• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

The iPhone 5's A6 SoC: Not A15 or A9, a Custom Apple Core Instead (Anandtech)

Status
Not open for further replies.
It's a anticipated spec bump in the SOC arms race.

There has always been a stand out angle to the iPhone, as illusionary as they may have been. Specs was never something to hold on to for Apple products to stand out.

It's a bullet point that many have lambasted other companies for touting because they had nothing special to stand out with.
 
I think the real news here is The Faceless Master has some sort of vendetta with Apple or something. Almost all of his posts since the iPhone 5 announcement have been filled with hatred.
 
Sentry said:
This is only news for people who give half a shit about hardware specs.

Waaaay too many Apple/iDevice threads lately. Especially when the main threads aren't even getting as much attention..
Click to expand...

Do not do this. You are not a moderator. Thread shitting gets you banned for a long time for a reason.

If a thread is not interesting or relevant to you, do not post in it. Let it sink, which it will do in a matter of seconds if other people feel the same way, which allows for a self regulating environment. By placing so much emphasis on a thread being "good enough" you make people scared of posting new threads and everything just gets shunted into an awkward enormous megathread that a dozen hardcore people follow and use as a chatroom, where if you click randomly as a casual follower you'll usually get nothing of relevance out of.
 
KHarvey16 said:
Money quote:
Click to expand...
Aren't these results a lot better than the vanilla ARM15? If so, how will other companies ever catch up to Apple CPU wise any time soon? Won't they also have to design their own CPU architecture which will take a few years? Are there any new ARM architectures coming out soon which will be competitive with the new Apple architecture?
 
Horse Armour said:
Aren't these results a lot better than the vanilla ARM15? If so, how will other companies ever catch up to Apple CPU wise any time soon? Won't they also have to design their own CPU architecture which will take a few years? Are there any new ARM architectures coming out soon which will be competitive with the new Apple architecture?
Click to expand...

Yes they are. They're also higher than the scores for any Andriod phone or tablet out there. The cpu was custom build by Apple and iOS 6 was designed around these specific customizations. I don't expect anyone to be able to catch up anytime soon.

Android-Benchmarks.gif


There's just one flaw remaining in the iPhone that I actually care about, lack of a 1280x720 resolution screen. If you're going to up the resolution to 1156x640 with a 16:9 aspect ration and put a black border around the apps until they get updated, why not just go that tiny bit further and go to 1280x720 allowing for perfect playback of 720p movies.

Ideally, I wish Steve Jobs had more foresight and made the original iPhone 640x400 so that the iPhone 4 could've been 1280x800, with the original iPad and upcoming iPad Mini being 1920x1200 and the iPad 3 being 2560x1600.
 
EviLore said:
Do not do this. You are not a moderator. Thread shitting gets you banned for a long time for a reason.

If a thread is not interesting or relevant to you, do not post in it. Let it sink, which it will do in a matter of seconds if other people feel the same way, which allows for a self regulating environment. By placing so much emphasis on a thread being "good enough" you make people scared of posting new threads and everything just gets shunted into an awkward enormous megathread that a dozen hardcore people follow and use as a chatroom, where if you click randomly as a casual follower you'll usually get nothing of relevance out of.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this. There's been a lot of "this should be in a megathread" lately, it's getting tiresome.
 
EviLore said:
Do not do this. You are not a moderator. Thread shitting gets you banned for a long time for a reason.

If a thread is not interesting or relevant to you, do not post in it. Let it sink, which it will do in a matter of seconds if other people feel the same way, which allows for a self regulating environment. By placing so much emphasis on a thread being "good enough" you make people scared of posting new threads and everything just gets shunted into an awkward enormous megathread that a dozen hardcore people follow and use as a chatroom, where if you click randomly as a casual follower you'll usually get nothing of relevance out of.
Click to expand...
I'd say there is no self-regulation if it becomes a tit for tat competition of thread creation and arguing from two equally invested "teams."
Horse Armour said:
Aren't these results a lot better than the vanilla ARM15? If so, how will other companies ever catch up to Apple CPU wise any time soon? Won't they also have to design their own CPU architecture which will take a few years? Are there any new ARM architectures coming out soon which will be competitive with the new Apple architecture?
Click to expand...
There aren't any A15 chips out though yet, right? How do you know it's better?
 
numble said:
Geekbench results

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/09/16...r-in-geekbench-showing-dual-core-1ghz-a6-cpu/
Click to expand...
Could be faked, but impressive if true. Geekbench is highly synthetic so it always favored multiple core chips. Quad core chips almost always scored >50% of their dual core equivalents, even if it wasn't at all reflective of their real world performance.

Anywho, if true, looks like Apple has finally reached the CPU performance of the 1.8 G5 from 2004: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geek...r:"PowerPC G5 (970FX)" frequency:1800 bits:32
 
solarus said:
Eh, it's more interesting and worthwhile than the several junk threads that came up after the iphone 5 announcement.
Click to expand...

Yup.


EviLore said:
Do not do this. You are not a moderator. Thread shitting gets you banned for a long time for a reason.

If a thread is not interesting or relevant to you, do not post in it. Let it sink, which it will do in a matter of seconds if other people feel the same way, which allows for a self regulating environment. By placing so much emphasis on a thread being "good enough" you make people scared of posting new threads and everything just gets shunted into an awkward enormous megathread that a dozen hardcore people follow and use as a chatroom, where if you click randomly as a casual follower you'll usually get nothing of relevance out of.
Click to expand...

Thank you.
 
giga said:
Could be faked, but impressive if true. Geekbench is highly synthetic so it always favored multiple core chips. Quad core chips almost always scored double their dual core equivalents, even if it wasn't at all reflective of their real world performance.

Anywho, if true, looks like Apple has finally reached the CPU performance of the 1.8 G5 from 2004: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geek...r:"PowerPC G5 (970FX)" frequency:1800 bits:32
Click to expand...
It's crazy that the fastest mobile CPU in the world has only just caught up with a slow CPU from 2004.
 
numble said:
I'd say there is no self-regulation if it becomes a tit for tat competition of thread creation and arguing from two equally invested "teams."

There aren't any A15 chips out though yet, right? How do you know it's better?
Click to expand...
I meant the rumoured improvements which are around a 1.4x performance increase over A9 at the same frequency which based on the GeekBench score, the A6 architecture completely destroys.
 
EightBitNate said:
I think the real news here is The Faceless Master has some sort of vendetta with Apple or something. Almost all of his posts since the iPhone 5 announcement have been filled with hatred.
Click to expand...

hatred? what makes you say that? where is the hatred? my brother has been a big fan of iOS since the iPhone (2G) launch and i don't hate him or his choice in cellular handsets (or tablets) so what would make you think that?
 
numble said:
Geekbench results

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/09/16...r-in-geekbench-showing-dual-core-1ghz-a6-cpu/
Click to expand...
The comments section seems to contradict what neogaf iPhone users say regarding how only android users care about having the fastest processor.

Regardless, dat architecture. Hopefully my friend gets his phone next week so I can see what kind of real world performance increases they brought.

EightBitNate said:
What would an iPhone even need 1gb ram for? Never owned a 4S, does it stutter or lag often?
Click to expand...
You're telling me you've never opened safari after previously using it, only to be greeted by a blank screen and a few seconds of wait before the page loads?
 
The Faceless Master said:
c'mon son. this one fits on your pocket and has it's own screen.
Click to expand...
I didn't mean it as a slight against mobile devices. It just puts into perspective the canyon between mobile devices and mains devices in terms of performance e.g. the top end GPUs being more than 100x faster than mobiles yet mobiles put out graphics much closer than you'd expect based on just the performance.
 
Horse Armour said:
Aren't these results a lot better than the vanilla ARM15? If so, how will other companies ever catch up to Apple CPU wise any time soon? Won't they also have to design their own CPU architecture which will take a few years? Are there any new ARM architectures coming out soon which will be competitive with the new Apple architecture?
Click to expand...

Asus Nexus 7 NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30L 1300 MHz (4 cores) -1591
Samsung Galaxy S III Samsung Exynos 4412 1400 MHz (4 cores) - 1560
HTC One S Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8260A 1500 MHz (2 cores) 1258
Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 Samsung Exynos 4210 1400 MHz (2 cores) 1250

They aren't that far off. :P I'm actually surprised that My Note's dual A9 seems to perform that much better than the A5X in the iPad 3.
 
Lonely1 said:
Asus Nexus 7 NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30L 1300 MHz (4 cores) -1591
Samsung Galaxy S III Samsung Exynos 4412 1400 MHz (4 cores) - 1560
HTC One S Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8260A 1500 MHz (2 cores) 1258
Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 Samsung Exynos 4210 1400 MHz (2 cores) 1250

They aren't that far off. :P I'm actually surprised that My Note's dual A9 seems to perform that much better than the A5X in the iPad 3.
Click to expand...
1. Nexus 7 is a tablet.
2. Even still all the competition you listed have 4 cores. So this custom ASIC is beating all of them with 2 cores .. (especially with what giga said - geekbench results scales well with cores)
 
Found this on B3D:

Comparing to a detailed iPhone 4S it looks like the breakdown is 2.2x integer speedup, 2.8x FP, 2.5x memory performance, and 3.2x memory bandwidth. Seeing as the theoretical memory bandwidth only increased 33%, from 2x32-bit LPDDR2-800 to 2x32-bit LPDDR2-1066, Apple must have really improved their memory controller bandwidth efficiency as Anand was hoping for when he makes his claims that ARM reference memory controllers aren't very efficient.
Click to expand...
 
Horse Armour said:
I didn't mean it as a slight against mobile devices. It just puts into perspective the canyon between mobile devices and mains devices in terms of performance e.g. the top end GPUs being more than 100x faster than mobiles yet mobiles put out graphics much closer than you'd expect based on just the performance.
Click to expand...

I always thought it was lack of advancement in battery technology that was holding back mobile processing advancement? Although now looking at that I suppose you could say the power requirements of the processors are the bottleneck.
 
artist said:
1. Nexus 7 is a tablet.
2. Even still all the competition you listed have 4 cores. So this custom ASIC is beating all of them with 2 cores .. (especially with what giga said - geekbench results scales well with cores)
Click to expand...

The last two are dual cores and aren't that far off from the quad's on this benchmarks.
 
Lonely1 said:
Asus Nexus 7 NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30L 1300 MHz (4 cores) -1591
Samsung Galaxy S III Samsung Exynos 4412 1400 MHz (4 cores) - 1560
HTC One S Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8260A 1500 MHz (2 cores) 1258
Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 Samsung Exynos 4210 1400 MHz (2 cores) 1250

They aren't that far off. :P I'm actually surprised that My Note's dual A9 seems to perform that much better than the A5X in the iPad 3.
Click to expand...

That's kind of weird isn't it? Shouln't the S3 be getting much better results than the Note seeing as the CPU cores are the same and it has double the amount?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

Apple Raises Prices...
48
554
Audiophile replied
Apple posts a very cringe ad for new iPhone - A ferret gets triggered
48
2K
PonyStation4 replied
Apple is increasing prices due to the hardware crisis caused by the AI boom
News 
38
545
Dr.Morris79 replied
Microslop CEO - We’re moving from OS and apps to agents instead
News  2
64
766
Brucey replied
Cape Fear | Official Trailer | Apple TV
14
615
John Marston replied
Top Bottom