They have historically, so I don't think this is krait. But if Apple wanted to license Krait and were willing to pay a fair price I wouldn't be too surprised if they would work out a deal. 50+ million devices will ship with the A6 so that's a lot of revenue potential that they wouldn't otherwise get with their limited fab output.
Exynos uses off-the-shelf ARM cores, as far as I'm aware. Historically, Qualcomm doesn't license its architectures, but they are already providing a lot of IP for these new iPhones, so it's far from impossible. Certainly as believable as the idea that the engineers who gave us the worst antenna design in the history of cellular communications could have designed their own CPU core.
Certainly you've only read the media coverage, and skipped the fact that every phone has it's own "death grip". I'm a left-hander and own one of those iPhones 4 with the crappy antenna. And, I live in Eastern Europe (bad technology adoption, etc). Might seem strange, but I haven't had the "death grip" experience. Not once.
More over, the engineers responsible for the CPU have nothing to do with the antenna. "Engineer" is a title, not a position, you know.
Also, what's been done with the antena of current models (4S and 5) is a couple of minor changes. The general antenna design stays.
Certainly you've read it wrong and skipped the fact that this is not the usual issue where your connection becomes unstable and weaker when you enclose the antennas with your hands.
The death-grip on the Iphone 4 worked different because you were able to short-circuit the antennas directly (which you can't do with any other phone I know) and the signal instantly dropped to 0.
Certainly, you've never actually used an iPhone 4 otherwise you'd know that your claims are patently false. My wife has an iPhone 4, you can't just make the signal completely drop by bridging the antenna gap. This "issue" didn't result in any more actual lost calls than other phones. The "issue" was corrected in software as to how the signal strength was being reported. Yes, multi-antenna designs are more consistent with regard to reception but even at it's worst, the iPhone 4 design is nowhere near what you describe. Further, this discussion is a bit off topic.
Your response to his antenna argument is a giant red herring? I guess all car manufacturers suck because at some point in time, one of their products had an issue. Or any manufacturer really.
I don't think it's as certain as you think it is. There are tests showing it happening on different designs as well (in fact, there's one on this site).
It did not drop to zero. It attenuated the signal. If you had abysmal signal, sure, it could/would drop. If you had high signal, certainly not. From anandtech's own tests, worst case, a 24 dB drop in signal.
It's not clearcut issue. By their own tests, in some situations the antenna improved things, and in some cases, it didn't.
This is what I've wondered, especially with the MSM8960T soon to be available. I guess we'll see since I didn't notice any references in this article other than "unpublishable" info about it not being cortex a9 based.
Probably, but I don't think it was wrong to doubt their abilities up to this point. A4/A5 wasn't exactly brilliant in any novel way. :-)
Good read, thanks for that!
Can someone explain ARM naming to me? They have Cortex A8, A9, A15 which get faster in the order of their numbers. Then they have Cortex A5 which is for new low end SoCs. Where are Cortex A10-A14? Are they in other markets? NAS or routers or something? Wouldn't mind some enlightenment. :D
They're not version numbers that increase by one with regard to anything, so no there aren't other versions with the missing numbers, although you did miss Cortex-A7.
I think that the number is meant to give some rough indicator of relative performance. A9 was released after A8 and is somewhat faster. A7 is marginally slower than A8. A5 is slower than A8 and A9, but not half the speed as either. A15 is substantially faster than A9. Of course it's not all linear with respect to benchmarks or anything but it gives you a good feel.
ARM does have two other product profiles (M and R) and I think the numbering there at least kind of fits in with this scheme, in that Cortex-M0/M1/M3/M4 and Cortex-R4/R5 all scale in performance in that order, and note that all the Cortex-M series are given numbers below 5 as they're all slower than Cortex-A5, but Cortex-R5 is on a similar performance level so doesn't have that restriction. The relation in numbering between different profiles is even cruder, but probably does still give a rough boundary point.
I think A7 is almost meant to mimic the performance of Cortex A8 at a much smaller power envelope to complement A15 in a big.LITTLE arrangement in high end smartphones/tablets in the coming years or in a dual A7 arrangement for low to midrange CPUs.
Thanks for the write up Anand, this is an interesting step forward and I very much look forward to seeing what they've put together. We've known for years that Apple has been acquiring significant chip design talent (P. A. Semi being a major example), but I think this will be the first time we'll get to see it really put to use at the lowest and most core levels, rather then merely SoC integration or peripheral stuff.
It's been many years since we last saw a wide array of companies trying to make different CPUs. It'll be very interesting to see what all comes of it.
I believe they leave gaps in the numbering scheme to allow for new types of cores in lower performance and power consumption brackets.
The Cortex-A8 was the first ARMv7-A design. It was followed considerably later by the A5 and A9, offering lower and higher performance (and power consumption) respectively. The A7 and A15 are the latest pair in the same vein.
There are also Cortex-R and Cortex-M series CPUs, following the ARMv7-R and ARMv7-M architectures respectively (except that the Cortex-M0, the very smallest ARM core, follows ARMv6-T2 instead). These designs are for Realtime and eMbedded designs respectively and have appropriate design tradeoffs accordingly.
None of these are to be confused with the ARM7 core, which dates back to the mid-1990s (using ARMv4T architecture) and is still insanely popular because it uses only a few ten-thousands of transistors. It has been regularly updated to work with newer processes, so these days it is a complete CPU core in a tiny fraction of a square millimetre, and runs at several hundred MHz. All together now: "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!"
After you are done wiping the egg off your face from your proud tweets earlier this week that it was an A15, I'm assuming you'll be running some tests once you get your hands on an iPhone 5. Is that a good assumption?
It will be interesting to see how well this compares to the A15, and what competitors will put into their phones over the coming months.
The SGX554MP2 is also a possibility. It offers 2x the ALU performance of the SGX543MP2, equivalent to the SGX543MP4 without doubling the TMU or ROP count which isn't as necessary given the resolution difference between the 2012 iPad and iPhone 5. Apple may not want to introduce a new GPU core when Rogue is around the corner though.
Is it too early for 2x32-bit LPDDR3? Sticking with LPDDR2 they could only move from LPDDR2-800 in the A5 to LPDDR2-1066, which is a pretty marginal difference in bandwidth to feed a 2x faster CPU and particularly a 2x faster GPU. If they could get LPDDR3-1600, they could match A5X memory bandwidth with half the memory controllers.
Any speculation on cache sizes? Shipping Cortex A9 designs seem to have stuck with 512KB per core, which was unchanged from higher-end Cortex A8 designs. Since Apple isn't worried about die space, would moving to 1MB L2 cache per core be worthwhile? Intel pushed a large, low latency L2 cache in Dothan as a power efficient way to increase performance so there is merit to that approach. Would Apple consider a shared L3 cache like Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge to share data between the CPU and GPU?
I have to admit, I was sure it was an MP4 like the latest iPad... but I hadn't considered the possibility of an MP3 (at slightly higher clocks than their A5 used) or an SGX554. I hadn't seen or heard of 554 being used, so I sort of forgot the design was there. Waiting.
Won't be long until Series 6 though, which will produce some pretty amazing mobile graphics. :D
Doesn't the Archos 101sx use the omap 4470, and the sgx 554? I seem to remember reading that in the review on this very site (page 3, middle of second paragraph).
I'm pretty sure that the 4470 has an SGX544. Looking around it looks like there were rumors of it being an SGX554 before release, but those same rumors said the CPU cores would be clocked at 1.8Ghz. So... yeah.
This makes a lot more sense than Apple having A15 CPUs (I always found it a little weird that Apple would be ready with them before TI when they were it's lead development partner, and we haven't seen silicon at final clocks yet).
Invariably, if we've got a custom CPU core, then sooner or later we're going to get a custom GPU core and the Apple SoC is going to be a black box where the only data we get about it is from benchmarks.
I'm glad the mistake has been cleared up and eager to see how it performs against Krait and Cortex A15.
They do own part of Img Tech so that wouldn't be too hard to do, but I wonder if it is necessary as they can likely get Img Tech to build to their specs.
Always expected A15 . A9 could have been an option, Apple quoted some perf numbers in some tests and since they are not all that honest it could have been higher clocks combined with faster RAM and much faster NAND. Custom core is far more interesting since they can build the silicon and the software together and they do have the units vol to afford it. Now they got to integrate the baseband soon and more in the next few years.
I'm curious what the performance of this will be like. Even though you seem to think that they've focused a lot on power consumption, the power consumption has barely improved in the new iPhone, according to Apple's own numbers. So it remains to seen if their CPU can compete with Qualcomm's S4 Pro and Cortex A15. My guess is it won't because this is a first for Apple, so it's unlikely they made something better than Qualcomm or ARM in terms of architecture, and knowing Apple they probably kept the frequency low, too (probably around 1.2 Ghz per core).
As for the GPU, if they went with PowerVR SGX543 again, that means they won't support OpenGL ES 3.0 in the iPhone for a year, until the next iPhone arrives, even though there will be phones supporting it as soon as this year.
I'm not sure that Apple needs to develop something “better than Qualcomm” to out-perform for its devices. It'd seem most high-performance, low-power designs would optimize for the Dalvik JIT instruction stream, which is very likely quite different from what Xcode generates.
After all, the confirmation process seems to have started in Xcode; it's obvious that Apple is attempting to exploit its tight linkage between OS, development tools and silicon.
Given the task-specific nature of CPU optimization, I'm not even sure what instruction mix would even be available for the unbiased analysis you seem to think would be out there.
Krait already outperforms Apples 2x claim on CPU only benchmarks, I don't think the A6 will beat Krait there. But once more Apple will have the fastest GPU by a long shot, other phones had just started to get close to the 4S.
I still wonder how after all this time no one else picked up SGX? It's in the PS Vita, but what smartphones besides the iPhone?
Qualcomm has Adreno, so they will never use anything else. TI uses SGX graphics in its OMAP3/4 and upcoming OMAP5 SoCs. For example all current 44x0 SoCs have some form of SGX in it (the 4460 can be found in the Galaxy Nexus, the 4470 is in the new Archos tablets etc.). ST-Ericsson will use Rogue in its upcoming Nova SoC. Intel uses the SGX540 and Samsung used SGX in its old Hummingbird SoC.
Hit "post" too soon. :D If you are wondering why no one else uses the multicore variants of the SGX, that is most likely because no one wants to build a SoC that large in the Android world. It costs too much and doesn't have enough benefits. Apple can do that easily as it has enough margins, can make good use of the graphics part because they are coding their own OS and having that graphics part across all their platforms means developers can exploit it easily as well. If you have an Android handset with great graphics developers still need to code for all the others with mediocre graphics and the good graphics might not make the game look better or run better.
It makes sense that no one else wants to create something with that die size as that would be costly for a few reasons, but maybe with 28 and 32mn processes they could at least use the MP2, which Apple has been at 45nm for a year.
Yeah, TI will use MP2 in OMAP5 (SGX544 at 532MHz). Samsung will likely stay with Mali GPUs, they are doing quite well. Nvidia will stay with their GeForce GPUs as well. Qualcomm has Adreno. Many of the Chinese SoCs are also using Mali this time around. So 3 of the big SoCs manufacturers at the high end have no need for SGX multicore solutions in the future. And it seems that Nvidia has the dedicated Android gaming market mostly in their hands. :-)
I might give Apple a bit more credit since they use to build their own CPUs as well as being the owners of ARM itself in the past. Also the purchase of both PA Semi and Intrinsity should to some degree put Apple on equal footing with Qualcomm.
I think you're forgetting there's a larger display and additional radio to drive. The fact that they held the line on power performance with those added and no real battery increase suggests tremendous power savings at the SoC level.
They also have a larger battery to compensate for that larger screen and the new radios. I'd say this new SoC has the same power consumption as the previous A5 at best...
The battery life with LTE will be influeced only by how efficient the chip is. If they are using a 28nm radio, it should be pretty efficient, but probably not more than other companies.
Was I the only one to notice that 2x the performance of A9 at 800MHz is actually pathetic? Anand always seems to drool over anything apple related, numbers be damned. Krait at 1.5GHz is going to mop the floor with that thing. Even Tegra 3 T33 will have comparable ST CPU performance with that thing. (A9 at 1.7GHz) This is already 2x faster than iPhone 4s CPU. Those numbers are actually PATHETIC and yet anand drools over that.
Well, if Apple's general claims are correct, that it has 2x the CPU and 2x the GPU of the iPhone 4S, the performance should be quite good. Remember, Apple didn't say twice the performance of "an A9". We're talking about the actual device here. The iPhone 4S is competitive with phones on the market with twice the clock speed at CPU tasks, and is faster than almost everything in GPU tasks. This new iPhone is clearly going to be no slouch in the performance department, regardless of your lack of interest because Apple produced it.
Seriously. Biased much? So many here are getting lost in numbers. It remains to be seen if the hardware, combined with better optimized software (the #1 thing Apple has over any android offering) will mean pages are actually rendered faster, etc.
In regards to graphics, I don't even really look at them these days. It seems Apple is simply uncontested in the graphics department. This can be bad, they need the competition to become more aggressive. Though this update I'm sure will be an iterative one, and will still be great, and still uncontested!
Despite your complaints, I don't remember reading Anand claiming the A6 has superior performance to other current or upcoming high-end SoC. Instead the focus is on how to increase performance in the most power efficient way. While Apple has traditionally focused on having leading GPU performance in their SoC, they haven't done the same for the CPU. As such, it wouldn't be surprising if the A6 is merely competitive, but is not the fastest CPU. If the reason Apple moved to a custom design is to increase power efficiency, the question of how successful they were needs to be answered by comparing performance/watt between SoC designs rather than raw maximum performance. I'm not sure there are very good ways to benchmark performance/watt between various mobile devices though.
Try again with Jelly Bean and a faster browser. Really, those Sunspider benchmarks don't show the whole picture when a webpage is loading and being rendered on the screen...
But if you want to see a more valid comparison, I'd suggest you wait for IE10 on Windows Phone 8 (highly optimized for the Snapdragon S4, unlike Android) and compare the browser speeds and general OS performance on that with the iPhone 5... You'll have a better picture.
Sunspider is not multithreaded (actually it's a limitation of Javascript in browsers). Sometimes the engine can use multiple cores, but there's no way the Tegra is being fully utilized here. That said, the additional two cores are hardly used elsewhere either.
Sadly, but I also agree. First, on the CPU side, they tried to gain more popularity by providing false "exclusive" info, and now they're saying that it's "pleasant" and making it seam as if it's revolutionary (on the vertical integration side) when Qualcomm has been doing this for years now (and doing a better job on the CPU side at that).
Second, about the GPU, they're still trying to speculate something TOTALLY off. Anand and crew know pretty well that Apple's claims of "2X" and "4X" are utter bull in real world performance (only in a sub-benchmarks do we get anything close to their claims). Refer to the comparison of the Apple A5X and nVidia Tegra3 for more info.
Sorry, but by the sounds of this chip, it would probably be comparable to the Exynos 4 Quad, but not nearly as powerful as the Snapdragon S4 Pro. Exynos 5 Dual will wipe the floor with all of the above...
It's really disappointing. I thought we had a reliable source on low level tech. They can be fanboys of whatever they want, but I didn't expect it to affect the way they reported tech news.
You question the GPU claims Apple made, yet it's common knowledge that the iPad has the fastest GPU of any tablet and the iPhone 4S, despite being a year old - still dominates the GPU benchmarks in America - beating the Samsung Galaxy S3, for example.
It is virtually guaranteed that the iPhone 5 will have the fastest GPU in any smartphone when it's reviewed.
Fanboy much? Go back to the review that this site has provided for the Galaxy S3, the Mali400 GPU in the Exynos 4 Quad is 25% faster than PowerVR in the iPhone 4S.
Benchmarks are cool, they give us a roughly good idea of what to expect out of a platform, but real world performance can differ slightly to significantly.
It doesn't really matter, it just needs to be faster than the last iPhone because it's a closed system. People don't buy the iPhone for relative performance vs Android.
They obviously don't think they need to. I'm inclined to agree. It's still simple enough for 99% of people. It's an OS. You have icons and you have functionality. The only thing it can do is evolve. People are easy to dismiss the new features and updates because the home screen still looks the same. Do you need live widgets on there? Well I'd argue most people don't. At least not in any way that Android does it. Perhaps something simpler the way WP8 or whatever does this. But that's risky with little payoff, Apple iOS is already well established. There are a ton of features added, mostly through apps, and that's an argument most will understand. That it's all about the apps.
Do you yell at Windows 7 and wish it was more evolved? I'd say most people here are content with the basic start menu/icons that it offers lol. So again, it would have to be a whole new redesign, and again don't think that's warranted whatsoever. It's all about the apps that will round out the OS. Like the reason people STICK with Windows OS', because it supports all their favorite and wide range of apps. Apple is bringing the apps. Look at their focus in the last couple years, they're pushing their iLife stuff and buffing up specs, and empower devs to develop more and more. When the Smartphone needs to evolve, then iOS will prob then too. Until then, a smartphone is just a smartphone, there's not much reason to take the next big leap.
This is exactly right, I think. It is a feature, not a bug, that the UI stays so similar from year to year.
Imagine if every time you bought a new car the controls were in a different place. Sometimes the brake is on the left, sometimes it's on the right; sometimes it's on the steering wheel, sometimes on the armrest. Same with the accelerator, except sometimes it's a motorcycle-style throttle. And sometimes you operate the turn signals with your feet - especially when you get a joystick instead of a steering wheel.
This would be cool for people who want to tinker with their cars, or who are tired of using the same old controls year after year. But for most people who just want to drive, by far the best plan is to keep the basic UI unchanged, and integrate newer features around them.
The same is true with phones; for the vast majority of consumers, the phone is a tool to do other things with and they don't want to spend very much time tweaking the phone itself.
So it's kind of a relief to these consumers that when they get a new phone, or upgrade to a new OS, they will be able to "drive" the new/updated phone in the same manner as the old phone.
At the end of the day majority of the iPhone users buy it for it's simplicity and usefulness without having to spend a ton of swipes to make things work.
That's the beauty of simplicity that you get things done without having to use a lot of resource.
Android is a very stubborn OS because it has to cater to those who use it for more than just a simple smartphone. That's why a bigger screen matters to Android users.
If I were to use an iPhone I would prefer one as small as my watch. I really wish SIRI can do everything for me without me ever lifting a finger.
"Imagine if every time you bought a new car the controls were in a different place. Sometimes the brake is on the left, sometimes it's on the right; sometimes it's on the steering wheel, sometimes on the armrest."
stupid example, should have farted out a better one.
first, you went a little too far with that. that's like saying you bought a phone where the microphone is above the screen and the speaker is below that.
second, it seems to me like you have only owned 1 car in your entire life. i'm on my third SUV from the same japanese maker. things like cruise control, wind shield wiper controls, audio controls always seem to move around.
hell, even the controls for the transfer case changed from a lever to a knob and moved about 8 inches further away from the gear stick. .
-"Well I'd argue most people don't." Who died and made you god? i'm sure they will decide for themselves when they see widgets in action. You should see the reactions on iPhone/BB user's faces when they play with my GS3 and see the gmail and calendar widgets, and the disappointment that follows when i tell them that only android does that.
-"Apple iOS is already well established." You mean well advertised. The Apple logo is flashed in the viewer eyes in movies, CW soap operas, rap videos, bill boards, etc. They work really hard to put that Apple in the center of the screen. no other company advertises anything so aggressively. when was the last time you saw the Toyota symbol flashed in your face every 5 minutes in a TV show? Characters on prime time shows like Vampire diaries and gossip girls always walk around with the Apple products and the Apple logo appears on the screen so much that it may as well be the protagonist.
go to youtube, enter "First Look: iPhone 5 jimmy kimmel" in the search box, hit enter and open the first video. (don't click the ads above the actual video).
-"Do you yell at Windows 7 and wish it was more evolved?" No. Windows 7 has all the functionality anyone could possibly desire. thanks to the registry editor, there isn't a single function or menu that can't be modified, removed or added. and the instructions for any modification are readily available to anyone who knows how to use google.
-"So again, it would have to be a whole new redesign, and again don't think that's warranted whatsoever." Of course not. Steve took a zillion surveys that demonstrated that his method was perfect.
-"It's all about the apps that will round out the OS" how about removable storage? and the ability to add songs to your music library on the go without being changed to iTunes and the horrible quality AAC? Maybe a notification LED in the front (i know you can use iPhone's flash as an indicator light, but it is way too bright and will burn the entire battery in a few hours).
Widgets may impress as an immediate gimmick, but in day to day use it's an irrelevance, which simply drains battery life.
iOS isn't advertised at all, really. Samsung spends far more on marketing than Apple does and when Apple DOES advertise it's for product features - not iOS itself. It's unarguable that iOS is better established than Android - it's plain obvious given Apples consistency and consistent support of legacy devices.
Jimmy Kimmel youtube video is funny - but proves nothing. Take any modern smartphone and you'll be able to capture similar responses. They no doubt edited out the people who said 'it looks the same'. It's a measure of American stupidity - not stupidity specific to Apple.
Rants on Windows 7 don't belong on a smartphone discussion.
As for removable storage - that's hardware, not software - so it's nothing to do with iOS. You can buy an adapter for a couple of dollars to allow you to read SD cards on your iPhone - most don't, because internal storage plus cloud = plenty. SD card storage is slow to read.
You don't need iTunes, full stop, to do anything - especially not to manage music - you just seem to not have a clue about that.
Seems like you don't really have a clue what iOS is like these days - you're living in the past while the rest of the world has moved on.
First you misunderstood completely. Second your argument is contradictory and not to mention rather ignorant, shows the blind bias really. Lastly all it goes to prove is that you are not the 99% that the phone is catered to. Failing to realize this is the most ignorant thing you can do when trying to make any comparison argument here.
You couldn't even acknowledge that iOS is well established lol. Let alone realize its the better app scene.
How exactly is iOS a piece of crap? It's a lot more efficient and faster than Android. Runs apps better and faster. Is a lot better at multi-core support. Less likely to have battery sucking apps in the background. Has a much better SDK. A better eco-system. Runs smoother and always has.
Is it because it looks the same? Windows has had pretty much the same look since Windows 95. Just a slow evolution. Yet, with Windows 8 coming, and a drastic change you have people screaming from the rooftops over it.
It doesn't really mean it's not A9 does it? It might only mean that the Old Intrinsity team and Samsung in Texas designed a A9-based chip from synthesizable RTL, changing out the FPU. It does however mean that they don't use any hard-macros or such from Samsung though, but they are still probably involved. Interesting to see either way especially if it's their own custom ARM-compatible processor but I doubt there is any performance enhancements in the pipeline except for the added VFPv4.
Remember even the A5X had roughly double the GPU power of the A5 or previous smartphone / iPhone SoC's/processors. It's not twice as fast gpu as A5X here.
If it is their own architecture actually then it's the old PA-Semi team that has designed it probably, not anyone in Texas, but if so why was it so adamant to buy the Intrinsity team that designed the A4 (and Hummingbird) with Samsung in Texas?
32nm mean at least that it is not Krait. But do we really know who's involved here? 28nm and another gpu vendor would mean it is a rebadged Qualcomm chip, but shouldn't the drivers leave any marks if so?
You at least forgetting there are three ways to implement ARM, one to design your own ARMv7/8 compatible architecture, two to implement and adapt a synthesizable Cortex-core from ARM which means you can adapt it for certain processes, power enhancements, fabrication and so on, or three to license a hard-macro from ARM/the fab and combine that with other logic IP.
As VFPv3 is optional (or at least configurable Tegra 2 with VFPv3-D16 is an example) on the Cortex A9 it's not totally alien to fathom that they also could replace it if they work with ARM here or work with say Samsung's fab which has a full license for ARM cores. Any way they seem to intentionally be very quiet about the subject.
"If it is their own architecture actually then it's the old PA-Semi team that has designed it probably, not anyone in Texas, but if so why was it so adamant to buy the Intrinsity team that designed the A4 (and Hummingbird) with Samsung in Texas?"
PA-Semi's contribution would likely be on the architecture while Intrinsity's specialty is in laying out the transistors to maximize performance and lower power consumption.
I agree that there is probably more here than even Anand is acknowledging could be (also Anand seems to be trying to throw as much good light as he can at Apple for this). Apple already has used ARM ISA designs in the past, and even went further and tweaked the Samsung's to make it just a bit more like how they want (or rather, PA Semi did that I believe... highly doubt there are any engineers actually at Apple that can do that stuff when they already own companies that do it). I doubt that this situation is any different than that previous situation, where they have just taken an already customized package and customized it some more. Of course, I think we wont know that for-sure until we get die-shots of the thing, like how we were able to tell that their previous one was almost exactly a Samsung processor.
Well the A4 was for example called the Apple A4 even when it was an Samsung and Intrinsity project for their then pretty small Apple customer, later they bought Intrinsity and came up with A5 and A5X and die-shrinks all on Samsungs fab with their help, they rebadged it before they bought Intrinsity so of course the first product was largely a Samsung project with Intrinsity as a subcontractor.
It would be fun if it's a custom chip here, but I'm kind of not leaning towards that because it largely didn't bring in any new features or enhancements they bragged about. It's certainly possible to upgrade a A9 with the FPU from the A5/A7 or whatever that is already on the market. The problem with the A5/A7 configuration of the FPU would be that it's a reduced registry D16-variant. But they probably have the FPU done already for the A15 proper, we have to wait and see how they went about creating this chip. Odd timing if it's a new custom architecture chip.
I'm pretty sure the PA-Semi and Intrinsity teams have no external work anymore as they were merged with Apple totally and don't exist as separate units any more. To bad that PA-Semi's processor went to do largely nothing. Intrinsity also helped other firms to design PPC and MIPS processors, and did ARM-work for others than Samsung in Texas were they were based, too. Basically they did specialist design tools for the business and collaborated and co-design stuff. I'm sure that other firms in the Texas area has snatched up people that doesn't work for Apple any more, any way we won't see their work in anything more then in Apple chips. It's sadly a downside of mergers if they don't want to keep and develop the product line. Apple is largely a retailer (as most people work in Apple stores and related) and a software company but they should have a few hundred semi design people from their buyouts alone, it's not like Dangers buyout by Microsoft or Microsoft's Nokia partnership here at least as they do deliver products. I just noted that they didn't say "totally new design, new powerful GPU etc etc". It just sounded like here, here's a new chip buy it :) Intrinsity team is the ARM guys. Several of the key PA-Semi guys left Apple after the acquisition or even months before but they should have plenty of skilled engineers still. Not sure they need such a large design team if they are only going to cook ARM-SoC's together with other IP-suppliers (physical IP) and manufacturers though, not sure how many is left or has been hired, we just have to see what they have come up with. Old Intrinsity team is the one who are best skilled at optimizing external design.
So, maybe Anand should do an apology article where he says something like, "I was wrong, it's not A15. Here's what I know." Oh, wait.. that's exactly what this article is.
you don't get it do you there's a difference between saying it's an educated guess, and what Brian did. On twitter he said he had insider information confirming it was A15.
And I bet he had insider information, but that ended up being incorrect. There is also a difference between Twitter and Anandtech.com. If you look at our articles about iPhone 5, we have not said it's A15 for sure:
"Based on the performance gains, Apple's history of SoC naming and some other stuff we've heard recently, it looks like Apple has integrated two ARM Cortex A15 on Samsung's 32nm LP HK+MG process."
"Apple reserves major Ax SoC number iterations for architecture changes, combine that with the performance claims as well as some other stuff we've heard offline and there's one conclusion: the iPhone 5 uses ARM Cortex A15 cores inside."
I read the stories and there was one titles A15 inside A6 CPU. Thats pretty damn definitively written and highly misleading.
There is just complete Apple Fanboy style reporting on Anandtech now. I own a MBP and had 5 iPhones before my S3 so i know how to spot them.
Time to take off the rose tinted glasses Anand. The IPhone 5 is a rip off at £529 with £105 worth of components. MAYBE YOU SHOULD REPORT ON THE COMPLETE OVERPRICING OF APPLE PRODUCTS.
Bill of materials is irrelevant, what matters is the prices of comparable phones. Galaxy S3 is not significantly cheaper than iPhone 5; I just checked Finland's biggest e-tailer and they have the S3 for 590€ and 16GB iPhone 5 for 620€. I don't think the situation is much different in UK or any other country.
The S3 doesn't cost 590€ to make so it's not like Apple is the only company charging more than the bill of materials. You have to remember that manufacturing costs are just one part of the big picture, engineering high-end phones like iPhone 5 and S3 costs millions. In the end, both Apple and Samsung are companies which aim to make profit and it seems that people are ready to pay £529 for the iPhone 5.
Unfortunately the specs won't be enough to call this one, we'll have to wait next week for Anandtech benchmarks to see where Apple's CPU/GPU puts them, compered to the USA SIII or the international SIII.
Then there is the question of design...
I find it pretty bold from Apple to stick to their notion that a phone screen should be only as wide as to be operated with a single thumb. The work on the aluminium too seems amazing.
Still as an iPhone 4 user no need to upgrade just yet (since I still get updates from Apple), I'll wait for the 6 hoping that by then x265 is implemented as well as the last OpenGL and OpenCL.
Not going to happen, but remember that Apple co-founded ARM back in the 80's. They later sold off their holding when they needed the money, but they obviously saw the potential of the architecture early.
>but they obviously saw the potential of the architecture early.
The ARM products used by Apple in recent years have nothing do with what they had in 80s and early 90s. If nothing else, the manufacturing process alone has changed so much. No one in the industry -not Apple, Intel, AMD or ARM itself- could have predicted how things have turned out over this period.
They saw f#ck all in ARM. But do go ahead and rewrite history, I am sure St. Steve had a vision and saw potential where none other did.
Steve wasn't at Apple when they where investing in Acorn, VLSI joint venture to produce low-power RISC-chips. NeXT still used 68000 and i960 which they dropped for a multiplatform OS support with Intel, PA-RISC and SPARC before taking over Apple. StrongARM was also a DEC product/architecture. Intel were one of the players behind the ARM arch moving into the mobile space. Without Acorn (who already had the early ARM-bits, kinda like IBM had Power before the AIM-alliance) and VLSI it would never have been successful. And all the licensee's which licensed and develop their own architectures from that base of course. The foundation of the modern Apple company still tried to build workstations on Unix at the time. At Jobs NeXT of course. That it runs on ARM is because players like Intel/DEC, Samsung, TI, Freescale and so on had made it successful by that time. They didn't go back to the Newton which Jobs killed as fast as he could. They really don't care if it is PPC, MIPS, SuperH, ARC, 88000, 68k/Coldfire and so on. OS X ran at PPC and Intel at the time, earlier also on PA-RISC and Sparc. Others had already used the build tools (GCC at the time) to build smartphones and smart devices at ARM so support was there across the board.
Microsoft helped MIPS along the way for that matter. They still choose PPC for their gaming consoles.
> "They saw f#ck all in ARM. But do go ahead and rewrite history, I am sure St. Steve had a vision and saw potential where none other did."
Unfortunately, actual history makes you look a bit foolish. Considering the Newton was ARM based, that sort of shoots a hole in your theory. I don't know what Steve's role in this was... probably nothing considering the Newton was Sculley's project. Either way, even back then, it was clear that if mobile was ever going to take off, it was going to be based on ARM rather than something like Intel.
I find the information useful - I just wish Anand would wait until the review (like he used to do).
You never see them rushing to state immediate speculation for newly-announced/released features about any other manufacturer's product. It always waits until the actual product review, where they break down the product feature-by-feature and discuss it within. But now though, every single thought that seems to come up regarding an Apple product, they throw up a front-page article as soon as possible. When's the last time you saw a front-page article discussing what might be in an HTC or Nokia smartphone within days of its announcement?
I just find it sad because I've been following Anandtech since the early 2000s, and it used to be that there wasn't really a lean towards any particular company, but over the last few years, it's "Let's overload on Apple info and reduce our effort on everyone else." Intel's IDF probably only gets the treatment it does because Apple uses Intel hardware and thus Haswell/etc. affects future Apple products.
I love the reviews they do on Apple products (I'm typing this on a 13" MBP), I just wish every single new thought/observation about something Apple is doing didn't demand a near-instantaneous article. Pretty soon they can just piece-meal a review by posting each separate section for the iPhone 5 separately, then just doing a "In summary:" article that ties it all together with links to each separate article. Or just break off and start up "AnandMac" or something. :)
I think here the biggest need for this article was the confusion and misinformation about the SoC. We had been saying that it's Cortex-A15, but as you can see, it's not. Because we had been sharing misinformation, it was important to get the correct information out as soon as possible. Reviewing a big launch like this can easily take a few weeks and by that time it's a bit too late to apologize for wrong information.
Another important point is exclusivity. As far as I know, we were the first to discover this, which means we don't want to wait and risk someone else finding it.
With Apple there is also more mystery than with other companies. If this was Samsung or Nokia, they most likely would have told more details about the SoC if Anand/Brian had asked. What Apple tells the media is that it's A6 and twice as fast as A5. That is not much to go by, but many people still want to know the details. Can it really be twice as fast? And can I still get more battery life too? Answering those questions is a lot easier if details about the SoC are known.
Yeah, I understand the "mystery" part, but honestly it's just seems as if over the last year or two, Anandtech has been taking more of a lean towards Apple dominance in so far as the quantity of articles relative to everyone else. Maybe this is just in part that I remember the days when Anand's actual focus was on more than just Apple products and the occasional interesting SSD, relegating the reviews now to most other products to others who don't put in as much effort it seems (and I base that solely off of the length of the reviews, where Anand's Apple reviews will regularly go 15-20 pages while most products seem to be half of that). It's just somewhat depressing to see a priority focus from being generally manufacturer-agnostic in terms of reporting to now more favorability towards Apple (and I do enjoy Apple products, but I also like seeing no one company be treated favorably).
The confusion regarding the SoC was mostly via Twitter and, if I recall, the live streaming. It just seems as if clarification on the SoC could have waited for the review given that for many of those who are purchasing an iPhone 5, the actual nature of the SoC wasn't going to influence their buying decision on it. I'm just afraid that instead of just waiting for the review to come up now, we'll just start seeing articles every few days now about the iPhone 5: "Here's the camera in the iPhone 5!", "Here's the specific information on the in-line cell for the iPhone 5's panel", "Here's the material the antenna's are made out of specifically!".
I mean, I've yet to see any article previewing Windows 8 now that it's available on MSDN/DreamSpark/etc. and a lot of people are now installing it, but I guess Anand/the site goes where the money is (Apple). :(
And most of those are Pipeline announcements and not front-page articles. Each of the three iPhone 5 articles they've posted in the last two days also are also about equal in length to 3-4 of those articles in your searched COMBINED. What's that say about Anand's favoritism?
Once again: take off the Apple-obsessing goggles, and look at it from a balanced standpoint: the site is significantly slanted towards Apple now relative to any other company. And I would just like to see them restore the balance a little more to actually saving many of these "Must. Report. Anything. Apple. NOW" articles to the actual product reviews so that I don't come to Anandtech and have 3/4ths of the front page just be Apple Apple Apple.
Cortex-A5 has 32 double (64-bit) registers. See page 2-9 of the ARM Technical Reference Manual for the Cortex A5 NEON variant. Cortex-A7 also supports 32 doubles.
The deciding thing is really whether your core includes NEON (Advanced SIMD) support. A5, A7, A8, A9 and A15 all have NEON variants.
The possibility for Apple using A15 cores in the new iPhone 5 was actually one of, if not the one and only, hope I had that Apple didn't completely compromise in every aspect of the new iPhone. That would have been an impressive step forward and another first within the industry which is what apple was known for in the jobsian era. But I was always a bit pessimistic given the lackluster ness of almost everything around the new iPhone, so I take this news with little shock and commend you and your team for all the efforts in breaking this information to us before anyone!
I am even more doubtful now, that we will be seeing anywhere near 2x performance as those figures were for cherry picked apps that apple has had several months to optimize for the new custom core. I will reserve judgement until your next major break in the A6 silicon story...
It seems like there was no reason for Apple to have hired all of those big names just to integrate a SoC. This has probably been in the works since before the release of the A4, at minimum. And those engineers left like a few months ago also; this was probably what they were working on and getting integrated, and left on completion.
Does this indicate a vote against ARM A15 for use in phones vs tablets? Will ARM A15 only fit well in the power-envelope for phones when paired with an ARM A7 in a big.LITTLE configuration? Will Apple be able to develop/interested in developing an A6 into a big.LITTLE configuration? What does this mean for the next iPad? I'd assumed that it would have an ARM A15 based SOC, if not, how will an iPad based on a development of the A6 perform against ARM A15 based competitors?
How do the number of engineers at Apple working on CPU architecture compare with the number of engineers at ARM working on advanced architectures? For comparison Jobs boasted that Apple had 1,000 engineers working on the "chip project". From wikipedia ARM has 2000 employees.
I am disappointed with the increasing pro-Apple bias Anand is infusing in his once great website.
Each day the article on this website read more and more as if they have been prepared by Apple marketing department and handed out to Anandtech for wider circulation. The podcasts are even worse, anything and everything there in is Apple-this & Apple-that.
Today -aside from benchmarks and occasional niche articles by likes of Johan and Cutress- there is little to seperate Anandtech from trash like Engadget. How the mighty have fallen.
First, Anand made the ridiculous "mistake" and hyped as the iphone 5 as having A15. Even the most illeterate people on forums could not come up with that propoganda. Apparently there was not much positive about the iphone, so Anand must find anything we can praise. And if he cannot find anything, he must invent a story?
And now he "corrects" his mistake, by praising the invented "A7".
By all means, keep loving Apple. I am sure it is financially beneficial for you. But do not throw away the last vestiges of integrity in the process.
When your bias is so evident in articles that cover all-things-Apple, they also raise doubts in the minds of readers about the integrity of increasingly fewer articles you publish which do not have the word 'Apple' mentioned once.
If you are going to sell out so blatantly, do the decent thing and rename yourself Apple-tech or something. Because you are not about covering technology anymore, but praising Apple.
Do you read tech news? Do u understand any tech related things? By all knowledge, knowing that Apple did not increase the Frequency, and it has twice the performance, what would you have guess the CPU was using?
And you could also say that Anand was praising Intel as well. And i am a AMD users here. And there is nothing wrong to admit, AMD has slower performing CPU then Intel. Intel has better CPU then AMD. And that is a Fact.
And Engadget speculate, but with out technology background and reason. Anand prove his point, admit his mistake and gave you the reason why he thought it was, and why it happened to be wrong.
And Apple cares about battery life of their SoC rather then performance. Anand simply just state that. If there anything wrong with that. So people cares about using renewable energy paying for a Electric Car like Telsa should be put off because others think they should have got a Ferrari instead for the same price?
And to quote you, by all means, keep hating apple. We tech lovers would continue to enjoy the technological advance and discovery with anand.
It seems that all the performance gains shown off by Apple are storage bound (launching app, saving files, viewing files).. there doesn't seem to be a performance data point for CPU bound tasks (browsing, imovie, garage band, etc). doesn't this make it more likely that the iphone could be faster because of improved storage (or filesystem), and not just a faster CPU?
Well that new Samsung NAND flash has like 4x the performance of previous flash (140 MB/s reads, 50 MB/s writes, plus good IOPS), but who knows if Apple decided to dip into that territory.
The "up to 2x faster" claim is probably a combination of improvements in the CPU, memory, storage, and compiler.
Unfortunately, the benchmarks won't be able to isolate the CPU performance alone since there's no control / standard to compare it to. They'll show A6 vs. Krait vs. Exynos, etc., but one can't really draw much of a conclusion about the CPU itself. You're basically benching the "total package".
The LLVM / Clang compiler that Apple uses is actually very well-tuned for ARM architectures.
Exactly. If the A6 is really 2 times fater than A5, they easily could have added a synthetic benchmark result which shows that the A6 computes 2 times faster, just to satisfy tech sites. But they didn't, they focused on things which could be caused by software optimizations (accelerated through GPU) or other tweaks as you said (storage).
I expected that the iPhone 5 will have a A15 to remain competive with next gen Android smartphones. Now I think the A6 is even less impressive than Anand believes it is. No A15, just a A9 with A15 like improvements, maybe worse than Qualcomm Krait. The biggest improvement: die shrink.
Strange that in this article you don't comment that all the previous iPhone compatible gadgets/hardware con be thrown out the window.
So your alarm clock, hi-fi system, speakers, docking stations... everything is not compatible.
Obviously you can buy, for the usual high price, an adaptor (that will not be physically compatible with all your previous generation gadgets). Remember to buy the cable too.
So you end paying 100$ more (check the prices for adaptor and lighting cables), just to connect it to your PC/Apple.
Are all apple users so used to be swindled? Are mentally impaired? There was no real technical reason to change, exuding the usual one.... grab zealot money.
Welcome to Apple, a company dedicated to the studies of the of fanboysm and logic limits.
First, you don't need 100$ in order to connect it to your pc, it comes with the usb cable. I assume you pc does has usb right?
No technical reason? Besides the fact that it is 5 times smaller, symmetrical and all around a better connector more suited to modern technologies..
Besides, could you care to point ANY company that has kept the same connector for nearly 9 years? I think It was long overdue and people has had more than time to benefit from their purchases.
I could point to many OEM who see fit to change their charger/connector every 6 months, but hey, all of us know they aren't screwing anyone because no one buys accessories for those devices.
If they changed the connector, thus made every iPhone 4S and previous accessory incompatible, why have they introduced a new proprietary connector and haven't made use of the standard micro USB connector. True, the iPhone 5 connector, thanks to its symmetry, is more handy. But that's the only advantage, the disadvantage of introducing a new propiertary connector, if a standard connector is established already, is much larger. You still have to carry an USB micro adapter with you, you additionally have to carry an adapter for your old accessories which you won't upgrade in the near term (car dock, hifi station), so why not just move to USB and get compatible with all the USB standards? (MHL)
You don't need to carry any USB micro adapter with you, at all. What on earth are you on about.
You don't need microUSB full stop. I've honestly never used it - not once, in any device.
You take the SUPPLIED cable and plug it into your pc, or use the SUPPLIED cable to charge your phone. How are you struggling with that?
Regarding lightning vs microUSB, unless you've extensively benchmarked both and know the absolute limitations and performance of both - you simply cannot make any claims regarding any benefits it may or may not have.
If you own a second device, the device will have a microUSB port most probably. If you visit a friend and forgot your cable, it's very likely that he has a microUSB cable because it's the standard, unlike the lightning cable.
How do you intend to benchmark the cable? Transfer speed to your computer? Well, you have to connect it to a USB port on your computer, so you get the USB limitations. What needs more bandwith? Video link, HDMI. MHL is supported via USB which supports 1080p, maybe even Apple uses MHL in their 'lightning' connector. So where exactly should it be faster? It's a marketing name, just as retina, for people like you, who blindly believe what Apple tells them.
'If you own a second device, the device will have a microUSB port most probably'
Um, no? There are thousands of devices which don't. And why does that matter anyway? I get a lightning cable,
'If you visit a friend and forgot your cable, it's very likely that he has a microUSB cable because it's the standard, unlike the lightning cable.'
Given how many iPhones sell, I doubt this anyway - but it's irrelevant. An iPhone has far longer battery life than say, the Samsung Galaxy S3 - so charging is less of an issue. I can't say I've EVER been caught at a friends without battery life and no-one there had an iPhone charger - it just doesn't happen.
And no - uses of the adapter aren't limited to just connecting to the PC - that's a primitive uneducated response. There could be all kinds of after market accessories which utilise a potentially faster connection - or advances in USB technology which surpass micro USB.
I believe MicroUSB can be quite brittle when attached to a long device.
Which MicroUSB variant are you pushing anyway, there's the 3.0 version which is ugly and has an extra piece on the side, or there's the 2.0 version which is as slow as USB 2.0 - can't even do 3.0 speeds.
USB 2.0 has one pair for signaling and one for voltage. USB 3.0 retains those pairs and adds 2 more signaling pairs for SuperSpeed USB. None of these can be repurposed within the confines of the standard.
Lighting is a general purpose connector which provides 8 pairs. This allows for much greater flexibility as Apple can now accommodate digital audio in/out, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, and SDIO, or a combination thereof, over a single connector simply by using different cables. Other legacy connections such as analog audio and video are possible through the use of active adapters containing DACs.
By the end of the month there will be over 10 million Lightning cables in the wild, so I don't imagine they'll be too hard to come by in the near future. Arguably, until not that long ago, chargers with Apple's 30-pin dock connector were easier to come by than those sporting Micro USB.
The iPhones sold in the EU will be required to ship with a Lightning to Micro USB adapter anyway, so they will also be available for those who choose to buy them stateside. I currently have a Micro USB charger in my car with a 30-pin dock connector to Micro USB adapter so I can accommodate most folks who happen to be riding with. I picked up an official Apple model for $7 on Amazon, and I don't imagine the case will be much different for the Lightning version before too long.
There is MHL for your digital connection needs. I have a camera that has a micro-USB port which has some added height for a special cable that gets me analog video and audio out. My old Touch Pro 2 had a modified micro-USB plug that was also used for the ear plugs. I'm pretty sure they could have gotten all the wanted from a micro-USB port with some modification. Minus the symmetry. They just don't care. Which is one of the reasons I don't like Apple.
No, they care a lot. Lightning has the potential to be far more flexible than simply providing A/V support. MHL is connector agnostic, so technically Lightning could qualify as an MHL connector.
And as you said, "I have a camera that has a micro-USB port which has some added height for a special cable..." The whole point of Lightning is to make a multi-purpose connector that needs no additional increase in dimension to support functionality beyond USB sync / charge.
Apple screwed the pooch on this one nicely for Samsung. Lets hope Samsung puts DDR3 and A15 Exynox in the next superphone. At this rate ill never need a HTPC i just use my phone!
Yes, by designing and implementing their own SoC and CPU cores with double the performance as the last, with better battery life, they really screwed up.
Wont be as powerful as the Exynos 5 and Samsung will have a much more powerful and open Smartphone from which to do things that Apple cant do and wont let you do. Win/Win
Previous iPhone released occured when there were already competitors with faster CPUs and more RAM. In practical terms, this greatly weakened Apple by
yea, I couldn't think of anything either.
The introduction of a new custom ARM design is an exciting thing for true geeks, no matter which platforms they prefer. If you can't handle it, go somewhere else.
I'm not quite sure why people feel compelled to compare future versions of product X to current versions of product Y. If that's your best argument, you've already lost.
Additionally, Apple's competitors seem to be at least a generation behind regarding GPU performance. The Mali based GPUs haven't exactly been breaking any speed records.
Finally, this may be a shocking revelation, but the moment an off the shelf part becomes better than what Apple has, Apple is free to use that part as well.
Quote Article: "The A6 is the first Apple SoC to use its own ARMv7 based processor design. The CPU core(s) aren't based on a vanilla A9 or A15 design from ARM IP, but instead are something of Apple's own creation."
A6 uses the ARMv7 instruction set and uses ARM IP to build a custom ARM based SoC, just like Qualcomms Snapdragon and Krait processors. Tegra, Omap or Exynos SoCs use a vanilla A9/A15 design from ARM, thus they have less to do on their own and less risk that something isn't working properly. Instead of modifying the core as Qualcomm did and Apple does now, they tune the surrounding (more cores, interaction between them, different GPU, different memory controller, different features, ...)
Yes it is ARM. There are two things you can do, licence out the ARM instruction set, or licence out pre-built cores like the ARM Cortex A9 or A15. Apple appears to have done the former this time and made their own core.
We don't know the core count yet, but if it was a quad they would certainly have said so, as that is easily marketable, money is on a faster dual core. We don't know clock speed and probably never will for sure, we'll just have estimates based on performance. Apple does not explicitly say the clock speed of the iPhones, they only have for the iPad.
Probably based on frequency/voltage scaling. They could increase the clock speed, but increase it at the same time as reducing power draw even with a shrink is much harder.
I'm very interested in what's in the Apple A6 but when I read this article it comes down to ""I've confirmed that Apple's A6 SoC is based on Apple's own ARM based CPU core" - while the VFPv4 certainly rules out Cortex A9 I can see no technical reason to rule out Cortex A15 or Cortext A7/A15 big-little. BTW as has been pointed out, A7 does support VFPv4-D32, and so could be an ARMv7s processor. More info in http://bloggershepherd.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/what...
"Based on a lot of digging over the past couple of days, and conversations with the right people, I've confirmed that Apple's A6 SoC is based on Apple's own ARM based CPU core and not the Cortex A15." Yes, that is not evidence, but that is sometimes how things are as long as there is no physical device out. Also, that blog post is wrong, Anand does say Cortex A7 also supports VFPv4: "Only the Cortex A5, A7 and A15 support the VFPv4 extensions to the ARMv7-A ISA."
That seems to be true. But I don't see how that influences his conclusion that Cortex A7 is not enough of a step up in performance. From where I'm standing, A15 is still a possibility, but highly unlikely given the time frame we are talking about. And I have no reason not to trust Anand's word that it isn't A15.
Honestly, I don't care that much either way right now. I'm not going to buy an iPhone and I will be eating up any hard facts about the SoC regardless of whether its a new design of Apple's take on an A15. It's interesting in either case. :D
Not sure it has been said before.. but overall power consumption doesn't scale exponentially with voltage. Some leakage may scale exponentially, but that's only a small part. Basic dynamic switching consumption scales with V^2, overall it's about V^3 for an entire modern chip - if I remember something I read during the last 1 or 2 years correctly. I think it was on Anandtech ;)
>I should probably give Apple's CPU team more credit in the future.
That's only fair - however, if they don't tell anyone about the new design, they can't expect to be given credit.
Exactly! Half the clock speed...half the RAM, and half the cores, yet just as 'quick' with what I'm sure will be a significant savings in 'power' accomplishing the same efficiency, speed and pure--end user enjoyment
These speeds from Geekbench are very impressive. Comparing to the actual dual core SIII sold in the US, there's an even larger 'gap' in performance as the international version is the only one sold with 4 cores. This is an engineering marvel and a big surprise. Apple is now ready and executing their own chip architecture. Married with designing their own OS, even bigger gains in perceived performance will be noticable. I'm a developer on both platforms and own the 3GS, 4 and 4S...as well as the Galaxy Note, Nexus and GSIII. My daily drivers are the 4s and GNote (the latter strictly for business apps and functionality). Regardless of the apps I use that are ambidextrous (both Android and iOS), the 4s, to this day, are more fluid them their counter part 'Droid app. I'm blown away by the processing power in these mobile devices...but even more excited by what Apple continues to achieve using less power, less speed, and less memory.
My hope is Google will follow Apple's lead wrestling control of their OS back from the manufacturers and providers...not allowing the 'bloat-ware' and skins that are dragging out the update/upgrade process and bogging down system performance. ICS and Jelly Bean are excellent updates but the fluidity and efficiency of iOS and the SDK from Apple make development a much easier endeavor. As well, knowing when and what you're users/customers are using as far as the OS build is invaluable.
This is a phenomenal engineering improvement. A huge pat on the back to the chefs (engineers) at Apple. Thinner, lighter, faster...better screen and color gamut, twice the speed (of even the 'new' iPad), screaming graphics AND as good or better battery life? Holy. Shit! Accolades to Apple. That's true innovation.
You don't have to guess, you can compare the single vs multi-core benchmarks line by line. They're a mixed bag --- A6 is usually ahead, but not always.
BUT A6 is running at 1 GHz vs 1.4GHz for SGS III, which probably means A6 is burning half the power or so. It also suggests that if Apple ever get desperate enough that they need a quick speed bump to compete in the market, they can do so, boosting either the speed or adding an additional core or two, whereas Samsung has less of this sort of flexibility.
Finally Apple, just like with iPad3, are obsessed with memory bandwidth --- this device has about 1.5 to 2x what SGS III offers, depending on the benchmark. I wonder how much of this reflects company memory of the past. Back in the PPC days, this was our biggest flaw compared to Intel, the thing that made me, as an Apple SW engineer focussed on optimization and performance, weep in frustration --- we had better CPU cores, as long as you stayed in L1, cache, but our memory systems were so crippled that the core never had a chance to shine.
We seem to be living through the mirror image of those days --- now the Apple HW engineers aren't going to make that mistake again, while the competition hope that synthetic (ie core-only) benchmarks will hide their memory system real-world limitations.
For those of you referencing the Geekbench 2 Results where the iPhone5 beats the Galaxy S3, you have been given the incorrect link. The link that shows the Galaxy S3 test with a lower score than an iPhone5 is because you were linked to the wrong test. The test you were linked to is under android tests which is the incorrect score. If you go to the same website and go to the popular results: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/popular
You'll notice that the iPhone5 Scores1601, and the Galaxy S3 scores 2059. I also noticed that the Galaxy S3 they were testing only registered ~800mb of RAM when in actuality the S3 has 2GB. . The Galaxy S3's hardware is superior to the iPhone5, and Apple isn't going to release another phone for who knows, a year? They dropped the ball with this one in my opinion.
What hardware is better in the S3 than the iPhone5? Better front facing camera (1.9MP), NFC chip, Larger & Removable battery, additional memory via SD card (up to 64GB), larger & full 720p resolution screen, and there's more, just take a look at Samsung's ad: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/samsung-gal...
Direct comparison of geekbench scores between the iPhone 5 and SGS3 isn't very meaningful. However assuming the direct comparison with the iPhone 4S and 3rd gen iPad is more or less valid, then the iPhone 5 is going to have a *ton* of performance headroom and plenty to last until the 5S or 6. And this doesn't even say anything about graphics performance which is going to be the top for a smartphone by quite a large margin if it's 2 times the 4S.
The iPhone 4S keeps up perceptually with a Galaxy S III. So we're expecting the 5 to surpass it from a general use perspective.
Also, size is a tradeoff. Saying "because it's bigger!" is not an advantage- or the iPad totally destroys the galaxy S3, right? The SGS3 is better because it's bigger. And the iPhone is better because it's smaller.
I believe the comparison between the S3 and the iPhone 5 is valid because they are both at the top of their markets, don't get into tablets that is a completely different subject. The iPhone 5 didn't improve the screen from the 4S, they added height to the top and the screen is not even 720p capable. The S3 is, and many other top of the line androids are. The iPhone 5 finally includes real 4G, while Android has had it for over a year. My point is that Apple is not innovating. You can say its better because its smaller, but because Android is open source, there are many companies like Samsung, HTC, LG, etc all making smartphones there will be smaller Android phones that still are superior to the iPhone 5. Like I said, Apple releases their phones after usually about a year so by the time the 5S comes out Android will be even further ahead, I imagine quad core phones will be the regular by then since the S3 is already a quad core phone. Android might even be optimized for 4 cores by then as well. Apple needs to stop innovation with their ridiculously broad patents and release some quality features for their phones. Keeping up with the hardware standard should be the first thing they improve on. The only thing I was actually impressed with on the iPhone 5 was the 5 microphones for better sound quality, although I'm not even sure it improves it I think it is a good idea. The screen, the processor, the 1 gig ram, the "different" plug that improves nothing at all, and the camera are all areas where there was no significant improvement compared to similar priced phones. Apple has in the past been at least up to standard with their releases, which holds the iPhone users at bay until the next release, but like I said I don't think they achieved that with this phone. I find that even Apple fans are a little let down that Apple only slightly changed the 4S to the 5.
Opps, I meant "apple needs to stop stifling innovation with their ridiculously broad patents and stick to releasing some quality features for their phones"
I mentioned tablets as a point of comparison, as conceptually they are similar. The reason I said the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3 comparison wasn't particularly valid was in terms of the Geekbench score- it might not be fair to one side or another because the operating system is different. In the real world, comparing the devices next to each other for *actual* performance is valid. And considering a 4S keeps up or exceeds a SGS3 on doing mundane things like tapping to zoom in a web browser, the iPhone 5 is really going to shine- again- in comparison. And of course iOS still has the most CPU/GPU demanding apps to even take advantage of such a processor (polished, feature rich first party apps - pro audio apps, and then high end games that are not yet available for other mobiles)
Apple _is_ innovating- the evidence is this very article. Trying to dodge that with complaints about "patents" is completely beside the point. The only thing that would put Android "ahead" here really is that you can fit a larger, hotter chip inside of a larger device. Hence again my comparison to the iPad.
I understand the geekbench score not being valid. But until a reputable source tests them both side by side, both running the latest firmware (JellyBean vs iOS), the tests are all we have. The operating systems are indeed way different and its hard to compare them. In terms of hardware, you cannot deny that the S3 is superior. A very large amount of the iPhone 5's parts (processor, memory, screen) are manufactured by Samsung (up to 25% of the phone). As for iOS having the most CPU/GPU demanding apps. where are you getting this information? There really isn't much difference between apps. A large majority of apps are available on both the Google Play store and the App store.
Apple is no longer innovating. The new iPhone5 has nothing new to bring to the table aside from having 5 microphones on the phone. All the other additions were just old technology that Apple had yet to add to the phone (4G, larger screen), or expected improvements such as the processor.
Anyways. My main point is that Apple did release a better phone but they did not improve enough. The S3 and iPhone5 are both top of the line phones and it can be argued by either side which one is faster. But the S3 came out before the iPhone5 did and the Android phone makers (Samsung, HTC, Motorolla, LG) all release phones and technology improvements faster than Apple. We might see a couple of new top of the line smartphones from each of the top companies before we will see the iPhone5, and I think by that point Apple is going to be further behind. As for the comment below me that Samsung is "scared", I hope you realize that they sell two phones for every Apple phone sold in addition to making up to 25% of the iPhone and iPad's. I think they're okay.
First, we have more data points for the GS3 then we do for the iPhone 5.
Second, the Geekbench tests are multi-threaded. Essentially, showing a best case scenario for quad core machines. In real life, it's debatable how often you'd ever see that advantage. Remember, the iPhone 5 is getting this performance with half the number of cores (and running at a 40% slower clock speed), which means each core is significantly faster on Apple's chip.
Third, the iPhone 4s "feels" faster than a GS3. That might be due to poor Android GUI optimizations or reflect upon the 4s' superior GPU performance. Either way, the iPhone 5 doubles the 4s's performance (in GPU also). Which by extension means that the iPhone 5 will feel faster than the GS3 for most tasks.
As for Samsung's ad, these are the actions of someone who is scared.
One thing I find troubling is the type of benchmarks Apple chose to use. They seem to be more disk i/o bound than CPU specific. Loading applications, saving files, etc...
Why is it so hard for people to notice this? Geekbench also tests memory performance, and Anand has already said it has vastly improved memory (which btw, could be a newer memory bought from Samsung).
So why the hell is all the focus on the CPU? Even if iPhone 5 has 1600 score and GS3 has 1560, that does NOT mean that it has a faster processor.
Again - the test measures BOTH memory and CPU performance, and it obviously means iPhone 5 has faster memory than GS3, which would give it a higher score for that...which is how the iPhone 5 compensates for actually having a SLOWER CPU.
I did notice that the Geekbench also tested the memory performance. But I don't trust these scores because of a few things. The tested the S3 a few different times if you look on http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/popular The Galaxy S3 scored 1781 and 2059, and the iPhone 1601. Opening the tests it showed that the iPhone exceeded the S3 in memory tests and the S3 had a faster processor. What was wrong though is looking at the test it listed the memory of the s3 to be 800MB when in fact it has 2GB of ram. Something there is wrong. As you mentioned, Samsung makes the memory for the iPhones, so why would they not use better memory on their own phones and let Apple use it?
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aNYthing24 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Krait also supports VFPv4, right?Ryan Smith - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Correct.tipoo - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Looking forward to knowing if it's faster than Krait.Flunk - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
They could have just licensed Krait or Exynos (less likely ;)) and slapped it in like they did with previous chipstipoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Is Qualcomm licencing out Krait? I thought they've only produced it on their own and sold the whole chips.frostyfiredude - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
They have historically, so I don't think this is krait. But if Apple wanted to license Krait and were willing to pay a fair price I wouldn't be too surprised if they would work out a deal. 50+ million devices will ship with the A6 so that's a lot of revenue potential that they wouldn't otherwise get with their limited fab output.lowlymarine - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Exynos uses off-the-shelf ARM cores, as far as I'm aware. Historically, Qualcomm doesn't license its architectures, but they are already providing a lot of IP for these new iPhones, so it's far from impossible. Certainly as believable as the idea that the engineers who gave us the worst antenna design in the history of cellular communications could have designed their own CPU core.A5 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
If you think RF and CPU Architecture would have the same teams, you're being silly. Come on.capasicum - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
Certainly you've only read the media coverage, and skipped the fact that every phone has it's own "death grip".I'm a left-hander and own one of those iPhones 4 with the crappy antenna. And, I live in Eastern Europe (bad technology adoption, etc). Might seem strange, but I haven't had the "death grip" experience. Not once.
More over, the engineers responsible for the CPU have nothing to do with the antenna. "Engineer" is a title, not a position, you know.
Also, what's been done with the antena of current models (4S and 5) is a couple of minor changes. The general antenna design stays.
tobi1449 - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
Certainly you've read it wrong and skipped the fact that this is not the usual issue where your connection becomes unstable and weaker when you enclose the antennas with your hands.The death-grip on the Iphone 4 worked different because you were able to short-circuit the antennas directly (which you can't do with any other phone I know) and the signal instantly dropped to 0.
techconc - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
@tobi1449:Certainly, you've never actually used an iPhone 4 otherwise you'd know that your claims are patently false. My wife has an iPhone 4, you can't just make the signal completely drop by bridging the antenna gap. This "issue" didn't result in any more actual lost calls than other phones. The "issue" was corrected in software as to how the signal strength was being reported. Yes, multi-antenna designs are more consistent with regard to reception but even at it's worst, the iPhone 4 design is nowhere near what you describe. Further, this discussion is a bit off topic.
rarson - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - link
Yeah, and that class action lawsuit for Mag"Safe" adapters catching fire didn't happen either.Apple products suck. They really do.
moogleii - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - link
Your response to his antenna argument is a giant red herring? I guess all car manufacturers suck because at some point in time, one of their products had an issue. Or any manufacturer really.http://www.arcfn.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-...
Looks like quality engineering there to me. But hey, let's all resort to knee-jerk fanboy-ism.
Your argument sucks. It really does. Honestly, I shouldn't even have bothered.
moogleii - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - link
I don't think it's as certain as you think it is. There are tests showing it happening on different designs as well (in fact, there's one on this site).http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-...
It did not drop to zero. It attenuated the signal. If you had abysmal signal, sure, it could/would drop. If you had high signal, certainly not. From anandtech's own tests, worst case, a 24
It's not clearcut issue. By their own tests, in some situations the antenna improved things, and in some cases, it didn't.
tuxRoller - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
This is what I've wondered, especially with the MSM8960T soon to be available.I guess we'll see since I didn't notice any references in this article other than "unpublishable" info about it not being cortex a9 based.
192168ll - Tuesday, September 11, 2018 - link
Yeah, They can simply license Krait!!______________________________
https://192168ll.co/
Death666Angel - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Probably, but I don't think it was wrong to doubt their abilities up to this point. A4/A5 wasn't exactly brilliant in any novel way. :-)Good read, thanks for that!
Can someone explain ARM naming to me? They have Cortex A8, A9, A15 which get faster in the order of their numbers. Then they have Cortex A5 which is for new low end SoCs. Where are Cortex A10-A14? Are they in other markets? NAS or routers or something? Wouldn't mind some enlightenment. :D
Exophase - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
They're not version numbers that increase by one with regard to anything, so no there aren't other versions with the missing numbers, although you did miss Cortex-A7.I think that the number is meant to give some rough indicator of relative performance. A9 was released after A8 and is somewhat faster. A7 is marginally slower than A8. A5 is slower than A8 and A9, but not half the speed as either. A15 is substantially faster than A9. Of course it's not all linear with respect to benchmarks or anything but it gives you a good feel.
ARM does have two other product profiles (M and R) and I think the numbering there at least kind of fits in with this scheme, in that Cortex-M0/M1/M3/M4 and Cortex-R4/R5 all scale in performance in that order, and note that all the Cortex-M series are given numbers below 5 as they're all slower than Cortex-A5, but Cortex-R5 is on a similar performance level so doesn't have that restriction. The relation in numbering between different profiles is even cruder, but probably does still give a rough boundary point.
dagamer34 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
I think A7 is almost meant to mimic the performance of Cortex A8 at a much smaller power envelope to complement A15 in a big.LITTLE arrangement in high end smartphones/tablets in the coming years or in a dual A7 arrangement for low to midrange CPUs.ratte - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Nice update on the A6.Will be really interesting to see the testresults
zanon - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Thanks for the write up Anand, this is an interesting step forward and I very much look forward to seeing what they've put together. We've known for years that Apple has been acquiring significant chip design talent (P. A. Semi being a major example), but I think this will be the first time we'll get to see it really put to use at the lowest and most core levels, rather then merely SoC integration or peripheral stuff.It's been many years since we last saw a wide array of companies trying to make different CPUs. It'll be very interesting to see what all comes of it.
chromatix - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
I believe they leave gaps in the numbering scheme to allow for new types of cores in lower performance and power consumption brackets.The Cortex-A8 was the first ARMv7-A design. It was followed considerably later by the A5 and A9, offering lower and higher performance (and power consumption) respectively. The A7 and A15 are the latest pair in the same vein.
There are also Cortex-R and Cortex-M series CPUs, following the ARMv7-R and ARMv7-M architectures respectively (except that the Cortex-M0, the very smallest ARM core, follows ARMv6-T2 instead). These designs are for Realtime and eMbedded designs respectively and have appropriate design tradeoffs accordingly.
None of these are to be confused with the ARM7 core, which dates back to the mid-1990s (using ARMv4T architecture) and is still insanely popular because it uses only a few ten-thousands of transistors. It has been regularly updated to work with newer processes, so these days it is a complete CPU core in a tiny fraction of a square millimetre, and runs at several hundred MHz. All together now: "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!"
KPOM - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
After you are done wiping the egg off your face from your proud tweets earlier this week that it was an A15, I'm assuming you'll be running some tests once you get your hands on an iPhone 5. Is that a good assumption?It will be interesting to see how well this compares to the A15, and what competitors will put into their phones over the coming months.
DigitalFreak - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
DickSufo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Oh my, what buffoons. Factually inaccurate tweets? However will they live it down? *snicker*ltcommanderdata - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
The SGX554MP2 is also a possibility. It offers 2x the ALU performance of the SGX543MP2, equivalent to the SGX543MP4 without doubling the TMU or ROP count which isn't as necessary given the resolution difference between the 2012 iPad and iPhone 5. Apple may not want to introduce a new GPU core when Rogue is around the corner though.Is it too early for 2x32-bit LPDDR3? Sticking with LPDDR2 they could only move from LPDDR2-800 in the A5 to LPDDR2-1066, which is a pretty marginal difference in bandwidth to feed a 2x faster CPU and particularly a 2x faster GPU. If they could get LPDDR3-1600, they could match A5X memory bandwidth with half the memory controllers.
Any speculation on cache sizes? Shipping Cortex A9 designs seem to have stuck with 512KB per core, which was unchanged from higher-end Cortex A8 designs. Since Apple isn't worried about die space, would moving to 1MB L2 cache per core be worthwhile? Intel pushed a large, low latency L2 cache in Dothan as a power efficient way to increase performance so there is merit to that approach. Would Apple consider a shared L3 cache like Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge to share data between the CPU and GPU?
Alexvrb - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I have to admit, I was sure it was an MP4 like the latest iPad... but I hadn't considered the possibility of an MP3 (at slightly higher clocks than their A5 used) or an SGX554. I hadn't seen or heard of 554 being used, so I sort of forgot the design was there. Waiting.Won't be long until Series 6 though, which will produce some pretty amazing mobile graphics. :D
erple2 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Doesn't the Archos 101sx use the omap 4470, and the sgx 554? I seem to remember reading that in the review on this very site (page 3, middle of second paragraph).Alexvrb - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I'm pretty sure that the 4470 has an SGX544. Looking around it looks like there were rumors of it being an SGX554 before release, but those same rumors said the CPU cores would be clocked at 1.8Ghz. So... yeah.dagamer34 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
This makes a lot more sense than Apple having A15 CPUs (I always found it a little weird that Apple would be ready with them before TI when they were it's lead development partner, and we haven't seen silicon at final clocks yet).Invariably, if we've got a custom CPU core, then sooner or later we're going to get a custom GPU core and the Apple SoC is going to be a black box where the only data we get about it is from benchmarks.
I'm glad the mistake has been cleared up and eager to see how it performs against Krait and Cortex A15.
solipsism - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
They do own part of Img Tech so that wouldn't be too hard to do, but I wonder if it is necessary as they can likely get Img Tech to build to their specs.jjj - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Always expected A15 .A9 could have been an option, Apple quoted some perf numbers in some tests and since they are not all that honest it could have been higher clocks combined with faster RAM and much faster NAND.
Custom core is far more interesting since they can build the silicon and the software together and they do have the units vol to afford it.
Now they got to integrate the baseband soon and more in the next few years.
Lucian Armasu - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
I'm curious what the performance of this will be like. Even though you seem to think that they've focused a lot on power consumption, the power consumption has barely improved in the new iPhone, according to Apple's own numbers. So it remains to seen if their CPU can compete with Qualcomm's S4 Pro and Cortex A15. My guess is it won't because this is a first for Apple, so it's unlikely they made something better than Qualcomm or ARM in terms of architecture, and knowing Apple they probably kept the frequency low, too (probably around 1.2 Ghz per core).As for the GPU, if they went with PowerVR SGX543 again, that means they won't support OpenGL ES 3.0 in the iPhone for a year, until the next iPhone arrives, even though there will be phones supporting it as soon as this year.
WaltFrench - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
I'm not sure that Apple needs to develop something “better than Qualcomm” to out-perform for its devices. It'd seem most high-performance, low-power designs would optimize for the Dalvik JIT instruction stream, which is very likely quite different from what Xcode generates.After all, the confirmation process seems to have started in Xcode; it's obvious that Apple is attempting to exploit its tight linkage between OS, development tools and silicon.
Given the task-specific nature of CPU optimization, I'm not even sure what instruction mix would even be available for the unbiased analysis you seem to think would be out there.
tipoo - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Krait already outperforms Apples 2x claim on CPU only benchmarks, I don't think the A6 will beat Krait there. But once more Apple will have the fastest GPU by a long shot, other phones had just started to get close to the 4S.I still wonder how after all this time no one else picked up SGX? It's in the PS Vita, but what smartphones besides the iPhone?
Death666Angel - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Qualcomm has Adreno, so they will never use anything else. TI uses SGX graphics in its OMAP3/4 and upcoming OMAP5 SoCs. For example all current 44x0 SoCs have some form of SGX in it (the 4460 can be found in the Galaxy Nexus, the 4470 is in the new Archos tablets etc.). ST-Ericsson will use Rogue in its upcoming Nova SoC. Intel uses the SGX540 and Samsung used SGX in its old Hummingbird SoC.Death666Angel - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Hit "post" too soon. :DIf you are wondering why no one else uses the multicore variants of the SGX, that is most likely because no one wants to build a SoC that large in the Android world. It costs too much and doesn't have enough benefits. Apple can do that easily as it has enough margins, can make good use of the graphics part because they are coding their own OS and having that graphics part across all their platforms means developers can exploit it easily as well. If you have an Android handset with great graphics developers still need to code for all the others with mediocre graphics and the good graphics might not make the game look better or run better.
tipoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
It makes sense that no one else wants to create something with that die size as that would be costly for a few reasons, but maybe with 28 and 32mn processes they could at least use the MP2, which Apple has been at 45nm for a year.Death666Angel - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Yeah, TI will use MP2 in OMAP5 (SGX544 at 532MHz).Samsung will likely stay with Mali GPUs, they are doing quite well. Nvidia will stay with their GeForce GPUs as well. Qualcomm has Adreno. Many of the Chinese SoCs are also using Mali this time around. So 3 of the big SoCs manufacturers at the high end have no need for SGX multicore solutions in the future. And it seems that Nvidia has the dedicated Android gaming market mostly in their hands. :-)
joelypolly - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
I might give Apple a bit more credit since they use to build their own CPUs as well as being the owners of ARM itself in the past. Also the purchase of both PA Semi and Intrinsity should to some degree put Apple on equal footing with Qualcomm.cocoviper - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I think you're forgetting there's a larger display and additional radio to drive. The fact that they held the line on power performance with those added and no real battery increase suggests tremendous power savings at the SoC level.lilmoe - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
They also have a larger battery to compensate for that larger screen and the new radios. I'd say this new SoC has the same power consumption as the previous A5 at best...Lucian Armasu - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
The battery life with LTE will be influeced only by how efficient the chip is. If they are using a 28nm radio, it should be pretty efficient, but probably not more than other companies.Death666Angel - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
As I understand it, smart software can also enhance LTE battery life. But mostly it's the chip and process node.Lepton87 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Was I the only one to notice that 2x the performance of A9 at 800MHz is actually pathetic? Anand always seems to drool over anything apple related, numbers be damned. Krait at 1.5GHz is going to mop the floor with that thing. Even Tegra 3 T33 will have comparable ST CPU performance with that thing. (A9 at 1.7GHz) This is already 2x faster than iPhone 4s CPU. Those numbers are actually PATHETIC and yet anand drools over that.darkcrayon - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Well, if Apple's general claims are correct, that it has 2x the CPU and 2x the GPU of the iPhone 4S, the performance should be quite good. Remember, Apple didn't say twice the performance of "an A9". We're talking about the actual device here. The iPhone 4S is competitive with phones on the market with twice the clock speed at CPU tasks, and is faster than almost everything in GPU tasks.This new iPhone is clearly going to be no slouch in the performance department, regardless of your lack of interest because Apple produced it.
EnzoFX - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Seriously. Biased much? So many here are getting lost in numbers. It remains to be seen if the hardware, combined with better optimized software (the #1 thing Apple has over any android offering) will mean pages are actually rendered faster, etc.In regards to graphics, I don't even really look at them these days. It seems Apple is simply uncontested in the graphics department. This can be bad, they need the competition to become more aggressive. Though this update I'm sure will be an iterative one, and will still be great, and still uncontested!
ltcommanderdata - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Despite your complaints, I don't remember reading Anand claiming the A6 has superior performance to other current or upcoming high-end SoC. Instead the focus is on how to increase performance in the most power efficient way. While Apple has traditionally focused on having leading GPU performance in their SoC, they haven't done the same for the CPU. As such, it wouldn't be surprising if the A6 is merely competitive, but is not the fastest CPU. If the reason Apple moved to a custom design is to increase power efficiency, the question of how successful they were needs to be answered by comparing performance/watt between SoC designs rather than raw maximum performance. I'm not sure there are very good ways to benchmark performance/watt between various mobile devices though.cocoviper - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Actually if you look at past benchmarks Apple's dual A9s at 800MHz pretty much tie with Tegra3 (due to more efficient software).http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6098/49612...
2x that performance puts it squarely in the realm of Krait or slightly better.
lilmoe - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Try again with Jelly Bean and a faster browser. Really, those Sunspider benchmarks don't show the whole picture when a webpage is loading and being rendered on the screen...But if you want to see a more valid comparison, I'd suggest you wait for IE10 on Windows Phone 8 (highly optimized for the Snapdragon S4, unlike Android) and compare the browser speeds and general OS performance on that with the iPhone 5... You'll have a better picture.
madmilk - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Sunspider is not multithreaded (actually it's a limitation of Javascript in browsers). Sometimes the engine can use multiple cores, but there's no way the Tegra is being fully utilized here. That said, the additional two cores are hardly used elsewhere either.lilmoe - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Sadly, but I also agree. First, on the CPU side, they tried to gain more popularity by providing false "exclusive" info, and now they're saying that it's "pleasant" and making it seam as if it's revolutionary (on the vertical integration side) when Qualcomm has been doing this for years now (and doing a better job on the CPU side at that).Second, about the GPU, they're still trying to speculate something TOTALLY off. Anand and crew know pretty well that Apple's claims of "2X" and "4X" are utter bull in real world performance (only in a sub-benchmarks do we get anything close to their claims). Refer to the comparison of the Apple A5X and nVidia Tegra3 for more info.
Sorry, but by the sounds of this chip, it would probably be comparable to the Exynos 4 Quad, but not nearly as powerful as the Snapdragon S4 Pro. Exynos 5 Dual will wipe the floor with all of the above...
It's really disappointing. I thought we had a reliable source on low level tech. They can be fanboys of whatever they want, but I didn't expect it to affect the way they reported tech news.
doobydoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
You question the GPU claims Apple made, yet it's common knowledge that the iPad has the fastest GPU of any tablet and the iPhone 4S, despite being a year old - still dominates the GPU benchmarks in America - beating the Samsung Galaxy S3, for example.It is virtually guaranteed that the iPhone 5 will have the fastest GPU in any smartphone when it's reviewed.
doobydoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Oh and your comments on the CPU are nothing short of totally unfounded guesswork.Death666Angel - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Considering the size of the SoC in the iPad, it better beat everything else. :PAnd the SGS3 international version is faster than the iPhone4s, so I guess it sucks to be stuck with the Krait version.
lilmoe - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Fanboy much? Go back to the review that this site has provided for the Galaxy S3, the Mali400 GPU in the Exynos 4 Quad is 25% faster than PowerVR in the iPhone 4S.Benchmarks are cool, they give us a roughly good idea of what to expect out of a platform, but real world performance can differ slightly to significantly.
doobydoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
The benchmarks I referred to are from this site, and they are facts - nothing opinionated and your fanboy statement is therefore a bit illogical.I specifically stated the GPU benchmarks in 'America' - the GPU in the iPhone 4s outperforms the American version of the SG3.
The Mali 400 is only found in the international version of the SG3 - and it's only marginally faster.
Given Apples claim of 2x faster GPU you would expect the iPhone 5 to easily take the GPU crown once again.
Flunk - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
It doesn't really matter, it just needs to be faster than the last iPhone because it's a closed system. People don't buy the iPhone for relative performance vs Android.bill4 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Apple has to spend a fraction of it's 500 zillion in the bank on something. And it certainly isn't modernizing that piece of crap iOS...EnzoFX - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
They obviously don't think they need to. I'm inclined to agree. It's still simple enough for 99% of people. It's an OS. You have icons and you have functionality. The only thing it can do is evolve. People are easy to dismiss the new features and updates because the home screen still looks the same. Do you need live widgets on there? Well I'd argue most people don't. At least not in any way that Android does it. Perhaps something simpler the way WP8 or whatever does this. But that's risky with little payoff, Apple iOS is already well established. There are a ton of features added, mostly through apps, and that's an argument most will understand. That it's all about the apps.Do you yell at Windows 7 and wish it was more evolved? I'd say most people here are content with the basic start menu/icons that it offers lol. So again, it would have to be a whole new redesign, and again don't think that's warranted whatsoever. It's all about the apps that will round out the OS. Like the reason people STICK with Windows OS', because it supports all their favorite and wide range of apps. Apple is bringing the apps. Look at their focus in the last couple years, they're pushing their iLife stuff and buffing up specs, and empower devs to develop more and more. When the Smartphone needs to evolve, then iOS will prob then too. Until then, a smartphone is just a smartphone, there's not much reason to take the next big leap.
Graag - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
This is exactly right, I think. It is a feature, not a bug, that the UI stays so similar from year to year.Imagine if every time you bought a new car the controls were in a different place. Sometimes the brake is on the left, sometimes it's on the right; sometimes it's on the steering wheel, sometimes on the armrest. Same with the accelerator, except sometimes it's a motorcycle-style throttle. And sometimes you operate the turn signals with your feet - especially when you get a joystick instead of a steering wheel.
This would be cool for people who want to tinker with their cars, or who are tired of using the same old controls year after year. But for most people who just want to drive, by far the best plan is to keep the basic UI unchanged, and integrate newer features around them.
The same is true with phones; for the vast majority of consumers, the phone is a tool to do other things with and they don't want to spend very much time tweaking the phone itself.
So it's kind of a relief to these consumers that when they get a new phone, or upgrade to a new OS, they will be able to "drive" the new/updated phone in the same manner as the old phone.
vision33r - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
At the end of the day majority of the iPhone users buy it for it's simplicity and usefulness without having to spend a ton of swipes to make things work.That's the beauty of simplicity that you get things done without having to use a lot of resource.
Android is a very stubborn OS because it has to cater to those who use it for more than just a simple smartphone. That's why a bigger screen matters to Android users.
If I were to use an iPhone I would prefer one as small as my watch. I really wish SIRI can do everything for me without me ever lifting a finger.
doobydoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
There's no useful end use that you can't achieve on iOS that you can on Android.There are just guys who think they are tech geeks who haven't worked out how to do something on an iPhone.
solomonshv - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
"Imagine if every time you bought a new car the controls were in a different place. Sometimes the brake is on the left, sometimes it's on the right; sometimes it's on the steering wheel, sometimes on the armrest."stupid example, should have farted out a better one.
first, you went a little too far with that. that's like saying you bought a phone where the microphone is above the screen and the speaker is below that.
second, it seems to me like you have only owned 1 car in your entire life. i'm on my third SUV from the same japanese maker. things like cruise control, wind shield wiper controls, audio controls always seem to move around.
hell, even the controls for the transfer case changed from a lever to a knob and moved about 8 inches further away from the gear stick. .
solomonshv - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
-"Do you need live widgets on there?"Yes.
-"Well I'd argue most people don't."
Who died and made you god? i'm sure they will decide for themselves when they see widgets in action. You should see the reactions on iPhone/BB user's faces when they play with my GS3 and see the gmail and calendar widgets, and the disappointment that follows when i tell them that only android does that.
-"Apple iOS is already well established."
You mean well advertised. The Apple logo is flashed in the viewer eyes in movies, CW soap operas, rap videos, bill boards, etc. They work really hard to put that Apple in the center of the screen. no other company advertises anything so aggressively. when was the last time you saw the Toyota symbol flashed in your face every 5 minutes in a TV show? Characters on prime time shows like Vampire diaries and gossip girls always walk around with the Apple products and the Apple logo appears on the screen so much that it may as well be the protagonist.
go to youtube, enter "First Look: iPhone 5 jimmy kimmel" in the search box, hit enter and open the first video. (don't click the ads above the actual video).
-"Do you yell at Windows 7 and wish it was more evolved?"
No. Windows 7 has all the functionality anyone could possibly desire. thanks to the registry editor, there isn't a single function or menu that can't be modified, removed or added. and the instructions for any modification are readily available to anyone who knows how to use google.
-"So again, it would have to be a whole new redesign, and again don't think that's warranted whatsoever."
Of course not. Steve took a zillion surveys that demonstrated that his method was perfect.
-"It's all about the apps that will round out the OS"
how about removable storage? and the ability to add songs to your music library on the go without being changed to iTunes and the horrible quality AAC? Maybe a notification LED in the front (i know you can use iPhone's flash as an indicator light, but it is way too bright and will burn the entire battery in a few hours).
doobydoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Widgets may impress as an immediate gimmick, but in day to day use it's an irrelevance, which simply drains battery life.iOS isn't advertised at all, really. Samsung spends far more on marketing than Apple does and when Apple DOES advertise it's for product features - not iOS itself. It's unarguable that iOS is better established than Android - it's plain obvious given Apples consistency and consistent support of legacy devices.
Jimmy Kimmel youtube video is funny - but proves nothing. Take any modern smartphone and you'll be able to capture similar responses. They no doubt edited out the people who said 'it looks the same'. It's a measure of American stupidity - not stupidity specific to Apple.
Rants on Windows 7 don't belong on a smartphone discussion.
As for removable storage - that's hardware, not software - so it's nothing to do with iOS. You can buy an adapter for a couple of dollars to allow you to read SD cards on your iPhone - most don't, because internal storage plus cloud = plenty. SD card storage is slow to read.
You don't need iTunes, full stop, to do anything - especially not to manage music - you just seem to not have a clue about that.
Seems like you don't really have a clue what iOS is like these days - you're living in the past while the rest of the world has moved on.
EnzoFX - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
First you misunderstood completely. Second your argument is contradictory and not to mention rather ignorant, shows the blind bias really. Lastly all it goes to prove is that you are not the 99% that the phone is catered to. Failing to realize this is the most ignorant thing you can do when trying to make any comparison argument here.You couldn't even acknowledge that iOS is well established lol. Let alone realize its the better app scene.
Scannall - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
How exactly is iOS a piece of crap? It's a lot more efficient and faster than Android. Runs apps better and faster. Is a lot better at multi-core support. Less likely to have battery sucking apps in the background. Has a much better SDK. A better eco-system. Runs smoother and always has.Is it because it looks the same? Windows has had pretty much the same look since Windows 95. Just a slow evolution. Yet, with Windows 8 coming, and a drastic change you have people screaming from the rooftops over it.
Penti - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
It doesn't really mean it's not A9 does it? It might only mean that the Old Intrinsity team and Samsung in Texas designed a A9-based chip from synthesizable RTL, changing out the FPU. It does however mean that they don't use any hard-macros or such from Samsung though, but they are still probably involved. Interesting to see either way especially if it's their own custom ARM-compatible processor but I doubt there is any performance enhancements in the pipeline except for the added VFPv4.Remember even the A5X had roughly double the GPU power of the A5 or previous smartphone / iPhone SoC's/processors. It's not twice as fast gpu as A5X here.
If it is their own architecture actually then it's the old PA-Semi team that has designed it probably, not anyone in Texas, but if so why was it so adamant to buy the Intrinsity team that designed the A4 (and Hummingbird) with Samsung in Texas?
32nm mean at least that it is not Krait. But do we really know who's involved here? 28nm and another gpu vendor would mean it is a rebadged Qualcomm chip, but shouldn't the drivers leave any marks if so?
You at least forgetting there are three ways to implement ARM, one to design your own ARMv7/8 compatible architecture, two to implement and adapt a synthesizable Cortex-core from ARM which means you can adapt it for certain processes, power enhancements, fabrication and so on, or three to license a hard-macro from ARM/the fab and combine that with other logic IP.
As VFPv3 is optional (or at least configurable Tegra 2 with VFPv3-D16 is an example) on the Cortex A9 it's not totally alien to fathom that they also could replace it if they work with ARM here or work with say Samsung's fab which has a full license for ARM cores. Any way they seem to intentionally be very quiet about the subject.
ltcommanderdata - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
"If it is their own architecture actually then it's the old PA-Semi team that has designed it probably, not anyone in Texas, but if so why was it so adamant to buy the Intrinsity team that designed the A4 (and Hummingbird) with Samsung in Texas?"PA-Semi's contribution would likely be on the architecture while Intrinsity's specialty is in laying out the transistors to maximize performance and lower power consumption.
Freakie - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I agree that there is probably more here than even Anand is acknowledging could be (also Anand seems to be trying to throw as much good light as he can at Apple for this). Apple already has used ARM ISA designs in the past, and even went further and tweaked the Samsung's to make it just a bit more like how they want (or rather, PA Semi did that I believe... highly doubt there are any engineers actually at Apple that can do that stuff when they already own companies that do it). I doubt that this situation is any different than that previous situation, where they have just taken an already customized package and customized it some more. Of course, I think we wont know that for-sure until we get die-shots of the thing, like how we were able to tell that their previous one was almost exactly a Samsung processor.Penti - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Well the A4 was for example called the Apple A4 even when it was an Samsung and Intrinsity project for their then pretty small Apple customer, later they bought Intrinsity and came up with A5 and A5X and die-shrinks all on Samsungs fab with their help, they rebadged it before they bought Intrinsity so of course the first product was largely a Samsung project with Intrinsity as a subcontractor.It would be fun if it's a custom chip here, but I'm kind of not leaning towards that because it largely didn't bring in any new features or enhancements they bragged about. It's certainly possible to upgrade a A9 with the FPU from the A5/A7 or whatever that is already on the market. The problem with the A5/A7 configuration of the FPU would be that it's a reduced registry D16-variant. But they probably have the FPU done already for the A15 proper, we have to wait and see how they went about creating this chip. Odd timing if it's a new custom architecture chip.
I'm pretty sure the PA-Semi and Intrinsity teams have no external work anymore as they were merged with Apple totally and don't exist as separate units any more. To bad that PA-Semi's processor went to do largely nothing. Intrinsity also helped other firms to design PPC and MIPS processors, and did ARM-work for others than Samsung in Texas were they were based, too. Basically they did specialist design tools for the business and collaborated and co-design stuff. I'm sure that other firms in the Texas area has snatched up people that doesn't work for Apple any more, any way we won't see their work in anything more then in Apple chips. It's sadly a downside of mergers if they don't want to keep and develop the product line. Apple is largely a retailer (as most people work in Apple stores and related) and a software company but they should have a few hundred semi design people from their buyouts alone, it's not like Dangers buyout by Microsoft or Microsoft's Nokia partnership here at least as they do deliver products. I just noted that they didn't say "totally new design, new powerful GPU etc etc". It just sounded like here, here's a new chip buy it :) Intrinsity team is the ARM guys. Several of the key PA-Semi guys left Apple after the acquisition or even months before but they should have plenty of skilled engineers still. Not sure they need such a large design team if they are only going to cook ARM-SoC's together with other IP-suppliers (physical IP) and manufacturers though, not sure how many is left or has been hired, we just have to see what they have come up with. Old Intrinsity team is the one who are best skilled at optimizing external design.
Fx1 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
I knew ANAND shouldnt have said it was a A15. So cock sure of himself on this one and boy was he wrong.I think an apology is in order.
DigitalFreak - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
No one cares.jenjohnson88 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Many people said it couldn't be A15, and Anand/Brian arrogantly said it was.you'd better believe we care that something was claimed as FACT when it was merely a guess.
JarredWalton - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
So, maybe Anand should do an apology article where he says something like, "I was wrong, it's not A15. Here's what I know." Oh, wait.. that's exactly what this article is.tipoo - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Lol. An apology? They try to inform us the best they can, sometimes they make mistakes. Get over it.jenjohnson88 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
you don't get it do youthere's a difference between saying it's an educated guess, and what Brian did.
On twitter he said he had insider information confirming it was A15.
Kristian Vättö - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
And I bet he had insider information, but that ended up being incorrect. There is also a difference between Twitter and Anandtech.com. If you look at our articles about iPhone 5, we have not said it's A15 for sure:"Based on the performance gains, Apple's history of SoC naming and some other stuff we've heard recently, it looks like Apple has integrated two ARM Cortex A15 on Samsung's 32nm LP HK+MG process."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6280/apple-iphone-5-...
"Apple reserves major Ax SoC number iterations for architecture changes, combine that with the performance claims as well as some other stuff we've heard offline and there's one conclusion: the iPhone 5 uses ARM Cortex A15 cores inside."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6279/apples-iphone-5...
Fx1 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I read the stories and there was one titles A15 inside A6 CPU. Thats pretty damn definitively written and highly misleading.There is just complete Apple Fanboy style reporting on Anandtech now. I own a MBP and had 5 iPhones before my S3 so i know how to spot them.
Time to take off the rose tinted glasses Anand. The IPhone 5 is a rip off at £529 with £105 worth of components. MAYBE YOU SHOULD REPORT ON THE COMPLETE OVERPRICING OF APPLE PRODUCTS.
Kristian Vättö - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Bill of materials is irrelevant, what matters is the prices of comparable phones. Galaxy S3 is not significantly cheaper than iPhone 5; I just checked Finland's biggest e-tailer and they have the S3 for 590€ and 16GB iPhone 5 for 620€. I don't think the situation is much different in UK or any other country.The S3 doesn't cost 590€ to make so it's not like Apple is the only company charging more than the bill of materials. You have to remember that manufacturing costs are just one part of the big picture, engineering high-end phones like iPhone 5 and S3 costs millions. In the end, both Apple and Samsung are companies which aim to make profit and it seems that people are ready to pay £529 for the iPhone 5.
Fx1 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Its 20% cheaper in the UK and the specs u get in the S3 are way higher!Torrijos - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
"specs u get in the S3 are way higher"Unfortunately the specs won't be enough to call this one, we'll have to wait next week for Anandtech benchmarks to see where Apple's CPU/GPU puts them, compered to the USA SIII or the international SIII.
Then there is the question of design...
I find it pretty bold from Apple to stick to their notion that a phone screen should be only as wide as to be operated with a single thumb.
The work on the aluminium too seems amazing.
Still as an iPhone 4 user no need to upgrade just yet (since I still get updates from Apple), I'll wait for the 6 hoping that by then x265 is implemented as well as the last OpenGL and OpenCL.
DesDizzy - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
Yeah and you get a plastic phone pretending to be a high end phone.secretmanofagent - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Ignore them, and keep doing the good job you guys are doing.lemonadesoda - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
In other news... Apple patents Apple Core, and sues ARM for infringement.xeizo - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
That doesn't seem unlikely, also, the chips are squarish in shape so - sue!!!!
altman - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Not going to happen, but remember that Apple co-founded ARM back in the 80's. They later sold off their holding when they needed the money, but they obviously saw the potential of the architecture early.meloz - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
>but they obviously saw the potential of the architecture early.The ARM products used by Apple in recent years have nothing do with what they had in 80s and early 90s. If nothing else, the manufacturing process alone has changed so much. No one in the industry -not Apple, Intel, AMD or ARM itself- could have predicted how things have turned out over this period.
They saw f#ck all in ARM. But do go ahead and rewrite history, I am sure St. Steve had a vision and saw potential where none other did.
lilmoe - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
"St Steve"Lol, epic...
Penti - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
Steve wasn't at Apple when they where investing in Acorn, VLSI joint venture to produce low-power RISC-chips. NeXT still used 68000 and i960 which they dropped for a multiplatform OS support with Intel, PA-RISC and SPARC before taking over Apple. StrongARM was also a DEC product/architecture. Intel were one of the players behind the ARM arch moving into the mobile space. Without Acorn (who already had the early ARM-bits, kinda like IBM had Power before the AIM-alliance) and VLSI it would never have been successful. And all the licensee's which licensed and develop their own architectures from that base of course. The foundation of the modern Apple company still tried to build workstations on Unix at the time. At Jobs NeXT of course. That it runs on ARM is because players like Intel/DEC, Samsung, TI, Freescale and so on had made it successful by that time. They didn't go back to the Newton which Jobs killed as fast as he could. They really don't care if it is PPC, MIPS, SuperH, ARC, 88000, 68k/Coldfire and so on. OS X ran at PPC and Intel at the time, earlier also on PA-RISC and Sparc. Others had already used the build tools (GCC at the time) to build smartphones and smart devices at ARM so support was there across the board.Microsoft helped MIPS along the way for that matter. They still choose PPC for their gaming consoles.
techconc - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
> "They saw f#ck all in ARM. But do go ahead and rewrite history, I am sure St. Steve had a vision and saw potential where none other did."Unfortunately, actual history makes you look a bit foolish. Considering the Newton was ARM based, that sort of shoots a hole in your theory. I don't know what Steve's role in this was... probably nothing considering the Newton was Sculley's project. Either way, even back then, it was clear that if mobile was ever going to take off, it was going to be based on ARM rather than something like Intel.
Pressurge - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
this couldn't have waited for the review, huh? Gotta meet the Apple Article Quota!KineticHummus - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
in its defense, this is a VERY informative article. lots of information. some of us find it interesting, if you don't then why even open it?Pressurge - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I find the information useful - I just wish Anand would wait until the review (like he used to do).You never see them rushing to state immediate speculation for newly-announced/released features about any other manufacturer's product. It always waits until the actual product review, where they break down the product feature-by-feature and discuss it within. But now though, every single thought that seems to come up regarding an Apple product, they throw up a front-page article as soon as possible. When's the last time you saw a front-page article discussing what might be in an HTC or Nokia smartphone within days of its announcement?
I just find it sad because I've been following Anandtech since the early 2000s, and it used to be that there wasn't really a lean towards any particular company, but over the last few years, it's "Let's overload on Apple info and reduce our effort on everyone else." Intel's IDF probably only gets the treatment it does because Apple uses Intel hardware and thus Haswell/etc. affects future Apple products.
I love the reviews they do on Apple products (I'm typing this on a 13" MBP), I just wish every single new thought/observation about something Apple is doing didn't demand a near-instantaneous article. Pretty soon they can just piece-meal a review by posting each separate section for the iPhone 5 separately, then just doing a "In summary:" article that ties it all together with links to each separate article. Or just break off and start up "AnandMac" or something. :)
Kristian Vättö - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I think here the biggest need for this article was the confusion and misinformation about the SoC. We had been saying that it's Cortex-A15, but as you can see, it's not. Because we had been sharing misinformation, it was important to get the correct information out as soon as possible. Reviewing a big launch like this can easily take a few weeks and by that time it's a bit too late to apologize for wrong information.Another important point is exclusivity. As far as I know, we were the first to discover this, which means we don't want to wait and risk someone else finding it.
With Apple there is also more mystery than with other companies. If this was Samsung or Nokia, they most likely would have told more details about the SoC if Anand/Brian had asked. What Apple tells the media is that it's A6 and twice as fast as A5. That is not much to go by, but many people still want to know the details. Can it really be twice as fast? And can I still get more battery life too? Answering those questions is a lot easier if details about the SoC are known.
Pressurge - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Yeah, I understand the "mystery" part, but honestly it's just seems as if over the last year or two, Anandtech has been taking more of a lean towards Apple dominance in so far as the quantity of articles relative to everyone else. Maybe this is just in part that I remember the days when Anand's actual focus was on more than just Apple products and the occasional interesting SSD, relegating the reviews now to most other products to others who don't put in as much effort it seems (and I base that solely off of the length of the reviews, where Anand's Apple reviews will regularly go 15-20 pages while most products seem to be half of that). It's just somewhat depressing to see a priority focus from being generally manufacturer-agnostic in terms of reporting to now more favorability towards Apple (and I do enjoy Apple products, but I also like seeing no one company be treated favorably).The confusion regarding the SoC was mostly via Twitter and, if I recall, the live streaming. It just seems as if clarification on the SoC could have waited for the review given that for many of those who are purchasing an iPhone 5, the actual nature of the SoC wasn't going to influence their buying decision on it. I'm just afraid that instead of just waiting for the review to come up now, we'll just start seeing articles every few days now about the iPhone 5: "Here's the camera in the iPhone 5!", "Here's the specific information on the in-line cell for the iPhone 5's panel", "Here's the material the antenna's are made out of specifically!".
I mean, I've yet to see any article previewing Windows 8 now that it's available on MSDN/DreamSpark/etc. and a lot of people are now installing it, but I guess Anand/the site goes where the money is (Apple). :(
secretmanofagent - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
You're not doing a very good job of looking, then.http://www.anandtech.com/SearchResults?CurrentPage...
Pressurge - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
And most of those are Pipeline announcements and not front-page articles. Each of the three iPhone 5 articles they've posted in the last two days also are also about equal in length to 3-4 of those articles in your searched COMBINED. What's that say about Anand's favoritism?Once again: take off the Apple-obsessing goggles, and look at it from a balanced standpoint: the site is significantly slanted towards Apple now relative to any other company. And I would just like to see them restore the balance a little more to actually saving many of these "Must. Report. Anything. Apple. NOW" articles to the actual product reviews so that I don't come to Anandtech and have 3/4ths of the front page just be Apple Apple Apple.
darwiniandude - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Can't wait for the benchmarks and the crazy people to slice open the SOC and examine it under a microscope.derektrotter - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Cortex-A5 has 32 double (64-bit) registers. See page 2-9 of the ARM Technical Reference Manual for the Cortex A5 NEON variant. Cortex-A7 also supports 32 doubles.The deciding thing is really whether your core includes NEON (Advanced SIMD) support. A5, A7, A8, A9 and A15 all have NEON variants.
derektrotter - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Or be more explicit. If your core supports NEON, then it supports 32 doubles. So there are versions of A5, A7, A8, A9 and A15 that support 32 doubles.nfineon - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
The possibility for Apple using A15 cores in the new iPhone 5 was actually one of, if not the one and only, hope I had that Apple didn't completely compromise in every aspect of the new iPhone. That would have been an impressive step forward and another first within the industry which is what apple was known for in the jobsian era. But I was always a bit pessimistic given the lackluster ness of almost everything around the new iPhone, so I take this news with little shock and commend you and your team for all the efforts in breaking this information to us before anyone!I am even more doubtful now, that we will be seeing anywhere near 2x performance as those figures were for cherry picked apps that apple has had several months to optimize for the new custom core. I will reserve judgement until your next major break in the A6 silicon story...
Rectified - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
The article states that voltage has an exponential effect on power consumption. This is false; it is quadratic.lmcd - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
It seems like there was no reason for Apple to have hired all of those big names just to integrate a SoC. This has probably been in the works since before the release of the A4, at minimum. And those engineers left like a few months ago also; this was probably what they were working on and getting integrated, and left on completion.nickager - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Fascinating.Does this indicate a vote against ARM A15 for use in phones vs tablets? Will ARM A15 only fit well in the power-envelope for phones when paired with an ARM A7 in a big.LITTLE configuration?
Will Apple be able to develop/interested in developing an A6 into a big.LITTLE configuration?
What does this mean for the next iPad? I'd assumed that it would have an ARM A15 based SOC, if not, how will an iPad based on a development of the A6 perform against ARM A15 based competitors?
How do the number of engineers at Apple working on CPU architecture compare with the number of engineers at ARM working on advanced architectures? For comparison Jobs boasted that Apple had 1,000 engineers working on the "chip project". From wikipedia ARM has 2000 employees.
meloz - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I am disappointed with the increasing pro-Apple bias Anand is infusing in his once great website.Each day the article on this website read more and more as if they have been prepared by Apple marketing department and handed out to Anandtech for wider circulation. The podcasts are even worse, anything and everything there in is Apple-this & Apple-that.
Today -aside from benchmarks and occasional niche articles by likes of Johan and Cutress- there is little to seperate Anandtech from trash like Engadget. How the mighty have fallen.
First, Anand made the ridiculous "mistake" and hyped as the iphone 5 as having A15. Even the most illeterate people on forums could not come up with that propoganda. Apparently there was not much positive about the iphone, so Anand must find anything we can praise. And if he cannot find anything, he must invent a story?
And now he "corrects" his mistake, by praising the invented "A7".
By all means, keep loving Apple. I am sure it is financially beneficial for you. But do not throw away the last vestiges of integrity in the process.
When your bias is so evident in articles that cover all-things-Apple, they also raise doubts in the minds of readers about the integrity of increasingly fewer articles you publish which do not have the word 'Apple' mentioned once.
If you are going to sell out so blatantly, do the decent thing and rename yourself Apple-tech or something. Because you are not about covering technology anymore, but praising Apple.
iwod - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Do you read tech news? Do u understand any tech related things? By all knowledge, knowing that Apple did not increase the Frequency, and it has twice the performance, what would you have guess the CPU was using?And you could also say that Anand was praising Intel as well. And i am a AMD users here. And there is nothing wrong to admit, AMD has slower performing CPU then Intel. Intel has better CPU then AMD. And that is a Fact.
And Engadget speculate, but with out technology background and reason. Anand prove his point, admit his mistake and gave you the reason why he thought it was, and why it happened to be wrong.
And Apple cares about battery life of their SoC rather then performance. Anand simply just state that. If there anything wrong with that. So people cares about using renewable energy paying for a Electric Car like Telsa should be put off because others think they should have got a Ferrari instead for the same price?
And to quote you, by all means, keep hating apple. We tech lovers would continue to enjoy the technological advance and discovery with anand.
dugbug - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Oh god go away alreadyThese articles are fantastic. There is no apple bias. Apple are big news in the world of mobile and their secrecy makes it intriguing.
jamyryals - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I agree with this. I love these articles. Keep it up Anand and Brian.secretmanofagent - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Same here. I've enjoyed the Krait in-depth reviews as well. Keep up the good work.abishekmuw - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
It seems that all the performance gains shown off by Apple are storage bound (launching app, saving files, viewing files).. there doesn't seem to be a performance data point for CPU bound tasks (browsing, imovie, garage band, etc). doesn't this make it more likely that the iphone could be faster because of improved storage (or filesystem), and not just a faster CPU?jwcalla - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Well that new Samsung NAND flash has like 4x the performance of previous flash (140 MB/s reads, 50 MB/s writes, plus good IOPS), but who knows if Apple decided to dip into that territory.The "up to 2x faster" claim is probably a combination of improvements in the CPU, memory, storage, and compiler.
Unfortunately, the benchmarks won't be able to isolate the CPU performance alone since there's no control / standard to compare it to. They'll show A6 vs. Krait vs. Exynos, etc., but one can't really draw much of a conclusion about the CPU itself. You're basically benching the "total package".
The LLVM / Clang compiler that Apple uses is actually very well-tuned for ARM architectures.
UpSpin - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Exactly. If the A6 is really 2 times fater than A5, they easily could have added a synthetic benchmark result which shows that the A6 computes 2 times faster, just to satisfy tech sites. But they didn't, they focused on things which could be caused by software optimizations (accelerated through GPU) or other tweaks as you said (storage).I expected that the iPhone 5 will have a A15 to remain competive with next gen Android smartphones. Now I think the A6 is even less impressive than Anand believes it is. No A15, just a A9 with A15 like improvements, maybe worse than Qualcomm Krait. The biggest improvement: die shrink.
darkcrayon - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
They also said 2x graphics performance, and none of the examples had *anything* to do with GPU. It won't take long for us to find out at least.Shamesung-korean-made - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
LOL! I think talk of A15 had fandroid fans running scared! Galaxy s3 - designed by KOREANS!cacca - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Strange that in this article you don't comment that all the previous iPhone compatible gadgets/hardware con be thrown out the window.So your alarm clock, hi-fi system, speakers, docking stations... everything is not compatible.
Obviously you can buy, for the usual high price, an adaptor (that will not be physically compatible with all your previous generation gadgets). Remember to buy the cable too.
So you end paying 100$ more (check the prices for adaptor and lighting cables), just to connect it to your PC/Apple.
Are all apple users so used to be swindled? Are mentally impaired? There was no real technical reason to change, exuding the usual one.... grab zealot money.
Welcome to Apple, a company dedicated to the studies of the of fanboysm and logic limits.
asendra - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Are you for real?First, you don't need 100$ in order to connect it to your pc, it comes with the usb cable. I assume you pc does has usb right?
No technical reason? Besides the fact that it is 5 times smaller, symmetrical and all around a better connector more suited to modern technologies..
Besides, could you care to point ANY company that has kept the same connector for nearly 9 years? I think It was long overdue and people has had more than time to benefit from their purchases.
I could point to many OEM who see fit to change their charger/connector every 6 months, but hey, all of us know they aren't screwing anyone because no one buys accessories for those devices.
UpSpin - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
If they changed the connector, thus made every iPhone 4S and previous accessory incompatible, why have they introduced a new proprietary connector and haven't made use of the standard micro USB connector.True, the iPhone 5 connector, thanks to its symmetry, is more handy. But that's the only advantage, the disadvantage of introducing a new propiertary connector, if a standard connector is established already, is much larger. You still have to carry an USB micro adapter with you, you additionally have to carry an adapter for your old accessories which you won't upgrade in the near term (car dock, hifi station), so why not just move to USB and get compatible with all the USB standards? (MHL)
doobydoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
You don't need to carry any USB micro adapter with you, at all. What on earth are you on about.You don't need microUSB full stop. I've honestly never used it - not once, in any device.
You take the SUPPLIED cable and plug it into your pc, or use the SUPPLIED cable to charge your phone. How are you struggling with that?
Regarding lightning vs microUSB, unless you've extensively benchmarked both and know the absolute limitations and performance of both - you simply cannot make any claims regarding any benefits it may or may not have.
UpSpin - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
If you own a second device, the device will have a microUSB port most probably. If you visit a friend and forgot your cable, it's very likely that he has a microUSB cable because it's the standard, unlike the lightning cable.How do you intend to benchmark the cable? Transfer speed to your computer? Well, you have to connect it to a USB port on your computer, so you get the USB limitations. What needs more bandwith? Video link, HDMI. MHL is supported via USB which supports 1080p, maybe even Apple uses MHL in their 'lightning' connector. So where exactly should it be faster? It's a marketing name, just as retina, for people like you, who blindly believe what Apple tells them.
doobydoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
'If you own a second device, the device will have a microUSB port most probably'Um, no? There are thousands of devices which don't. And why does that matter anyway? I get a lightning cable,
'If you visit a friend and forgot your cable, it's very likely that he has a microUSB cable because it's the standard, unlike the lightning cable.'
Given how many iPhones sell, I doubt this anyway - but it's irrelevant. An iPhone has far longer battery life than say, the Samsung Galaxy S3 - so charging is less of an issue. I can't say I've EVER been caught at a friends without battery life and no-one there had an iPhone charger - it just doesn't happen.
And no - uses of the adapter aren't limited to just connecting to the PC - that's a primitive uneducated response. There could be all kinds of after market accessories which utilise a potentially faster connection - or advances in USB technology which surpass micro USB.
doobydoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
And we haven't even considered power requirements, size & space requirements, CPU utilisation etc.All in all you're just posting uneducated claims about a connector you know nothing about.
doobydoo - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
Another factor is how robust the connection is.I believe MicroUSB can be quite brittle when attached to a long device.
Which MicroUSB variant are you pushing anyway, there's the 3.0 version which is ugly and has an extra piece on the side, or there's the 2.0 version which is as slow as USB 2.0 - can't even do 3.0 speeds.
repoman27 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
USB 2.0 has one pair for signaling and one for voltage. USB 3.0 retains those pairs and adds 2 more signaling pairs for SuperSpeed USB. None of these can be repurposed within the confines of the standard.Lighting is a general purpose connector which provides 8 pairs. This allows for much greater flexibility as Apple can now accommodate digital audio in/out, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, and SDIO, or a combination thereof, over a single connector simply by using different cables. Other legacy connections such as analog audio and video are possible through the use of active adapters containing DACs.
By the end of the month there will be over 10 million Lightning cables in the wild, so I don't imagine they'll be too hard to come by in the near future. Arguably, until not that long ago, chargers with Apple's 30-pin dock connector were easier to come by than those sporting Micro USB.
The iPhones sold in the EU will be required to ship with a Lightning to Micro USB adapter anyway, so they will also be available for those who choose to buy them stateside. I currently have a Micro USB charger in my car with a 30-pin dock connector to Micro USB adapter so I can accommodate most folks who happen to be riding with. I picked up an official Apple model for $7 on Amazon, and I don't imagine the case will be much different for the Lightning version before too long.
Death666Angel - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
There is MHL for your digital connection needs. I have a camera that has a micro-USB port which has some added height for a special cable that gets me analog video and audio out. My old Touch Pro 2 had a modified micro-USB plug that was also used for the ear plugs. I'm pretty sure they could have gotten all the wanted from a micro-USB port with some modification. Minus the symmetry. They just don't care. Which is one of the reasons I don't like Apple.repoman27 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
No, they care a lot. Lightning has the potential to be far more flexible than simply providing A/V support. MHL is connector agnostic, so technically Lightning could qualify as an MHL connector.And as you said, "I have a camera that has a micro-USB port which has some added height for a special cable..." The whole point of Lightning is to make a multi-purpose connector that needs no additional increase in dimension to support functionality beyond USB sync / charge.
Fx1 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Apple screwed the pooch on this one nicely for Samsung. Lets hope Samsung puts DDR3 and A15 Exynox in the next superphone. At this rate ill never need a HTPC i just use my phone!darkcrayon - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Yes, by designing and implementing their own SoC and CPU cores with double the performance as the last, with better battery life, they really screwed up....
What?
Fx1 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Wont be as powerful as the Exynos 5 and Samsung will have a much more powerful and open Smartphone from which to do things that Apple cant do and wont let you do. Win/Winmavere - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Previous iPhone released occured when there were already competitors with faster CPUs and more RAM. In practical terms, this greatly weakened Apple byyea, I couldn't think of anything either.
The introduction of a new custom ARM design is an exciting thing for true geeks, no matter which platforms they prefer. If you can't handle it, go somewhere else.
techconc - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
I'm not quite sure why people feel compelled to compare future versions of product X to current versions of product Y. If that's your best argument, you've already lost.Additionally, Apple's competitors seem to be at least a generation behind regarding GPU performance. The Mali based GPUs haven't exactly been breaking any speed records.
Finally, this may be a shocking revelation, but the moment an off the shelf part becomes better than what Apple has, Apple is free to use that part as well.
user11 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Hello!One question: A6 processor isn't ARM?
Dual Core or Quad Core? GHZ?
Thanks for response :)
UpSpin - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Quote Article:"The A6 is the first Apple SoC to use its own ARMv7 based processor design. The CPU core(s) aren't based on a vanilla A9 or A15 design from ARM IP, but instead are something of Apple's own creation."
A6 uses the ARMv7 instruction set and uses ARM IP to build a custom ARM based SoC, just like Qualcomms Snapdragon and Krait processors.
Tegra, Omap or Exynos SoCs use a vanilla A9/A15 design from ARM, thus they have less to do on their own and less risk that something isn't working properly. Instead of modifying the core as Qualcomm did and Apple does now, they tune the surrounding (more cores, interaction between them, different GPU, different memory controller, different features, ...)
tipoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Yes it is ARM. There are two things you can do, licence out the ARM instruction set, or licence out pre-built cores like the ARM Cortex A9 or A15. Apple appears to have done the former this time and made their own core.We don't know the core count yet, but if it was a quad they would certainly have said so, as that is easily marketable, money is on a faster dual core. We don't know clock speed and probably never will for sure, we'll just have estimates based on performance. Apple does not explicitly say the clock speed of the iPhones, they only have for the iPad.
Lepton87 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
How do you know that clock frequency stays at a pathetic 800MHz?
tipoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Probably based on frequency/voltage scaling. They could increase the clock speed, but increase it at the same time as reducing power draw even with a shrink is much harder.RogerShepherd - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I'm very interested in what's in the Apple A6 but when I read this article it comes down to ""I've confirmed that Apple's A6 SoC is based on Apple's own ARM based CPU core" - while the VFPv4 certainly rules out Cortex A9 I can see no technical reason to rule out Cortex A15 or Cortext A7/A15 big-little. BTW as has been pointed out, A7 does support VFPv4-D32, and so could be an ARMv7s processor. More info in http://bloggershepherd.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/what...Death666Angel - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
"Based on a lot of digging over the past couple of days, and conversations with the right people, I've confirmed that Apple's A6 SoC is based on Apple's own ARM based CPU core and not the Cortex A15." Yes, that is not evidence, but that is sometimes how things are as long as there is no physical device out.Also, that blog post is wrong, Anand does say Cortex A7 also supports VFPv4: "Only the Cortex A5, A7 and A15 support the VFPv4 extensions to the ARMv7-A ISA."
RogerShepherd - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
I agree that Anand says"Only the Cortex A5, A7 and A15 support the VFPv4 extensions to the ARMv7-A ISA"
but he then goes on
"If you want to get really specific, the Cortex A5 and A7 implement a 16 register VFPv4 FPU, while the A15 features a 32 register implementation"
It's this comment that's not correct. In fact, A7 can have a 16 or 32-register version of VFPv4; if it has Neon, it has the 32-register version.
Death666Angel - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
That seems to be true. But I don't see how that influences his conclusion that Cortex A7 is not enough of a step up in performance.From where I'm standing, A15 is still a possibility, but highly unlikely given the time frame we are talking about. And I have no reason not to trust Anand's word that it isn't A15.
Honestly, I don't care that much either way right now. I'm not going to buy an iPhone and I will be eating up any hard facts about the SoC regardless of whether its a new design of Apple's take on an A15. It's interesting in either case. :D
MrSpadge - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Not sure it has been said before.. but overall power consumption doesn't scale exponentially with voltage. Some leakage may scale exponentially, but that's only a small part. Basic dynamic switching consumption scales with V^2, overall it's about V^3 for an entire modern chip - if I remember something I read during the last 1 or 2 years correctly. I think it was on Anandtech ;)>I should probably give Apple's CPU team more credit in the future.
That's only fair - however, if they don't tell anyone about the new design, they can't expect to be given credit.
KPOM - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
It's a dual-core 1.0GHz model. It scored 1601 vs. 629 for the iPhone 4S and 1560 for the S3.http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=14432...
It's pretty impressive.
shank2001 - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
And considering that geekbench utilizes all cores, and the S3 is a quad core device, the real world single threaded performance gap will be MASSIVE!Hardly anything running on a phone whether iOS or android is multithreaded.
akdj - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Exactly! Half the clock speed...half the RAM, and half the cores, yet just as 'quick' with what I'm sure will be a significant savings in 'power' accomplishing the same efficiency, speed and pure--end user enjoymentThese speeds from Geekbench are very impressive. Comparing to the actual dual core SIII sold in the US, there's an even larger 'gap' in performance as the international version is the only one sold with 4 cores. This is an engineering marvel and a big surprise. Apple is now ready and executing their own chip architecture. Married with designing their own OS, even bigger gains in perceived performance will be noticable. I'm a developer on both platforms and own the 3GS, 4 and 4S...as well as the Galaxy Note, Nexus and GSIII. My daily drivers are the 4s and GNote (the latter strictly for business apps and functionality). Regardless of the apps I use that are ambidextrous (both Android and iOS), the 4s, to this day, are more fluid them their counter part 'Droid app. I'm blown away by the processing power in these mobile devices...but even more excited by what Apple continues to achieve using less power, less speed, and less memory.
My hope is Google will follow Apple's lead wrestling control of their OS back from the manufacturers and providers...not allowing the 'bloat-ware' and skins that are dragging out the update/upgrade process and bogging down system performance. ICS and Jelly Bean are excellent updates but the fluidity and efficiency of iOS and the SDK from Apple make development a much easier endeavor. As well, knowing when and what you're users/customers are using as far as the OS build is invaluable.
This is a phenomenal engineering improvement. A huge pat on the back to the chefs (engineers) at Apple. Thinner, lighter, faster...better screen and color gamut, twice the speed (of even the 'new' iPad), screaming graphics AND as good or better battery life? Holy. Shit! Accolades to Apple. That's true innovation.
Jeremy
name99 - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
You don't have to guess, you can compare the single vs multi-core benchmarks line by line. They're a mixed bag --- A6 is usually ahead, but not always.BUT A6 is running at 1 GHz vs 1.4GHz for SGS III, which probably means A6 is burning half the power or so. It also suggests that if Apple ever get desperate enough that they need a quick speed bump to compete in the market, they can do so, boosting either the speed or adding an additional core or two, whereas Samsung has less of this sort of flexibility.
Finally Apple, just like with iPad3, are obsessed with memory bandwidth --- this device has about 1.5 to 2x what SGS III offers, depending on the benchmark. I wonder how much of this reflects company memory of the past. Back in the PPC days, this was our biggest flaw compared to Intel, the thing that made me, as an Apple SW engineer focussed on optimization and performance, weep in frustration --- we had better CPU cores, as long as you stayed in L1, cache, but our memory systems were so crippled that the core never had a chance to shine.
We seem to be living through the mirror image of those days --- now the Apple HW engineers aren't going to make that mistake again, while the competition hope that synthetic (ie core-only) benchmarks will hide their memory system real-world limitations.
RogerShepherd - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
If you look at the breakdown of the Geekbench scores, it's in line with a Cortex A15 being used http://bloggershepherd.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/more...Death666Angel - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Interesting. Also, disgusting forum posts over there. Yikes.tipoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Geekbench also got the frequency, 1GHz. Even more impressive that it's faster than Krait at 1.5GHz. But then, Krait is what, a a year or so old.Didn't think I'd feel it, but the mobile SoC wars have gotten more interesting than the desktop CPU ones. At least there's leapfrogging going on here.
Brayan Schroeder - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Ok, but the Apple A6 is better than ARM Cortex A15? Thanks.tipoo - Sunday, September 16, 2012 - link
Look one post above you, it seems to be in the ballpark of A15, but A15 isn't out yet so I guess we'll see.tru_th - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
For those of you referencing the Geekbench 2 Results where the iPhone5 beats the Galaxy S3, you have been given the incorrect link. The link that shows the Galaxy S3 test with a lower score than an iPhone5 is because you were linked to the wrong test. The test you were linked to is under android tests which is the incorrect score. If you go to the same website and go to the popular results:http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/popular
You'll notice that the iPhone5 Scores1601, and the Galaxy S3 scores 2059. I also noticed that the Galaxy S3 they were testing only registered ~800mb of RAM when in actuality the S3 has 2GB. . The Galaxy S3's hardware is superior to the iPhone5, and Apple isn't going to release another phone for who knows, a year? They dropped the ball with this one in my opinion.
What hardware is better in the S3 than the iPhone5? Better front facing camera (1.9MP), NFC chip, Larger & Removable battery, additional memory via SD card (up to 64GB), larger & full 720p resolution screen, and there's more, just take a look at Samsung's ad:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/samsung-gal...
darkcrayon - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
Direct comparison of geekbench scores between the iPhone 5 and SGS3 isn't very meaningful. However assuming the direct comparison with the iPhone 4S and 3rd gen iPad is more or less valid, then the iPhone 5 is going to have a *ton* of performance headroom and plenty to last until the 5S or 6. And this doesn't even say anything about graphics performance which is going to be the top for a smartphone by quite a large margin if it's 2 times the 4S.The iPhone 4S keeps up perceptually with a Galaxy S III. So we're expecting the 5 to surpass it from a general use perspective.
Also, size is a tradeoff. Saying "because it's bigger!" is not an advantage- or the iPad totally destroys the galaxy S3, right? The SGS3 is better because it's bigger. And the iPhone is better because it's smaller.
tru_th - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
I believe the comparison between the S3 and the iPhone 5 is valid because they are both at the top of their markets, don't get into tablets that is a completely different subject. The iPhone 5 didn't improve the screen from the 4S, they added height to the top and the screen is not even 720p capable. The S3 is, and many other top of the line androids are. The iPhone 5 finally includes real 4G, while Android has had it for over a year. My point is that Apple is not innovating. You can say its better because its smaller, but because Android is open source, there are many companies like Samsung, HTC, LG, etc all making smartphones there will be smaller Android phones that still are superior to the iPhone 5. Like I said, Apple releases their phones after usually about a year so by the time the 5S comes out Android will be even further ahead, I imagine quad core phones will be the regular by then since the S3 is already a quad core phone. Android might even be optimized for 4 cores by then as well. Apple needs to stop innovation with their ridiculously broad patents and release some quality features for their phones. Keeping up with the hardware standard should be the first thing they improve on. The only thing I was actually impressed with on the iPhone 5 was the 5 microphones for better sound quality, although I'm not even sure it improves it I think it is a good idea. The screen, the processor, the 1 gig ram, the "different" plug that improves nothing at all, and the camera are all areas where there was no significant improvement compared to similar priced phones. Apple has in the past been at least up to standard with their releases, which holds the iPhone users at bay until the next release, but like I said I don't think they achieved that with this phone. I find that even Apple fans are a little let down that Apple only slightly changed the 4S to the 5.tru_th - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
Opps, I meant "apple needs to stop stifling innovation with their ridiculously broad patents and stick to releasing some quality features for their phones"darkcrayon - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
I mentioned tablets as a point of comparison, as conceptually they are similar. The reason I said the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3 comparison wasn't particularly valid was in terms of the Geekbench score- it might not be fair to one side or another because the operating system is different. In the real world, comparing the devices next to each other for *actual* performance is valid. And considering a 4S keeps up or exceeds a SGS3 on doing mundane things like tapping to zoom in a web browser, the iPhone 5 is really going to shine- again- in comparison. And of course iOS still has the most CPU/GPU demanding apps to even take advantage of such a processor (polished, feature rich first party apps - pro audio apps, and then high end games that are not yet available for other mobiles)Apple _is_ innovating- the evidence is this very article. Trying to dodge that with complaints about "patents" is completely beside the point. The only thing that would put Android "ahead" here really is that you can fit a larger, hotter chip inside of a larger device. Hence again my comparison to the iPad.
tru_th - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - link
I understand the geekbench score not being valid. But until a reputable source tests them both side by side, both running the latest firmware (JellyBean vs iOS), the tests are all we have. The operating systems are indeed way different and its hard to compare them. In terms of hardware, you cannot deny that the S3 is superior. A very large amount of the iPhone 5's parts (processor, memory, screen) are manufactured by Samsung (up to 25% of the phone). As for iOS having the most CPU/GPU demanding apps. where are you getting this information? There really isn't much difference between apps. A large majority of apps are available on both the Google Play store and the App store.Apple is no longer innovating. The new iPhone5 has nothing new to bring to the table aside from having 5 microphones on the phone. All the other additions were just old technology that Apple had yet to add to the phone (4G, larger screen), or expected improvements such as the processor.
Anyways. My main point is that Apple did release a better phone but they did not improve enough. The S3 and iPhone5 are both top of the line phones and it can be argued by either side which one is faster. But the S3 came out before the iPhone5 did and the Android phone makers (Samsung, HTC, Motorolla, LG) all release phones and technology improvements faster than Apple. We might see a couple of new top of the line smartphones from each of the top companies before we will see the iPhone5, and I think by that point Apple is going to be further behind. As for the comment below me that Samsung is "scared", I hope you realize that they sell two phones for every Apple phone sold in addition to making up to 25% of the iPhone and iPad's. I think they're okay.
techconc - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
There are a couple things to note.First, we have more data points for the GS3 then we do for the iPhone 5.
Second, the Geekbench tests are multi-threaded. Essentially, showing a best case scenario for quad core machines. In real life, it's debatable how often you'd ever see that advantage. Remember, the iPhone 5 is getting this performance with half the number of cores (and running at a 40% slower clock speed), which means each core is significantly faster on Apple's chip.
Third, the iPhone 4s "feels" faster than a GS3. That might be due to poor Android GUI optimizations or reflect upon the 4s' superior GPU performance. Either way, the iPhone 5 doubles the 4s's performance (in GPU also). Which by extension means that the iPhone 5 will feel faster than the GS3 for most tasks.
As for Samsung's ad, these are the actions of someone who is scared.
techconc - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
One thing I find troubling is the type of benchmarks Apple chose to use. They seem to be more disk i/o bound than CPU specific. Loading applications, saving files, etc...Lucian Armasu - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
Why is it so hard for people to notice this? Geekbench also tests memory performance, and Anand has already said it has vastly improved memory (which btw, could be a newer memory bought from Samsung).So why the hell is all the focus on the CPU? Even if iPhone 5 has 1600 score and GS3 has 1560, that does NOT mean that it has a faster processor.
Again - the test measures BOTH memory and CPU performance, and it obviously means iPhone 5 has faster memory than GS3, which would give it a higher score for that...which is how the iPhone 5 compensates for actually having a SLOWER CPU.
tru_th - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - link
I did notice that the Geekbench also tested the memory performance. But I don't trust these scores because of a few things. The tested the S3 a few different times if you look on http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/popularThe Galaxy S3 scored 1781 and 2059, and the iPhone 1601.
Opening the tests it showed that the iPhone exceeded the S3 in memory tests and the S3 had a faster processor. What was wrong though is looking at the test it listed the memory of the s3 to be 800MB when in fact it has 2GB of ram. Something there is wrong. As you mentioned, Samsung makes the memory for the iPhones, so why would they not use better memory on their own phones and let Apple use it?
directaccess - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
Even with iOS6, and the new iPhone 5, Siri still won’t do email.We need true email inbox management that’s eyes-free. There’s a NEW smartphone app called Talkler — billed as “email for your ears.” Talkler is a free smartphone app for heads-up, hands-off, reads-aloud-to-you,voice-controlled email. So we can reclaim those wasted minutes behind the wheel, and get to the office with an empty inbox. Worth checking out:Facebook.com/Talkler and www.Talkler.com
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