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

[witeken]

this iPhone 7 Plus of mine is just insanely, unbelievably fast. Magic, I tell you. Magic.

Cool, but I always think it's an insult when people think an amazing engineering achievement is magic. No, it's not. It's applied physics. At best it's indistinguishable from magic.

And where do you base this being fast on? Because it has a smooth GUI ?

 

[name99]

The power efficiency gains at 10nm are not really great (18% over 16FF+) so the clocks will increase only marginally like we saw from A7 at 28nm to A8 at 20nm.

That's not what TSMC says. TSMC says to expect 20% faster clocks at same power, or 40% lower power at same clocks.

 

[name99]

If Apple does that, then they run into the same problems that Intel faces. The reason A-series is so good is that it doesn't have to scale a wide range of performance/frequency points -- they literally have the world's best engineers laser focused on iPad/iPhone chips.

I would hate to see Apple try to do everything only to end up starving the iPhone/iPad class hardware to try to replace a few million Mac processors when Intel ones work just fine.

Apple is clearly capable of running two chip lines (A# and A#X) in parallel (three if you count the Samsung and TSMC A9's separately).
There is no obvious reason they can't be slightly more aggressive, and a plausible future is not hard.

There's a 2 core SoC for iPhone.
There's a 3 core SoC for iPad.
That 3 core base unit gets replicated (along with the GPU) on a die that's, say, 30% larger to form a 6 core A#Z. That die maybe drops some of the SoC stuff that's not relevant to a laptop/desktop (?) or maybe not, maybe it's all relevant --- provide a kickass ISP for image recognition/login, GPS functionality because why not, same with fingerprint, same with some of the sensors --- and easier just to leave on die the others.
This 6 core base unit has connectivity on-board (like HyperTransport) to connect to one (or three?) other other such chips.

Now, with three SoCs, we have a nice set of building blocks for
- iPad (A#X)
- laptop (A#X)
- mini and iMac (A#Z)
- mac Pro (2 and 4 A#Z's)

We also (BTW) have a nice building block for Apple's data warehouse, which might help reduce both the annual payments to Intel and the power costs...

Intel's line is such a goddamn mess in part because they're trying to extract every dollar from the market, in part because of internal politics that keeps certain segments alive, in part because of yield issues.

Apple doesn't care about most of these. They aren't playing market games, so it's OK if the A#Z has some extra functionality on board that the iMac will never use. They appear to have vastly less destructive politics than any other company. And they can handle yield by dumping lesser performing chips in less demanding products (eg dump weaker cores in iPod Touches, or in Apple TVs, or in their future Amazon Echo clone, or in a future Airport Base Station(?). )

 

[Eug]

And where do you base this being fast on? Because it has a smooth GUI ?

You jest, but yes the 7 Plus indeed is very, very smooth. I don't I think I've ever experienced an iPhone this smooth in any version of iOS, and we've owned the 3G (still have it), 4 (still have it), 5 (mother-in-law uses it now), 5S (still have it), and 6s (still have). And I've definitely not experienced anything close in Android.

In every phone I've ever used I've either thought "Ehh, that is really laggy" or else "Hey, that's pretty good. It's impressive what you can have in a phone these days.", or something in between, but they were never completely smooth. The 7 Plus pushes the threshold that much higher. It's a hard act to follow in terms of GUI performance.

There is Windows Phone, but I just hate the interface so I never gave it a chance.

 

[StrangerGuy]

You jest, but yes the 7 Plus indeed is very, very smooth. I don't I think I've ever experienced an iPhone this smooth in any version of iOS, and we've owned the 3G (still have it), 4 (still have it), 5 (mother-in-law uses it now), 5S (still have it), and 6s (still have). And I've definitely not experienced anything close in Android.

In every phone I've ever used I've either thought "Ehh, that is really laggy" or else "Hey, that's pretty good. It's impressive what you can have in a phone these days.", or something in between, but they were never completely smooth. The 7 Plus pushes the threshold that much higher. It's a hard act to follow in terms of GUI performance.

There is Windows Phone, but I just hate the interface so I never gave it a chance.

My iPad Air definitely runs smoother on iOS 10 than 9, and the SE literally flies regardless thanks to a screen with a sane resolution. Besides, most of the performance issues with pre-6S Apple devices are due to lack of RAM and much slower NAND than lack of pure CPU power.

 

[greatnoob]

On my 6s (new replacement), iOS 10 seems to have made the app switcher and scrolling slower as it stutters and drops frames much, much more than iOS 9. Seems like 9.0 and 9.2 were the best in terms of UI responsiveness. 9.3 and later seem to have regressed in performance

 

[Eug]

Just to be clear, my comparison with the 5, 5S, and 6s includes with running iOS 10, and I installed iOS 10 on all of these myself. The 5 is quite noticeably laggy in spots but nonetheless still runs iOS 10 quite well, so I'm quite pleased with it. Not bad for a 4 year old phone. The 5S flies in comparison to the 5 but nonetheless it's still a very noticeable improvement going to the 7 Plus. It should be noted though that the 7 Plus is the only iPhone with 3 GB so that could be a factor. Similarly, perhaps one reason the iPhone 5 does reasonably well is because it is 32-bit, meaning it effectively has a bit more RAM to work with than 1 GB 64-bit iPhone models. OTOH, the 7 Plus has a much bigger screen than all the other iPhones we own, yet still is much faster. Also, some people say the 2 GB iPhone 7 is equally remarkably fast.

The 7 Plus is also smoother than the iPad Air 2 but that iPad has a much bigger screen to contend with so I didn't include the iPad in the comparison initially. However, I can say Apple did do something in Safari because Safari seems to scroll better in iOS 10 on the iPad. Although rendering speed seems to be faster in iOS 10, it is not completely due to rendering speed because some scrolling issues in iOS 9 persist even after the page is fully rendered, but those issues have been improved in iOS 10. (Browser benches in iOS 10 are indeed faster than in iOS 9, BTW.)

Summary:

The 7 Plus is so consistently fast and consistently smooth that you forget about GUI performance and start to think the feel one gets on the 7 Plus is normal and expected. But then you use any older iPhone and get the lags, which really can be jarring in comparison.

 

[witeken]

I've heard this smoothness story many many times before. The iPhone 5 was super smooth, the 5s again, then again for the desktop class iPhone 6 and last year the 16nm iPhone 6s, and now we're at the 7. Next year it will be 10nm iPhone 7s that will again be the smoothest ever, again a little bit smoother than the 7. Nice story.

But GUI also depend on the GPU to render the graphics and software and just as importantly, the RAM (and when it's not in RAM, NAND). Up to iPhone 6 it has only 1GB RAM, so no sherlock that it's become smoother. My PC at this moment uses 3.4GB.

Good that Apple made it smoother, but you can't really pinpoint all of that to the CPU, can you? For that, you need the good old benchmarks.

 

[scannall]

I've heard this smoothness story many many times before. The iPhone 5 was super smooth, the 5s again, then again for the desktop class iPhone 6 and last year the 16nm iPhone 6s, and now we're at the 7. Next year it will be 10nm iPhone 7s that will again be the smoothest ever, again a little bit smoother than the 7. Nice story.

But GUI also depend on the GPU to render the graphics and software and just as importantly, the RAM (and when it's not in RAM, NAND). Up to iPhone 6 it has only 1GB RAM, so no sherlock that it's become smoother. My PC at this moment uses 3.4GB.

Good that Apple made it smoother, but you can't really pinpoint all of that to the CPU, can you? For that, you need the good old benchmarks.

Each iteration of iOS adds more stuff, to take advantage of the faster CPU. Older models start showing a lack of smoothness as time goes on. Do you expand iOS, at the risk of older devices running a little worse, or do you leave it stagnant?

 

[Eug]

I've heard this smoothness story many many times before. The iPhone 5 was super smooth, the 5s again, then again for the desktop class iPhone 6 and last year the 16nm iPhone 6s, and now we're at the 7. Next year it will be 10nm iPhone 7s that will again be the smoothest ever, again a little bit smoother than the 7. Nice story.

But GUI also depend on the GPU to render the graphics and software and just as importantly, the RAM (and when it's not in RAM, NAND). Up to iPhone 6 it has only 1GB RAM, so no sherlock that it's become smoother. My PC at this moment uses 3.4GB.

Good that Apple made it smoother, but you can't really pinpoint all of that to the CPU, can you? For that, you need the good old benchmarks.

In comparative terms, iOS has always been smoother than the competition, ie. Android, especially when a new iDevice model came out. However, in absolute terms, iOS has never been this smooth before. Never. This is especially true with the experience around browsing.

No it's not all CPU, but you can be sure a large part is, when you have four different iPhones at your disposal (plus an iPad) running the exact same OS version for comparison.

As for memory, I already addressed that. While the 7 Plus has the most memory, and I don't have 7 for comparison, other people who have used both the 7 Plus and 7 say both are uber smooth, and more so than prior models.

 

[raghu78]

I've heard this smoothness story many many times before. The iPhone 5 was super smooth, the 5s again, then again for the desktop class iPhone 6 and last year the 16nm iPhone 6s, and now we're at the 7. Next year it will be 10nm iPhone 7s that will again be the smoothest ever, again a little bit smoother than the 7. Nice story.

But GUI also depend on the GPU to render the graphics and software and just as importantly, the RAM (and when it's not in RAM, NAND). Up to iPhone 6 it has only 1GB RAM, so no sherlock that it's become smoother. My PC at this moment uses 3.4GB.

Good that Apple made it smoother, but you can't really pinpoint all of that to the CPU, can you? For that, you need the good old benchmarks.

The A10 is faster than A9X. we aready have seen SPEC 2006 on Core M vs A9X. We know Intel has far better FP performance while integer performance on Apple's A9X was very respectable.Since the A10 is a phone chip with better performance than A9X its an amazing achievement. Try running Core M in a 5 inch smartphone and measuring sustained performance and not just bursty turbo performance. The fact is Apple has the best mobile chip and Intel cannot compete with Apple in smartphones. No wonder Intel gave up on smartphones.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-review/4

Apple's rate of CPU improvement over the past 4-5 years is mind boggling. At this rate and with the TSMC 10nm and TSMC 7nm processes upcoming the A11, A12, A13 are going to keep up the rate of CPU/GPU improvements. Eventually I see Apple unifying its platforms under their custom ARM chips by the 2019/2020 timeframe.

 

[jihe]

Each iteration of iOS adds more stuff, to take advantage of the faster CPU. Older models start showing a lack of smoothness as time goes on. Do you expand iOS, at the risk of older devices running a little worse, or do you leave it stagnant?

You don't push stupid upgrades down consumer's throat, that's what you or any sensible person would do, but not apple. Must fleece those sheeple, fleece.

 

[witeken]

Article about InFO: http://semiengineering.com/packaging-wars-begin/.

 

[Eug]

Here is a benchmark (rendered off screen) that I had never heard of before, but a user in the Apple forum requested it:

http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=threads/iphone-7.2459784/page-15#post-38489461

Apple A10 Fusion:

Apple A9 iOS 9.3.3:

So, for minimum frame rate, there is a 46% improvement in speed (20 fps vs 13.7 fps). For maximum frame rate, there is a 43% improvement (52.63 vs 37.04). Apple says there is a 50% increase in GPU performance in their press blurb.

There is also an Nvidia Shield bench posted there but it is not the same test. It's the Ultra test.

BTW, Nvidia Shield gets 42428 in 3D Mark Ice Storm Unlimited, vs 21708 for the iPad Air 2. According to Tom's Hardware, the iPhone 7 gets 37810.

 

[Eug]

Here is a benchmark (rendered off screen) that I had never heard of before, but a user in the Apple forum requested it:

http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=threads/iphone-7.2459784/page-15#post-38489461

Apple A10 Fusion:

Apple A9 iOS 9.3.3:

So, for minimum frame rate, there is a 46% improvement in speed (20 fps vs 13.7 fps). For maximum frame rate, there is a 43% improvement (52.63 vs 37.04). Apple says there is a 50% increase in GPU performance in their press blurb.

iPad Pro 12.9's A9X does considerably better than A10.

 

[Mopetar]

However, in absolute terms, iOS has never been this smooth before. Never. This is especially true with the experience around browsing.

No it's not all CPU, but you can be sure a large part is, when you have four different iPhones at your disposal (plus an iPad) running the exact same OS version for comparison.

I just installed the iOS update on my iPad Air 2 so I'll have to see if it feels any different. Apparently with iOS 10 there were some pretty significant Webkit improvements to animation that should make it feel a lot smoother.

That seems like a pretty significant improvement on top of any CPU boost which is why it probably feels so different. I don't know how well that particular benchmark translates into overall web browsing performance, but if it was a major bottleneck for the browser, it's going to feel a lot better.

Kind of weird to see the iPad Air 2 having such a low score compared to even the 6S. The first generation iPad I had definitely felt its age after two years when I upgraded to the iPad 3, but the Air 2 doesn't feel slow at all at this point.

 

[Eug]

I just installed the iOS update on my iPad Air 2 so I'll have to see if it feels any different. Apparently with iOS 10 there were some pretty significant Webkit improvements to animation that should make it feel a lot smoother.

That seems like a pretty significant improvement on top of any CPU boost which is why it probably feels so different. I don't know how well that particular benchmark translates into overall web browsing performance, but if it was a major bottleneck for the browser, it's going to feel a lot better.

Kind of weird to see the iPad Air 2 having such a low score compared to even the 6S. The first generation iPad I had definitely felt its age after two years when I upgraded to the iPad 3, but the Air 2 doesn't feel slow at all at this point.

I had found the iPad Air 2 a bit laggy in Safari browsing in iOS 9. The main lag was the rendering on some pages, but it really depended upon the complexity of the page. The easiest way to notice it was to scroll fast and what you'd get is blank spots on the screen for a little while, and then it'd render, and then you could scroll again. That seems to be much less in iOS 10, although it still does occur occasionally. However, it's hard to compare since it really depends on the page, and the behaviour wasn't 100% consistent.

In contrast, the (lower resolution) iPhone 7 Plus doesn't have this issue. The (even lower resolution) iPhone 6s in iOS 10 still occasionally has it, but it's not bad at all. My wife says her iPhone 6s feels so much faster, and I suspect it's because of faster animations and because of faster WebKit. I do agree it feels faster and more lag free on the 6s, but that just means the original iOS 9 iPhone 6s combo had a bit of lag here and there that the iPhone 7 Plus doesn't have, even though last year the iPhone 6s was the king of smartphone GUI smoothness.

BTW, thanks for posting that MotionMark graph. I wasn't aware of that bench. Below is my 7 Plus (iOS 10.1 beta). I ran the bench twice only, once for zoomed mode and one for standard mode. I don't know if the difference is just chance, or if zoomed mode is truly a bit less compute intensive. It could be chance, since the scores are within the listed error ranges for the tests. Whatever the case, it's in the 300 range, which is large boost over the 12.9" iPad Pro.

Zoomed:

Standard:

EDIT:

It should be noted though that the MotionMark bench is basically a graphics bench. The lagginess in Safari I was talking about before was just on regular mainstream webpages like AnandTech. So, I was getting delays while scrolling on the A8X in HTML rendering, not 3D graphics rendering.

 

[Eug]

I
BTW, thanks for posting that MotionMark graph. I wasn't aware of that bench. Below is my 7 Plus (iOS 10.1 beta).

And here is my MacBook Pro 13" 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 running macOS Sierra. (There is a patch for the Sierra installer that allows installation on this unsupported Mac, and Sierra works perfectly on it.)

So, my phone is twice as fast as my laptop.

I also tried it in El Capitan 10.11.6, and got essentially the same score (146.13), but that's probably because it's running Safari 10 which came out Sept. 20 for El Capitan (and Yosemite). That's the version of Safari that runs on Sierra.

 

[Mopetar]

The easiest way to notice it was to scroll fast and what you'd get is blank spots on the screen for a little while, and then it'd render, and then you could scroll again.

iOS has always behaved like that. It will always try to respond to user input as a priority even if it means dropping frames or flat out leaving something unrendered.

It should be noted though that the MotionMark bench is basically a graphics bench. The lagginess in Safari I was talking about before was just on regular mainstream webpages like AnandTech. So, I was getting delays while scrolling on the A8X in HTML rendering, not 3D graphics rendering.

It's not just graphics. The indicate that it tests some commonly used CSS stuff as well as HTML text rendering:

• Multiply: CSS border radius, transforms, opacity
• Arcs and Fills: Canvas path fills and arcs
• Leaves: CSS-transformed <img> elements
• Paths: Canvas line, quadratic, and Bezier paths
• Lines: Canvas line segments
• Focus: CSS blur filter, opacity
• Images: Canvas getImageData() and putImageData()
• Design: HTML text rendering
• Suits: SVG clip paths, gradients and transforms

I'm guessing that some of the optimizations that resulted from this also made web-pages feel more responsive.

 

[Eug]

iOS has always behaved like that. It will always try to respond to user input as a priority even if it means dropping frames or flat out leaving something unrendered.

Yeah but with the iPhone 7 Plus it's no longer a significant issue.

It seems to be mitigated with the iPad Air 2 too but it's not as good as the iPhone 7 Plus.

So it goes back to what I was saying before, which is that A10 Fusion (with iOS 10) has significantly raised my expectations for the responsiveness of a smartphone for surfing.

However, I'm not as impressed with this Intel modem, or else the software controlling it. When I lose the signal (inside a building or whatever) it sometimes stays lost for more extended periods, as in over a minute even when I'm back in range, which is pretty damn irritating. This is not limited to iPhones with Intel modems but it seems to happen more often and/or for longer times with my iPhone 7 Plus (Intel) than it did with my iPhone 5S (Qualcomm).

When this happens, turning on Airport mode to turn off the radio and then immediately turning it back on usually solves it.

 

[stingerman]

At this rate and with the TSMC 10nm and TSMC 7nm processes upcoming the A11, A12, A13 are going to keep up the rate of CPU/GPU improvements. Eventually I see Apple unifying its platforms under their custom ARM chips by the 2019/2020 timeframe.

The 10FF node is now in production at TSMC, I don't see Apple waiting a whole year before using it. The iPad Pro models makes sense since they can get another 20% speed boost over the A10. There is a 2.1 reduction in size from 16FF+, So they can double the cores of both the CPU and GPU or some other combination of further component integration, including bringing more of the logic board components onto the InFO wafer level packaging.

 

[Eug]

Yeah but with the iPhone 7 Plus it's no longer a significant issue.

It seems to be mitigated with the iPad Air 2 too but it's not as good as the iPhone 7 Plus.

So it goes back to what I was saying before, which is that A10 Fusion (with iOS 10) has significantly raised my expectations for the responsiveness of a smartphone for surfing.

However, I'm not as impressed with this Intel modem, or else the software controlling it. When I lose the signal (inside a building or whatever) it sometimes stays lost for more extended periods, as in over a minute even when I'm back in range, which is pretty damn irritating. This is not limited to iPhones with Intel modems but it seems to happen more often and/or for longer times with my iPhone 7 Plus (Intel) than it did with my iPhone 5S (Qualcomm).

When this happens, turning on Airport mode to turn off the radio and then immediately turning it back on usually solves it.

It seems I am not alone. However it doesn't seem to be an Intel modem issue. The most common i7 complaints were with Verizon (Qualcomm).

 

[Arachnotronic]

A10 CPU is code named Hurricane.

 

[StrangerGuy]

A10 CPU is code named Hurricane.

Next year, Tornado? They are running out of cyclonic codenames.

But seriously though, I don't expect A73 to even match the A9 in ST performance next year (ARM's own A73 promo page confirms this, +30% over Kirin 955 at best) and by the time they arrive on actual devices, Apple would probably be half a year away to 4000+ ST GB4 scores with the A11.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Next year, Tornado? They are running out of cyclonic codenames.

But seriously though, I don't expect A73 to even match the A9 in ST performance next year (ARM's own A73 promo page confirms this, +30% over Kirin 955 at best) and by the time they arrive on actual devices, Apple would probably be half a year away to 4000+ ST GB4 scores with the A11.

A10X should give a preview of what's to come with A11. I expect A10X to clock the CPUs at significantly higher frequencies, and I expect that with A11, Apple will be able to bring both a frequency improvement as well as a "tock-like" improvement in perf/MHz.

Apple's chip team is insane. And I mean this in all of the good senses of that word.