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The A8 chip is "only" a dual-core and clocked at a relatively modest 1.4GHz. It's heartening to see it beat competing 2+GHz Quad-cores. To me, it looks like App
by ksk 12y ago
The A8 chip is "only" a dual-core and clocked at a relatively modest 1.4GHz. It's heartening to see it beat competing 2+GHz Quad-cores. To me, it looks like Apple is comfortable enough with their marketing strategy to stay away from the pointless GHz rat-race that exists in the Android world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth
- ctdonath 12y agoMethinks Apple has decided/realized that specs are a cop-out. Customers are, all too often, inundated with numbers not so much to prove how good the product is, but to conceal that it's not good enough. "Meh, the new iPhone has a mere 1.4GHz dual-core, but our product has a 2+GHz quad-core!" really means "here's some numbers that look overwhelmingly superior, in hopes that will distract you from the fact that it isn't." Apple went "retina" to end the pixel-count competition: if you can't see the pixels, you don't care how many there are. Apple refused to state RAM size for mobile devices from the beginning: user doesn't have an option, and rarely (if ever) notices the limit, so the actual memory size doesn't matter. Processor count & speed is irrelevant if it's used efficiently enough to practically outrun the competition. Sure, Apple does provide some specs. People are too used to seeing such numbers, despite few needing to see them IF the implementation is done right. People want options, so some specs are flexible (at a price). But remember that behind the scenes at retail, the devices options are labeled little more than "Good, Better, Best": most users don't want better numbers, they want superior performance with whatever it's got. Those gloating about size are likely less able to use it.
- orkoden 12y agoApples doesn't advertise clock rate or RAM size. You can't even find it on the tech specs pages. The most they do is tell you the chip's name.
- avn2109 12y agoThis is something I've been harping about for a long time. Apple is a _user experience_ company, not a hardware or software company (perhaps they're the only UX company out there). There's an old saw about the railroads getting killed by the tractor trailer in the 20th century because they thought they were in the railroad business, when in fact they were in the transportation business. This time, Apple knows exactly what business it's in, while the competition seems to have no idea (compare the highly-curated experience of shopping/buying/shipping/using an Apple product to the Android or Lenovo analogue).
- 7luckykids 12y agoApple introduced 'retina hd' this year; they are still doing 'pixel counts' by other means
- rsynnott 12y agoThere's some documentation of the A7 (the previous chip) here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchitecture-detailed http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchi...
- pavanky 12y agoApple is better on Javascript benchmarks. If you look at the 3DMark physics engine the iphones are towards the bottom of the list as you would expect. This tells me that the javascript engine for ios / safari is far more optimized than the ones for Chrome / Android. In day to day life your performance is going to be in between these two extremes.
- agumonkey 12y agoI can't attest the value of this test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P9vDAY0U0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P9vDAY0U0A They show how a Moto E is more responsive than a Galaxy S5. Full stack system performance, when doable, gives you this kind of leverage.
- nicpottier 12y agoI carry a Moto E daily. Out of the box it is indeed reasonably snappy, but as soon as you have a few apps running it really starts chugging. Great device for the target user, but if you actually load a bunch of apps then you start seeing the limits of it. Mind you I'm not a game player or anything, this is just the normal stuff of having a podcast app, spotify, HN and a few others daily used apps. Great phone, but it can't compare with a flagship. (I carried a Nexus 5 before)
- agumonkey 12y agoThanks for the info. So I guess high end devices may lag but it's a fixed overhead.
- Igglyboo 12y agoI can name many friends of mine that talk down towards the iPhone because their <current state of the art android phone> has more cores or ram or ghz, but what does that actually materialize into? If the extra performance doesn't actually do anything for the user then why waste the money on it? Apple has an amazing UX and doesn't need to throw pointless numbers at you to get you to buy their phone.
- kllrnohj 12y agoThe ONLY CPU benchmark that was not browser-based (and therefore running wildly different software) is the 3DMark Physics test, and A8 lost bad on that test. Everything else was either single threaded (all the browser benchmarks), in which case dual vs. quad is irrelevant, or they were GPU bottlenecked in which case you aren't talking 1.4GHz dual core, and on the GPU front Apple spends a huge amount of transistors on that. They throw oodles of power at the GPU. Also thanks to power management the vast, vast majority of those "2+GHz Quad-cores" were not running at 2+GHz, they were running at closer to 1.4-1.6 GHz. Apple is really good about settings its max frequency to something sustainable, whereas everyone else advertises burst frequencies.
- diminish 12y agoCould you pls explore browser benchmarks being single threaded? I mean, when I use Chrome or Firefox on Android isn't the browsing experience implemented as multi-threaded (e.g. when I have the 8-core S5)?
- kllrnohj 12y agoThere are multiple threads, but the benchmarks are specifically looking at JavaScript performance (as it's the only thing they can actually measure - anything claiming to measure drawing performance is a lie, whether or not they realize it, but I digress), and JavaScript is all single-threaded. There is going to be painting and such while the benchmark runs, which will use a second thread, but that's about it. And that's going to be relatively light compared to actual usage where you're scrolling around and such. The majority of the other threads of a browser are I/O bound (networking, disk, etc...) and won't be using much of the CPU.
- DCKing 12y agoIt's a false claim that there is GHz rat-race in the Android world. There is one Android SoC maker of note, and that is Qualcomm, who achieved total dominance of high end smartphones by anticompetitive behaviour. Just because Qualcomm's design achieves high clock speeds doesn't mean there's a rat-race in the Android world. Since Qualcomm dominates, there is no race at all. Second, Qualcomm's competitors are much more moderately clocked. Samsung's, Intel's and Nvidia's current high end chips don't even touch 2 GHz yet. For a rat race you need rats and a race. But there's only one rat and no race.
- baddox 12y agoWhat was Qualcomm's anti-competitive behavior?
- kllrnohj 12y agoTheir SoCs were too good. Critically even though they may not always have the best CPU cores or best GPUs, they do have the best radios. And integrating that into the SoC is just better from a power perspective, making Snapdragon overall the best SoC package for a phone.
- ksk 12y agoI accept your point.