The iPhone XS and XS Max Review: Unveiling the Silicon Secrets

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-unveiling-the-silicon-secrets

by gok • 8 years ago

254 342 8 years ago

Indeed 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• 8 years ago

Lab? Mobile network testers are available off the shelf

taf2• 8 years ago

We saw 120Mb/s from our office in Maryland - Annapolis. Older iphones getting only 20Mb/s

DenisM• 8 years ago

I'm getting 120mbps on iPhone 6s in Seattle (T-Mo).

isatty• 8 years ago

250 Mbps, Singapore, iPhone xs

https://i.imgur.com/nU4pSKN.png

However my iPhone 8 got 210 Mbps same carrier, same test location, 1 minute apart.

MrBuddyCasino• 8 years 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_hn3• 8 years ago

1. 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.

hesdeadjim2• 8 years ago

Legacy 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.

ChuckMcM• 8 years ago

I would expect there is some legacy aspect to it, although Intel building the Itanium (no legacy restrictions) just made a box that used more watts per instruction than their 32 bit line and wasn't that much better off. That said, things like the 'half carry' flag, segment pointers, and a large power hungry FPU don't help the Intel story.

I expect the primary difference one will find is that Intel has more "large" cores in their chips (full fledged cores) and the comparable instructions have some "gotchas" (like the flag mention) which make them harder to retire early in the pipeline. Toshiba made a funny comment at one of the Microprocessor forums that for their microprocessors, if you only compare the instructions that both they and Intel implement, the Toshiba processor is better in every way.

What is clearly true though is that compatibility aside, ARM chips are becoming serious contenders in the desktop/laptop space sooner than I expected them too.

oflannabhra3• 8 years ago

Apple gets a lot of flack for the high margins on their products, but those high margins allow them to design and create high-cost SoCs. They also essentially have a business guarantee that all of the chips they fabricate will get purchased, at a know price and ROI.

So, on top of the vertical integration of software/hardware advantage, they have diminished risk.

ianai2• 8 years ago

They’re also optimizing for UI/UX by emphasizing single more performance. That’s what affects how fast and responsive the interface is to user input.

aquadrop6• 8 years ago

I'm pretty skeptical of this. 3 W mobile CPU outperforms 165 W desktop CPU? If it was the case, they would have those things in macbooks already, and would boast tens of hours from one charge... If you go to the article that is mentioned in "recent figures", they tested single-core performance. So it was single core of a 28-core CPU (with boost though). It's still impressive, but not unbelievable.

jonknee2• 8 years ago

The reason they don't have them in laptops is not because of performance, it's because they don't have an OS. A laptop that only runs iOS is called an iPad and it doesn't have the software I want to run.

kbenson4• 8 years ago

I'm also somewhat skeptical, but it's worth noting that "Skylake" covers a lot of ground[1], and the mobile Skylake processors use 15W (9.5W when in low power processing mode)[2]. Still a matter of multiples, but 5x instead of 55x.

1: https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/37572/Skylake

2: https://ark.intel.com/products/91169/Intel-Core-i7-6660U-Pro...

polskibus• 8 years ago

Isn't it the display that eats most of the battery, not the CPU?

JonathonW2• 8 years ago

I'd consider it feasible-- in my testing, my iPhone XS outperforms my mid-2017 MacBook Pro (with i7-7820HQ [1]) in single-core benchmarking with Geekbench 4. Not by much, but it does manage a slight lead: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/10006209?baseli...

Granted, this probably wouldn't hold up for a more sustained workload since the fanless iPhone's going to hit its thermal limits much more quickly than the full-size laptop, but it's pretty impressive that they're edging this close to Intel anyways (in a much smaller, much lower-power package). It'll be really interesting to see what happens with the more unconstrained A12X that'll likely go into the iPad Pro this year.

[1] https://ark.intel.com/products/97496/Intel-Core-i7-7820HQ-Pr...

rayiner4• 8 years ago

It's a 165 watt desktop CPU running a single-threaded integer benchmark that doesn't use the other 27 cores, doesn't fully utilize the 6 memory channels or 40 PCIe lanes, etc. Also, you're comparing TDP to average power. Skylake won't come close to the TDP running an integer benchmark (it's the AVX units that really suck power).

Amber Lake Y (a 2-core part with 4.2 GHz turbo) should achieve similar performance on a single-threaded integer benchmark like that, and it's a 5W part. Still, that's incredibly impressive on Apple's part.

wintercharm9• 8 years ago

SpecInt/FP is comparing Single core IPC between one A12 BIG core, and one Skylake server CPU core.

Per-core power consumption on that Intel chip is 165/28 = 5.89W.

Apple is pushing similar IPC at 3W instead of 5.89W. In that context, it's not so unbelievable. But it's still really fucking impressive.

JustSomeNobody• 8 years ago

The question should be for how long? Can it outperform a Skylake for 10 seconds? 30 seconds? 1 minute? 15 minutes?

A burst for a few seconds is ok on a phone, but not on a server or workstation.

pertymcpert5• 8 years ago

That's not really the question, because turbo boost exists on servers and workstations too. Intel chips will clock to 4.5GHz for a short while before throttling down to their base frequency once the thermal ceiling is hit.

endorphone• 8 years ago

But that isn't really the question rather than the answer -- in other profiles the chip could have significantly better heat dissipation solutions and would have dramatically more headroom.

baybal25• 8 years ago

Huuuiuuge caches, and optimisations for using them as efficiently as possible: probably async prefetch, possibly a semblance of maskable cache, very likely reordering for cache missing ops.

Here, the prehistoric nature of x86 actually drags it down because of poor predictability

astrange7• 8 years ago

x86-64 is decently predictable, probably the same as armv8. i386 wouldn't be because it has to spill to memory so much you can barely manage to rename those registers.

kbenson4• 8 years ago

After looking at this closer, what they are comparing is single threaded performance of the Skylake Xeon 8176. At 28 cores and 56 threads, that watts per thread or core value starts to look somewhat comparable, given Apple's low core count (compared to that desktop CPU) and that they might not run the Vortex (2x) and Tempest (4x) cores at the same time(?).

So, I think it's both a matter of comparing Apples to Oranges (ugh, I would use a less confusing analogy if one came to mind) in that the types and usage and number of cores are different, and also just fairly impressive that they can get that much single threaded performance out of the chip.

frou_dh3• 8 years ago

IIRC one of the changes from the A10 to the A11 was that the different sized cores started being able to run simultaneously.

Apparently the smaller Tempest core from the A12 is being used as the main core in the new Apple Watch. Talk about, uh, synergy.

jfb2• 8 years ago

The craziest thing is how close they get at 3W. That's the part that's staggering. What could Apple do with, say, laptop thermals? Desktop thermals? The mind creeps closer to boggling.

oflannabhra3• 8 years 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.

aw16211078• 8 years ago

Wow 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.

mediocrejoker2• 8 years ago

Just speculating but surely it must have something to do with the entire stack being designed under one roof, no? Having the kernel devs be able to walk across the campus and ask the hardware guys what a register is for must speed up development immensely.

aninteger• 8 years ago

Could 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.

oflannabhra3• 8 years ago

The article gets into some technical aspects, but focuses specifically on A11->A12 changes.

Mostly, A-series chips have enormous L1 cache, great cache hierarchy and management, and very low memory latency. A12 specifically seems to have included an almost total redesign of the cache hierarchy.

I'm sure there are many more reasons their designs significantly outperform competitors, but I've not seen any more publicly available analysis.

tyingq2• 8 years ago

Some of it is likely just the high volume sales of a limited number of expensive phone models. They have the money to spend.

Android manufacturers have more competition, and have to address the low end of the market too. Their money, and attention, is spread in a wider swath.

GeekyBear• 8 years ago

One factor called out in the article is the number of instructions that can be carried out simultaneously during a single clock cycle.

Monsoon (A11) and Vortex (A12) are extremely wide machines – with 6 integer execution pipelines among which two are complex units, two load units and store units, two branch ports, and three FP/vector pipelines this gives an estimated 13 execution ports, far wider than Arm’s upcoming Cortex A76 and also wider than Samsung’s M3. In fact, assuming we're not looking at an atypical shared port situation, Apple’s microarchitecture seems to far surpass anything else in terms of width, including desktop CPUs.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re...

Apple first moved to wide CPU designs with the Cyclone CPU core found in the A7 SOC first used in the iPhone 5s.

With Cyclone Apple is in a completely different league. As far as I can tell, peak issue width of Cyclone is 6 instructions. That’s at least 2x the width of Swift and Krait, and at best more than 3x the width depending on instruction mix. Limitations on co-issuing FP and integer math have also been lifted as you can run up to four integer adds and two FP adds in parallel. You can also perform up to two loads or stores per clock.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/7460/apple-ipad-air-review/2

grecy2• 8 years ago

Given Apple can get so far ahead of the competition with ARM for small devices... I still think it's entirely possible they're going to make their own CPUs for desktop Macs, and that is the massive hold up on the "New Mac Pro 2019(ish)"

ken2• 8 years ago

The last time they changed architectures, they stuffed a new motherboard in an old case, to let developers get ready for the change.

I think it's unlikely they'll update their flagship Mac to a new CPU architecture without notifying developers first. On day one, all existing apps would perform poorly, and that's not how you promote a new top-of-the-line system.

frou_dh3• 8 years ago

They're looking to win back workstation users, not alienate them further with a swathe of software compatibility issues.

Someone• 8 years ago

They also write:

”This also gives us a great piece of context for Samsung’s M3 core, which was released this year […] Here the Exynos 9810 uses twice the energy over last year’s A11 – at a 55% performance deficit.”

Doesn’t that mean the A11 already is three times as efficient as recent Android cores? (The Samsung M3 was in January’s Hot Chips)

tempodox• 8 years ago

That web site is so full of cruft, it has become unusable. Even the best iPhone can‘t change that.

LaGrange• 8 years ago

Funnily 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• 8 years ago

use the print view: https://www.anandtech.com/print/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-r...

matchbok3• 8 years ago

Crazy 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• 8 years ago

Isn'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• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

The 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).

screye• 8 years ago

I don't think that's a fair statement.

The processor is one of the only thing Apple has a clear lead in over Android flagships. (Others being customer support and longevity)

Android hardware and software are fully stable now. Android phones have better cameras and match apple in most other hardware metrics (display, speakers, antennas, build, touch response)

Software wise, it comes down to preferences. Both have a few things they do well, and others they stumble on. iOS12 is from what I have heard, smoother as butter. However, top flagships from Samsung, Google, OnePlus all run Android without any stutter at stable 60fps too.

All of my daily apps/usecases are at parity with their iOS. I don't know if the app ecosystem complaints are valid in 2018. (Apart from snap chat, because they have some wierd hate for Android)

I can respect your choice of wanting an Apple device. Especially if you are invested in their hardware and software ecosystem. But to someone who isn't, the iPhone does offer enough to switch from Android.

ddalex• 8 years ago

top flagships from Samsung, Google, OnePlus all run Android without any stutter at stable 60fps too

This is true. The problem is that the FPS don't matter so much as latency touch-to-update does. And Apple keeps this latency about 1/2 of what Android can do.

StreamBright3• 8 years ago

>> The processor is one of the only thing Apple has a clear lead in over Android flagships.

This is the only thing I do not give a shit about. A much slower CPU would be just fine. The true advantage is the UX. Just try to disable automatic grammar correction on both iOS and Android and count the number of items you had to go through. It is insane how much crap Android has for every single thing. Designed by engineers for engineers mentality is the root cause here. Apple puts the user in charge how an mobile OS should look like or should behave and this is the biggest differentiating factor between iOS vs other platforms.

ericd3• 8 years ago

Typing this on a pixel, "fully stable" is a whopper of an exaggeration. Maybe I have a lemon, but I've had camera crashes, GPS issues, numerous freezes in all sorts of Google apps, and more.

irrational6• 8 years ago

Android phones have better cameras and match apple in most other hardware metrics

High-end android phones. But the run of the mill android phones that most people I know have... not so much.

dwighttk6• 8 years ago

I would also put privacy in Apple’s favor

beerlord• 8 years ago

I was an Android fanatic - I had the very first device, the HTC G1, and about 10 other devices since then.

Eventually I got the Google Nexus 5, an Android flagship. Its updates ceased about a year after I bought it.

I gave up and got an iPhone 6S. Still getting updates to this day, despite being a 3 year old device. The constant software updates and support that Apple offers is clearly superior to what is provided with Android - even when you buy the 'official' Google phone.

__sr__9• 8 years ago

Android phones have better cameras and match apple in most other hardware metrics

I am sure there is an Android phone out there which has got a better camera, another one that has got better speakers, yet another one with better display and yet another which had got a better build than iPhone. The thing that most people forget is that almost all Android phones have some USPs and in exchange they compromise a lot on something else. Why do you thing the entire Android ecosystem should be treated as a single entity against the iPhone? Show me an Android that does every single thing better (or on par) with iPhone.

My experience has been that iPhones are usually not the absolute best at pretty much anything, but they are usually right up there at the top. Maybe it doesn’t have the absolute best camera, but it certainly has one of the best, and so on. And let’s not even compare the longevity of devices.

And before someone talks about prices, Androids that compete in the same arena as the iPhone cost about the same.

Then there is the app ecosystem. Sure, you have all the big names available on Android. But there are lot of smaller developers with great apps which are missing from Android — simply because of the crappy ecosystem which takes a village to build and support apps for. There are no apps which come close to the likes of OmniFocus, Things etc. And while Google does come up with cutting edge tech like AR, a lot of it is not adopted immediately — if ever — by the third party developers who have to wait for the shiny new version of Android to gain some momentum — something that takes forever in Android land.

So no, it is not just the processor that the iPhone has a clear lead on — it’s the overall experience. I couldn’t care less about the specs as long as the experience is maintained.

Full disclaimer: I am someone who usually carries two phones. This means that given the lack of alternatives, I end up with an Android in addition to my iPhone. And while I like some of the features offered by the individual Android OEMs, I do not consider the ecosystem as a whole to be anywhere near comparable to that of iOS.

matchbok3• 8 years ago

Agreed, but I'd also argue that 99% of people don't care about what the processor is. It seems even the basic GUI of Android can't do things that iPhone was doing in 2007. (Live resizing of app windows, realtime view blurring, etc)

Even today, the keyboard on Android forces an entire view refresh, awkwardly jerking the entire view. It's a jarring and unfinished experienced IMO.

EpicEng3• 8 years ago

If only they'd let me do the things I want to do with my phone.

dijit3• 8 years ago

Well. That’s fair and I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. However I have to ask: what do you want to do on your phone?

bjoli6• 8 years ago

Everyone trying to send a file over Bluetooth is a pirate!

Ataraxy• 8 years ago

Yeah that's not hyperbole or anything.

izacus2• 8 years ago

I don't understand, why did you feel like you had to put down Android in this thread with statement that is unsubstantiated and probably years out of date at least?

If you're happy with your current iPhone (yay!)... why the need for this inflammatory rethoric? Or is it marketing?

bjoli6• 8 years ago

Unless you have very specific apps you use (most big ones are the same imo) I'd recommend getting a low end Android phone over a 1400 dollar phone any friggin day.

My $279 phone has taken more beating than all my iProducts combined and still works great, and whenever it breaks I can fix most of it myself (not having to deal with an apple store is always a big plus).

cycrutchfield3• 8 years ago

This is like trying to argue that your Toyota Corolla is a superior car when compared to a Mercedes. It's a very narrow utilitarian way of thinking that only appeals to ascetics.

rajacombinator2• 8 years ago

This seems like a super delusional/ill informed comment. The iPhone excels in various benchmarks that don’t matter for the typical user. Otherwise android hardware and software is extremely competitive, often better, at much lower prices. Especially the mid range phones coming out of China. Take a look at the Oneplus 6 and tell me the iPhone XS is 2x better than that phone. Because the price is 2x. I’m a long time Apple user looking to switch soon.

threeseed9• 8 years ago

iPhones are worth 2x as much because they last 2x as much.

In iOS 12 the performance of the iPhone 6s was dramatically improved which was released over 3 years ago. And Apple will continue to release software updates for probably another year or two.

How many Android devices are receiving updates 4-5 years after release ?

matchbok3• 8 years ago

Really, only a handful of people care about benchmarks.

Phones are no longer "computers". They are personal items that we all depend on. Processors and RAM simply don't matter.

iPhones are worth more than any other phone 2 years after release.

andrepd3• 8 years ago

horrible hardware, lower-quality apps, and lack of support

The latest pixel (if you want to use that as a comparison) has better or equivalent specs in almost everything other than CPU power. Lack of support? Well look at how the Nexus 5 still has the latest android version available.

And for me the clincher. Can I install an alternative free OS (like you can install Lineage in the pixel)? If not, then into the trash it goes.

saagarjha12• 8 years ago

Well look at how the Nexus 5 still has the latest android version available.

…didn't Google drop support after Marshmallow?

megablast• 8 years ago

The other crazy thing is Apple keeps delivering these big increases. If this was Intel, you would get a 10% increase every year.

exadeci• 8 years ago

People often if not always compare their <$500 Android to an Iphone.

A fair comparison is a Galaxy S/Note vs Iphone and aside from the cpu the Samsung phones win IMO

itsreallyme• 8 years ago

I’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• 8 years ago

I 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.

dalyons2• 8 years ago

I 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

RedOrGreen• 8 years ago

Would you care to elaborate on what you find objectionable about Face ID? Just like the fingerprint reader, all data is stored on the device secure enclave, and does not leave the phone. And it's been pretty much fast enough for me since the X. (I don't notice much change in speed for the XS but it's probably a bit faster.)

gergles4• 8 years ago

Not GP, but there are three big downgraded use cases:

- Apple Pay ("double-tap the side and look at the phone, then set it on the terminal" is not remotely as fluid as "rest your thumb on the fingerprint reader and touch the phone to the terminal")

- Unlock the phone while it is laying flat on a table/desk in front of you so you can read a notification without picking the phone up and drawing attention that you are doing this.

- Remove the phone from your pocket and press in on the home button with a registered finger so it is fully unlocked and 100% ready to go by the time you can see it in your field of vision.

Overall, however, I am much more bullish on the long term value of Face ID and the phone knowing whether you are paying attention to it or not that I have accepted these downgrades. There are also several upgraded experiences.

xutopia• 8 years ago

I find quite the opposite. I wouldn't go back to fingerprint. I wished that my macbook had faceid.

AimForTheBushes• 8 years ago

FaceId on the macbook would be a game changer.

outworlder2• 8 years ago

If anything, usability is better.

I was skeptical, but after seeing that notification texts are hidden by default until I look at the phone, I was then quickly sold on the value.

The added screen real state due to the lack of a home button compensates for the required notch and then some.

overcast• 8 years ago

At 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.

wintercharm9• 8 years ago

I'd give it 2-3 years. They need to implement Marzipan fully, first.

saagarjha12• 8 years ago

Why would Marzipan have anything to do with switching to ARM? All of those apps are running on x86.

forapurpose• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Yes, 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• 8 years ago

I 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• 8 years ago

I’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• 8 years 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.

wintercharm9• 8 years ago

Those AVX instructions are quite costly though.

vbezhenar2• 8 years ago

2.5GHz is far from crown. Need 2x more to compete with Intel.

ghettoimp2• 8 years ago

Performance 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

nimos• 8 years ago

I wonder if Apple will ever get into the server market, even indirectly through licencing their cores.

frou_dh3• 8 years ago

I'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• 8 years ago

This 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)

Ambroos• 8 years ago

It 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

It's misleading to say the least.

saagarjha12• 8 years ago

My 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• 8 years ago

To 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• 8 years ago

I'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...

nickdandakis• 8 years ago

If you're bulking up your iPhone with a case, the camera bump is a non-issue.

I agree that we've reached diminishing returns as far as overall thickness is concerned, though.

Would love to know the split between cased and case-less phone users. I'm in the case-less camp, and even though I think I'm in the minority, I don't think it's as small as it actually is.

microtherion• 8 years ago

It's even sneakier than that: the wallpaper on the XS hides the notch, while the wallpaper on the XR pretty much highlights the notch. I wonder which of the two Apple has a higher margin on...

saagarjha12• 8 years ago

Less cynical viewpoint: Apple is trying to highlight that iPhone XR has a notch "just like iPhone X does"–similar to the marketing material last year which didn't make any effort to hide the cutout.

hoorayimhelping• 8 years ago

Not obvious to me until you pointed it out. That's really clever, the way the planet fills up the screen where the notch isn't.

whitepoplar• 8 years ago

It 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• 8 years ago

It'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• 8 years ago

iPhone 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_• 8 years 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?

macintux3• 8 years ago

Sceenshots are saved by default.

cycrutchfield3• 8 years ago

Why are you on your phone while driving?

slededit• 8 years ago

Probably to find an alternate route.

astrange7• 8 years ago

- In traffic jams I want to grab my phone with my thumb and have it open right away as my iPhone 8 does.

This is illegal in 16 US states plus DC.

jakelarkin2• 8 years ago

Apple 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-re... …

wlesieutre• 8 years ago

On 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• 8 years ago

I'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.

gehsty• 8 years ago

No 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• 8 years ago

The sad thing is that it's in android OEM's hands. Add more cache and optimize for fast/efficient cores instead of cheap

graphememes• 8 years ago

Android isn't keeping up anymore.

wintercharm9• 8 years ago

Big 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• 8 years ago

What does "in terms of width" mean in this context?

jakelarkin2• 8 years ago

probably the processor-memory bus. GPUs have wider ones

duhast• 8 years ago

width in this context means number of CPU execution ports or how many INT/FP operations CPU core can perform at the same time

ksec• 8 years ago

The 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.

schuke• 8 years ago

The iPad has so much potential yet the best effort they gave it was an average stylus and a clumsy keyboard cover. Now that the Surface has not only caught up but developed its unique forte the iPad has even less opportunity to innovate and lead.

rajacombinator2• 8 years ago

Steve Jobs would never have allowed the UX regressions that have plagued the X and XS iterations.

jrockway• 8 years ago

Steve "you're holding it wrong" Jobs wouldn't let a product ship with a bug?

codedokode3• 8 years ago

The 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.

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