Samsung Starts Manufacturing Apple's A9 Chip for 2015 iOS Devices

[Tech198]

I would like to see more powerful apps come out that tax the hardware more and make the iPad become a more viable PC replacement.

The A7 processor was 4 times as fast as the A5. To put things in perspective, an imovie clip which used to take 1 hour to export now takes me just 15 minutes.

There's definitely room for the iOS devices to become even more powerful than they currently are.

u mean like Bioshock ? I love that game on iOS.

 

[Abazigal]

u mean like Bioshock ? I love that game on iOS.

Games is one. Productivity apps is another. A way to record and edit podcasts on your ios device more seamlessly would be welcome by many, I am sure. We now have pixelmator for ipad, where's photoshop?

 

[Keirasplace]

Not even close.
The A7 to A8 CPU (single threaded) performance jump is about 25% split about equally three ways between
- Compiler improvements (so not REALLY a CPU improvement, because the A7 gets the same 8% speed boost when things are recompiled)
- 100MHz speed increase
- very slightly improved/tweaked design. (The most obvious parts of this are
= second integer multiplication unit
= FPU add/multiply decrease latency by one cycle
= L3 cache substantially decreases latency).

A8X runs 100MHz faster than the A8, so it gets an additional 8% or so from that. An honest accounting (ignoring compiler speedups) would be that single threaded A8X is about 25% faster than A7.

Of course A8X has that third core which is very nice for maintaining a responsive UI in some especially demanding situations where many things are happening at once, but let's not go the Android route of pretending that more cores makes everything faster. Today that's just not the case for most apps in most situations. Every year an additional core becomes a little more useful --- the OS does a little more offloading from the main thread, apps work a little harder to parallelize themselves --- but we're by no means at the point where most software that needs it is making aggressive use of parallelism.

It's very tempting to enthuse about how super fast the A9 will be. I'm not sure that's the right mindset. Apple is not losing any sales from people saying "I really want an iPhone/iPad but they're just too darn slow", and that's not likely to change next year. The first crop of A57 devices will probably lag an A9 that's just a process tweaked A8. nVidia's Denver may be a worthy competitor; but only a competitor --- better along some dimensions, worse along others.

What we MAY see in the A9 is the ARM8.1 instruction set modifications, in particular the RMW atomics which should allow for faster reference count updates of objects shared between threads. (It's not clear if Apple was the one who wanted these ISA changes or one of the ARM server vendors, but if Apple implements them, it should help them to be somewhat more aggressive in multithreading Cocoa.)

What we MAY see in the A9 is the mythical Apple designed (perhaps based on an existing Imagination design) GPU. Alternatively Apple may feel that the current deal they have with Imagination (which appears to allow for taking existing Imagination designs and scaling them further that what Imagination sells to anyone else) is good enough.

What we MAY see in the A9 is the long-awaited HSA architecture which has CPU and GPU sharing a coherent address space, along with the OS allowed much more control of how individual GPU cores are scheduled.

All three of these are more subtle than just "it's 30% faster", but they are the natural next steps for Apple, if not now than over the next three years or so, and they will all contribute to Apple being once again a year or more ahead of the competition. As far as the user goes, they will all contribute to "snappiness" rather than higher benchmark numbers, which will make a few fanboys sad, but should make the customer base as a whole happier.

Which means I expect the FinFets and smaller geometry of the new process to be used much like the A7 to A8 transition --- some more transistors to support the functionality I'm described, a minor speed boost from tweaks and maybe an extra 100MHz, and another halving or so of energy used. I expect Apple to stick with the basics of the existing (quite satisfactory) design while they add the 8.1 instructions and HSA and only work on a more radical design (at which point they drop 32-bit instruction support and go for more aggressive performance) once 8.1 and HSA are implemented and fully understood.

We'll see how right I am in a few months...

Oh, right, again the meme of most of the 25% highly linked to compiler that ONLY affects the A8.... As the baseline tests were done on a A7 with IOS 8. Your assertion is HIGHLY disputed BTW.

 

[Keirasplace]

Let's remind ourselves that iPads only exist since January 2010. And almost five years later we have the A9X powering the 6.1 mm iPad Air 2. The people who complain about "it's only thinner and faster" do not appreciate what a difference it makes after a few years of progress in these two dimensions. It doesn't make for an entertaining keynote to hear the new iPad is thinner (again) and faster (again) and otherwise virtually unchanged. But it improves the experience so much.



Korean company, manufactures in Austin, TX.
Hated by Germans.

American company, manufactures in China.
Loved by Germans.

 Now try to explain that. Hint: It's not about who or where.

Most of the profits from that American company belong to Apple (maybe 25% of revenues goes into actual foreign labor). People seem to forget that Foxconn is not the one making the most money off they phones ;-).

Same way, Samsung gives jobs to a few in Texas, but most of the money from those fabs don't go in the employees or contractors who built the plant's pockets.

 

[iZac]

So soon?!

My coworker is excitedly insistent that this MEANS that the iPhone 6S is bring released in the spring alongside the Apple Watch and I can do nothing to steady his expectations that it'll be Autumn like always.

 

[Technarchy]

Seems really early for A9.

Does Apple have plans for iOS devices in the spring or summer?

 

[diamond.g]

in the past the ipad chips have maintained similar CPU processing power, with beefed up graphics.

this year, the A8x is almost a generation jump away from the A8 in the CPU side of things.

In fact, A8 --> A8X jump is significantly more massive than A7 -> A8.

On the CPU side I really think we are seeing some throttling with the A8. Looking at the Single Core scores, the 200 point jump (for it to be the same Arch with a 100Mhz bump) seems pretty high.

 

[Steve121178]

I'm just wondering about the A9X. Will they increase the cores up to 4 from the current 3? Will they stay with 2 GB of RAM? Will it be used to run the new iPad Pro and the Air that comes out next year? What about the mini, are they done with that category or are they going to relaunch it with a bang with the A9X next year?

As long as iOS keeps dropping in quality and dropping further and further behind the competition in terms of features then it really doesn't matter how many cores or RAM the next iOS based devices have.

 

[quackers82]

Taking into account the current iPhone 6 A8 chip started production in March 2014 its very curious they are starting production of the A9 3 months early compared to the previous one.

-So either the iPhone 6S is launching in June/July
-The A9 chip is for a device like an updated Apple TV or iPad Pro
-The demand for the iPhone 6 was so huge they are starting production of components early.
-Or something else.

 

[TMay]

LOL, that was pretty funny.

For anyone that doesn't get the joke: The A-10 is officially called the "Thunderbolt". And the F-35 is officially called the "Lightning II". The original "Lightning" was the P-38, a twin-engine WW2-era fighter.

But frankly, hardly anyone uses the official name for the A-10. It's almost universally known as the "Warthog".

This is eyes only for Apple; the Lightning II replaces the Thunderbolt II's mission in real life...

Myself, I always wondered why Steve Job's named OS X versions after German tanks...

Btw, I'm still waiting for somebody to mount a couple of Mac Pro's on a large scare RC Thunderbolt II, as the TF-34 engines!