Possible New Architecture in A7 Enabling New Features in Next iPhone

[Chocolatemilty]

One thing that has me very intrigued by the Moto X is Moto's new X8 Computing System, which combines multiple processors for different functions and features for the phone. While the iPhone has done just fine up till now with single and now dual-core processing (and I'm no expert by any means on the subject, merely curiosity's got me here), but I wonder if the next iPhone's chipset would allow something along the lines of a computing system like the Moto X's. Is it possible a quad-core processor could have cores devoted to special functions like natural language processing? That could open the door for a very powerful Siri. I know Apple's been in the news with rumors of them producing their own chip foundry and moving to new suppliers, and I'm just wondering if all that moving and shaking is opening the door for Apple to bring in the next mobile revolution of multi-core/multi-processing mobile computing systems.

What do you guys think?

 

[Troneas]

everything that runs in the background waiting for you to do something requires RAM, before anything else. only when it is activated it will start processing the information in the CPU.

as for siri, i would suspect it uses very little of both. it doesnt stay active in the background and all it does is take in what you've said and sends it over to some apple server that will decipher the request and send it back. it will then act upon it by launching an app that will carry out your request.


and before a quad core CPU opens the door for anything, i think siri still has some way to go before it works as intended in its current state. specifically, its just too darn slow; but again, that is not a problem with the phone - its the whole system.

 

[w00t951]

I don't know why Apple insists on using server processing for Siri recognition - my Galaxy Nexus has offline voice recognition that's instant and more accurate than Siri.

The Moto X isn't using that secondary core for language processing; it's using that low power core so that you can say "Hey Google Now" at any time near the phone to start voice capture. Even my 2.5 year old Nexus, with its unsophisticated TI OMAP 4460 SoC, handles language processing just fine - it's just that keeping the main processor awake to listen for voice commands is battery intensive.

What they may do, with all these rumors of fingerprint biometric security, is use a low power core dedicated to processing fingerprint information. Waiting for the OS to send instructions to the processor from a sleep state would produce noticeable lag times when using the fingerprint unlock feature - a constantly active low power core would eliminate this inconvenience.

I just hope that Apple does a proper job of supporting quad core, with multithreaded system apps and a nice developer kit to make things easier for transitioning app developers. When I wrote my first multithreaded program, I remember the length multiplying - a 100 line program turned into 400 lines, etc. Those extra cores aren't going to be useful unless apps are written to take advantage of them.