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."

Comments

It will be purchased with life energy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It will be purchased with life energy

[blai]

I expect to see this post modded +5 informative once the iPhone 5 is out.

Flaunt? New?

[TheRaven64]

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).

Re:Flaunt? New?

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

The article was translated a bit poorly. A8 means "Apple's new name for their processor", not "Cortex A8 architecture".

Re:Flaunt? New?

[the linux geek]

No. A5 is Apple's new processor. The article explicitly states that they're adding an ARM Cortex A8 chip, which weirdly the iPhone 4 already has.

A4 has an A8 processor. Next SoC will be A9 based

[teh31337one]

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.

Not A8

[Microlith]

Holy cow that article is written from ignorance. Never put it past a business rag to get technical details entirely wrong.

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.

Holy shit they're stupid. The A4 processor IS a Cortex-A8. I suppose Apple can be blamed for their stupid marketing garbage, though.

Also, Engadget reported that the next edition of iPad and iPhone will run on A9 multi-core chips designed by Qualcomm.

Goddamnit, no. Qualcomm does not use the ARM designed Cortex cores.

Apple Insider reported that the SGX543 is designed to parallel as many as 16 cores together thus the developers do not have to rewrite the apps to optimize multiple-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.

Re:Not A8

[TheRaven64]

Qualcomm does not use the ARM designed Cortex cores

The Qualcomm Snapdragon is a (very) heavily modified A8. Qualcomm has one of the most expensive ARM licenses, which allows them to extensively modify the cores, rather than just stamp them into SoCs with other stuff.

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, I think I lost 5 IQ points from reading TFA. That'll teach me to click on links in /. stories.

Re:Not A8

[tlhIngan]

The Qualcomm Snapdragon is a (very) heavily modified A8. Qualcomm has one of the most expensive ARM licenses, which allows them to extensively modify the cores, rather than just stamp them into SoCs with other stuff.

As does Apple and Marvell (who has the original architecture license - DEC (StrongARM) --> Compaq (acquired DEC) --> Intel (through litigation with Compaq, and produced XScale) --> Marvell (purchasing Intel's mobile division)).

Samsung might have one too - their Cortex A8's were modified by that company Apple acquired as well, unless the A8 licensing allows minor modifications. Still, the A8 core used by Apple and Samsung aren't stock - I think the Apple one is actually a bit more modified as well.

(Fun fact - Apple was one of the original ARM investors (back when it was Acorn RISC Machines) and pretty much made it popular with Newton...)

Re:Not A8

[amicusNYCL]

Holy shit they're stupid.

Seriously. Who doesn't know that the A4 contains an A8 and that the A8 (the new A8, not the other A8 in the A4) will contain an A9? Shit, I learned that in pre-school.

Re:Not A8

[Jesus_666]

Apple revealed its new iPhone 5 to the press. The iPhone 5 will feature two new A8 processors, unlike the iPhone 4, which used a single A4 processor. Basic understanding of the DIN A norm tells us that this means the iPhone 5's processors will be much smaller, at a mere 39 square centimeters each compared to the 625 square centimeter processor of its predecessor.

The iPhone 5 will also use sixteen Qualcomm SGX543 graphics cards, seamlessly converting all running applications to multithreads. With 35 million polygons times 1 billion pixels, the SGX543 can render video and games at resolutions of 40000x25000, upstaging current Motorola devices that merely support 1080x1728. This will allow the iPhone 5 to natively support HDMI, DisplayPort and SCART display technologies.


This is Bob Bobson for the Podunk Future Tech Gazette.

Re:N900?

[Microlith]

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?

[larry bagina]

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).

Re:flaunt?

[Pojut]

I still have yet to understand what's so amazing about iOS, from a GUI point of view. It's incredibly sparse and lacking in workflow functionality. The steps you have to take when you get an email or a text message, for example, are far more convoluted than on Android (in which you pull down the notification bar (regardless of what you're doing), tap the email/text, read it, then just hit the back arrow twice to immediately go back to what you were doing.

This is just one such example. iOS seems like it functions off a central core with a bunch of solitary roads going outward. Android, however, seems like it has the same layout, but each of the "roads" are interconnected.

Sure, you'll get where you want to go with iOS, but you have to get there in a specific way, whereas with Android you have much more navigational freedom. iOs is Good Enough®, but I still don't see how people applaud it so loudly when it isn't conducive to non-centralized navigation. Let's face it, the homescreen looks like an Android app drawer...

Re:flaunt?

[cgenman]

If you have pop-ups enabled, it appears in the middle of your screen as it happens. You click on the pop-up to get to the message. Going back is a bit more convoluted. You have to tap the home button twice to bring up the list of running applications, then tap the app you were in to go back. It's not bad, though the double-tap of the home button for multitasking is not that intuitive.

Remember, though, that Android and other platforms are building from what was learned on iOS. The closest thing to an iOS type operating system was Palm, and there are many reasons why that was light years different. Don't get me started on the royal crap that was smartphones at the time of the iPhone launch.

It's a bit like The Matrix. If you go back and re-watch it now, you have to wonder what was so special about it. "They're doing eastern mysticism, hong-kong kung-fu wirework, and slow-mo fight scenes. So what? Every movie does that." Well yes, every movie does that because they're all based on The Matrix. Similarly, there are several good portable smartphone operating system choices out there, which all do certain things better than iOS. They all also happen to exist because they copied iOS. And then they built out, did some things better, and became their own animals. But credit where credit is due: nobody was copying Windows Mobile 6. Everyone built from the basis established in iOS.

Re:Cortex A8 = Single Core

[TheRaven64]

single core people

That's not a nice way of talking about iPhone users.

Confused

[mike260]

'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.

Re:N900?

[vbraga]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapdragon_(System_on_Chip)

Re:N900?

[TheRaven64]

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.

The RDF is strong with this one...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...

Re:A4 has an A8 processor. Next SoC will be A9 bas

[Low Ranked Craig]

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.

Not to 50!

[Ambitwistor]

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?

Uh, no, no it's not.

[seebs]

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.