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The iPhone XS and XS Max Review: Unveiling the Silicon Secrets
- gm-conspiracy 8y agoIndeed in terms of cellular connectivity, the new iPhones boast a significant jump as we’ve seen an upgrade in download speeds to a gigabit for LTE networks. I would like to see this speedtest and know the location, please.
- TomMarius 8y agoLab? Mobile network testers are available off the shelf
- taf2 8y agoWe saw 120Mb/s from our office in Maryland - Annapolis. Older iphones getting only 20Mb/s
- DenisM 8y agoI'm getting 120mbps on iPhone 6s in Seattle (T-Mo).
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- isatty 8y ago250 Mbps, Singapore, iPhone xs https://i.imgur.com/nU4pSKN.png https://i.imgur.com/nU4pSKN.png However my iPhone 8 got 210 Mbps same carrier, same test location, 1 minute apart.
- MrBuddyCasino 8y ago"What is quite astonishing, is just how close Apple’s A11 and A12 are to current desktop CPUs. I haven’t had the opportunity to run things in a more comparable manner, but taking our server editor, Johan De Gelas’ recent figures from earlier this summer, we see that the A12 outperforms a Skylake CPU." How do they do it?
- tinus_hn 8y ago1. It probably helps if you don’t have to accommodate 30 years of legacy. 2. The mobile phone industry is fiercely competitive while the PC industry has Intel and their near-monopoly.
- hesdeadjim 8y agoLegacy isn’t a good explanation because the instruction decoder that turns x86 instructions into microcode is basically a fixed cost and makes up a tiny portion of the silicon. Clearly there is room for innovation in the x86 sphere as well because the AMD Zen architecture was created brand new from scratch and has become very competitive. The more likely explanation is that there is an exponential difficulty curve in CPU optimization and performance that Apple and their admittedly talented engineers are climbing very quickly. When an Ax chip hits true desktop performance sooner than later, the limit of physics is going to slow down Apple just like it has Intel and AMD. There isn’t any magic they are going to be able to do that suddenly gives them a 2x IPC gain or huge frequency advantage.
- umanwizard 8y agoWell my Intel chip needs a fan and my iPhone doesn’t. So it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison (no pun intended, please nobody reply with “I see what you did there”). The fact that someone can come up with a chip of similar performance to Intel’s isn’t that amazing. The fact that they can do so without needing a fan is.
- oliveshell 8y agoI agree— though it’s perhaps worth mentioning that a fan on the phones was used for the SPEC2006 benchmarks: > The performance measurement was run in a synthetic environment (read: bench fan cooling the phones) where we assured thermals wouldn’t be an issue for the 1-2 hours it takes to complete a full suite run. Still darn impressive, as in the real world you won’t be doing anything with your phone that maxes out the SoC for 2 hours straight.
- 8y ago
- oflannabhra 8y ago> Overall the new A12 Vortex cores and the architectural improvements on the SoC’s memory subsystem give Apple’s new piece of silicon a much higher performance advantage than Apple’s marketing materials promote. The contrast to the best Android SoCs have to offer is extremely stark – both in terms of performance as well as in power efficiency. Apple’s SoCs have better energy efficiency than all recent Android SoCs while having a nearly 2x performance advantage. I wouldn’t be surprised that if we were to normalise for energy used, Apple would have a 3x performance efficiency lead. Wow.
- aw1621107 8y agoWow indeed. I'm impressed that Apple has managed to create and maintain such an insane lead in ARM performance for such a long period of time. Does anyone know of more technical reasons for Apple's ARM processors outperforming everyone else's by such a large margin, and for such a long period of time? Seems like there's some fundamental difference in what Apple is doing, and I'd love to read more about it.
- aninteger 8y agoCould it also be that a lot more of the applications are written and compiled to the native machine versus the overhead of a VM (even if that is JIT). I'd guess Minecraft pocket edition would perform similar on both systems.
- aw1621107 8y agoEven if more things are being compiled to native code instead of Dalvik, I don't think that would explain the benchmark results here, as I think SPEC is always compiled to native code. It seems there's something more fundamental to Apple's hardware that is allowing for such insane performance. As for Minecraft Pocket Edition, isn't that written in native code anyways? So I'd expect it to perform better on Apple hardware, assuming the hardware is actually the bottleneck for performance.
- 8y ago
- tempodox 8y agoThat web site is so full of cruft, it has become unusable. Even the best iPhone can‘t change that.
- LaGrange 8y agoFunnily enough, even a 5S can, in fact, change that. For all its terribleness, it doesn't seem to mess with reader view at all.
- wolf550e 8y agouse the print view: https://www.anandtech.com/print/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-unveiling-the-silicon-secrets https://www.anandtech.com/print/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-r...
- matchbok 8y agoCrazy how far ahead the iPhone is over every single Android phone. I moved over years ago because of the horrible hardware, lower-quality apps, and lack of support. Seems like this trend will continue.
- Spooks 8y agoIsn't this just an iteration on last year’s iPhone X? I always thought android were further ahead in a lot of departments (especially hardware). Mainly because there is a new android phone almost weekly, which sometimes uses new technology that the iPhone did not have available to them at the time. Though I would agree on the quality of apps.
- simonh 8y ago>Isn't this just an iteration on last year’s iPhone X? In the way that every iPhone has been an iteration on previous models, but here we are. The main feature this year is photographic quality is difficult lighting conditions, particularly low light and with harsh backlighting. Some of the side by sides with pictures taken with last years model are pretty impressive. In terms of hardware, it used to be that Android manufacturers could get a new component into a phone maybe 6 months before Apple, but nowadays Apple is developing custom hardware features Android manufacturers have now way to replicate. Things like in house developed health sensors, neural engine CPU co-processors for the image enhancements I mentioned above. The 3D face scanning tech in Face ID. These aren’t things that can be knocked together in 6 months, it takes years, so we’ve gone from occasionally Apple missing a feature for 6 months and sometimes stealing a 6 months March, to its competitors now being several years behind, if they even have a path to effectively competing at all. But as ever, it just depends what features matter to you and at what price point.
- Grazester 8y agoThe hardware quality of Android phones are pretty good and the phones do not suffer as a result of their processor. If anything I would however say they suffer because of their bloat software(that is installed onto of Android).
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- itsreallyme 8y agoI’d love to upgrade to these epic new phones, but I won’t, because FaceID… Removing the fingerprint reader ruined the usability for me.
- xienze 8y agoI just upgraded and honestly FaceID is really nice. I loved TouchID but there were plenty of times it didn't work because my fingers were too moist or whatever. FaceID really doesn't have any issues other than using it too close to your face.
- dalyons 8y agoI wish you could teach it multiple faces, because it doesn’t work for me if I have stuff on my head, like a bike helmet and sunglasses, or ski goggles, etc
- abakker 8y agoIt works fine for me with safety goggle, bike helmet, etc.
- Eugr 8y agoActually, you can. iOS 12 supports "alternate appearances" - you can find it in Face ID settings.
- matthewmacleod 8y agoiOS 12 now supports this. I don't know how well it will work with a helmet or ski goggles though, but it's worth a shot!
- kaokien 8y agoIn iOS 12 you can set an alternate face. You know have two total faces you can set for FaceID.
- dalyons 8y ago
- overcast 8y agoAt this point I'm fairly confident that my XS is more powerful than my 2008 Mac Pro tower. How long before Apple goes full ARM for all of their future products? Owning basically the entire hardware chain.
- wintercharm 8y agoI'd give it 2-3 years. They need to implement Marzipan fully, first.
- saagarjha 8y agoWhy would Marzipan have anything to do with switching to ARM? All of those apps are running on x86.
- forapurpose 8y ago> Cellular ... UE Category 16 LTE (1Gbps) with 4x4 MIMO and LAA Do cellular providers allow 4x4 (or even 2x2) connections? Do they provide gigabit bandwidth to individual devices? I'd be surprised if they simply handed out bandwidth to whomever could suck down the most.
- fipple 8y agoYes, because cellular providers now mostly bill by GB rather than unlimited. If you can suck down a GB in 10 seconds that's a GB of bandwidth they sold in 10 seconds instead of 1 minute.
- modeless 8y agoI don't think people realize how important this story is. Apple is about to take the single thread performance crown from Intel, who has held it nearly uncontested for, what, a decade or more? And they're doing it in a phone! Imagine what they could do on a laptop or desktop power budget. I'll bet you won't have to imagine much longer either, as I expect an ARM Mac within a few years.
- Joeri 8y agoI’m curious how many cores they’ll put in. Intel’s cores are 10x the size. Let’s say they fit 4x cores into a high TDP package. That would mean a 24 core Macbook Pro cpu and an 64 core iMac Pro cpu.
- SadWebDeveloper 8y ago> Apple is about to take the single thread performance crown from Intel I believe they already have that crown have for mobile/low-power, but for desktop/servers nop... not even close considering the microarchitecture their processor are being designed they won't even be close to what intel already does with a single instruction.
- wintercharm 8y agoThose AVX instructions are quite costly though.
- vbezhenar 8y ago2.5GHz is far from crown. Need 2x more to compete with Intel.
- ghettoimp 8y agoPerformance can be approximately measured by instructions-per-clock * clock-rate. But the GHz number on a chip only tells you its clock rate. So if you focus on this, you're missing a crucial aspect of performance (the instructions-per-clock part). Chip designers can try to increase the clock rate to some insane number, but when they do that, it makes each clock cycle very short, leaving very little time to do productive work. At any rate, within a particular architecture it's potentially meaningful to look at clock rate. You can expect a 2GHz Pentium 4 to be faster than a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4. It won't be a whole 25% faster, because, for instance, if the processor is waiting for data from RAM, it doesn't matter how fast its clock is ticking, the RAM chips are going to take the same amount of time to get the data that the CPU is waiting for. But when you talk about completely different designs, e.g., Intel versus AMD, Intel versus Apple, etc., clock speed becomes really and truly meaningless. See for instance the "Comparing" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_rate
- nimos 8y agoI wonder if Apple will ever get into the server market, even indirectly through licencing their cores.
- frou_dh 8y agoI've no idea if the following would make real-world economic sense, but if their chip design truly is in a class of its own in terms of power efficiency then there might be a competitive advantage to using them exclusively in their own datacenters.
- jccalhoun 8y agoThis may be obvious to many but I just noticed that the iphone's default wallpaper is designed to hide the notch.(at least I assume the wallpaper in this review is the default)
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- Ambroos 8y agoIt bothers me endlessly about Apple's new marketing materials. When comparing the iPhone X and XS on their site it seems like they got rid of the notch in the XS, even though the phones are almost identical. Screenshot of apple.com/iphone/compare: https://i.imgur.com/EKEJ8vE.jpg https://i.imgur.com/EKEJ8vE.jpg It's misleading to say the least.
- saagarjha 8y agoMy guess is that the notch was very much a marketing feature last year–it defined an entire category of smartphone design. Now that it's "normal" Apple has chosen to draw attention away from it.
- dandare 8y agoTo me the screen notch and the camera bump are frustrating design abominations. We participate in a mass delusion where we pretend modern smartphones are edge to edge screen - but they can not be used like that. You either bulk up your phone with a protective cover or you inevitably break the screen. The super tough "gorilla" glass is not suitable for the intended use: using your phone every day in a real world environment. We all pay premium for thin, light, glass/metal, all-screen phones with notches and bumps only to hide them in second plastic bodies made in China.
- count 8y agoI've not had a cover on an iPhone, and have owned every iPhone since the original. I've broken 1 (and a case wouldn't have saved it..it got run over). Not everybody is fucking gorilla handling their phones. Some of us can have nice things...
- whitepoplar 8y agoIt seems obvious, to me at least, that within the next decade, desktop/laptop/server makers will jump ship to ARM. Cheaper, faster, lower power chips with fanless designs and longer battery life. I can't for the life of me figure out why Intel's stock is valued so highly today. What am I missing?
- cprayingmantis 8y agoIt's the same reason a lot of other tech dinosaurs are valued so highly. They've been around forever and people are betting on things staying the same rather than changing.
- paul7986 8y agoiPhone X or Xs is no good and a UX step backwards... - No I don't want to take hundreds of accidental screenshots a day & upload them to iCloud - In traffic jams I want to grab my phone with my thumb and have it open right away as my iPhone 8 does. Not mess with it.. put it up to my face & push up to open it. Why add a step? Im taking this junk back today!
- DRW_ 8y ago> No I don't want to take hundreds of accidental screenshots a day & upload them to iCloud I hear this is a thing, and fine, enough people seem to have this problem that they should probably look at that. But why are you screenshots uploading to icloud? That should only happen if you actually take the step to save the screenshots?
- jakelarkin 8y agoApple CPU Architecture excellence is nothing short of amazing. iPhone XS A12 processors are 2x or 3x the speed of a Snapdragon 845 (Pixel 3) and have lower power consumption. For these benchmarks they're approaching consumer desktop CPU performance, which typically draw 40-50 watts, using only 4 watts in the A12. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re... …
- wlesieutre 8y agoOn the one hand I'm excited about Oculus Quest's promise for untethered VR. On the other, it's built on the Snapdragon 835 (last year's flagship to keep costs down) and I can't help but wonder what they could do if they had Apple's hardware instead. Of course Apple's only publicly interested AR stuff with their phone-based ARKit, but media and gaming are huge markets for them. I don't think an Apple VR headset is out of the question, and it would 100% be an untethered device like the Quest is.
- sundvor 8y agoI'm not at all excited by Quest for reasons of performance. I just want a high DPI, wide FOV unit for use with my high end PC... so I'm holding off for the foreseeable future.
- jsemrau 8y agoI am holding off for more social reasons. But then I don't watch much TV either.
- gehsty 8y agoNo VR headset from Apple... if anything like this comes it will be a set of AR glasses, and unfortunately I doubt it will be a gaming device.
- jeanmichelx 8y agoThe sad thing is that it's in android OEM's hands. Add more cache and optimize for fast/efficient cores instead of cheap
- graphememes 8y agoAndroid isn't keeping up anymore.
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- wintercharm 8y agoBig takeaways: - A12 has 8MB on chip “SoC cache” - Big core L1$ = 128kB; Little Core L1$ = 32kB - For the big core, L2$ is a whopping 128 instances 6MB per core/thread, 8MB at 64KB/inst. - Little core L2$ is 32 instances, 1.5MB per core/thread, 2MB at 64KB/inst - A12 GPU uses memory compression! - A12 Big has 2.38 GHz base clock and 2.5 GHz 1 core boost - A12 Little has 1.538 GHz all core, and 1.562 GHz 2 or 3 core boost, and 1.587Ghz 1 core boost - A11 and A12 have a 7-wide decode (up from 6 on the A10) and 6Int ALU (up from 4 on the A10) - Apple’s microarchitecture seems to far surpass anything else in terms of width, including desktop CPUs - SPECint/fp Numbers show that it’s got 2x the speed of and any all other mobile SoC’s. 3x perf/watt if you normalize speed / power consumption. - SPECint/fp numbers also show that the A12 is faster than a skylake server cpu (in core-for-core IPC). Not a perfect comparison, but far better than Geekbench
- tgb 8y agoWhat does "in terms of width" mean in this context?
- jakelarkin 8y agoprobably the processor-memory bus. GPUs have wider ones
- duhast 8y agowidth in this context means number of CPU execution ports or how many INT/FP operations CPU core can perform at the same time
- ksec 8y agoThe A12 CPU Core is nearly if not exactly the same as A11. Only difference is clock speed, cache and node improvement. Think of A12 as a optimisation / Tock improvement. ( Anandtech didn't do deep dive on A11 last year due to shortage of staff ) So basically Apple's A11 has already reached Skylake like IPC since last year. Which makes me wonder why Apple is still paying Intel substantial amount of premium for x86 on Mac? There is at least $100 BOM cost saving, translate to $200 in RSP. In an ideal world, iPad would have had 8 years of iteration and eating away PC market shares. It seems the vision of iPad died along with Steve Jobs 7 years ago today. Steve, we miss you.
- rajacombinator 8y agoSteve Jobs would never have allowed the UX regressions that have plagued the X and XS iterations.
- jrockway 8y agoSteve "you're holding it wrong" Jobs wouldn't let a product ship with a bug?
- ispiansclsda 8y agoHooray! Yet another "Apple vs Android" shitfest thread.
- codedokode 8y agoThe iPhone prices are ridiculous. It can cost as much as 5 average Chinese Android phones. Maybe they don't have such fast CPU but still are pretty usable, and often have similar amount of RAM. Don't understand why people choose to pay more just to buy a device to browse Instagram or Telegram.