The iPhone 5 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Brian Klug & Vivek Gowri on October 16, 2012 11:33 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone 5
Apple's Swift: Visualized
Section by Anand Shimpi
Based on my findings on the previous pages, as well as some additional off-the-record data, this is what I believe Swift looks like at a high level:
Note that most of those blocks are just place holders as I don't know how they've changed from Cortex A9 to Swift, but the general design of the machine is likely what you see above. Swift moves from a 2-wide to a 3-wide machine at the front end. It remains a relatively small out-of-order core, but increases the number of execution ports from 3 in Cortex A9 to 5. Note the dedicated load/store port, which would help explain the tremendous gains in high bandwidth FP performance.
I asked Qualcomm for some additional details on Krait unfortunately they are being quite tight lipped about their architecture. Krait is somewhat similar to Swift in that it has a 3-wide front end, however it only has 4 ports to its 7 execution units. Qualcomm wouldn't give me specifics on what those 7 units were or how they were shared by those 4 ports. It's a shame that Intel will tell me just how big Haswell's integer and FP register files are 9 months before launch, but its competitors in the mobile SoC space are worried about sharing high level details of architectures that have been shipping for half a year.
Apple's Swift core is a wider machine than the Cortex A9, and seemingly on-par with Qualcomm's Krait. How does ARM's Cortex A15 compare? While the front end remans 3-wide, ARM claims a doubling of fetch bandwidth compared to Cortex A9. The A15 is also able to execute more types of instructions out of order, although admittedly we don't know Swift's capabilities in this regard. There's also a loop cache at the front end, something that both AMD and Intel have in their modern architectures (again, it's unclear whether or not Swift features something similar). ARM moves to three dedicated issue pools feeding 8 independent pipelines on the execution side. There are dedicated load and store pipelines, two integer ALU pipes, two FP/NEON pipes, one pipe for branches and one for all multiplies/divides. The Cortex A15 is simply a beast, and it should be more power hungry as a result. It remains to be seen how the first Cortex A15 based smartphone SoCs will compare to Swift/Krait in terms of power. ARM's big.LITTLE configuration was clearly designed to help mitigate the issues that the Cortex A15 architecture could pose from a power consumption standpoint. I suspect we haven't seen the end of NVIDIA's companion core either.
At a high level, it would appear that ARM's Cortex A15 is still a bigger machine than Swift. Swift instead feels like Apple's answer to Krait. The release cadence Apple is on right now almost guarantees that it will be a CPU generation behind in the first half of next year if everyone moves to Cortex A15 based designs.
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medi01 - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
Try to do it in a darker environment.If you still don't notice that AMOLED black is actually, cough, black and "iphone"'s black is actually gray, you probably should visit a doctor.
darwiniandude - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Who cares about black being 100% black when all the colour accuracy is terrible? The galaxy note looks like is has cellophane over the screen next to an iPhone, the white doesn't look white. You take a photo of a hill side and all the trees and grass is the same over saturated shade of green. It's because of this that I'd only consider the HTC one X excuse it has an accurate LCD. I've personally never found an Amoled screen so far I can put up with. Each to their own, if black is more important to you than the rest of the spectrum, then enjoy it.bpear96 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Well obiously, there PPI's are almost the same, because of the size difference.If you had a 4.8" 1136 x 640 display, next to a 4" 1136 x 640 the 4.8" would not look nearly as good as the 4" because it would have a lower PPI (pixels per inch) since the GS3 is larger it needs a higher res display to be on par with the 4" iphone 5 display.
bpear96 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
type - obviously *star-affinity - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
The difference (in my opinion) being that the Galaxy S III has over saturated colors which is quite bad.http://www.displaymate.com/Smartphone_ShootOut_2.h...
GabeA - Saturday, January 5, 2013 - link
Sorry, you're comparing a poor screen technology (PenTile subpel matrix) with a top-of-the-line LCD. The comparison is flawed because the effective resolution on text is only ~82% in either direction (something like 1050 x 590 on sharp, black text) due to the interpolated, non-RGB subpixels.A good comparison would absolutely involve the One X series by HTC. In fact, holding the SGS3 and the One X side by side on this page shows an obvious difference in text clarity in favor of the One X.
rocketbuddha - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
Don't you know that every iPhone comes with the halo of the RDF (Reality Distortion Field) :DThus things that other things have been having for months/years in other models appear antiquated/vanish once iPhone comes near ;-)
doobydoo - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
So having the fastest hardware in any smartphone ever, the iPhone 5 was late to the party?Or was it the fact that it's the thinnest that you're claiming they copied from Android. Or lightest, or thinnest, or shortest, or battery life.
I wonder when any Android phone (bar the Razr Maxx which lets face it is a brick) will catch up?
A5 - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
So you want a Droid Razr HD Maxx, then?webmastir - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
Yep. That should be the #1 choice at the moment.