A5 Mystery Solved (Why Siri Won't Run On iPhone 4)

Hugh Pickens writes "Anna Leach reports that Siri support has been a contentious issue for owners of earlier iPhones, but a recent filing from Audience shows that Siri won't run on the iPhone 4 because the phone's chip can't handle it. Linley Gwennap of the Linley Group cracked one of the secrets of the new iPhone's A5 chip after working out that it packs some serious audio cleaning power not available on the iPhone 4's A4 chip. Audience has developed technology that removes most or all of the background noise when someone places a cell-phone call from a restaurant, airport, or other noisy location. The iPhone 4S integrates Audience's 'EarSmart' technology directly into the A5 processor, improving its technology to handle 'far-field speech,' which means holding the device at arm's length rather than directly in front of the mouth. Apple has also licensed the Audience technology for a 'new generation of processor IP,' which may mean that the forthcoming A6 processor will appear in the iPad 3 and iPhone 5. 'Why Apple has not simply purchased Audience is unclear. An acquisition would prevent Audience's other major customer, Samsung, from using the technology to compete with Apple,' says Gwennap. 'The company may be hedging its bets, as it could switch to Qualcomm's Fluence noise-reduction technology in the future.'"

Comments

Interesting but wrong

[zonker]

Or at least not the whole story. It has been shown already that a jailbroken iPhone 4 can run Siri just fine.

Re:Interesting but wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, reading TFS, it says they "licensed a new generation of processor IP" -- but if you ask me, that sounds suspiciously like "licensed some DSP code that runs on any sufficiently-powerful DSP, but only paid for a license for their new chip (and pay royalties on the DSP code for every A5, whether it runs Siri or not)" -- cheaper than paying licensing for all manufactured iPhone 4 units (whether or not they use Siri) and provides an incentive to buy the latest. There's absolutely no reason something like that would be implemented in dedicated silicon, it just doesn't make sense. And yeah, it's possible the A4's DSP isn't powerful enough, but I have a hard time seeing how speech cleanup could be more demanding than x264 de/encoding...

Re:Interesting but wrong

[BasilBrush]

There's a difference between running and running as well as on the 4S. The demo of noise reduction is impressive.
http://www.audience.com/demos/transmit-noise-en.php
It's easy to see why with that noise reduction, Siri would be much more accurate than without it, in real scenarios.

Apple obviously wants Siri to be judged on it's best performance. They have a reputation for quality to maintain.

Mystery?

[Evro]

I always assumed the answer was something to the effect of:

boolean siriEnabled() {
    return (system.cpu.version >= 5.0);
}

Is anything else really needed? They don't want to support it on older models so you have to buy the new one. Conversely, if you really want the feature, buy the latest phone. Personally I find Siri an overhyped piece of junk. I have a 4S and I disabled it because it kept getting activated randomly and rarely understood my commands. Plus for the basic stuff like weather, I can just open the app. The anecdotal crap like "Will I need an umbrella today?" is just a dumb gimmick to me. But anyway, the fact is that the 4S is really an incremental improvement over the 4, and Siri is the one feature Apple can point to on the 4S as a differentiator, so they enforce that differentiation.

Good article, bad summary

[MobyDisk]

Possibly true: Siri uses a unique feature of the iPhone 4S.
False: Siri won't run on the iPhone 4

Siri runs just fine on jailbroken a iPhone 4, and it ran just fine on an iPhone 4 Before apple removed it. Kudos to the authors for enhancing Siri to use new features of the A5 chip. Good job to the researcher who figured this out. But shame on anyone who uses this as FUD to make Apple look like they didn't cripple their own product to force people to upgrade.