AT's iPhone 6S review is up

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stingerman

Member
Feb 8, 2005
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witeken said:
A9 is still no competition for Core m (or Mobile Maxwell on the graphics side).
Click to expand...

Will never see Core M in a mobile phone. But, what happens when A9 or A9X is put in a notebook with better cooling? At a higher voltage, can it go to 2.5GHz, TSMC in 2014 did a test that indicates that their FinFet+ can be taken that high with the basic ARM reference design much less Apple's optimized designs. And what speed can they clock the GPU with better cooling.

A9X should be very telling.
 
R

raghu78

Diamond Member
Aug 23, 2012
4,093
1,475
136
stingerman said:
Will never see Core M in a mobile phone. But, what happens when A9 or A9X is put in a notebook with better cooling? At a higher voltage, can it go to 2.5GHz, TSMC in 2014 did a test that indicates that their FinFet+ can be taken that high with the basic ARM reference design much less Apple's optimized designs. And what speed can they clock the GPU with better cooling.

A9X should be very telling.
Click to expand...

Well said. Apple is well on its way to moving their entire product stack to ARMv8-A. Apple is waiting for the right time to make the transition. Apple should get Symmetric Multi threading up and running in their custom ARMV8-A core next year. Now that would really crank the multithread performance up. SMT is hard to get done right. Only Intel and IBM have it running now on their CPU cores. AMD Zen and Apple A10/A10X should have it too.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/10/02/is-there-any-truth-to-this-apple-inc-a10-rumor.aspx

Right now its very clear that Apple is the king of the mobile world. When somebody wants to compare the performance of Core M against A9/A9X they need to look at the performance in the relevant form factors and most importantly sustained performance. Intel chips are good at bursty performance but suck at sustained performance and throttle like mad over long time periods (1+ hr) .

A9X will beat Core M for CPU performance and be competitive for GPU performance when you test with similar form factors. Anybody who is serious about Core M vs A9X needs to look at passively cooled 12-13 inch Skylake tablet vs iPad Pro. Apple SoCs are now the high standard against which any other mobile SoC is measured. Apple has arguably the best mobile SoC in the world and their custom ARMv8-A CPU core leads the competition by a huge margin in single thread performance which btw is still the most important gating factor for a superior smartphone user experience.
 
Zodiark1593

Zodiark1593

Platinum Member
Oct 21, 2012
2,230
4
81
raghu78 said:
Well said. Apple is well on its way to moving their entire product stack to ARMv8-A. Apple is waiting for the right time to make the transition. Apple should get Symmetric Multi threading up and running in their custom ARMV8-A core next year. Now that would really crank the multithread performance up. SMT is hard to get done right. Only Intel and IBM have it running now on their CPU cores. AMD Zen and Apple A10/A10X should have it too.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/10/02/is-there-any-truth-to-this-apple-inc-a10-rumor.aspx

Right now its very clear that Apple is the king of the mobile world. When somebody wants to compare the performance of Core M against A9/A9X they need to look at the performance in the relevant form factors and most importantly sustained performance. Intel chips are good at bursty performance but suck at sustained performance and throttle like mad over long time periods (1+ hr) .

A9X will beat Core M for CPU performance and be competitive for GPU performance when you test with similar form factors. Anybody who is serious about Core M vs A9X needs to look at passively cooled 12-13 inch Skylake tablet vs iPad Pro. Apple SoCs are now the high standard against which any other mobile SoC is measured. Apple has arguably the best mobile SoC in the world and their custom ARMv8-A CPU core leads the competition by a huge margin in single thread performance which btw is still the most important gating factor for a superior smartphone user experience.
Click to expand...

Or you could, I dunno, wait until we actually get said relevent products in our hands before making such judgement. I certainly wouldn't count Intel out though. I sincerely doubt they've just been twittling their thumbs for the past two years ever since Apple's Cyclone cpu, unless for some reason, they don't see the chip as a threat.

Real cross-platform benches would also be nice. In gpus, half precision FP is often used in mobile to boost shader performance and reduce power consumption, I'm quite curious if Apple also made similar concessions in their cpu pipeline to focus on what will matter most for a user (IE, extremely fast for what 99.99% of users will use it for, sub-par for heavy production tasks). Also, I very dearly want to see how far this chip can be clocked.

What would be great is a benchmark that abuses every advantage that can be taken from both cpus (short of any half-precision shortcuts) including NEON, AVX, etc, etc. Basically, a true measure of raw power under ideal circumstances for both architectures.
 
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Arachnotronic

Arachnotronic

Lifer
Mar 10, 2006
11,715
2,012
126
raghu78 said:
Well said. Apple is well on its way to moving their entire product stack to ARMv8-A. Apple is waiting for the right time to make the transition. Apple should get Symmetric Multi threading up and running in their custom ARMV8-A core next year. Now that would really crank the multithread performance up. SMT is hard to get done right. Only Intel and IBM have it running now on their CPU cores. AMD Zen and Apple A10/A10X should have it too.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/10/02/is-there-any-truth-to-this-apple-inc-a10-rumor.aspx

Right now its very clear that Apple is the king of the mobile world. When somebody wants to compare the performance of Core M against A9/A9X they need to look at the performance in the relevant form factors and most importantly sustained performance. Intel chips are good at bursty performance but suck at sustained performance and throttle like mad over long time periods (1+ hr) .

A9X will beat Core M for CPU performance and be competitive for GPU performance when you test with similar form factors. Anybody who is serious about Core M vs A9X needs to look at passively cooled 12-13 inch Skylake tablet vs iPad Pro. Apple SoCs are now the high standard against which any other mobile SoC is measured. Apple has arguably the best mobile SoC in the world and their custom ARMv8-A CPU core leads the competition by a huge margin in single thread performance which btw is still the most important gating factor for a superior smartphone user experience.
Click to expand...

Broadcom also employs SMT in its XLP processors and MIPS offers core IP with SMT :)

But yes I would love to see SMT on a future A series chip. That wide machine is just begging for it.
 
Arachnotronic

Arachnotronic

Lifer
Mar 10, 2006
11,715
2,012
126
witeken said:
If A9 is "a monster", "enormous", "incredible" and other stuff said in the iPhone "sponsored by Apple" 6s review, then I wonder which adjectives exist to properly describe SKL ():).

A9 is still no competition for Core m (or Mobile Maxwell on the graphics side).

Also, my calculation of cache http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37805764&postcount=5390.
Click to expand...

What evidence do you have that the iPhone 6s review is "paid for"? I own both phones (which I paid for, of course) and the AT review is spot on.

The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are the only phones I recommend to anybody in the market for a high end phone. They are that good.
 
N

Nothingness

Platinum Member
Jul 3, 2013
2,446
767
136
SPEC 2000 shows more gain than Geekbench. Time to move to SPEC 2006, especially given L2/L3 cache sizes...
 
S

SPBHM

Diamond Member
Sep 12, 2012
5,056
409
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it's such a shame that it's only being used for Iphones, Ipads and whatever because that's a great chip, Apple continues to deliver,

the only benchmark that didn't look great was again 3dmark physics...
 
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Shehriazad

Senior member
Nov 3, 2014
555
2
46
If only I could get my hands on that chip outside of an iOS environment. It looks very interesting.

I really do wonder if Apple will take that step and use this chip in an "ultrabook" or something like it (or any of their future chips in the near-ish future)...they certainly seem to approach acceptable performance levels
 
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TrulyUncouth

Senior member
Jul 16, 2013
213
0
76
Arachnotronic said:
What evidence do you have that the iPhone 6s review is "paid for"? I own both phones (which I paid for, of course) and the AT review is spot on.

The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are the only phones I recommend to anybody in the market for a high end phone. They are that good.
Click to expand...

I've used a ton of high-end phones, the user experience has reached a level where everything is pretty even. I've been suggesting s6/note5 to a ton of people because the VR headsets are an extremely unique peripheral that set them apart.

If I had only one eye, I might check out iphones again. Have a 5s through work and trialed a 6 plus for a week. Just doesn't seem like enough benefits to make up for the amoled screen, easier file structure, and now VR of android.
 
witeken

witeken

Diamond Member
Dec 25, 2013
3,899
193
106
Phynaz said:
I expected talk about Anandtech accepting payola in the mobile forum, not in the CPU forum. :\
Click to expand...

I know that AT isn't sponsered by anyone. That's why it was between quotation marks. But really, the review was very, very positive. I won't blame anyone for thinking such a thing. I don't have the phone so I can't judge, but when you hear a reviewer talking about "perfect (phone)"...
 
Arachnotronic

Arachnotronic

Lifer
Mar 10, 2006
11,715
2,012
126
witeken said:
I know that AT isn't sponsered by anyone. That's why it was between quotation marks. But really, the review was very, very positive. I won't blame anyone for thinking such a thing. I don't have the phone so I can't judge, but when you hear a reviewer talking about "perfect (phone)"...
Click to expand...

It's very positive because it is a truly excellent product. I highly recommend getting one to see for yourself -- it's truly insane what Apple has delivered here.
 
NTMBK

NTMBK

Lifer
Nov 14, 2011
10,245
5,035
136
witeken said:
If A9 is "a monster", "enormous", "incredible" and other stuff said in the iPhone "sponsored by Apple" 6s review, then I wonder which adjectives exist to properly describe SKL ():).

A9 is still no competition for Core m (or Mobile Maxwell on the graphics side).

Also, my calculation of cache http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37805764&postcount=5390.
Click to expand...

It's the finest chip available in its niche- and that niche is the fastest growing, highest volume and most competitive chip market in the world :) It's very specifically targeted at a phone and tablet thermal envelope, and does it very well. However unlike some posters here, I sincerely doubt that this design could clock much higher- leaving slack in the design for higher clocks means worse efficiency at lower clocks. (Intel demonstrated this years ago with their excellent Pentium M line.)
 
T

thunng8

Member
Jan 8, 2013
152
61
101
ShintaiDK said:
And that's the only one being computational CPU bound.
Click to expand...

3dmark physics is a joke on iOS devices. It was hard coded to use 2 threads so a8x saw no speed increases despite it having 3 cores That just shows the quality of the code from 3dmark
 
S

Space69

Member
Aug 12, 2014
39
0
66
Zodiark1593 said:
What would be great is a benchmark that abuses every advantage that can be taken from both cpus (short of any half-precision shortcuts) including NEON, AVX, etc, etc. Basically, a true measure of raw power under ideal circumstances for both architectures.
Click to expand...

That would be great, but will never happen because there's no business case in providing such a benchmark. The amount of work associated with delivering of highly hand optimized code for each CPU family is just too much for any 3rd party. What should the benchmark test? Intel would love heavy optimized AVX2 (and AVX512) FP32/FP64 with random memory access patterns and it would annihilate anything from ARM. ARM would love general purpose code (preferable with fixed functions) with sequential memory access into cache.
 
T

Thanatosis

Member
Aug 16, 2015
102
0
0
I just wish they had put OIS in the smaller phone. You shouldn't have to use a clownphone to get a flagship camera. Maybe Apple should move their top tier camera to the ipad if it feels bigger size = better camera.
 
sm625

sm625

Diamond Member
May 6, 2011
8,172
137
106
Gold rating for a phone that has worse battery life. What an epic fail. Sure it is faster and has a couple new features, but we're talking $800 dollars here. You shouldnt have to sacrifice battery life on a $800 "upgrade".
 
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