Apple A8 Benchmarked

[Arachnotronic]

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/09/iphone-6-geekbench-1-4-ghz-dual-core-a8-1gb-ram/

 

[liahos1]

Seems like a 16% bump. Meh. I guess they are focused more on their NFC stuff for this iteration.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Seems like a 16% bump. Meh. I guess they are focused more on their NFC stuff for this iteration.

I would expect that if there are any significant performance improvements in the A8 at this point, they'll be in the GPU.

 

[JDG1980]

What alarms me the most is that RAM figure. 1GB of RAM is just not okay on a flagship device in 2014.

 

[ShintaiDK]

What alarms me the most is that RAM figure. 1GB of RAM is just not okay on a flagship device in 2014.

And specially not the crazy +50% price rumours say.

But I guess you can sell an iPhone 6M? later with 2GB...

16% geekbench, seems the low hanging fruit is gone.

 

[Nothingness]

If that score is true, that'd mean about a 10% IPC increase (compared to iPad Air which get ~1480). Not bad, but not impressive. I guess this basically means they already picked all the low hanging fruits.

 

[Atreidin]

What alarms me the most is that RAM figure. 1GB of RAM is just not okay on a flagship device in 2014.

Apple fans will pull excuses from everywhere about why it's the optimal amount of RAM, but the same people would laud Apple's foresight and brilliance if three months later they release iphone 6.1 with 8GB of RAM.

 

[liahos1]

does this mean denver k1 is faster?

 

[Eug]

I had posted this earlier in the Broadwell thread since someone was talking about A7 and Geekbench, but I guess it does make sense to start a new thread on this. However, we're all assuming for the time being it isn't faked.

Seems like a 16% bump. Meh. I guess they are focused more on their NFC stuff for this iteration.

Yeah, about that. According to this page it's about a 17-18% bump...

If that score is true, that'd mean about a 10% IPC increase (compared to iPad Air which get ~1480). Not bad, but not impressive. I guess this basically means they already picked all the low hanging fruits.

...and yep, that's about a 10% IPC increase. Merely not bad.

As mentioned, all the low hanging fruit has been picked. That's fine though, since you couldn't have performance doublings every year forever.

But then again...

I would expect that if there are any significant performance improvements in the A8 at this point, they'll be in the GPU.

...this is a very important point. They're probably allocating a bunch of silicon to the GPU to drive that 5.5" iPhone's rumoured 3X Retina screen.

What alarms me the most is that RAM figure. 1GB of RAM is just not okay on a flagship device in 2014.

IMO, it was not OK on a flagship 64-bit iDevice in 2013 either. Either something is seriously wrong with Safari in iOS 7 on my iPhone 5s, or else the iPhone 5s is running into RAM issues rather frequently. In fact, Anand commented about this in his iPhone 5s review.

I've said before that if the iPad Air 2 has 1 GB RAM, I'm likely not buying. I've waited since 2011 with my iPad 2. What's another year?

 

[Grooveriding]

Realistically as an Apple product the specs won't even matter. There will be droves lining up to buy one weeks before they are even available :sneaky: A good number of consumers loyal to Apple wouldn't even understand the specs if you told them. Number one metric of import is: does it have a white apple with a bite out of it on the product followed by does someone else have one and now I must also have one.

 

[Eug]

The specs won't matter, in that there is a lot of pent up demand for a 4.7-5.5" iPhone. However, they will matter in terms of usage, unless iOS 8 somehow magically manages memory better. AFAIK, there is no memory compression in iOS 8.

However, this is how Apple operates. It staggers its upgrades, because it can.

 

[Enigmoid]

A major problem with geekbench is that without the score breakdown its very hard to guess the actual performance.

Adding significantly better encryption performance will boost scores without actually doing anything for anything non encryption.

The RAM amount is stupid. I have 1 GB on my phone from 2012 (dual core A9) and even then its not enough.

 

[Eug]

The RAM amount is stupid. I have 1 GB on my phone from 2012 (dual core A9) and even then its not enough.

Which phone?

Cuz if it's Android, IMO they need more memory to keep up. I'd say the 32-bit iPhone 5 back in 2012 was fine with 1 GB RAM. But the 64-bit iPhone 5s in 2013 needed more. And the 64-bit larger-sized iPhone 6 in 2014 definitely needs more.

 

[Enigmoid]

Which phone?

Cuz if it's Android, IMO they need more memory to keep up. I'd say the 32-bit iPhone 5 back in 2012 was fine with 1 GB RAM. But the 64-bit iPhone 5s in 2013 needed more. And the 64-bit larger-sized iPhone 6 in 2014 definitely needs more.

Yep its android.

The point i'm trying to make though is that the RAM to CPU power ratio is way off.

Apple always tries to keep ram/vram down. Like when they sold the nvidia 650m with 512 MB.

 

[HurleyBird]

1GB of RAM is certainly not enough, hope this is false. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

 

[Sweepr]

I knew they wouldn't be able to deliver 2x CPU performance every year forever, but anything less than 50% is kinda disappointing. I wouldn't hold my breath for huge GPU gains either, but I am a bit more optimistic here. 1GB is a bummer considering these are late 2014 64-bit devices, there's no other way to look at it. I'll stick with my A7 devices and wait for 2015 16nm A9.

 

[sm625]

As soon as they bump up the RAM to 2GB, you'll have every idiot software developer wasting twice as much memory on useless garbage, further ruining and/or breaking the user experience on all models with 1GB. 1GB is a LOT of space. Rather than harping on apple for not increasing it, we need to be on the devs to get them to stop wasting so much memory.

 

[liahos1]

I knew they wouldn't be able to deliver 2x CPU performance every year forever, but anything less than 50% is kinda disappointing. I wouldn't hold my breath for huge GPU gains either, but I am a bit more optimistic here. 1GB is a bummer considering these are late 2014 64-bit devices, there's no other way to look at it. I'll stick with my A7 devices and wait for 2015 16nm A9.

perhaps the limitations of 20nm and the low ipc hanging fruit showing their heads.

 

[dawheat]

As soon as they bump up the RAM to 2GB, you'll have every idiot software developer wasting twice as much memory on useless garbage, further ruining and/or breaking the user experience on all models with 1GB. 1GB is a LOT of space. Rather than harping on apple for not increasing it, we need to be on the devs to get them to stop wasting so much memory.

By far the app with the most regular memory issues is Safari, especially on the iPad. Having multiple tabs open is frustrating as tabs constantly reload as it runs out of memory.

 

[Rdmkr]

I'm sceptical of the claim that increasing ram from 1GB to 2GB in a phone has a noticeable effect on much of anything. None of the benchmark results I've seen suggest such a thing and a real world comparison between HTC Evo and Samsung S3, same SoCs but 2 vs 1GB ram, showed no difference whatsoever.

 

[Mopetar]

1GB of RAM is certainly not enough, hope this is false. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Since iOS doesn't do real multitasking, 1 GB of RAM isn't as much of a problem. However, as other users have pointed out, more pixels is going to use up more memory in some cases so it will be more noticeable.

 

[kimmel]

Since iOS doesn't do real multitasking, 1 GB of RAM isn't as much of a problem. However, as other users have pointed out, more pixels is going to use up more memory in some cases so it will be more noticeable.

Having Safari reload pages incessantly because IOS kicked the page out of memory drives me insane.

 

[Eug]

As soon as they bump up the RAM to 2GB, you'll have every idiot software developer wasting twice as much memory on useless garbage, further ruining and/or breaking the user experience on all models with 1GB. 1GB is a LOT of space. Rather than harping on apple for not increasing it, we need to be on the devs to get them to stop wasting so much memory.

As mentioned, the #1 problematic use memory wise is a core app written by Apple - Safari.

It seems esp. bad with 64-bit iDevices, presumably because 64-bit apps and OS require more memory.

 

[soccerballtux]

And specially not the crazy +50% price rumours say.

But I guess you can sell an iPhone 6M? later with 2GB...

16% geekbench, seems the low hanging fruit is gone.

next one will have 1.5GB probably

 

[soccerballtux]

Since iOS doesn't do real multitasking, 1 GB of RAM isn't as much of a problem. However, as other users have pointed out, more pixels is going to use up more memory in some cases so it will be more noticeable.

they know exactly what they're doing. The large screen will be worth it. Wait for the iPhone 7 if you want >1GB RAM