Apple A10 Fusion is ** Quad-core big.LITTLE **

[Eug]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10687/early-iphone-7-teardown-modems-and-more

 

[Eug]

My iPhone 7 Plus (running 10.0), model A1784 / iPhone9,4:

So, 2.33 GHz with 3 GB RAM. I ran each test only once. Antutu crashes on 10.0.

 

[Mondozei]

Thanks for the infodump and benchmarks, Eug. I do wonder, on a more personal note, do you think you'll ever use the amazing amount of performance in your iP7+?

The only thing I can think of is in niche games which are designed for the iOS ecosystem and as such tend to feature more advanced graphics. Did I miss anything?

 

[Ajay]

A10x is on TSMC 10nm.

Source please. TIA!

 

[Eug]

Thanks for the infodump and benchmarks, Eug. I do wonder, on a more personal note, do you think you'll ever use the amazing amount of performance in your iP7+?

The only thing I can think of is in niche games which are designed for the iOS ecosystem and as such tend to feature more advanced graphics. Did I miss anything?

Remember, the iPhone even has stuff like iMovie on it for short movie editing, and the i7+ has 1080p and 4K video recording. I haven't tried it on my iPhone 7+ yet, but on my iPhone 5S the rendering was just hurry up and wait.

But one thing I noticed is that the i7+ is just absolutely fluid. No hiccups anywhere. The 5S can seriously lag in spots, and even the 6s and iPad Air 2 have occasional stutters, esp. with Safari. The fluidity of the i7+ is highly addicting I must say. That coupled with the uber fast Safari rendering and the faster LTE mode means if I'm in a good spot, I can get a noticeably faster surfing experience than my computers at home with wired internet access, and it's really easy to rack up the data usage. Luckily I doubled my monthly data allotment last week from 2 GB to 4 GB.

In truth though, having an occasional stutter and lag isn't the end of the world, but the i7+ eliminates that... well... until iOS 12 or whatever comes out. Speaking of which...

After a fresh reboot with no apps open, the i7+ has about 1.45 GB free RAM. The i6s has 0.5 GB free RAM. Again, that's with no apps open. So we are only one year out from the 6s release and already we are at a state that an unused machine has only 0.5 GB RAM to spare. To put it another way, an i7+ arguably effectively has three times the free RAM to work with for loading apps when compared to the 6s.

So, as much as I think the A10 Fusion is awesome, I think having the extra 1 GB RAM is even more important. Mind you, if those storage benchmarks above are to believed, an i7 2 GB would probably suffer less memory-related lag than a 6s.

 

[Ajay]

After a fresh reboot with no apps open, the i7+ has about 1.45 GB free RAM. The i6s has 0.5 GB free RAM. Again, that's with no apps open. So we are only one year out from the 6s release and already we are at a state that an unused machine has only 0.5 GB RAM to spare. To put it another way, an i7+ arguably effectively has three times the free RAM to work with for loading apps when compared to the 6s.

So, as much as I think the A10 Fusion is awesome, I think having the extra 1 GB RAM is even more important. Mind you, if those storage benchmarks above are to believed, an i7 2 GB would probably suffer less memory-related lag than a 6s.

Are those number with both iphones using IOS 10? If that's the case, a regular iphone 7 (non plus) will have the same limitation

The wife is thinking of getting an iphone 7 (upgrade from her 5) and I have the 6S.

 

[Mondozei]

Nice write-up, Eug. I am personally using a Moto G4. I haven't used an iPhone, ever, so I can't make a fair comparison. I did have a L1520 before and while is very smooth/no bloat, I can't say I am unhappy with the G4's smoothness either.

Then again, my needs are fairly basic. I don't have a ton of background apps open and so on. Nevertheless, I am excited that we have this amount of power in phones in 2016. I hope Apple continues to blaze ahead as much of Android now goes into the "good enough" space, as the developed markets mature and the endgame is developing world, which means sub-150 USD in practice. Not much incentive for high-end SoCs there.

I personally wonder if the GPU in the iP7+ is now better than what we have in XB1 for instance. Is it still some ways away? Counting the fact that Apple has access to close to metal APIs like Metal.

 

[Eug]

Are those number with both iphones using IOS 10? If that's the case, a regular iphone 7 (non plus) will have the same limitation

The wife is thinking of getting an iphone 7 (upgrade from here 5) and I have the 6S.

All of our iPhones in our house that can run iOS 10 are already on iOS 10. In this picture I have the left three phones running iOS 10, and the last one running iOS 7. These are: 7 Plus, 6s, 5S, 4

I also have an iPhone 3G that's stuck on iOS 4. It functions solely as an iPod.

The iPhone 7 has 2 GB RAM, and the iPhone 7 Plus has 3 GB. The iPhone 5 supposedly actually does reasonably well in iOS 10, even with its 1 GB RAM, but it should be noted it's a 32-bit device with a small screen. Jumping to the iPhone 6 Plus with huge screen, people say it really lags, presumably because although the SoC is faster, it has much more work to do, and it also is limited by the same 1 GB RAM. Furthermore, it is a 64-bit device, so that effectively makes its 1 GB RAM less than the iPhone 5's 1 GB RAM.

IMO, anything in the 6s line or higher is fine, but if I were buying a 4.7" iPhone today, it would be the 7, because the cost difference between the 6s and 7 isn't that different, and you get other benefits. I wouldn't buy a 6 or less, unless you're getting it is really, really cheap. If you want a small phone, then get the iPhone SE.

 

[avAT]

Source please. TIA!

A reliable analyst (Ming-Chi Kuo) has been saying so since the beginning of 2015, but I personally haven't seen anything 100% solid.

 

[jpiniero]

I personally wonder if the GPU in the iP7+ is now better than what we have in XB1 for instance. Is it still some ways away? Counting the fact that Apple has access to close to metal APIs like Metal.

Don't think it's there quite yet. Probably better than the NX though.

 

[Eug]

A reliable analyst (Ming-Chi Kuo) has been saying so since the beginning of 2015, but I personally haven't seen anything 100% solid.

EDIT:
I'm impressed how accurate this ended up being considering it's from almost 2 year ago.

Hmmm... I was wondering how TSMC was going to get the A10X out in time for 10 nm, since the stated dates didn't seem to match up, unless the A10X was going to come out really late.

But I see that table states the A10X won't be TSMC, but Samsung instead. Interesting. Is Samsung on track for a big 10 nm release any time soon? Cuz the iPad Pro is due for an update sooner rather than later.

 

[witeken]

10nm FinFET from Samsung in 2016. LOL, sneaky Samsung. TSMC has been the loudest about 10nm, but might not get much share. So that's maybe why they're rushing so hard for 7nm . Hopefully poor TSMC won't get caught by Intel 10nm by that time . http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328866

I doubt A10X in 2016, though.

In any case, interesting to see that at least some of TSMC pre-production plans are turning out correct: TSMC did indeed start 10nm risk production in Q2'16: http://wccftech.com/samsung-releasing-10-nm-chips-before-tsmc/.

 

[avAT]

Hmmm... I was wondering how TSMC was going to get the A10X out in time for 10 nm, since the stated dates didn't seem to match up, unless the A10X was going to come out really late.

But I see that table states the A10X won't be TSMC, but Samsung instead. Interesting. Is Samsung on track for a big 10 nm release any time soon? Cuz the iPad Pro is due for an update sooner rather than later.

You're too fast! I removed my edit right after I posted it because I realized the A9 breakdown ended up being totally different.. so I'm less impressed.

I expect A10X in Q1 2017, but I can't remember where I picked that timeframe up from.

 

[Eug]

Interesting. The iPhone 7 Plus has been confirmed to support USB 3, but so far all the evidence is that the iPhone 7 does not.

You'd think if they'd share that feature, but they don't. It's almost as if the Plus could have gotten trickle down features from the iPad Pro, but the 7 is more like a tarted up 6s. They share a brain, but the design around the braun has some significant differences.

I look forward to AnandTech review, and hopefully they'll touch on memory and storage performance.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Interesting. The iPhone 7 Plus has been confirmed to support USB 3, but so far all the evidence is that the iPhone 7 does not.

You'd think if they'd share that feature, but they don't. It's almost as if the Plus could have gotten trickle down features from the iPad Pro, but the 7 is more like a tarted up 6s. They share a brain, but the design around the braun has some significant differences.

I look forward to AnandTech review, and hopefully they'll touch on memory and storage performance.

By the time the AnandTech review shows up, we'll be half-way to the iPhone 8

 

[Eug]

Remember, the iPhone even has stuff like iMovie on it for short movie editing, and the i7+ has 1080p and 4K video recording. I haven't tried it on my iPhone 7+ yet, but on my iPhone 5S the rendering was just hurry up and wait.

Hmmm....

http://www.pcmag.com/news/347916/the-iphone-7-is-the-fastest-phone-ever

Benchmarks don't tell the whole story, though. We made every iPhone export a one-minute 1080p video to a 720p file in iMovie, and found that iMovie—at least for now—is no faster on the iPhone 7 than on the iPhone 6s. Both phones exported the file in 10 seconds, as opposed to 17 seconds with the iPhone 6 and 22 seconds with the iPhone 5s.

So at least those iMovie exports will be more than twice as fast as my iPhone 5S, but not sure if it will be any faster than a 6s.

I ran these two tests once each and got 26901 for Octane 2.0 and 1097.4 ms for Kraken 1.1.

I tried Peacekeeper in Safari but it crashed, and not all the codecs are supported anyway apparently.

 

[daxzy]

After a fresh reboot with no apps open, the i7+ has about 1.45 GB free RAM. The i6s has 0.5 GB free RAM. Again, that's with no apps open. So we are only one year out from the 6s release and already we are at a state that an unused machine has only 0.5 GB RAM to spare. To put it another way, an i7+ arguably effectively has three times the free RAM to work with for loading apps when compared to the 6s.

So, as much as I think the A10 Fusion is awesome, I think having the extra 1 GB RAM is even more important. Mind you, if those storage benchmarks above are to believed, an i7 2 GB would probably suffer less memory-related lag than a 6s.

Even though it says free memory, isn't part of the used memory just reserved and/or cached by the OS?

Because what you're telling me is that the standard iphone 7, at 2GB memory, is only going to have 0.5GB memory on cold boot? That sounds atrocious.

 

[Mopetar]

Apples SoCs have had dedicated video encoders baked into the hardware since they started doing custom silicon. The CPU cores won't touch it at all so that's why there's no performance difference. What was really funny was when someone found that iMovie on an iPad could render faster than their x86 Mac desktop because the dedicated hardware is that much better even on their old SoCs that weren't the crazy performance monsters they are today could still beat the high end multi-core Intel chips.

 

[Eug]

http://www.chipworks.com/about-chipworks/overview/blog/apple-iphone-7-teardown

We’re pretty sure about the GPU and SDRAM interface blocks, but for us the question is, where are the two new low-power cores announced by Phil Schiller during the launch last week?

We are looking for two pairs of cores that are usually symmetrical in layout, and the large high-power cores are fairly obvious on the right side of the die image. However, they take up ` ~16 mm2, compared with the ~13 mm2 used by the A9 cores; so do we have more powerful and larger high-power cores, or are the “little” cores integrated with the “big” ones in the same area, on the left of that block? The existence of two large blocks of SRAM in there (compared with the A9’s single area LINK TO A9 BLOG) provides some support to that theory.

On the other hand, we have two other twin blocks that we have marked up that could also be CPU cores. We need further investigation, or reader information gratefully received!

 

[Arachnotronic]

The small core pair is in between the two big blocks of SRAM...

 

[Andrei.]

The small core pair is in between the two big blocks of SRAM...

That's just L2 arbitration just as it was on the A9 just the L2 is now sliced in 2 blocks. The small cores are the distinct coloured blocks on the left side around the PLL and left L2 islands with both big and small core L1 next to the L2 arb.

Edit: Decided to keep this until an article.

At least that's my take on it, unless you have third party confirmation of otherwise.

Also after I did the image I realised the A9 L2 might just as well be sliced in 2 chunks as well with each slice being connected to two of those L2 Arb SRAM units.

 

[Arachnotronic]

That's just L2 arbitration just as it was on the A9 just the L2 is now sliced in 2 blocks. The small cores are the distinct coloured blocks on the left side around the PLL and left L2 islands with both big and small core L1 next to the L2 arb.

Edit: An image explains it much better, so here's my analysis:

At least that's my take on it, unless you have third party confirmation of otherwise.

Also after I did the image I realised the A9 L2 might just as well be sliced in 2 chunks as well with each slice being connected to two of those L2 Arb SRAM units.

I'm saying that the small core pair is in between the two blocks of L3$, not the L2$.

 

[Andrei.]

I'm saying that the small core pair is in between the two blocks of L3$, not the L2$.

That block/structure was already present on the A9, it's L3 arbitration.

 

[witeken]

Even though Apple has only once published a die shot (without information), I have the feeling that Apple's SoCs are even more analyzed than Intel's CPUs. What's the point? I only want to know how big the cores are and how much cache it has.

 

[Eug]

What L3?

---

Geekbench now has the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus listed officially.

The iPhone 7 line scores are a bit lower than most of the latest results, so it makes me wonder if it's including the low power mode scores, but then again, some scores were right around that level, so I'll accept them. The iPhone 7 line is roughly 10X as fast as the iPad 3 / 2 / mini line, and more than 10X as fast as the iPhone 4S. We knew this already, but it's impressive to see in graph form.

BTW, while this is non-scientific, I would say after playing with the phone for a few days that the speed really does translate into real-life phone use.

Safari on the iPhone 7 Plus is the smoothest browsing experience in my entire house. It's not perfect, but in terms of buttery smoothness it gets close. Note that my fastest desktop is a quad-core Core i7 870 2.93 GHz iMac, which according to the Geekbench results search gets 2810/8574, and it's not as smooth as the iPhone 7 Plus. Granted the iMac has to contend with a 27" 2560x1440 screen and a lot more OS overhead, but then again the iMac has 12 GB RAM. My triple-core 2.9 GHz Athlon II X3 435 machine running Windows 10 is noticeably laggier. I mean both of these machines are fine for basic to moderate usage, but any lag really stands out now compared to the iPhone 7 Plus.

Browsing on the 6s is fine, but it does encounter occasional stutters, and browsing on the 5S is also fine but it stutters/lags even more. The iPad Air 2 is decent as well, but again, not as smooth as the 7 Plus (although again has a bigger screen to contend with). In contrast, browsing on my Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz T8300 MacBook running iOS 10.7 is a lag fest, and browsing on my dual-core 1.3 GHz Pentium SU4100 (mobile Core 2 Duo class) Windows 10 laptop is sometimes quite painful, although it's not as bad as my dual-core 1.6 GHz Atom 330 with ION running Windows 10.

I've been using my Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz P8400 MacBook Pro (running 10.11) as my primary laptop, which is impressive considering I bought it in 2009, but it's showing its age. And my phone being much smoother is a pretty good kick in the pants to get me to upgrade. My first impressions of the Core M MacBook probably are sort of in line with its Geekbench scores, considering the screen it needs to power and the OS overhead it has to overcome. The MacBook's Core M is a bit anemic, so I may end up getting a MacBook Pro (although in truth the bigger reason I'm not a fan of the MacBook is the keyboard). I'll will likely get a Kaby Lake or Cannonlake model though, as I want hardware 10-bit h.265 decoding.