Apple’s iPhone 5s’ A7 chip is a benchmarking beast

13 years ago

“The Apple A7 is a benchmark beast, and Apple accomplished this through big improvements in their CPU, GPU, the addition of ARM v8 instructions, and Apple driver and software optimizations,” Patrick Moorhead reports for Forbes. “Apple has an architectural license from ARM, meaning they can literally design the entire CPU with their own IP instead licensing the design from ARM. With an ARM architectural license, Apple can improve the CPUs in many ways: increasing the size or number of integer execution or floating point units, improving memory subsystem, adding cache memory, and many other ways.”

“The Apple A7 SoC also integrated ARM’s new architecture, called ‘v8’ which includes the capability for 64-bit memory addressability,” Moorhead reports. “The improvements Apple made to the A7 CPU paid off when you look at the figures in the AnandTech article. The article cites, ‘integer performance is up 44% on average, while floating point performance is up by 67%.’ Competitively, the Apple A7 fared well against the competition on CPU benchmarks, too, many times beating out reference silicon platforms and even tablet platforms, an impressive feat. The iPhone 5s even outperformed phones at the same price point by 2X, no small feat.”

Moorheaqd writes, “I would be remiss if I didn’t bring in Apple’s software capabilities as it relates to these benchmarks… Apple can pull the hardware, software and application lever to improve performance and they did with the A7 [and iOS 7]… The improvements Apple made with the A7 are truly incredible, and they really went against the grain in their choices. With an industry is obsessed with more cores, they went with fewer, larger and efficient cores. With people expecting v8 and 64-bit ARM in late 2014, Apple brings it out in 2013 with full Xcode support and many performance optimizations. With almost no sightings of Imagination’s Rogue graphics, Apple has it productized and optimized first.”

Much more in the full article – recommended – here.

MacDailyNews Take: B, b, but where’s the “innovation?” (heavy sarcasm)