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iPhone 6s's A9 Processor Racks Up Impressive Benchmarks
MojoKid writes: Underneath the hood of Apple's new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus models is a new custom designed System-on-Chip (SoC) that Apple has dubbed its A9 processor. It's a 64-bit chip that, according to Apple, is the most advanced ever built for any smartphone, and that's just one of many claims coming out of Cupertino. Apple is also claiming a level of gaming performance on par with dedicated game consoles and with a graphics engine that's 90 percent faster than the previous generation. For compute chores, Apple says the A9 chip improves overall CPU performance by up to 70 percent. These performance promises come without divulging too much about the physical makeup of the A9, though in testing its dual-core SoC does seem to compete well with the likes of Samsung's octal-core Exynos chips found in the Galaxy S6 line. Further, in intial graphics benchmark testing, the A9 also leads the pack in mosts tests, sometimes by a healthy margin, even besting Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 in tests like 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited.
IIRC, didn't Apple crow about increasing the CPU - RAM bandwidth by a fair bit? That tends to speed up nearly everything. Yeah, they went from LPDDR3 to LPDDR4.
You cherry-picked the first benchmark mentioned, and disregarded the other tests where iPhone 6S out-performed the other phones.
>In Geekbench, the iPhone 6s Plus performed second only to Samsung's newest Galaxy models
So it came in second! Yay!
I'm not sure where you got your figures (since there is no citation, Yay!); but this article claims that the iPhone 6s "Obliterates" the competition. And the GeekBench 3 scores in that article would tend to support that claim.
I have an idea for a phone, how about making it so that the back of the phone, not the screen, is where the mic and speaker are? If not that, how about one of the two long edges?
Back of the phone: Stupid. That's the face that is in contact with your desktop when the phone is out of your pocket, sitting on your desk, and the side that is 50-50 chance of facing your chest with the phone in a shirt pocket.
Long sides: Stupid. Where are you going to hold the phone?
As far as the article is telling me, a dual core cpu is keeping up with a 8 core cpu.
That's pretty damn impressive, but only if this doesn't come at a price (decrease in battery life).
4.... 3... 2.. 1.
Ask and ye shall receive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Wouldn't there be a problem of accidentally touching the LCD screen?
Now, if only their UI designers would get some sense in their heads and kill this white and harsh blue, ultra skinny fonts, overly animated everything and go back AT LEAST A LITTLE to the iOS 5 and iOS 6 realism.
That UI was SO much easier to understand and less visually hideous to look at.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
My roommate claims that the iPhone 6s is faster than the iPhone 5c I traded in. The Amazon Kindle app doesn't appear to be running any faster than before. Then again, email, news and text don't require that much speed.
You're Holding the Geekbench Wrong
Only because Satan likes iPhones. We all know that iPhones are the work of the Devil, and that hellfire awaits those who buy iPhones. Throw yours away, brother. Don't be sucked into the Devil's evil plot! Buy Android, the smartphone for the Righteous!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Was this before or after the carrier bloatware was added?
Um, in case you didn't know, on the iPhone, the Carriers aren't allowed to add ANY bloatware whatsoever.
I almost never put my phone up to my face. I put it on "speaker" and set it down on my desk.
You must be wonderful to sit next to in the office.
Just picture a basement dweller in a school color mini skirt and typing while simultaneously wearing pompoms. It helps. It's also handy when political discussions come up.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You cherry-picked the first benchmark mentioned, and disregarded the other tests where iPhone 6S out-performed the other phones.
To be fair, the other benchmarks were:
sunspider
and
graphics benchmark, graphics benchmark, graphics benchmark. (Where I'd generally expect the same system winning one really should mean winning all.)
Personally, I don't play games on my phone. So 3dmark etc is irrelevant to me. (But I realize many people do, including my own kids... and the iphone 6s looks like the best phone for games right now; at least in terms of hardware performance.)
The fact that I can't load it up with hundlebundle mobile games, emulators, and so forth still counts against it though.
I try to avoid exposing my kids to freemium ad-ridden crap.
Now the sunspider (javascript) win is more interesting to me, but I'm pretty sure it's just showing that a faster core is faster at single threaded operations, and the A9 is a dual core with 2 faster cores vs Samsung which is octocore but the cores are slower.
That's not particularly interesting by itself; although it does hint at valid question -- is fewer faster cores better or worse than more slower cores a better strategy in a smart phone?
Real world use will answer that... benchmarks not really.
So the upshot... Apple 6s has better graphics performance than a phone released 6 months ago. The new CPU is good... better at single threaded than anything out right now due to faster cores, but it still lags in multithreaded due to only having 2 cores despite them being faster, and I don't know which core strategy ends up being actually better.
How does the battery compare? I was happy with an iphone 3GS years ago, then I was disappointed with my S3 battery, but am quite happy with my current S5. I expect I'd be happy with the battery on an iphone 6s.
And at the end of the day, benchmarks don't matter. Choosing apple vs samsung isn't about benchmarks. Its about ecosystems, and deciding which one you want: apple or android. Myself, I have no intention of ever returning to IOS due to the overly restrictive walls on the garden. But that's just me.
You must be wonderful to sit next to in the office.
I have a private office with real walls and a door. Nobody sits next to me.
When other people speak on a phone, I find it more annoying when I only hear half the conversation. It would bother me less if they just put it on speaker.
IIRC, didn't Apple crow about increasing the CPU - RAM bandwidth by a fair bit?
There's a great article covering just that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm struggling to understand how apple get away with not announcing any info about the codes, the cache size, memory bandwidth etc. Surely on a mobile device with limited power, optimisation of applications is a priority. How do people manage this without any idea of the physical architecture of the machine they are developing for?
Maybe i'm just old school, but knowing what hardware you are targeting is almost the first bit of info which informs an efficient use of the resources available.
To the 3party developer house that made this for apple.. congrats.. I know there must be a 3rd party entity somewhere.. Because the product seems to work..
Sorry. Apple did the R&D on this themselves.
I also find it interesting how those surface with the "shiny look in their eyes" Ohh New Apple product "pretty, pretty, pretty" without truly understanding the premise of what they are getting into..
What in the Hell are you even blathering-on about? is your Apple Hatred so strong that you can't speak; or are you just incapable of composing a sentence?
Much like the Lisa, the Newton, and the i-ball, this too will pass. "like a wet fart in an elevator"
The Lisa was a wonderfully-engineered machine, built (and priced) for business; with an integrated Office suite, Suspend/Resume for all open Applications and Documents, the first consumer-ready GUI, and much more; the Newton was a game-changer; but suffered from bad management at Apple at the time; WTF is the "i-ball"?
Congrats Apple on your new adventures..
I also find it funny that up-untill recently, Samsung made the apple chips.. Now that they are out of the loop.. lets see what happens..
thanks
Samsung NEVER Designed Apple's CPUs; they were (and are now again) Apple's "Fab House" for CPUs. BIG Difference.
TSMC was briefly the Fab House for the A8 SoC; but Apple went back to Samsung after that experiment. Actually, I think that Samsung was even listed as a "Second Source" Fab for the A8, and I'll bet that TSMC is listed as the "Second Source" on the A9.
Such is the way when it comes to custom IC manufacturing.
There's no decrease in battery life from the old 6 to the new one (from multiple reports and my own personal experience verifies).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
>In Geekbench, the iPhone 6s Plus performed second only to Samsung's newest Galaxy models
So it came in second! Yay!
I'm not sure where you got your figures (since there is no citation, Yay!); but this article claims that the iPhone 6s "Obliterates" the competition. And the GeekBench 3 scores in that article would tend to support that claim.
I got my figures from the article. I see a headline proclaiming product A to be the best and I scroll down and the first figures I find are of product B being better.
4996, 4952, 4824 and 4799 are all bigger numbers than 4379, yet they put the 4379 first in the chart, whereas all the other entries in that chart are ranked by geekbench score. This was not an objective exposition of the data. Tufte would been spinning in his grave if he was dead.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
What, are you some kind of communist?
You are welcome on my lawn.
As far as the article is telling me, a dual core cpu is keeping up with a 8 core cpu.
That's pretty damn impressive, but only if this doesn't come at a price (decrease in battery life).
This is normal. The rationale for 8 slow cores is you can turn off the other 7 when you aren't using them. The aim is to win on power consumption. The world has not declared a winner yet.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Or we could accept that tiny microphones and speakers don't work well in flat phones. Get rid of them and require the phone to be used with a headset.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Honestly, there was only a 100 year period where synchronous direct speech audio communication was the norm. In 1900 with a population of almost 80 million, only a few million had a telephone. By the year 2000, we already say a generation that was reverting back to the way humans had communicated through much of history, writing and sending asynchronously, such as one does with texting and email. The paradigm shift, so to speak, that made the smart phone a success, was the realization that for most people synchronous verbal communication was not of primary importance. Sure, a lot of people might want to make a video for later use, but I wonder how many people who can use Facetime or the like really use it. Furthermore, he rise of the answering machine tells us that the phone as a critical mode of communication is not all it was cracked up to be.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
'Cause it interferes with Apple's bloatware.
Did you use the A9 processor?
Such hate...
FYI, I know a former Lisa owner. She still raves about it.
A couple of Newton owners, and they still rave about it.
You stumped me with iBall. I'm sure it was a very shitty product though.
Long sides: Stupid. Where are you going to hold the phone?
The return of Side Talking!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I didn't hold the geekbench. I was pointing out what the article said.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Honestly many of these benchmarks probably don't come close to using the 8 cores on Samsung phones.
But 8 cores on a phone is probably stupid to begin with.
So you think Apple is evil and Google is pure goodness?
Boy, do we have spyware and tracking for you!
Here's something that fixes all the problems, is compatible with most smartphones and is available today: a bluetooth earpiece.
Is that a euphemism for masturbation?
I have a private office with real walls and a door. Nobody sits next to me.
There's a guy down the hall with a private office with real walls and a door. We can all tell when he's on a call using his speakerphone because we hear him all the way down the hall.
It would bother me less if they just put it on speaker.
And it would bother more people even less if they heard neither side of the call.
The single-core figure is listed in first place because it's the most relevant predictor of phone performance. Very few applications are written to be parallel--they're mostly games with physics simulations and the like. Even then, you have to remember that Samsung packs 8 cores into those phones and the A9 only has two and is clocked lower. That means that not only is the A9 more efficient per tick, it's also significantly more efficient per core. That means better output for less power draw.
So yes, the multi-core scores are lower, there's no doubt. The only thing that means is that in that one artificial benchmark, the bar is shorter for the A9 than for the other phones. In nearly every other benchmark--and most importantly, in benchmarks meant to simulate real-world situations--it outperforms the other CPUs by a wide margin.
That's not particularly interesting by itself; although it does hint at valid question -- is fewer faster cores better or worse than more slower cores a better strategy in a smart phone? Real world use will answer that... benchmarks not really.
My first question was, is the phone software rigged to identify benchmark code and execute it faster? (E.g., lower precision math, pre-configured answers, etc.) Like the VWs ...? Will the iPhone 6s emit scads of nitrogen oxides in your face while you use it, unless you're running a benchmark on it?
Many years ago, I recall hearing about the GNU C compiler, I think it was, that recognized when it was compiling one of the standard benchmark packages and highly optimized the output because it knew what it was supposed to be.
http://techrights.org/2013/08/...
https://groups.google.com/foru...
Apple's 'bloatware' is most irritating for the screen space that it takes up more than anything else. It's otherwise generally useful software if you don't already have a favourite app to do that thing. The Podcasts app on the iPhone is, apparently, basically the most used podcast listening app there is. The power of defaults is really strong, and a lot of those applications get used more than you'd expect. In terms of space, it takes up around 100MB, last I checked, which is a pretty trivial amount, even on a 16GB unit.
1. Javascript benchmarks are a real-world test, since these phones are constantly executing javascript when you use the browser. What you say is true, though--Apple has an advantage because it has both the best processor and best engine for executing javascript, so it's not showing exactly how powerful the CPU is. But that's what the synthetic benchmark is for.
2. The display on the iPhone isn't 'low res', it's just a lower resolution than the one on other phones. But that's a relevant trade-off, because it means that Apple can push those pixels faster, for less battery cost than other phones. It's a calculated trade-off, because nearly nobody can tell the difference. The games on the iPhone will look just as good or better. Don't blame Apple for not throwing pixels at a problem that doesn't exist.
If you go into settings and turn on "Reduce Motion" it will get rid of all the annoying animations and the phone will feel twice as fast. I have no idea why Apple won't let the stupid transitions go.
Wait till you explain it uses the ARM v8 instruction set.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
FYI, I know a former Lisa owner. She still raves about it.
I was a former Lisa owner. She was great. Not as good as the Marcia I owned prior to her, but almost as good as the Charon I owned afterwards.
A couple of Newton owners, and they still rave about it.
I owned one of them, too, but he was too uppity and sat around under apple trees all day. He was great at keeping the financial records, though.
And then the damn government stepped in and told me I had to let them all go. Curse you, Mr. Lincoln!
I'd just love to have a pre8.4 Music app back. God is that app awful...
While you may disagree whether the A9 is the best chip, it's a fact that Apple designed it. Denying it shows your disillusions. As for "buying" other companies and the putting their name on it, you merely don't want to acknowledge Apple has actually built things. Like many other companies they buy smaller ones for their tech, patents, people, etc. But they also spend years after the purchase making things.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Also there are very few applications that will take advantage of 8 cores on a smart phone. This is why I found the competition between smart phone manufacturers about the number of cores funny. It's like the race for most blades in a razor; I still only have one face to shave and more blades won't necessary shave it any faster.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No he just doesnt like ad companies, you know like Google
Heheh... don't think i don't see the irony of preferring android, while not liking ads / ad companies.
The reality is the smartphone market is garbage; and any selection is one of tradeoffs and compromises. I've found that Android is the best compromise for me so far.
So you think Apple is evil and Google is pure goodness?
Boy, do we have spyware and tracking for you!
Well, gods are generally omnipresent and all knowing and so is Google. Thus it should not come as a surprise that some of the religiously inclined would decide to worship Google and it it's prophet Android (peace be upon it).
The tiny microphones and speakers in my flat phone sound as good as any handset that I've ever used. You can use your headset with your phone, but don't expect anybody else to think that a phone that can't be used as a phone without a headset is a good idea.
And yet they fiddled the rank sorting. That's a VW move.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Spoken like a true apple shill. Apple use ARM CPUs, an open CPU design.
While the ARM CPU architecture itself is essentially "Open", Apple, like Qualcomm and Samsung (and VERY few others) are actually licensed to "roll their own" ARM Designs, IIRC.
And, BTW, do you know who has more years of ARM design and development knowledge than pretty much everyone besides the Acorn Group?
They've been using other to design and fab them for most of their iThing history, only changing after they bought an entire fucking corporation company that did it. So spare us your zealot bullshit.
Are you talking about PA Semi? They bought that Fabless Design Company for its designs that Apple hoped would get them to a Mobile PowerPC chip, not for its ARM expertise. PA Semi never could have done any "Fab", and as far as Design, I am pretty sure that is actually Apple. Apple has been in the custom chip design business for a few decades now; so spare us your hater bullshit.
Buying a complete company and sticking your logo on the outside doesn't mean they're the ones doing the work. Just wait until the existing plant needs retooling, that'll cost them billions and they'll go back to China fab plants expecting Samsung & Co to make them once more.
Again, you are sadly misinformed, brother hater.
Apple used Samsung to Fab (only!) its SoCs. Then, when they suspected Samsung of ripping-of elements of Apple's Design, and because of the Apple v. Samsung v. Apple v. Samsung v... lawsuits, they tried to "uplift" their second-source supplier, TSMC. That must not have worked out as well as Apple hoped; because for the A9, they seem to be back to Samsung for the Fab work (probably with TSMC as an alternate-source).
I also find it funny that up-untill recently, Samsung made the apple chips..
With Samsung being a chip manufacturer, how is that "funny"? That's like saying it's funny if Samsung made nVidia's Tegra or if Samsung made Qualcomm's Snapdragon. Up until the A4, Samsung designed Apple's chips with more input from Apple until they came out with their own designs. But that was in 2010.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They did no such thing. The single core score is right there--there are two bars per device--and it's almost twice as big as the next device. Just add up the numbers for an aggregate score, and it's trivially obvious that the phones are in the right order.
iPhone 6s+: 6885 ...
Samsung S6: 6449
S6 Edge: 6446
So by your logic, Lenovo doesn't make PCs, and Google doesn't make Android or smartphones? Apple has never fabbed their own chips, and they still don't. They design them in-house. Yeah, they bought companies to get the resources to do that, in 2008 (P.A. Semi) and 2010 (Intrinsity). I think that 5 to 7 years is enough time that you can now consider Apple SoCs to be "in-house".
They started out by using off-the-shelf designs (licensed ARM cores) in their own SOCs (the A4 and A5) to build experience, and then graduated to a custom CPU (licensed ARM instruction set) with the A6. They're now on their fourth-generation custom processor, so it's not like they are new at this.
Did you use the A9 processor?
LOL! Good one!
While this article is targeted as a chip review, I can't really get behind the idea of outlawing 3d game benchmarks on phones based on pixel resolution. In any case like a desktop where the screen wasn't a big part of the device, I can get behind what you're saying, but with phones its not like you can simply swap out the screen. I think it should be tested because no matter how good the processor is, it doesn't matter if you don't scale the phone performance demand properly. If your processor is pushing a screen with 20% more pixels than it can handle and constantly throttles itself or lags, that would show up in these tests, and that's the metric that matters most.
How did it "lose" to the Exynos 7420 when it is apparent that it bested the Samsung line which has the Exynos (Samsung Galaxy S6, Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+, Samsung Galaxy Note 5) in all but one category? As for Tegra X1, they are so few devices that use it (NVidia Shield Android TV) that testing it is not a real possibility at this point.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
To be fair, some people still think the new Apple TV should have been 4K capable even though most TVs, services, and content do not really support it yet.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
So the upshot... Apple 6s has better graphics performance than a phone released 6 months ago. The new CPU is good... better at single threaded than anything out right now due to faster cores, but it still lags in multithreaded due to only having 2 cores despite them being faster, and I don't know which core strategy ends up being actually better.
Past two well-designed CPU cores (which apparently the A9 has), it is largely just a dick-measuring contest.
The reason being that, almost NO mobile software is actually designed to take advantage of "relatively-massive" parallelism. And even with something like Apple's GCD (Grand Central Dispatch) (which I am pretty sure iOS doesn't support) to automagically dole-out threads to multiple CPU cores, the point of diminishing returns with multiple cores happens pretty quickly. So, in most cases, the extra cores are either at idle, or kept alive just enough to eat some extra battery life.
How does the battery compare? I was happy with an iphone 3GS years ago, then I was disappointed with my S3 battery, but am quite happy with my current S5. I expect I'd be happy with the battery on an iphone 6s.
Well, if it is anything like my iPhone 6 plus, the battery life will be stellar. I never get less than three days' use, and most often, about 5 days.
And since this is a "die-shrink" to 10 nm, I would expect even better battery life, since the battery-eating Miller-effect (charging and discharging all those tiny little junction capacitances). THAT's what actually consumes battery in a FET-based CPU topology. And the smaller the junctions, the smaller the junction-capacitance (which also helps with speed and heat-dissipation; because during "Miller Time" (as we used to call it at one job), the FETs are actually in a LINEAR state.
Apple designed it. The same way I design a meal if I go to the buffet and load up my tray.
Like Qualcomm designs Snapdragon (custom core and custom GPU, manufactured by Samsung or TSMC or whoever, etc). Like NVidia designs Tegra (stock core, custom GPU, manufactured by Samsung or TSMC) . Compared to A9 (custom core, stock GPU, manufactured by TSMC or Samsung). Which of these facts would you like to deny?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Well what the Android devices are trending towards is many cores, but not all identical - some low powered and some high powered.
A phone is largely idle but it can never shut down entirely so you only need a bit of near constant computing power keeping everything running.
The low powered cores can handle that just fine.
And when you start using it actively then the high powered cores kick in seamlessly to take over.
The iPhone misses out on that advantage because whenever it needs to do something like ping a mobile phone tower it needs to power up a high powered core.
Why is this modded troll? I use PCs with every interface possible, Linux, BSD, OSX, Windows, OS/2 (yup!) and have used Blackberry and iPhones since they were launched, now have iPhone, Android (nice dual-SIM Chinese generic) and a Nokia Windows phone (not bad, not great)
So I guess pretty neutral here, and maybe slightly experienced..agree with OP that iPhone interface is going backwards...and as others more loquacious than I have noted, same seems to be true of various desktops and browsers.
Different =/= better. Either improve it or leave it alone, especially if you don't understand why it was done that way in the first place...
But then you'll get me going about that twat Poettering...
I could go on and On, but that would just sink me deeper and deeper down to that level, I have been there enough in this little speech, no reason to ramble..
Nothing's stopping you, so far.
"Furthermore, he rise of the answering machine tells us that the phone as a critical mode of communication is not all it was cracked up to be."
Sure. If you suffer from Aspergers. The rest of us however quite enjoy "synchronous direct speech" and I'd far sooner lose SMS and email than the actual phone functionality. If all I wanted was a computer I'd just carry around a wifi tablet.
I wonder if Apple would ever consider moving OS/X away from Intel and over to ARM, allowing them to use their A series CPUs? If not, why not?
I just hate the targeting of kids with the freemium games and other types of social engineering.
If my kid wants to play games, she can use her 3DS. But no, you don't get to put in a credit card number.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Does the truth really sting that much? (like holy water)
WTF "Truth" would THAT be, ANONYMOUS HATER?
The reason being that, almost NO mobile software is actually designed to take advantage of "relatively-massive" parallelism.
I'm sure I'm not running anything individually that needs 8 cores. But I'm running a hell of a lot more than 2 threads. I agree the benefit drops off pretty rapidly... but I'm not convinced 2 is really the ideal number either; and I think the best solution is probably some sort of asymmetric solution, where the foreground interactive app is running on a couple fast cores, while the rest of the system lives on lower power cores...and it doesn't have to wake up a fast core just to stay in contact with the cellular network, do tower handoffs, and receive SMS messages, email...
Or not. Maybe the extra complexity of that loses you any advantages. I don't think its really a settled question.
Well, if it is anything like my iPhone 6 plus, the battery life will be stellar. I never get less than three days' use, and most often, about 5 days.
Yeah, that would be fine. Successive generations of iphone/ios have not always been an improvement on their predecessors though. But I expect the 6S to be good... adequate performance has been with us for a while, and the focus on efficiency has been everyone's priority lately.
"Apple is also claiming a level of gaming performance on par with dedicated game consoles"
Which is just one more reason I can't understand why they didn't put this in the new Apple TV, and instead put in the older A8.
The resolution of the iPhone is basically 1080p, and according to the benches, the A9 can drive it to (as they put it) "console level performance".
The A8 can't. And since that's what's going into the ATV, that means the games on the new ATV will *not* have "console level performance".
WHY?!?!
No, don't say it's production quantities. Apple will sell 20x iPhones and iPads as ATVs (or more), this is a rounding error.
Form factor changed too, so if you needed more room for heat or power, that's not an issue either.
1. Javascript benchmarks. They should be outlawed, period. They test the software (browser) more than the CPU. Also they are probably single threaded or close to be.
2. On-screen 3D game benchmarks. Because they favor phones with low-res display such as iPhones.
None of the benchmarks in TFA even consider RAM size and flash memory speed, which both have real-world benefits.
I'm sure that ALL of these benchmarks are done by Apple shills.
Right.
Oh, and whiner, I found this and this about the memory subsystem in the iPhone 6s. Glad you asked!
So where is the data on the claimed gaming performance on par with dedicated game consoles?
I can give you one performance metric. In order to enjoy the same immersion as a PC screen 3 feet away or a gaming console on a big screen TV 10 feet away, I have to hold the phone 7 inches from my face. But that is true of all phones, not just the new iPhone.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You stumped me with iBall. I'm sure it was a very shitty product though.
For hire.
Maybe I'm getting old but yeah.. "eh". The big bottlenecks for me are always RAM and storage IO. I don't really care these days about CPU performance for phones other than for battery numbers. It isn't even like Apple is pushing any sort of cool VR solution that could justify some technolust over CPU specs.
You are forgetting that the phone with a higher-res display could easily render the game in a lower resolution. Especially now with QHD phones, as they have 4x the pixels of 1280x720, a resolution which games must support.
... but I'm not convinced 2 is really the ideal number either; and I think the best solution is probably some sort of asymmetric solution, where the foreground interactive app is running on a couple fast cores, while the rest of the system lives on lower power cores...and it doesn't have to wake up a fast core just to stay in contact with the cellular network, do tower handoffs, and receive SMS messages, email.
Well Apple uses a motion co-processor that handles collecting and processing the sensor data so that the main processor can focus on computing. As of the A9, the M9 has been moved back onto the same die.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What are you trolling about? Did I say Apple cheated? That the benchmark results of TFA were false? Or that the A9 was slow? I understand that with a name such as Mac4all, you feel personally attacked when someone attacks Apple, but that wasn't the case here.
And yes, I've seen the Anandtech review about Flash performance and it is interesting. Still nothing about the impact of RAM size, however. This was leading many people to think that 1GB RAM was enough, since more RAM didn't help getting a higher score in their Javascript or 3D game benchmark.
And requires carrying a second device.
If we're going to go down that route, give me a damn smartwatch that actually works on its own. Then I'll add a bluetooth headset and use the watch as the phone, and use a tablet as the screen-based device.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I loaded CarTunes. The provided music app always kinda sucked, IMNSHO.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Benchmarks are completely pointless for phones. High end phones are all fast enough. Things like battery life and cost matter. Unless you really want the latest and greatest it seems like you might as well just get the older and cheaper iPhone 6, or pay 1/3rd as much for something like a OnePlus or Motorola. Or wait until tomorrow and get a new and much cheaper Nexus.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Are you talking about PA Semi? They bought that Fabless Design Company for its designs that Apple hoped would get them to a Mobile PowerPC chip, not for its ARM expertise.
I'm not sure I agree with you on this point. Apple has switched over to Intel by 2006 and bought PA Semi in 2008. The purchase of PA Semi wouldn't be for PowerPC as it seems they abandoned it by then, but, at the time, there was wide speculation as to why Apple bought them. According to Jobs at WWDC 2008, PA Semi was bought to help design mobile chips for iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
In 11 June 2008, during the annual Worldwide Developer's Conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that the acquisition was meant to add the talent of P. A. Semi's engineers to Apple's workforce and help them build custom chips for the iPod, iPhone, and other future mobile devices such as the iPad
This was one case where Apple bought a company for the personnel and expertise and not the technology.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Do not taunt Happy Fun iBall.
Because everyone knows if you cross Happy Fun iBall they may stay that way. Mom was right.
I knock Apple because of their rabid fan base and exhorbitant pricing, but they do have good engineers and produce some pretty damned solid hardware. Fair is fair -- they're better than HP was in their heyday!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
But it's clearly the way the industry is going. It's already a fairly large percentage of new TV sales, and growing.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
And even with something like Apple's GCD (Grand Central Dispatch) (which I am pretty sure iOS doesn't support)
What's your next guess?
GCD has been on iOS since iOS 4. We're up to iOS 9 now.
Any iOS app that uses AVMedia, the UIKit, Core Animation, and the rest of the standard frameworks benefits from GCD.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apple use ARM CPUs, an open CPU design.
You're confused about the difference between a CPU design, and a CPU specification. Apple designs their mobile CPUs. They conform to the ARM specification.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Nope. Apple has more CPU design talent in-house today than Sun, DEC or MIPS ever did. They're not buying standard cells off the shelf, they're designing CPUs and contracting the fabrication to outside companies.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
PA Semi was bought to help design mobile chips for iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
I met some of the PA Semi guys when I worked in Apple's hardware testing group. That's exactly what they're doing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
And if I don't ever listen to podcasts?
Are you talking about PA Semi? They bought that Fabless Design Company for its designs that Apple hoped would get them to a Mobile PowerPC chip, not for its ARM expertise.
I'm not sure I agree with you on this point. Apple has switched over to Intel by 2006 and bought PA Semi in 2008. The purchase of PA Semi wouldn't be for PowerPC as it seems they abandoned it by then, but, at the time, there was wide speculation as to why Apple bought them. According to Jobs at WWDC 2008, PA Semi was bought to help design mobile chips for iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
In 11 June 2008, during the annual Worldwide Developer's Conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that the acquisition was meant to add the talent of P. A. Semi's engineers to Apple's workforce and help them build custom chips for the iPod, iPhone, and other future mobile devices such as the iPad
This was one case where Apple bought a company for the personnel and expertise and not the technology.
I stand corrected. I thought the acquisition of PA Semi was earlier than that. Wonder what I was thinking of?
And even with something like Apple's GCD (Grand Central Dispatch) (which I am pretty sure iOS doesn't support)
What's your next guess?
GCD has been on iOS since iOS 4. We're up to iOS 9 now.
Any iOS app that uses AVMedia, the UIKit, Core Animation, and the rest of the standard frameworks benefits from GCD.
-jcr
I stand corrected. Bug that doesn't negate the rest of my points.
Having received my 6S a few days ago, what I can tell you is that for "normal" usage this thing is blazingly fast.
I mean, i've never used an OS, be it desktop or mobile where everything is that fast.
Everything happens instantly, no wait time whatsoever, I mean even things that ought to be slow like opening a link into safari from an app :
When the app switching animation is finished and safari appears, is seems the page is already loaded and ready to go.
I'm on fiber and have a fast wifi, but still.
Coming from an iPhone 4, the difference is astonishing. Like coming from a P500 to an I7 with a SDD or something.
Plus you can tell that it has some graphic power to spare for those usages, as i've yet to notice a single graphic slowdown.
uhh..
the benches are done on different versions of the benchmark on different gpu's and different screens and glue logic and different compilers, ram chips etc.
and on different operating systems. furthermore with ample time to "optimize" for the test case.
it's an ok chip, sure.. and it might be faster than whats on the cheapest macbook air but that's only because the cheapest macbook air has SHIT FOR CPU inside it.
who cares about the bloatware. the bloatware would be th same as the last ios device too. and sure enough your new ios update will make your older apple device slower so there's that..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
there's quite a lot less of designing a licensed arm soc than designing a cpu from scratch.
most of it is licensed just straight up.
the real magic is getting it actually manufactured after that.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The ARM 8 code systems use the bigLITTLE model, where they have four high performance cores and four low power cores. It works really well for extending battery life and giving excellent performance with all apps and operating systems.
Apple went a different route. They have only two high performance cores, but lots of extra little sub-processors for specific tasks. They can do that because they have such tight control over the hardware and can create APIs and apps to take advantage of specialized hardware, where as Android needs to be a bit more generic.
From a performance point of view, the biggest factor on modern phones is the amount of RAM.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The Chrome browser is multi-threaded. It uses multiple threads to render a single page (network, image decoding, layout, compositing). So multi-threaded performance is very relevant to real-world use.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Then it's not a problem as Apple's podcasts app isn't included on iOS. It's a download from the app store.
lol - sorry - wrong about that - it used to be a download but isn't any more.
In that case, why are the benchmarks always so much slower than the iPhone benchmarks for web browsing? I'd expect Chrome to be way ahead.
Then you hide the app in a folder like everyone else. The app itself literally only takes up less than 1MB, I think. I'm looking on my phone and it reads 4.7MB, but that's all 'Documents and Data', which is probably a cached old podcast that I used to test it out.
But there's a reason why the overwhelming majority of podcast listeners are on iPhones--not only does the iTunes store make podcast discovery really easy, but having a default app on the phone really simplifies the matter.
And since this is a "die-shrink" to 10 nm
Really? Because the Samsung A9 is done with a 14 nm process and the TSMC A9 is done with a 16 nm process, as some smart people have found. So what are you talking about? The gorilla glass thickness? Or the thickness of the rose gold layer?
No. I didn't read an article correctly.
I now see that Samsung has just now produced some prototype 10 nm parts, and expects to be in actual production with 10 nm by the end of 2016.
That's what I get for posting on Slashdot while trying to work, too!
Because the benchmarks are not good indicators of real-world performance. Most of the are artificial Javascript/HTML 5 tests. Since core JS engines tend to do better on CPUs with high single core performance, obviously. If you look at real world use though, the biggest factor is usually the amount of RAM available. 2GB is okay, but 3GB is better. Otherwise no matter how fast your CPU is, it will be waiting around while pages re-load from disk. For complex pages multi-threaded rendering really helps too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's not a bug it's a feature!
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
You can delete it.
Oh wait, just tried it, and no you can't.
You can ignore it though.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
It's not a bug it's a feature!
That is a PITA issue in my tablet's Autocorrect. I wish I cared enough to find out how to retrain it out of that peccadillo.
There's no decrease in battery life from the old 6 to the new one (from multiple reports and my own personal experience verifies).
And that despite not only the faster CPU, but also a lower capacity battery.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Here's something that fixes all the problems, is compatible with most smartphones and is available today: a bluetooth earpiece.
Ah yes.... Bluetooth.
I'm an old guy, ex-musician (still playing, but..) and I fell into the world of hearing aids a while back. When folks ask about how I lost my hearing, or was I "born that way," etc, I usually just say... "Mesa Boogie."
I do have issues with Bluetooth (reliability, limited bandwidth in some cases, etc) but there is nothing like in-ear monitoring for everything from voice, to soundtracks, or programmed music.
My fallback, with the phone, is "speaker." But for that clarity, that some dynamic range and near-field sound pressure levels can really enhance, there's nothing like high end hearing aids with BT or a direct feed through a 3.5mm cable (cabling into a separate antenna/controller/program switcher device). Mmmmmmm...
I think Anonymous Coward is just having some fun with ya'll and trying to get a rise out of you. No one would likely really be that bizarrely obtuse and stubborn on such a subject. Apple's design input (and financial support) into ARM goes back to the 1980's. From wikipedia... "In the late 1980s Apple Computer and VLSI Technology started working with Acorn on newer versions of the ARM core. In 1990, Acorn spun off the design team into a new company named Advanced RISC Machines Ltd.,[27][28][29] which became ARM Ltd when its parent company, ARM Holdings plc, floated on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998.[30] The new Apple-ARM work would eventually evolve into the ARM6, first released in early 1992. Apple used the ARM6-based ARM610 as the basis for their Apple Newton PDA. In 1994,"
Your desktop is running hundreds of threads right now.. 99% of them using 0.1% CPU combined.
Things haven't changed much in 15 years : going dual core (formerly dual CPU) gives you a tremendous advantage, especially for not crumbling down when a single thread or process uses 100% CPU. After that it's a wash. And linux still runs well on a fast single core desktop (Athlon 64, Pentium M, Celeron 430)
In real world usage a fast dual core almost always is faster than a slow quad core.
When loading a web page you'll often be waiting for that one pig javascript script to finish.
The quad core would need evenly splitted tasks to catch up or surpass the dual core.
How well does it work without an iTunes account, only the SIM card? Just a question.
I couldn't answer that (since I do have an iTunes account), but given that podcasts are free, I suspect that it's fine.
your lost,, when you pull your head out, realize. the contention is not whom designed it, but whom ultimately makes it..
Let's look at just smartphones only: Google makes very few smartphones themselves except a few reference models. Even then they don't "make" them as it is manufactured by Foxconn or the like. Many name brands in smartphones are actually "made" by a contract manufacturer.
If we look at the components of the phones, most of these brand don't "make" all of them either. Sure Sony may manufacture some of their own chips. HTC might have a few original parts in theirs, but the majority of components are made by others. Sometimes they even use components from competitors. Like Sony might use memory made by Samsung or processor by Qualcomm. Cellular radio chips are probably made by someone like Qualcomm who also makes main processors. However, Qualcomm designs processors/chips for many smartphones but does not manufacture them. It is done by a fab like Samsung or TSMC.
By your contention, none of these companies: Google, Sony, HTC, Apple, NVidia, Qualcomm, etc. "makes" the phone or the chips. Which of these facts is inconvenient to your argument?
If it's an apple "pure-play" then it will fail, Pls reflect on history.. regarding this segment.
I'm not sure what you mean by "pure-play" but history says their iPhones, iPads, iPods have sold quite well. I say your version of history is distorted.
Turning to Cisco to work out their enterprise connectivity issues.. Why is it they themselves cannot fix their own MAJOR ISSUE??
I'm not sure what you are referring to connectivity issues. This is what Apple says "Apple® and Cisco today announced a partnership to create a fast lane for iOS business users by optimizing Cisco networks for iOS devices and apps, integrating iPhone® with Cisco enterprise environments and providing unique collaboration on iPhone and iPad®." And? Besides meaningless fluff, there isn't anything really to say other than a partnership between the two. Suffice to say you are reading more into a statement than is there.
If Apple has such good products, and alot of money, why after all these years do they still get "assed" out from the enterprise?
Despite being not welcome into enterprises initially, corporate networks have had to begrudgingly let them in because . . . they are being "assed"? What you say makes no sense. Apple has always been consumer products. The fact that they are so popular with people that businesses have to let them into their networks says a lot about how poor business products must have been.
So.. buying a company and putting your name on it, does not make u the designer, it makes the company you bought the designer..
So what do you say about Samsung who does not design the CPU or the GPU for their own Exynos chips. They use stock Cortex A53 and A57 chips with stock Mail processors. As for "buying", that's as idiotic as saying that a company that buys another can never claim to "design" anything after they bought it. AMD bought ATI; therefore AMD can never "design" new Radeon GPUs. Idiotic.
Once again, apples new stragety, we know we'll blunder fuck the disign and the production as our colored histry shows us.. so, well find someone to do it cheap and buy them and call it ours..
AMD/ATI, Blackberry/QNX, Oracle/Sun. What about these examples? Or are you going to admit you're just biased?
So ultimately it seems the statement that originated this thread seems to be more and more honest and straight forward, as the Shills try to pick it apart..
It wasn't honest if it was factually incorrect.
just like the original author said, "lame"
And how do we know that you're not the same author trying to shill his own position?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
There's always been a group of people who wish to see Apple go back to PowerPC. At the time, Power was a better architecture IMHO. The problem for Apple was logistics. They and their Power partners could not keep up with Intel for all of Apple's PC needs. Pragmatically, it had to be done. There may be a time in the future where ARM could replace x86_64 but not right now. The performance/power consumption factors really favor ARM for mobile devices and as more people ditch PCs for mobile devices this may be more of a reality 5 or 10 years from now.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The problem isn't that you have multiple background applications running; the OS and the applications are not designed to be parallel in that regards for every task. There is some work like Grand Central Dispatch and Bolts, etc. but these are more designed for bigger processes like scientific computations. As a general rule, it's just more power intensive to keep multiple cores running for small tasks than to keep one core running multiple threads for small tasks. In your example, the news reader isn't actually doing anything intensive computing wise that would justify using a whole core to do background downloading. Most of the bottleneck would be the I/O mainly the wireless connection. Using a separate thread on the same core would be much more efficient. Now if it was a desktop where power matters less, yes, another core can be used.
As for my razor example, yes having multiple razors is helpful but at what point is having more and more not really about effectiveness and more about pure marketing? Three or four blades seem to be about where there is diminishing returns.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.