Finally, the user also noted that they could not find any mention of a near-field communications chip in the native Settings application on iOS 8.
I wonder what he was expecting? A switch to turn it On or Off? I would presume if there was a NFC chip inside a new iPhone it would simply give you a popup from iOS, asking to approve or not. What does he want to configure?
If the rumour about the iPad allowing 2 apps side by side is true, I'm sure the new iPad will have 2GB. Even the PS4 and Xbox One come with 8GB these days.
Apple has doubled performance 3 years straight. To only offer a modest 25% increase doesn't make sense.
Unless they made huge improvements to battery life and/or the GPU (which is lagging the competition).
OR, the A8X is back for tablets with CPU and GPU results.
No, it makes sense. It was all but inevitable. There was only one thing left in my mind, but it is at best a compromised measure, and I wasn't sure 20 nm would get them there.
All the low hanging fruit for CPU performance have been implemented. ARM marched up the path that server/desktop processors took. They did it in 6 years versus about 2 decades. Superscalar, deep pipelining, SIMD, OOOE, branch prediction, multi-core, 64-bit, etc. It took close to 20 years for the PC space go through this. In the mobile world, all this stuff was already known and was just waiting for the fab process to get good enough for implementations to fit inside 2 W to 4 W thermal envelopes. And march right up they did.
Now, it's going to be similar to what Intel's been doing over the last 3 or 4 years or so. 10%, 15%. A slow slog. The only thing left is a "turbo" mode and maybe an active idle mode. It looks like from this Geekbench result they are getting a 20% improvement per clock over the A7. That is pretty good for a modern CPU architecture. I was hoping they could have implemented a turbo where one core is power-gated down and the other core could be clocked up 50% or more. That would have gotten near 2x in single threaded performance, which would have been awesome.
If the rumour about the iPad allowing 2 apps side by side is true, I'm sure the new iPad will have 2GB. Even the PS4 and Xbox One come with 8GB these days.
Those are non-mobile platforms plugged into the wall. Not a valid comparison.
I know, the ram issue is almost becoming a joke. I feel my new ipad air and ipad mini retina are gimp devices, I will replace those as soon as Apple upgrade the ram. The current devices are not for power users or gamers.
At some point I dont want a thinner device, I want better battery life and more ram... maybe having a design guy in charge is not such a great idea.
doom! doooooom! DOOOOOM!!
as far i know Ive is in charge of design, not hardware (electrical) engineering, not has he ever been.
guess what? more ram uses more battery. so which do you want more of on your phone -- ram, or battery?
As much as it would be nice to see more RAM, keeping it low also makes it so developers are careful with their programs. It makes for a better experience for the people with older devices. For the most part, A5 devices have 512MB, they'll all get dumped at once and then 1GB will be the new limit.
If Apple wants to encourage developers to be memory efficient, why don't they just set memory limits in their app store policies? Forcing the issue at the hardware level seems the wrong way to go, as it ignores various use cases where a large amount of RAM is legitimately needed (such as web browsing).
Why do you think web browsing needs lots of RAM? IOS can page ram to flash and you really do not see a major impact in speed. I browse on my 5S with 10 tabs open with no problems. I have 7 pages of apps. Games dont crash.
IOS 7 had all kinds of problems and crashing but with the current release all is well for me. There are so many people who are superstitious about RAM. Show me some hard evidence that it is actually RAM issues for app crashes versus IOS issues and maybe I will believe.
At some point I dont want a thinner device, I want better battery life and more ram...
So true!
The A7 in the iPhone 5S has to drop the speed significantly after half a minute.
If the A8 could behave in the iPhone like the A7 in the iPad Air, only a slight drop after a much longer period, than the 20% more speed in Geekbench would transform to a 45% speed increase under heavy usage.
Something that wouldn't show in the usual benchmarks but benefit the user in real life...
And maybe they need the power envelope for the GPU
Apple has doubled performance 3 years straight. To only offer a modest 25% increase doesn't make sense.
fyi, theres nothing magic about performance doubling -- they've been able to do it thus far because theres room to. but eventually it gets harder and the return gets smaller. see intel.
guess what? more ram uses more battery. so which do you want more of on your phone -- ram, or battery?
Please enlighten us- how much more?
The "battery" excuse is a very very poor one. An incremental step up from 1gb to 1.5gb has a negligible impact on battery life. Please find another excuse to use.
I wish I was.... that being said, we still have to wait on product announcements. Apple is not in trouble yet, I am hoping they will up the ram on ipads for multitasking issues, which will save the games at the same time.
apple isn't anywhere near being in trouble in mobile, nor have they for the past 7 years. its only the FUD peddlers who think otherwise.
If you are having to do a reboot to stop your game crashing then that is a game problem. Apps are automatically flushed (unless they are authorised to run in the background) I have an Ipad 2 and have never "flushed apps" before running any game and never had a problem, The PS3 has half the RAM of my Ipad and has no problems. The limitations are known constraints, the game developers should be working within these limits. I see lots of games with no support for my iphone 4 because of RAM and CPU limitations.
The "battery" excuse is a very very poor one. An incremental step up from 1gb to 1.5gb has a negligible impact on battery life. Please find another excuse to use.
it's not an excuse, its physics. twice as much memory addresses to manage and electrons to store -- how could it not use more battery? apple isn't sitting here miserly dreaming up new ways to piss off online whiners....they think about practical effects of real world trade-offs.
but dont take my word for it -- take Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky's:
Apple is stingy with RAM in their mobile devices for whatever reason.
More RAM = more circuits = more transistors = more power.
Efficient memory usage is a key component to battery performance. Cramming more RAM into a mobile device solves some problems, but creates other challenges.
It's also more expensive and cost is always an important consideration.
It's likely that Apple tries different CPUs with different levels of RAM, different clock speeds, etc. in the prototyping stage and that they decided on the RAM level based on various tests using a wide assortment of applications. Most likely larger amounts of RAM are only beneficial to a handful of applications (like photo or video editing) and that the design group felt the performance benefit from 2GB of RAM was not sufficient to outweigh the cost/power considerations.
Luckily, RAM prices will continue to come down, as does power usage due to smaller fabrication processes. We will see 2GB in an Apple mobile device sometime in the not-too-distant future.
apple isn't anywhere near being in trouble in mobile, nor have they for the past 7 years. its only the FUD peddlers who think otherwise.
imo they could be on the ipad side if they keep the 1g of ram. But regarding mobile, an iWatch with NFC and payments may be the killer app for that device. I can see myself paying by not taking out anything and just use the watch.
If you are having to do a reboot to stop your game crashing then that is a game problem. Apps are automatically flushed (unless they are authorised to run in the background) I have an Ipad 2 and have never "flushed apps" before running any game and never had a problem, The PS3 has half the RAM of my Ipad and has no problems. The limitations are known constraints, the game developers should be working within these limits. I see lots of games with no support for my iphone 4 because of RAM and CPU limitations.
I have an iPad 3 and I too have never had any memory issues while gaming. I didn't even know these problems affected other people.
More RAM = more circuits = more transistors = more power.
Efficient memory usage is a key component to battery performance. Cramming more RAM into a mobile device solves some problems, but creates other challenges.
Comments
And I can wait until next year to upgrade my iPhone.
I don't know about you but I drive my phones and my cars into the ground. They better last for years.
1 is the loneliest number.
Phone needs memory to last a few upgrade cycles imao.
I wonder what he was expecting? A switch to turn it On or Off? I would presume if there was a NFC chip inside a new iPhone it would simply give you a popup from iOS, asking to approve or not. What does he want to configure?
If the rumour about the iPad allowing 2 apps side by side is true, I'm sure the new iPad will have 2GB. Even the PS4 and Xbox One come with 8GB these days.
Apple has doubled performance 3 years straight. To only offer a modest 25% increase doesn't make sense.
Unless they made huge improvements to battery life and/or the GPU (which is lagging the competition).
OR, the A8X is back for tablets with CPU and GPU results.
No, it makes sense. It was all but inevitable. There was only one thing left in my mind, but it is at best a compromised measure, and I wasn't sure 20 nm would get them there.
All the low hanging fruit for CPU performance have been implemented. ARM marched up the path that server/desktop processors took. They did it in 6 years versus about 2 decades. Superscalar, deep pipelining, SIMD, OOOE, branch prediction, multi-core, 64-bit, etc. It took close to 20 years for the PC space go through this. In the mobile world, all this stuff was already known and was just waiting for the fab process to get good enough for implementations to fit inside 2 W to 4 W thermal envelopes. And march right up they did.
Now, it's going to be similar to what Intel's been doing over the last 3 or 4 years or so. 10%, 15%. A slow slog. The only thing left is a "turbo" mode and maybe an active idle mode. It looks like from this Geekbench result they are getting a 20% improvement per clock over the A7. That is pretty good for a modern CPU architecture. I was hoping they could have implemented a turbo where one core is power-gated down and the other core could be clocked up 50% or more. That would have gotten near 2x in single threaded performance, which would have been awesome.
If the rumour about the iPad allowing 2 apps side by side is true, I'm sure the new iPad will have 2GB. Even the PS4 and Xbox One come with 8GB these days.
Those are non-mobile platforms plugged into the wall. Not a valid comparison.
I know, the ram issue is almost becoming a joke. I feel my new ipad air and ipad mini retina are gimp devices, I will replace those as soon as Apple upgrade the ram. The current devices are not for power users or gamers.
At some point I dont want a thinner device, I want better battery life and more ram... maybe having a design guy in charge is not such a great idea.
doom! doooooom! DOOOOOM!!
as far i know Ive is in charge of design, not hardware (electrical) engineering, not has he ever been.
guess what? more ram uses more battery. so which do you want more of on your phone -- ram, or battery?
As much as it would be nice to see more RAM, keeping it low also makes it so developers are careful with their programs. It makes for a better experience for the people with older devices. For the most part, A5 devices have 512MB, they'll all get dumped at once and then 1GB will be the new limit.
If Apple wants to encourage developers to be memory efficient, why don't they just set memory limits in their app store policies? Forcing the issue at the hardware level seems the wrong way to go, as it ignores various use cases where a large amount of RAM is legitimately needed (such as web browsing).
Why do you think web browsing needs lots of RAM? IOS can page ram to flash and you really do not see a major impact in speed. I browse on my 5S with 10 tabs open with no problems. I have 7 pages of apps. Games dont crash.
IOS 7 had all kinds of problems and crashing but with the current release all is well for me. There are so many people who are superstitious about RAM. Show me some hard evidence that it is actually RAM issues for app crashes versus IOS issues and maybe I will believe.
Speed is not an issue for 99% of 5 and 5S users.
At some point I dont want a thinner device, I want better battery life and more ram...
So true!
The A7 in the iPhone 5S has to drop the speed significantly after half a minute.
If the A8 could behave in the iPhone like the A7 in the iPad Air, only a slight drop after a much longer period, than the 20% more speed in Geekbench would transform to a 45% speed increase under heavy usage.
Something that wouldn't show in the usual benchmarks but benefit the user in real life...
And maybe they need the power envelope for the GPU
Those are non-mobile platforms plugged into the wall. Not a valid comparison.
It's something to think about though, if Apple wants the latest console games ported to iOS.
Apple has doubled performance 3 years straight. To only offer a modest 25% increase doesn't make sense.
fyi, theres nothing magic about performance doubling -- they've been able to do it thus far because theres room to. but eventually it gets harder and the return gets smaller. see intel.
guess what? more ram uses more battery. so which do you want more of on your phone -- ram, or battery?
Please enlighten us- how much more?
The "battery" excuse is a very very poor one. An incremental step up from 1gb to 1.5gb has a negligible impact on battery life. Please find another excuse to use.
I wish I was.... that being said, we still have to wait on product announcements. Apple is not in trouble yet, I am hoping they will up the ram on ipads for multitasking issues, which will save the games at the same time.
apple isn't anywhere near being in trouble in mobile, nor have they for the past 7 years. its only the FUD peddlers who think otherwise.
Please enlighten us- how much more?
The "battery" excuse is a very very poor one. An incremental step up from 1gb to 1.5gb has a negligible impact on battery life. Please find another excuse to use.
it's not an excuse, its physics. twice as much memory addresses to manage and electrons to store -- how could it not use more battery? apple isn't sitting here miserly dreaming up new ways to piss off online whiners....they think about practical effects of real world trade-offs.
but dont take my word for it -- take Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky's:
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/12/ram-energy
Apple is stingy with RAM in their mobile devices for whatever reason.
More RAM = more circuits = more transistors = more power.
Efficient memory usage is a key component to battery performance. Cramming more RAM into a mobile device solves some problems, but creates other challenges.
It's also more expensive and cost is always an important consideration.
It's likely that Apple tries different CPUs with different levels of RAM, different clock speeds, etc. in the prototyping stage and that they decided on the RAM level based on various tests using a wide assortment of applications. Most likely larger amounts of RAM are only beneficial to a handful of applications (like photo or video editing) and that the design group felt the performance benefit from 2GB of RAM was not sufficient to outweigh the cost/power considerations.
Luckily, RAM prices will continue to come down, as does power usage due to smaller fabrication processes. We will see 2GB in an Apple mobile device sometime in the not-too-distant future.
apple isn't anywhere near being in trouble in mobile, nor have they for the past 7 years. its only the FUD peddlers who think otherwise.
imo they could be on the ipad side if they keep the 1g of ram. But regarding mobile, an iWatch with NFC and payments may be the killer app for that device. I can see myself paying by not taking out anything and just use the watch.
It's something to think about though, if Apple wants the latest console games ported to iOS.
Apple does not want anything 'ported'. They want total clean sheet software with maybe re-used images/media. Ported games waste resources.
If you are having to do a reboot to stop your game crashing then that is a game problem. Apps are automatically flushed (unless they are authorised to run in the background) I have an Ipad 2 and have never "flushed apps" before running any game and never had a problem, The PS3 has half the RAM of my Ipad and has no problems. The limitations are known constraints, the game developers should be working within these limits. I see lots of games with no support for my iphone 4 because of RAM and CPU limitations.
I have an iPad 3 and I too have never had any memory issues while gaming. I didn't even know these problems affected other people.