Apple iPhone 4S: Thoroughly Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on October 31, 2011 7:45 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone
- iPhone 4S
The A6: What's Next?
Apple has somehow managed to get a lot of the mainstream press to believe it doesn't care about specs and that it competes entirely based on user experience. Simply looking at the facts tell us a different story entirely:
| Apple SoCs | ||||||||
| 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | |||
| Process | 90nm | 90nm | 65nm | 45nm | 45nm | 28/32nm | ||
| µArch | ARM11 | ARM11 | Cortex A8 | Cortex A8 | Cortex A9 | ? | ||
| CPU Clock | 412MHz | 412MHz | 600MHz | 800MHz | 800MHz | ? | ||
Apple has been at the forefront of the mobile hardware race, particularly if we look at the iOS platform as a whole (iPad + iPhone). Apple was among the first to move from ARM11 to the Cortex A8, and once again with the move to the A9. On the GPU side Apple has been even more aggressive.
Apple hasn't stayed on the same process node for more than two generations, echoing a philosophy maintained by even the high-end PC GPU vendors. It also hasn't shipped the same microprocessor architecture for more than two generations in a row.
Furthermore Apple even seems to be ok with combining a process shrink with a new architecture as we saw with the iPhone 3GS. It's generally thought of as a risky practice to migrate to both a new process technology and a new architecture in the same generation, although if you can pull it off the benefits are wonderful.
The truth of the matter is Apple is very focused on user experience, but it enables that experience by using the fastest hardware available on the market. With that in mind, what comes in 2012 with Apple's sixth-generation SoC?
It's fairly obvious that we'll see a process node shrink. Apple has been on 45nm for two generations now and the entire market will be moving to 28/32nm next year. If Apple sticks with Samsung, it'll be on their 32nm LP process.
The CPU architecture is a bit of a question at this point. We already know that Qualcomm will be shipping its next-generation Krait architecture in devices in the first half of 2012. TI, on the other hand, will deliver an ARM Cortex A15 based competitor by the end of next year. The aggressive move would be for Apple to once again migrate to a new process and architecture and debut a Cortex A15 design at 32nm next year.
Looking purely at historical evidence it would seem likely that we'd get a 32nm dual-Cortex A9 design at higher clocks first. If Apple wants to release an iPad update early next year, that's likely what we'll see. That still doesn't preclude a late 2012 release of a dual-Cortex A15 solution, perhaps for use in the next iPhone.
Note that we haven't talked much about potential GPU options for Apple's next silicon. Given the huge upgrade we saw going into the A5 and likely resolution targets for next-generation tablets, it's likely that we'll see pretty big gains there as well.
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Davabled - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
With Field test enabled, do numbers closer to zero indicate a better connection? (I'm referring to the numbers that replace the bars in the upper left corner)Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
Correct :)Take care,
Anand
Formul - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
why the huge drop from iPad 2 to iPhone 4S in the GL benchmark pro? its only about 30% performance .... any explanation?Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
Because the number was incorrect :-P Fixed now :)Take care,
Anand
ZebuluniteX - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
Great review as always Anand!In addition to the GL benchmark pro results Formul mentioned, I was also surprised to see the Motorola Droid RAZR for some reason do far better than other Gingerbread-based Android smartphones. It is listed as using different version of Android (2.3.5 vs 2.3.4 or older), but given that very similar results were shown between the iPhone 4S and Honeycomb-running Galaxy Tab 8.9 in your 'iPhone 4S Preliminary Benchmarks' article (where the 4S was a bit slower than the Galaxy Tab in SunSpider, and marginally faster in BrowserMark), I'm guess those are just mislabeled Galaxy Tab results. Is that the case?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
Thank you - be sure to thank Brian Klug as well, he really did the bulk of the heavy lifting here. I just popped in to talk about silicon and battery life.The RAZR numbers are what we ran at the RAZR announcement: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4981/motorola-droid-...
The improvement is likely due to an updated browser from Motorola. I included those numbers effectively as a placeholder until Ice Cream Sandwich arrives :)
Take care,
Anand
ZebuluniteX - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Ah, thanks for the clarification, I missed that article. Hmm, that's interesting that, apparently, Motorola "ported" Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich's browser optimizations to Gingerbread (or at least I assume that's what happened)...I'm in the market for a smartphone, and while I was leaning towards the 4S since I already am in the Apple ecosystem via an iPod Touch 2G, before pulling the trigger I wanted to read the Anandtech take on it. The review was excellent as always - thanks again to both you and Brian!
Formul - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
that was fast! i knew something was not right as there was no mention of this in the text :-)thanks for another great review, keep up the good work! :-)
zanon - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
The article wrote "The expectation that Apple will always deliver more than just a hardware upgrade is likely what made Siri a 4S exclusive."While only time will tell for sure, it seems quite possible that graduated ramp up had a bigger role to play here. As you say, most of the heavy duty lifting for Siri is going on server-side, and in turn local processing needs aren't too bad. However, the natural flip side of that of course is that the server-side infrastructure is required for the service to work at all, and resources aren't unlimited there either. Even with it limited purely to 4S users, Siri still had some availability problems in the first few days as millions activated and tried to user it simultaneously. It's not hard to imagine what would have happened if every single one of the tens of millions able to upgrade to iOS 5 *also* tried to start using it immediately. Apple has built a huge data center and that's all well and good, but nothing substitutes for actual working experience when it comes to massive software services.
By limiting the initial rollout, Apple can do performance profiling, get an idea of average loads after initial "let's try it" dies down, and so forth. Staggering a rollout also means being able to plan for the general load rather then suffering the classic and well known double-bind of
A) Building for a peak load, and ending up being left with a lot of extraneous hardware that barely gets used.
B) Building for the average, then suffering from embarrassing and headline generating outages for a week or two.
It's true they could just decide to keep it 4S only, but given they are still selling the iPhone 4, and probably make plenty of profit on that now very mature device, I think there is a decent chance they'll roll it out to a wider audience down the road.
Also, a few typos:
Page 2:
I think the phrase is "pretty much par for the *course* for Apple..." rather then "par for the case".
Pg 9, WiFi:
"...newest WLAN, Bluetooth, and FM *cobo* chip" should I think be "combo".
Pg 15:
...4S, without a (big blank, presumably some sentence was supposed to go here?)
Pg 16:
"aren't simply *academical*" should be "academic".
Again, great review, thank you.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
That's a very good point, I will add it to the discussion. The sinister view is to assume Apple did it to differentiate, the balanced view takes into account infrastructure, which is exactly what you did here :)And thanks for the corrections :)