The iPhone 5s Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 17, 2013 9:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone
- iPhone 5S
Final Words
The iPhone 5s is quite possibly the biggest S-update we've ever seen from Apple. I remember walking out of the venue during Apple's iPhone 5 launch and being blown away by the level of innovation, at the platform/silicon level, that Apple crammed into the iPhone 5. What got me last time was that Apple built their own ARM based CPU architecture from the ground up, while I understand that doesn't matter for the majority of consumers - it's no less of an achievement in my eyes. At the same time I remember reading through a sea of disappointment on Twitter - users hoping for more from Apple with the iPhone 5. If you fell into that group last time, there's no way you're going to be impressed by the iPhone 5s. For me however, there's quite a bit to be excited about.
The A7 SoC is seriously impressive. Apple calls it a desktop-class SoC, but I'd rather refer to it as something capable of competing with the best Intel has to offer in this market. In many cases the A7's dual cores were competitive with Intel's recently announced Bay Trail SoC. Web browsing is ultimately where I noticed the A7's performance the most. As long as I was on a good internet connection, web pages just appeared after resolving DNS. The A7's GPU performance is also insanely good - more than enough for anything you could possibly throw at the iPhone 5s today, and fast enough to help keep this device feeling quick for a while.
Apple's move to 64-bit proves it is not only committed to supporting its own microarchitectures in the mobile space, but also that it is being a good steward of the platform. Just like AMD had to do in the mid-2000s, Apple must plan ahead for the future of iOS and that's exactly what it has done. The immediate upsides to moving to 64-bit today are increased performance across the board as well as some huge potential performance gains in certain FP and cryptographic workloads.
The new camera is an evolutionary but much appreciated step forward compared to the iPhone 5. Low light performance is undoubtedly better, and Apple presents its users with an interesting balance of spatial resolution and low light sensitivity. The HTC One seemed to be a very polarizing device for those users who wanted more resolution and not just great low light performance - with the 5s Apple attempts to strike a more conservative balance. The 5s also benefits from the iOS's excellent auto mode, which seems to do quite well for novice photographers. I would love to see full manual control exposed in the camera UI, but Apple's auto mode seems to be quite good for those who don't want to mess with settings. The A7's improved ISP means things like HDR captures are significantly quicker than they were on even the iPhone 5. Shot to shot latency is also incredibly low.
Apple's Touch ID was the biggest surprise for me. I found it very well executed and a nice part of the overall experience. When between the 5s and the 5/5c, I immediately miss Touch ID. Apple is still a bit too conservative with where it allows Touch ID instead of a passcode, but even just as a way to unlock the device and avoid typing in my iCloud password when downloading apps it's a real improvement. I originally expected Touch ID to be very gimmicky, but now I'm thinking this actually may be a feature we see used far more frequently on other platforms as well.
The 5s builds upon the same chassis as the iPhone 5 and with that comes a number of tradeoffs. I still love the chassis, design and build quality - I just wish it had a larger display. While I don't believe the world needs to embrace 6-inch displays, I do feel there is room for another sweet spot above 4-inches. For me personally, Motorola has come the closest with the Moto X and I would love to see what Apple does with a larger chassis. The iPhone has always been a remarkably power efficient platform, a larger chassis wouldn't only give it a bigger, more usable screen but also a much larger battery to boot. I'm not saying that replacing the 4-inch 5s chassis is the only option, I'd be fine with a third model sitting above it in screen size/battery capacity similar to how there are both 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pros.
The lack of 802.11ac and LTE-A support also bother me as the 5s is so ahead of the curve elsewhere in silicon. There's not much I can see to either point other than it's obvious that both will be present in next year's model, and for some they may be features worth waiting for.
At the end of the day, if you prefer iOS for your smartphone - the iPhone 5s won't disappoint. In many ways it's an evolutionary improvement over the iPhone 5, but in others it is a significant step forward. What Apple's silicon teams have been doing for these past couple of years has really started to pay off. From a CPU and GPU standpoint, the 5s is probably the most futureproof of any iPhone ever launched. As much as it pains me to use the word futureproof, if you are one of those people who likes to hold onto their device for a while - the 5s is as good a starting point as any.
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BrooksT - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Nobody will disagree because you've completely destroyed your credibility by insulting the credibility, integrity, and competence of the reviewer, the site, and Apple because the evidence doesn't conform to your speculations and bias. You are not to be taken seriously, and at this point I think everyone sees that.Post evidence of this conspiracy or STFU.
ddriver - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
How a whiff of reality for you - my credibility is and has not been on the line on this one. You don't know who I am, you don't know my credentials. This is not the case for Anand, even if I am right he is not in the position to admit to compiling the review in a manner that creates an unrealistically good presentation of a product, because unlike for me, that would be a huge credibility calamity for him. If anything, his responses are very "political" carefully dancing around the pivot points of my concerns. While his response did partially bring light to a few of my concerns, my key points remain valid - the article continues to not compare A7 with ARMv7 head to head in the sole native CPU benchmark present in the article, "CPU performance" was not renamed to JS performance or moved to browser performance or something like that. See, just because he didn't agree with my points and admit to being biased does not mean I am wrong and that is not the case, considering he is not in the position to do that. I didn't really expect anything more or less than the same "carefully dancing" answer as the article itself, my main motivation was to show him that not all AT readers are incapable of reading between the lines, for the sake of future articles, I did not expect that he would make any revision to the article at hand. Honesty is for those who have nothing to lose, and while his credibility is no the line, my isn't, make the conclusions, if you can ;)CyberAngel - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
Don't worry! I believe you...conditionally!I put it this way: I greatly doubt that the tests would reveal any points that are less than favorable the Apple. ANY company would do the same: promote the best parts and highlight the strength of the product.
akdj - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
"You don't know who I am, you don't know my credentials."I'm not sure anyone here is interested---you've already made clear you're a conspiracy theorist, that you believe Apple is paying off reviewers, that you disrespect folks MUCH more intelligent than yourself when it comes to chip architecture...and that your "main motivation was (Is) to show him that not all AT readers are incapable of reading between the lines". You've shown NO one ANYthing substantiated. You continue to argue baseless facts and accuse respected individuals and groups/teams of intelligent members of being bias towards Apple. Nothing in this review supports your claims---NOTHING! And, as I pointed out earlier---even the biggest anti-apple sites are applauding Apple's efforts with this SoC effort.
You're in the minority---and to be so vain that we would care about who you are and what your credentials are is silly. It sounds to me like you're a 17 year old with a decent vocabulary and not enough paper in the pocket to pick up an iPhone 5s for yourself. But...what do I know. I don't know you, your credentials...or how you lean politically, nor do I care.
IMO---you're an insult to the entire Anand crew. I'm not sure why I continue to read your responses, they're all the same, just worded differently. Again...you're in the (extreme) minority. You're certainly not an engineer, chip designer, app developer or technological guru---if you were, you would understand the feat Apple has achieved with this SoC architecture.
J
Nurenthapa - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
I've been enjoying reading this in China, but you, sir, are really annoying me with your sniveling drivel. You have an axe to grind and simply won't shut up. Hope you disappear from this forum. BTW, I use a HTC One and iPad 2, and occasionally my old original 2007 iPhone. I love IOS and iPhones, but won't be buying one until they come out with a somewhat bigger screen.oryades - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Intel, now Apple, the same featured reviews.edward kuebler - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
We are talking about 64 bits too much. The story is new instruction set in ARMv8. Instead complicating the hardware for backwards compatibility (e.g. look at x86 still supporting 16bit code) they wrote a new instruction set faster and less energy demanding. There is still ARMv7 compatibility, but the 64bit mode is independent. And the thing is, once you redesign your architecture, why not go 64bit? what´s the point of staying 32 bit? Moving more data is both slower and faster. More and wider registers help compiler optimizations and media decoding. I didn't get all this “cunning deceitful conspiracy” feeling you talk about. Staying in 32 bit land, *that* would keep me guessing.Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Our browser based suite (stressing js/HTML5 and other browser based workloads) remains unchanged from all of the other mobile SoC reviews we've done. There's no way of getting around the software differences on these mobile devices as you buy hardware+software together. Unfortunately it's still our best option for non-GPU cross platform comparisons, there just aren't many good cross platform CPU tests.I called out the inclusion of hardware accelerated AES/SHA when referencing those tests, there were no attempts to hide that fact. The fact remains that those algorithms will see a speedup on ARMv8 hardware because of those instructions. Note this is no different than when we run the TrueCrypt benchmarks on AES-NI enabled processors vs. those that don't have it (e.g. http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph5626/44765...
Apple provided absolutely zero guidelines on how the review was to be conducted. The only stipulations were around making sure we didn't disclose the fact that we had devices. In fact, most manufacturers don't - at least not with us. Whenever there are any stipulations presented, we always disclose them on the site (e.g. see our early look at Trinity desktop performance).
Krait implements ARMv7, so that's 64-bit wide registers for its NEON units. It expanded the width of the execution units, but the registers themselves have to adhere to the ARMv7 ISA.
I think we explained why 64-bit makes sense (doing so at the last minute doesn't make sense, immediate SIMD/Crypto perf increases today, and helps build up the ecosystem), and even highlighted cases where a performance degradation does happen (see: Dijkstra tests). Keep in mind that iOS has always erred on the side of being more thrifty with RAM to begin with. I would like to see more but I don't know how necessary it is today.
Take care,
Anand
ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Anand, maybe you should hire a developer to write native cross platform benchmark tools. This is the only way to avoid all caveats like sponsored exclusive optimizations, different implementations, eliminate unrealistic low footprint synthetics, "selective compilers" (*cough Intel*) and whatnot. Considering the amount of reviews you are doing and the fact that C/C++ compilers have caught up with ARM for a long time, this is nothing hard and something that entirely makes sense, especially relative to using different JS engine implementations to measure CPU performance. JS should go in the "browser" department, not CPU performance.According to wikipedia, Krait implements 128bit SIMD, so maybe that is a mistake on wikipedia's behalf?
I still think encryption results belong in their own chart, and have no place in a chart that is supposed to be indicative of the integer performance delta between 32 and 64bit execution modes. Even with the clarification you made, it creates an unrealistic impression, not to mention some people skimp over the text and only look at the numbers. Encryption is encryption, integer performance is integer performance. Why mix the two (except for the reason I already mentioned and you deny)?
I wish you'd reflected a bit on the marketing aspect of the transition to 64, considering how much apple is riding it this time around. No one argues 64bit is good and more performance is good, but this brings up the issue of the particular implementation, e.g. a fast chip with only a single gigabyte of ram, and how will that play out with an actual performance demanding real world application.
Thanks for addressing my concerns.
Wilco1 - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
ARMv7 has 32 64-bit SIMD registers but they can also be used as 16 128-bit SIMD registers. Modern CPUs like Cortex-A15 and Krait support many 128-bit SIMD operations in a single cycle, but not all operations are supported (such as double precision FP). ARMv8 has 32 128-bit SIMD registers and supports SIMD of 2 64-bit doubles.