isn't used in the industry for a reason.

 

[MRrainer]

It's closing in on my 2012 2.3GHz i7 MacMini. That's really crazy.

 

[kiranmk2]

I don't hold too much faith in these results. The change down to 7 nm will give a lot of headroom for increased speed, so I believe we'll see bigger CPU gains than 10%. GPU increase is to be expected given the poor showing (reletively) in the A11 with the first non-PowerVR chip.

The issue with the A8 was that they couldn't get the FinFET process working which would have given A9-levels of perforance. Without that process improvement Apple could only increase the speed by upping the clock rate - which had limited gains given the thermal and power increase.

 

[Omega Mac]

It’d probably be the A11X if they were to use an “off the shelf” part... more likely still is a custom Mac part!

Yep with iPP3 on the horizon, very possibly that's what this chip is.

 

[78Bandit]

Why just can't apple adopt OLED screens to all their phones? it's 2018 cmon, and we still see cheap LCD screens on 700$+ smartphones, even cheap phones from china come with OLED. My wife's 8 plus screen looks like sh*t compared to my ipX.

Because the cost Apple pays for a high quality AMOLED screen vs. an LCD screen is about $70 higher. Apple won't reduce their 66% gross-price margins on the iPhones so this means it has to jack the consumer price of the device up by $210.

Those less expensive China phones are running much lower profit margins the extra cost of an OLED screen to the consumer is negligible.

Bottom line is Apple COULD make an AMOLED iPhone for $700 and maintain the per-device profit of the iPhone 8, but LCD screens allow them to have a $700 phone and still be able to claim historical profit margin percentages.

 

[Falhófnir]

It's ironic that you move away from a % only to return to it in the same sentence when comparing it to the jump from the A7 to A8. It's a poor comparison that isn't used in the industry for a reason.

Benchmarks themselves are simply assigning an arbitrary quantitative figure to the abstract of performance, their whole point is to allow for a comparison. Therefore it’s a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it. In absolute terms, this ‘10% increase’ is starting from a much larger base and so the overall performance increase is still bigger than many chipset generations in the past.

 

[ROGmaster]

Yes, more RAM causes more battery drain.

That's relative. The advantages of having more Ram would outweigh a very slight bump in battery consumption.
Mobile RAM is very power efficient, adding 1-2GB to a phone barely have a noticeable impact on battery life.
This is easy to see between Android phones that have 4 - 6GB Ram or 6 - 8GB Ram on the same model.

 

[The Mercurian]

For a brief moment when I saw becnhmark scores but before i parsed the text, I had a flicker of hope that new MBP's were on the way.

Then my brain caught up. 10% cpu boost in iOS devices. Meh. Nobody cares about their phone cpu speed

 

[Falhófnir]

Yep with iPP3 on the horizon, very possibly that's what this chip is.

Unfortunately going by the metal score this likely isn’t that chip as it’s significantly less than what the A10X achieves! I’m certainly interested to see what apple’s first in house iPad gpu can do

 

[johnnyenv]

Apple's persistence in skimping on RAM is purely due to creating upgrading paths. If you had iPhone 6 with 4Gig of ram they'd be supporting it in iOS18. They'll never put in more than whats a minimum requirement.

 

[Cosmosent]

From a Burst Photography "capture" perspective, 4 GB "could" get you up-to 60 "12 Mpx" photos @ up-to 60 fps.

3 GB will (ONLY) get you up-to 30 12 Mpx photos @ up-to 60 fps.

The iPhone 8, 8+, & X currently support ONLY "4K" photo capture @ up-to 60 fps.

I expect (some of) the Next-Gen iPhones to expand that, & include "12 Mpx" photo capture @ up-to 60 fps.

 

[thenewyorkgod]

4GB of RAM is the most interesting take and will be the most beneficial. Improved processors by 10%? Meh, I don’t get excited about that anymore. There’s barely any difference between a 6S and an 8 in terms of speed. The RAM though makes the real difference, can never have enough of that. The more of it the better!

We are loading our pc's with tb's of ram. Why is it so hard/challenging for phones to go up even a gig or two?

 

[name99]

I bet that's an a11 derivative for the entry-level LCD phone

I agree that it looks VERY MUCH like an A11 derivative... because it is one!

Here's my guess: the real A12 has been slipped by a year, and the A11 was reworked to fix all the speculation-based attacks that we learned about this year (Spectre, Meltdown, TLBleed, etc). In principle this would be things like attaching appropriate IDs (PID or privilege level) to various data structures throughput the core, and then testing those IDs at appropriate points during speculation --- lots of finnicky careful work!
The result would be a CPU that's basically identical to the A11 except
(a) safer, in the sense that it's no longer vulnerable to these attacks
(b) can be run slightly faster due to being on 7nm (and they'd use 7nm to increase the size of whatever structures --- cache? TLB? branch predictors? --- they could grow without hurting cycle time).

If I'm correct, I don't think this will remain speculation, I think THE focus of the September announcement will be this security update (just like A10 was Fusion and A11 was Bionic --- ie neural unit); Apple will make a big deal about all these security problems in every CPU, and how there's is the first designed from the ground up to protect against these problems.

Well, only 2.5 months till the next iPhone event --- we'll see