what Apple's doing here is what they've always done. March to their own drumbeat. While Microsoft has been attempting for years to slap Windows on everything that moves, Apple correctly forked OSX with the release of the iPhone and then correctly proceeded to use iOS as their tablet OS.They caught a lot of flack for that, back in 2010 but were once again proven right and all the imitators started slapping Android on their offerings. Now that mobile hardware has evolved, we may be seeing the first steps taken into merging the two OS's. Same goes for other Apple forward thinking like the M7 co processor. Benefits may not be immediate, but new doors are being opened. I guess Apple could've taken the easy way and just come out with a phablet with huge battery and then claim awesome battery life. They decided to find new ways to get more out of existing technology however. Example, device isn't moving, then stop pinging for location data thus saving precious power. More such innovations are sure to follow.
Meh, it's still a consumption device. Not at all like a creation device running Windows 8 that can turn out complicated formatted Word and Excel documents while multitasking legacy software in a separate window.
Apple is probably exaggerating; I bet it's only a 62 or 63 bit processor, and everyone knows it can't do real multitasking.
It's not only faster (above), but vastly more efficient, allowing iPhone 5s to beat the Note 3 in battery life when browsing the web over LTE (below).
This is a really good article DED overall, but that part is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. Clearly powering a screen almost 6in at a higher resolution is going to require more energy than one using 4in for something like browsing. The end experience shows both devices getting somewhere 8+ hours, so that doesn't prove much of anything from the end perspective. You would have to dig deeper into a PPW metric to expose efficiency. (Maybe they should start doing that)
Think of it this way, no one will be surprised a Camry will cover a few more miles on a complete tank of gas than a Camero despite have a smaller tank. We don't look at it that way, we use MPG to level the field.
Check out the physics tests. A7 is possibly the best dual core ARM chip there is, but naturally it cannot outperform good quad core chips in tasks that really utilize all cores you have.
What also is alarming that iPhone 5s's GPU loses to Adreno 330 in GLBenchmark 2.7 (Egypt HD, offscreen 1080p). Even if iPhone 5s's next generation mobile GPU was 25% faster than Adreno 330, the result would still be a small disappointment. A7 has also a miserable triangle throughput when compared to even iPhone 5's GPU... With A7 you gain some but lose some...
All in all, A7 is a great mobile chip, but it's not really a revolution. Inside the always-down-clocked Apple world it might be, but if you take other platforms into account it's not so fantastic any more. Especially now that Apple will be using A7 for the next 12 months and competitors will once again keep on launching their new stuff that contain Snapdragon 800s and other new stuff. But a nice catch up from Apple with A7.
Check out the physics tests. A7 is possibly the best dual core ARM chip there is, but naturally it cannot outperform good quad core chips in tasks that really utilize all cores you have.
What also is alarming that iPhone 5s's GPU loses to Adreno 330 in GLBenchmark 2.7 (Egypt HD, offscreen 1080p). Even if iPhone 5s's next generation mobile GPU was 25% faster than Adreno 330, the result would still be a small disappointment. A7 has also a miserable triangle throughput when compared to even iPhone 5's GPU... With A7 you gain some but lose some...
All in all, A7 is a great mobile chip, but it's not really a revolution. Inside the always-down-clocked Apple world it might be, but if you take other platforms into account it's not so fantastic any more. Especially now that Apple will be using A7 for the next 12 months and competitors will once again keep on launching their new stuff that contain Snapdragon 800s and other new stuff. But a nice catch up from Apple with A7.
Lol now imagine if you read what Anand said about those specific results... poor troll.
Basically the a7 alone has put Apple months ahead of the best tablet CPUs available, even from intel, and ignoring what is happening as a platform.
The snapdragon 800 and bay trail are already beaten, friend, look at the G2 and note3, for example. Not only that, Android apps can't (in a million years) take advantage of it because it would put 95% of android costumers out of the party.
Sometimes I wonder if you guys try that on purpose or are just stupid.
Interesting how it's the audio developers that are first to leverage the A7. I'm waiting to see what the rest of them come up with (like Auria, for example).
Just being a devils advocate here. We laud Apple for its attention to detail, exquisite design, user experience, customer service, and all the intangibles that make it great. We bristle when the critics play the spec-war game and explain that specs mean nothing if the above intangibles aren't there.
But now we have a CPU and hardware that really kicks butt and suddenly WE want to play the spec-war game because we can. If we don't care about specs than we don't, not just when we have the advantage for a while.
For me it's still the entire package. Arguing with spec-monkeys will get you nowhere. They always have an answer for everything, even the cheating going on for Android benchmarks. Just take a gander at the post from the resident spec-monkey in this very thread.
64 bit is a bit of a gimmick, what really matters is the ARMv8 support.... But try selling that to customers....
Only problem I see here is fragmentation...If the difference is this large, won't we get 5s only apps ?
It's not fragmentation, it's PROGRESSION. Like DED said in this article, it's going to enable new and enhanced functionality as well as whole new classes of apps. With iOS 7 and the iPhone 5s Apple has successfully executed a one-two punch which has simultaneously captured the attention of customers and developers.
These are facts and will survive any amount of yap-yap trying to denigrate Apple or to inflate the competition.
A switch down the road to ARM on Apple's desktop OS seems more and more likely. I wouldn't say a certainty; for now, Apple is just hedging its bets. I wouldn't mind if they abandoned X86 entirely except for that *%^$#ing Quicken which still can't/doesn't make a decent version for OS-X.
Just being a devils advocate here. We laud Apple for its attention to detail, exquisite design, user experience, customer service, and all the intangibles that make it great. We bristle when the critics play the spec-war game and explain that specs mean nothing if the above intangibles aren't there.
But now we have a CPU and hardware that really kicks butt and suddenly WE want to play the spec-war game because we can. If we don't care about specs than we don't, not just when we have the advantage for a while.
For me it's still the entire package. Arguing with spec-monkeys will get you nowhere. They always have an answer for everything, even the cheating going on for Android benchmarks. Just take a gander at the post from the resident spec-monkey in this very thread.
I don't think it's as simple as that. It's about capability.
The A7 gives the 5S the capability to change the key of a song in real time. That's a capability that other phones don't offer. While it is undoubtedly meaningless to most people, for some people, it would be enough to justify buying the phone. Other developers are finding similar quantum leaps in performance which open new capabilities.
While I agree that "my phone runs game xyz 3% faster than your phone" is a meaningless spec-war game, the ability to add new functionality that the competition can't match is an entirely different matter - and absolutely worth talking about.
A switch down the road to ARM on Apple's desktop OS seems more and more likely. I wouldn't say a certainty; for now, Apple is just hedging its bets. I wouldn't mind if they abandoned X86 entirely except for that *%^$#ing Quicken which still can't/doesn't make a decent version for OS-X.
I don't see it any time soon. Even the slowest MBA is still many times faster than the iPhone 5S. While the 5S might be enough for many people, I just don't see Apple introducing a new Mac which is an order of magnitude slower than the old one.
Heck, think about how much grief the got over the PowerPC - which was faster than the old one with native apps, but a good bit slower with Rosetta. If EVERYTHING is forced to run slower, it would be disastrous.
I can, however, see a laptop-style iPad (call it the iPad Pro) which would run on ARM. They could offer both the MBA-Intel and the iPad Pro-ARM for some time to get people used to the idea while allowing ARM to continue to close the gap.
Just being a devils advocate here. We laud Apple for its attention to detail, exquisite design, user experience, customer service, and all the intangibles that make it great. We bristle when the critics play the spec-war game and explain that specs mean nothing if the above intangibles aren't there.
But now we have a CPU and hardware that really kicks butt and suddenly WE want to play the spec-war game because we can. If we don't care about specs than we don't, not just when we have the advantage for a while.
For me it's still the entire package. Arguing with spec-monkeys will get you nowhere. They always have an answer for everything, even the cheating going on for Android benchmarks. Just take a gander at the post from the resident spec-monkey in this very thread.
That's a totally different beast.
Fandroids vomit things like "my phone is better" because it has a faster processor, when we know that despite the faster processor the phone is slower. That's the way Android works. Right?
Not only that, those processors mean nothing because they can't be used on everyday tasks, otherwise 95% of android phones would be useless.
The a6 and software made the iphone 5 the fastest phone, but the a7 is a gate to another world. It means a lot, not because of benchmarks, but because of the benefits that the whole platform is already having.
Not only that, now, Apple is Kicking Microsoft's ass on OSes and mobile office suits, Google's Ass on services, Samsung's ass on hardware, Everybody's ass on retail, Adobe's ass on pro-software, all other PC OEMs ass in high end sales, and now Intel and Qualcomm's ass on CPUs... And they are:
That's quite a list for a single company, and the P/E is 10 or less lol
To put it simply: the a7 is great because it shows that the true ass kicking is only starting.
There is no evidence that any of these gains are coming from 64 bit versus 32 bit. They are coming from other changes made simultaneous to the jump to 64 bit. The reason 32 bit apps run slower is that they are running in the old instruction set on the chip's compatibility mode. ARM probably could've made the core 32 bit and left in everything else and gotten the same gains. So, it wasn't really apples choice to go to 64, but ARM's. On the other hand, apple did choose to market 64 bit as a advantage, and Qualcom's chief is right to call BS. Perhaps he knows a bit more than those of you commenting here.
I think many critics of A7 were jaded by Microsoft's slow and awkward transition from 32 to 64 bit, as well Intel's insistence of a separate product architecture for the 64-bit processor initially. Many people also don't understand the difference between 64-bit address space (memory) and 64-bit instruction set (code).
Because Apple controls the processor architecture as well the OS and the App Store ecosystem, only Apple can pull this off and establish it in what seems like a short time frame.
I have to call BS here on the fanboy article. There is no evidence that any of these gains are coming from 64 bit versus 32 bit. They are coming from other changes made simultaneous to the jump to 64 bit. The reason 32 bit apps run slower is that they are running in the old instruction set on the chip's compatibility mode. ARM probably could've made the core 32 bit and left in everything else and gotten the same gains. So, it wasn't really apples choice to go to 64, but ARM's. On the other hand, apple did choose to market 64 bit as a advantage, and Qualcom's chief is right to call BS. Perhaps he knows a bit more than those of you commenting here.
I don't think it's as simple as that. It's about capability.
The A7 gives the 5S the capability to change the key of a song in real time. That's a capability that other phones don't offer. While it is undoubtedly meaningless to most people, for some people, it would be enough to justify buying the phone. Other developers are finding similar quantum leaps in performance which open new capabilities.
While I agree that "my phone runs game xyz 3% faster than your phone" is a meaningless spec-war game, the ability to add new functionality that the competition can't match is an entirely different matter - and absolutely worth talking about.
Bingo.
Someone with true vision will look at an advance in processor power and think "what new feature could I implement now that I have this much power at my disposal."
While others will go "meh, my phone is already fast enough - it's a waste having that much power in a phone."
Which of these two people would make a good App developer?
I can, however, see a laptop-style iPad (call it the iPad Pro) which would run on ARM. They could offer both the MBA-Intel and the iPad Pro-ARM for some time to get people used to the idea while allowing ARM to continue to close the gap.
Are you thinking they could maybe include a detachable keyboard and some way to support the display when used on the desktop? Perhaps tweak the OS to better run familiar Mac apps optimized for the "pro" iPad?
Comments
Now that mobile hardware has evolved, we may be seeing the first steps taken into merging the two OS's.
Same goes for other Apple forward thinking like the M7 co processor. Benefits may not be immediate, but new doors are being opened. I guess Apple could've taken the easy way and just come out with a phablet with huge battery and then claim awesome battery life. They decided to find new ways to get more out of existing technology however. Example, device isn't moving, then stop pinging for location data thus saving precious power. More such innovations are sure to follow.
inspiring. great article.
and the ultimate estimate may be
ios x / os xi
will definitely sooner than later be combined.
crossing fingers for 2015
Lol
61.5 I bet
This is a really good article DED overall, but that part is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. Clearly powering a screen almost 6in at a higher resolution is going to require more energy than one using 4in for something like browsing. The end experience shows both devices getting somewhere 8+ hours, so that doesn't prove much of anything from the end perspective. You would have to dig deeper into a PPW metric to expose efficiency. (Maybe they should start doing that)
Think of it this way, no one will be surprised a Camry will cover a few more miles on a complete tank of gas than a Camero despite have a smaller tank. We don't look at it that way, we use MPG to level the field.
An article by a fan for fans. Unfortunately dual core is still a dual core, as seen from some benchmarks that stress all cores:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/7
Check out the physics tests. A7 is possibly the best dual core ARM chip there is, but naturally it cannot outperform good quad core chips in tasks that really utilize all cores you have.
What also is alarming that iPhone 5s's GPU loses to Adreno 330 in GLBenchmark 2.7 (Egypt HD, offscreen 1080p). Even if iPhone 5s's next generation mobile GPU was 25% faster than Adreno 330, the result would still be a small disappointment. A7 has also a miserable triangle throughput when compared to even iPhone 5's GPU... With A7 you gain some but lose some...
All in all, A7 is a great mobile chip, but it's not really a revolution. Inside the always-down-clocked Apple world it might be, but if you take other platforms into account it's not so fantastic any more. Especially now that Apple will be using A7 for the next 12 months and competitors will once again keep on launching their new stuff that contain Snapdragon 800s and other new stuff. But a nice catch up from Apple with A7.
An article by a fan for fans. Unfortunately dual core is still a dual core, as seen from some benchmarks that stress all cores:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/7
Check out the physics tests. A7 is possibly the best dual core ARM chip there is, but naturally it cannot outperform good quad core chips in tasks that really utilize all cores you have.
What also is alarming that iPhone 5s's GPU loses to Adreno 330 in GLBenchmark 2.7 (Egypt HD, offscreen 1080p). Even if iPhone 5s's next generation mobile GPU was 25% faster than Adreno 330, the result would still be a small disappointment. A7 has also a miserable triangle throughput when compared to even iPhone 5's GPU... With A7 you gain some but lose some...
All in all, A7 is a great mobile chip, but it's not really a revolution. Inside the always-down-clocked Apple world it might be, but if you take other platforms into account it's not so fantastic any more. Especially now that Apple will be using A7 for the next 12 months and competitors will once again keep on launching their new stuff that contain Snapdragon 800s and other new stuff. But a nice catch up from Apple with A7.
Lol now imagine if you read what Anand said about those specific results... poor troll.
Basically the a7 alone has put Apple months ahead of the best tablet CPUs available, even from intel, and ignoring what is happening as a platform.
The snapdragon 800 and bay trail are already beaten, friend, look at the G2 and note3, for example. Not only that, Android apps can't (in a million years) take advantage of it because it would put 95% of android costumers out of the party.
Sometimes I wonder if you guys try that on purpose or are just stupid.
Just being a devils advocate here. We laud Apple for its attention to detail, exquisite design, user experience, customer service, and all the intangibles that make it great. We bristle when the critics play the spec-war game and explain that specs mean nothing if the above intangibles aren't there.
But now we have a CPU and hardware that really kicks butt and suddenly WE want to play the spec-war game because we can. If we don't care about specs than we don't, not just when we have the advantage for a while.
For me it's still the entire package. Arguing with spec-monkeys will get you nowhere. They always have an answer for everything, even the cheating going on for Android benchmarks. Just take a gander at the post from the resident spec-monkey in this very thread.
It's not fragmentation, it's PROGRESSION. Like DED said in this article, it's going to enable new and enhanced functionality as well as whole new classes of apps. With iOS 7 and the iPhone 5s Apple has successfully executed a one-two punch which has simultaneously captured the attention of customers and developers.
These are facts and will survive any amount of yap-yap trying to denigrate Apple or to inflate the competition.
I like that
A switch down the road to ARM on Apple's desktop OS seems more and more likely. I wouldn't say a certainty; for now, Apple is just hedging its bets. I wouldn't mind if they abandoned X86 entirely except for that *%^$#ing Quicken which still can't/doesn't make a decent version for OS-X.
I don't think it's as simple as that. It's about capability.
The A7 gives the 5S the capability to change the key of a song in real time. That's a capability that other phones don't offer. While it is undoubtedly meaningless to most people, for some people, it would be enough to justify buying the phone. Other developers are finding similar quantum leaps in performance which open new capabilities.
While I agree that "my phone runs game xyz 3% faster than your phone" is a meaningless spec-war game, the ability to add new functionality that the competition can't match is an entirely different matter - and absolutely worth talking about.
I don't see it any time soon. Even the slowest MBA is still many times faster than the iPhone 5S. While the 5S might be enough for many people, I just don't see Apple introducing a new Mac which is an order of magnitude slower than the old one.
Heck, think about how much grief the got over the PowerPC - which was faster than the old one with native apps, but a good bit slower with Rosetta. If EVERYTHING is forced to run slower, it would be disastrous.
I can, however, see a laptop-style iPad (call it the iPad Pro) which would run on ARM. They could offer both the MBA-Intel and the iPad Pro-ARM for some time to get people used to the idea while allowing ARM to continue to close the gap.
Just being a devils advocate here. We laud Apple for its attention to detail, exquisite design, user experience, customer service, and all the intangibles that make it great. We bristle when the critics play the spec-war game and explain that specs mean nothing if the above intangibles aren't there.
But now we have a CPU and hardware that really kicks butt and suddenly WE want to play the spec-war game because we can. If we don't care about specs than we don't, not just when we have the advantage for a while.
For me it's still the entire package. Arguing with spec-monkeys will get you nowhere. They always have an answer for everything, even the cheating going on for Android benchmarks. Just take a gander at the post from the resident spec-monkey in this very thread.
That's a totally different beast.
Fandroids vomit things like "my phone is better" because it has a faster processor, when we know that despite the faster processor the phone is slower. That's the way Android works. Right?
Not only that, those processors mean nothing because they can't be used on everyday tasks, otherwise 95% of android phones would be useless.
The a6 and software made the iphone 5 the fastest phone, but the a7 is a gate to another world. It means a lot, not because of benchmarks, but because of the benefits that the whole platform is already having.
Not only that, now, Apple is Kicking Microsoft's ass on OSes and mobile office suits, Google's Ass on services, Samsung's ass on hardware, Everybody's ass on retail, Adobe's ass on pro-software, all other PC OEMs ass in high end sales, and now Intel and Qualcomm's ass on CPUs... And they are:
That's quite a list for a single company, and the P/E is 10 or less lol
To put it simply: the a7 is great because it shows that the true ass kicking is only starting.
I think many critics of A7 were jaded by Microsoft's slow and awkward transition from 32 to 64 bit, as well Intel's insistence of a separate product architecture for the 64-bit processor initially. Many people also don't understand the difference between 64-bit address space (memory) and 64-bit instruction set (code).
Because Apple controls the processor architecture as well the OS and the App Store ecosystem, only Apple can pull this off and establish it in what seems like a short time frame.
I have to call BS here on the fanboy article. There is no evidence that any of these gains are coming from 64 bit versus 32 bit. They are coming from other changes made simultaneous to the jump to 64 bit. The reason 32 bit apps run slower is that they are running in the old instruction set on the chip's compatibility mode. ARM probably could've made the core 32 bit and left in everything else and gotten the same gains. So, it wasn't really apples choice to go to 64, but ARM's. On the other hand, apple did choose to market 64 bit as a advantage, and Qualcom's chief is right to call BS. Perhaps he knows a bit more than those of you commenting here.
Oh look, we've got another one over here.
I don't think it's as simple as that. It's about capability.
The A7 gives the 5S the capability to change the key of a song in real time. That's a capability that other phones don't offer. While it is undoubtedly meaningless to most people, for some people, it would be enough to justify buying the phone. Other developers are finding similar quantum leaps in performance which open new capabilities.
While I agree that "my phone runs game xyz 3% faster than your phone" is a meaningless spec-war game, the ability to add new functionality that the competition can't match is an entirely different matter - and absolutely worth talking about.
Bingo.
Someone with true vision will look at an advance in processor power and think "what new feature could I implement now that I have this much power at my disposal."
While others will go "meh, my phone is already fast enough - it's a waste having that much power in a phone."
Which of these two people would make a good App developer?
Are you thinking they could maybe include a detachable keyboard and some way to support the display when used on the desktop? Perhaps tweak the OS to better run familiar Mac apps optimized for the "pro" iPad?