RAM in iPhone 13 unchanged from iPhone 12 models

AppleInsider

Data mined from Apple's Xcode confirms that the iPhone 13 lineup has the same amount of RAM as the corresponding iPhone 12 models.

The iPhone 13 has the same amount of RAM as iPhone 12

The iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini have 4GB of RAM. The iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max have 6GB of RAM. These values are identical to the iPhone 12 models.

MacRumors discovered code strings in the Xcode 13 beta that indicate iPhone 13's RAM. These specs are never disclosed by Apple, but the device simulator in Xcode would need a reference point when testing apps.

These same code strings revealed the RAM for iPhone 12 and earlier models as well, so the data is likely accurate. Apple has never targeted high RAM in iPhone due to the efficiency of the A-series processors.

The A15 processor is still a bit of a mystery in terms of computational power. Rather than comparing the A15 to the A14 during the iPhone event, Apple said the A15 has 50% more power than competitors.

The iPhone 13 lineup will be available to pre-order starting September 17 and will ship on September 24. Primary features include a smaller notch, better cameras, and high-refresh displays in the pro models.

Read on AppleInsider

cpsro

In gross appearance, the A15 looks just like the A14 except for one additional GPU core. Both chips are built at 5nm scale. Apple had to go with "iPhone 13" instead of "iPhone 12[s]" because the new device looks to be not any faster except on graphics. Hence, Apple didn't promote speed improvement of the iPhone 13 over the 12 and instead talked about Apple's superiority over the competition. This feels like fallout from the pandemic. While the A15 may not wow compared to the A14, Apple employees have done well to keep new products rolling.

sflocal

Considering how anemic the performance increases with x86 CPU has been year over year, I'm more than happy with the big jumps that the Ax CPU's have had since they were introduced.

KITA

AppleInsider said:

The A15 processor is still a bit of a mystery in terms of computational power. Rather than comparing the A15 to the A14 during the iPhone event, Apple said the A15 has 50% more power than competitors.

The iPhone 13 lineup will be available to pre-order starting September 17 and will ship on September 24. Primary features include a smaller notch, better cameras, and high-refresh displays in the pro models.

Read on AppleInsider

Anandtech noted the following (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16934/apple-announces-iphone-13-series):

Here, they’re claiming that the new A15 will be +50% better than the next-best competitor. The next-best competitor is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 – if we look up our benchmark result set, we can see that the A14 is +41% more performant than the Snapdragon 888 in SPECint2017 – for the A15 to grow that gap to 50% it really would only need to be roughly 6% faster than the A14, which is indeed not a very large upgrade. Apple also didn’t comment on any new ISA features such as Armv9/SVE2, so it seems that the CPU doesn’t feature it?

 Apple claimed that the A15 (5 core graphics) in the new iPad Mini has a 40% faster CPU than the A12:



Last year, they also claimed the A14 CPU was 40% faster than the CPU in the A12 (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/09/apple-unveils-all-new-ipad-air-with-a14-bionic-apples-most-advanced-chip/):

Using breakthrough 5-nanometer process technology, A14 Bionic is packed with 11.8 billion transistors for increased performance and power efficiency in nearly every part of the chip. This latest-generation A-series chip features a new 6-core design for a 40 percent boost in CPU performance, and a new 4-core graphics architecture for a 30 percent improvement in graphics.

cia

Now that the dust has settled, I'm pretty OK with the release.  I think the naming should have been 12s, but beyond that it's basically in line with what we expected.  5nm++ was the node, which we knew would bring refinements, but not much new performance. Sure enough, we got better battery life but not much extra oomph.  The other stuff (better cameras, Pro-motion display) was in line with expectations.  Basically everything leaked, and we got what we got.

Should be called the 12s though.

fastasleep

cpsro said:

In gross appearance, the A15 looks just like the A14 except for one additional GPU core. Both chips are built at 5nm scale. Apple had to go with "iPhone 13" instead of "iPhone 12[s]" because the new device looks to be not any faster except on graphics. Hence, Apple didn't promote speed improvement of the iPhone 13 over the 12 and instead talked about Apple's superiority over the competition. This feels like fallout from the pandemic. While the A15 may not wow compared to the A14, Apple employees have done well to keep new products rolling.

So by “gross appearance” you mean ignoring details? 3.2 billion additional transistors didn’t just go into an additional GPU core, it also got a higher-performance neural engine for AI and machine learning tasks and increases AI operations from last year's 11 trillion operations per second to 15.8 trillion, and a new image signal processor. That’s not nothing. Apple is clearly looking at advances in the chip from a holistic perspective versus just node process and core counts. 

melgross

The reality these days is that the other processors are just as important as the CPU, possibly the GPU, and in a number of tasks, more important. We haven’t seen improvements in the neural processor since it went to 16 cores several years ago, yet, that didn’t bother anybody. Now it has, the ISP is improved, as are other elements of the SoC.

but, you know, you can’t make everyone happy. To some, only the CPU and GPU scores mean anything. And, it looks as those early CPU scores were pretty close after all, if what we’re gleaning from what Apple has said so far, is correct.

JustSomeGuy1

Despite the previous poster's claim, it seems likely that CPU performance is not significantly improved - lacking more facts, my money is on Andrei's analysis (in AnandTech), maybe 5-6%. But there are two wildly divergent ways to look at this.

It is possible that this is simply the result of a brain drain. That's a popular take in the press, right now. It's not clear how that analysis lines up with other known facts, like the massively improved NPU.

There is another possibility though. Apple is now designing a pair of cores for use not just in the phone, but also in the Mac. What are the needs of those two devices?

- For the phone, the biggest need is NOT more CPU performance. It's lower power use, which leads to greater sustained performance or longer battery life.

- For the Mac, it *is* more performance. But Macs are very different from phones, even the laptops. They can afford to burn more power on increased clock speed, unlike phones... IF the chip has the ability to run at higher clocks. It seems likely that the A14/M1 does NOT have that ability, simply based on the MBPs not clocking past 3.2GHz even when on wall current. (This is normal - every chip design has a maximum beyond which it can't go, no matter how much power you throw at it.)

The A-series chips have sped up from ~2.3GHz to ~3GHz over the last five years, since the iPhone 7, but most of the performance has come from widening the cores. But this leaves a ton of performance on the table- they should be able to get at least 4GHz, and possibly close to 5GHz, out of the process node they're using now, with a newer design. (Power requirements prevent that in the phone, of course.)

Now... what would such a redesign look like? Really, you'd want to try to preserve the IPC of your existing design while allowing for higher clocks. And you'd probably also want to increase your caches to compensate for the fact that every cache miss is going to cost more cycles (as each cycle is quicker). Once that design is done, if you don't need the max performance out of that chip in one situation, you'd run it slower and pocket the power savings.

This looks like it might be what Apple has done. They're claiming better battery life, despite a high-refresh-rate screen, a brighter screen, and a doubled system cache. And oh yeah, that doubled cache seems telling.

So, I think we can't really know what's going on at Apple until the new Macs ship. And maybe not until a new desktop (27" imac and/or Pro, not so much the mini) ship. If my guess is right, what we're seeing is Apple being very smart about maximizing the RoI on a single pair of core designs (high-perf & high-efficiency). They get better power efficiency in the A15, which is their primary design goal this time around, while being able to drive the cores much faster (4-4.5GHz, maybe?) in the M2 Macs. That would give the cores +25%-+40% performance PER CORE from clockspeed. You'd lose some performance due to longer pipelines, cache misses, etc, probably made up for by the larger cache (which might be where the +6% is coming from in the A14).

Next month will be *fascinating*.

rinosaur

Another disappointment, the non pros could have been upped on RAM especially