“Apple has begun updating some of their developer documentation for iOS to account for the new phone,” Ryan Smith reports for AnandTech. “This of course is always a fun time for tech punditry, as those updates will often include information on the hardware differences in the platform, and explain to developers the various features that different generations of hardware can offer developers.”
“We believe that at this point we have a solid idea of the configuration of Apple’s latest SoC,” Smith reports. “Given Apple’s conservative stance on clockspeeds for power purposes and the die space gains from the 20nm process, accounting for a 50% performance upgrade is easily done by replacing a 4 core G6430 with the 6 core GX6650. At equal clockspeeds the GX6650 should be 50% faster on paper (matching Apple’s paper numbers), leading us to strongly believe that the A8 is utilizing a PowerVR Series6XT GX6650 GPU.”
“Given no other reason to doubt this [GeekBench] data at the moment and given Apple’s preference for low clocked SoCs, the 1.4GHz reading appears legitimate. In which case this would be a 100MHz increase over the 1.3GHz A7 found in the iPhone 5S,” Smith reports. “However the fact that it’s a 100MHz increase also means that clockspeeds alone cannot account for the full 25% performance gain that Apple is promoting and that these Geekbench results are reporting, as 1.4GHz is only a roughly 8% clockspeed increase over 1.3GHz. This in turn means that there must be more going on under the hood to improve the A8’s CPU performance other than clock speed alone…”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Attribution: AppleInsider. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Johnny SoC” for the heads up.]
This is why I like AnandTech!
I bet Anand Shimpi knows what’s inside the A8!
Yup. I would think so now that he works there!
Apple compared the A8 to an A7 scoring 1300 when my 5S scores 1470. The CPU gains are compared to a bloated 5S with a year of crap on it. The A8 is nothing but an A7X with a little more cache.
Sam…? What say you Scum?
What, no 64 bit?
Sammy is comparing a YUGO truck to big Mercedes just because they are the same size and YUGO truck came first.
Yes, Sammy, Mercedes did copy YUGO truck !!
More power, Scotty!
It will be interesting to read more about this. In the Keynote Phil said that they doubled the number of transistors going from 1 billion in the A7 to 2 billion in the A8. That was stunning. What are they doing with an extra billion transistors?
If Apple has 6-core A8s running at a ‘conservative’ 1.4Ghz for battery life, wonder what a MacMini with a faster A8 could do?
Run slower than the current Mac Mini with an Intel processor?
Not run most of the applications currently running on my Mac Mini?