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Apple iPhone 5 To Flaunt New A8 Processor
An anonymous reader writes "The release of iOS 4.3 beta for developers has revealed updates to gesture-based navigation, AirPlay and Personal Hot Spot in the next edition of iPad and iPhone. However, not all changes are UI-related; it is reported that Apple is due to add an ARM Cortex A8 processor to its iPhone 5. Apple Daily, a Hong Kong-based newspaper, reported that Apple's iPhone 5 will be powered by a dual core processor with SGX543 graphics. It is reported that Apple is in contact with a Taiwanese component maker for the A8 SoC. Currently Apple uses a custom made A4 SoC in its iPad and iPhone 4 and uses SGX535 graphics and video support."
Rather than paying with dollars, iPhone 5 owners will have to pay with some of their own life energy. Every iPhone 5 owner will be required to give up one hour of their life. This way, with every 24 sold, Steve Jobs lives another day. Every million devices sold will grant Steve Jobs slightly more than an extra century of life.
Uh, the A8 is ARM's old smartphone core. Putting two of them in a package is a little bit clever because, unlike the A9 that everyone else's next generation products are using, the A8 isn't actually designed for multicore applications (the A9 scales to 4 cores).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A4 uses a Cortex A8 processor. A4 is the marketing term for their SoC, (Cortex A8 @ 1ghz(800ish mhz on iPhone 4) + PowerVR 430). The next version will probably have a Cortex A9 based chip.
Cortex A8 = single core people. Cortex A9 = dual core.
It might be that Apple is calling their new processor A8, like the called their old processor A4. These names, though, are arbitrary and don't reflect the underlying Cortex architecture.
Holy cow that article is written from ignorance. Never put it past a business rag to get technical details entirely wrong.
Holy shit they're stupid. The A4 processor IS a Cortex-A8. I suppose Apple can be blamed for their stupid marketing garbage, though.
Goddamnit, no. Qualcomm does not use the ARM designed Cortex cores.
Apparently the author of this article is just throwing around words, instead of being aware that there's a difference between the actual processor core and the on-die GPU core.
Basically, this article is filled with flawed writing based on the author's almost total ignorance of the subject. They know just enough, however, to be completely and totally wrong.
Yes, the N900.
And the Palm Pre.
And the Motorola DROID, Droid X, DROID 2, and DROID PRO.
iPhone 3Gs, iPad, iPhone 4, iPods, and Apple TV.
Pretty much every non-Qualcomm based phone currently runs on Cortex-A8 based CPUs.
flaunt |flônt; flänt|
verb [ trans. ]
display (something) ostentatiously, esp. in order to provoke envy or admiration or to show defiance : newly rich consumers eager to flaunt their prosperity. ( flaunt oneself) dress or behave in a sexually provocative way.
Apple flaunts the UI, not the tech specs (ram, processor, bus speed, etc).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
'A4' is Apple's name for a chip based on ARMs Cortex A8 architecture. The next chip will probably be called 'A5', and will probably be based on Cortex A9. A4/A5 and A8/A9 are two seperate nomenclatures.
Also, to 'flaunt' means to
display something ostentatiously, esp. in order to provoke envy or admiration
This is not something an inanimate object like a phone can do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapdragon_(System_on_Chip)
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Here's to hoping that Apple puts a more powerful processor in the second iPad than they do in the 5th iPhone. I realize they likely had the same processor in the iPad/iPhone 4 just to keep things simple, but it seemed really strange to me that a device with a bigger screen (and marginally larger resolution) had the same CPU in it as the tiny version.
Living With a Nerd
Good news again! I've totally forgotten that Steve Jobs is leaving Apple. BUY BUY BUY!
A very heavily modified A8. Qualcomm licensed the A8, but then ripped out the floating point pipeline and replaced it with something better, tweaked the rest of the pipeline in a few places and branded it Scorpion. It generally ships in their Snapdragon SoC. It's somewhere between the A8 and A9 in performance for most workloads.
ARM provides a variety of different licenses. The cheapest just let you take their core, pop it in the middle of a chip and put other cores around out (or fab it by itself). The most expensive ones give you all of the designs and the right to modify them in any way you like. Qualcomm is one of the few companies with the latter kind.
Most SoC makers get the cheaper ones and differentiate their products by adding different components to the ARM core. For example, the TI OMAP series comes with a TI DSP that provides a lot more performance (and a huge amount more performance-per-Watt) for a lot of media decoding tasks, nVidia's Tegra series comes with an nVidia GPU.
Qualcomm modifies the ARM core itself, which means that it takes them longer to get to market but gives better performance. It also has the effect that they are out of phase with the rest of the market. Everyone else was shipping A8s before the Snapdragon was out, but then Snapdragon (which outperforms the A8) came out before anyone was shipping A9 cores. They will probably do something similar with the A9 and bring their tweaked version to market just as the A9 is starting to show its age.
The other interesting company is Marvell. They have a license from ARM that allows them to modify ARM chips or produce their own independently designed ARM-compatible chips. They bought the XScale line from Intel, which is based on the StrongARM design from Digital. They make the chips in the SheevaPlug and similar systems, which are not ARM designs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You really have to hand it to Apple: Very few other companies garner headlines for what amounts to "Pre-release software build indicates that version N+1 of product X will incorporate version N+1 of the assorted off-the-shelf hardware that went into version N".
Seriously. There is a reasonably limited set of companies with performance-oriented ARM SoC designs. There is a similarly fairly limited set of GPU options for power constrained scenarios. Shockingly enough, Apple(just like everybody else) is pretty much going to combine the most recent one of each that they can shoehorn into their design and production process and go from there.
In other news, the next Mac Pro will probably have a newly released Xeon in it...
This is correct. Apple's new processor will be named A5 and is a multi-code Cortex A9 processer. It will reportedly have dual-core SGX543 graphics, up from the A4's single SGX535 GPU, which means that in theory you could do 1080p on the device no problems at all. They are also replacing the Infineon chipset with a Qualcomm chipset that does both CDMA/GSM/UMTS.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Lifespan at 5 deg C, 33% metabolic rate.
Sequence shortened.
Just wait till you have to deal with the Life Span Exporting Countries cartel.
I've just sucked one year of your life away. I might one day go as high as five, but I really don't know what that would do to you. So, let's just start with what we have. What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity so be honest. How do you feel?
Unless the package says "Now with A8 Processor!" or something similar, it's not flaunting the A8. Given Apple's general refusal to put any kind of hardware specs they can avoid on packaging for these devices, it seems very, very, unlikely that they will "flaunt" anything so meaningless to the average reader.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I don't know why Apple does this. Just to confuse the market and make it seem like Apple has some special sauce whereas the reality is that Apple uses the same ARM designs as everybody else, running at the same silicons and Apples "customizations" are really minor hacks to the peripheral support. To me, this comes across as dishonest, and I wonder why they do it especially considering many people will perceive the next iphone as underpowered because of what seems to be an ARM chip from the previous generation.
Apple's "A4" is really an ARM A8 and it would seem that Apple's "A8" is really an ARM A9. Same processor as everybody else for the next phone generation. And there is nothing special or unique to Apple about the PowerVR core Apple will use either.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
There are quite a few companies with the ARM Architecture license. It was needed by anyone delivering an A8 at 1GHz, since that's beyond the point of ARM's certification. Apple has an Architecture license, though they probably didn't need it yet, since all their stuff so far is just stripped down versions of Samsung SOCs. The shopping for a foundry in Taiwan might be true, though... with Samsung emerging as a big player in both smartphone and tablet, Apple might be getting a little nervous about their supply. Or even the simple fact that every iPhone, iPod, or iPad sold is also boosting Samung's economies of scale. Not that the world's second largest chip maker need worry all that much, anyway.
Most of the media decoding on these devices isn't done on the CPU, or even the DSP or GPU. To really keep power down, there are dedicated DCT acceleration engines in hardware. The Tegra 2, for example, can play 1080p using only about 400mW. The playback engine isn't totally dedicated to one specific video type... nVidia claims support for H.264, MPEG1/2, VP6, VP8, VC-1, and other DCT-based standards.
When the SGX543 was announced, PowerVR were actually showing it off in a four-core version. Otherwise, it's basically an SGX540.. maybe a little faster in most implementations, since the original design targeted 65nm chips, and no one's using that for this year's smartphones and tablets. This is a synthesizable core, as are all their "chips", so this can be implemented between 1 and 16 cores. The cores are computing cores, capable of GPGPU computing (OpenCL, etc). Desktop GPUs, of course, can have hundreds of such processors, but this is fairly new in chips designed for mobile computing. Of course, since this a PowerVR design, they're going to be in everyone's SOCs before you know it.
Apple's SOC names are only adding to the confusion... does an A8 SOC contain a Cortex A8 or Cortex A9 CPU? And how many? Most of the new tablets and even smart phones are going to A9 and dual core, at 1GHz or more. That's a good 2.5x faster than an iPad, at least at the metal (Android is going to be slower on some things per clock cycle, at least until is starts using the NEON vector instructions
-Dave Haynie
actually, iOS is better than Linux, its UNIX based since its a stem of OSX, which is UNIX with a good GUI