The iPhone XS & XS Max Review: Unveiling the Silicon Secrets
by Andrei Frumusanu on October 5, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Apple
- Smartphones
- iPhone XS
- iPhone XS Max
Conclusion & End Remarks
While the iPhone XS and XS Max in one sense are just another iteration on last year’s iPhone X, they’re also a big shift for Apple’s line-up. Rather than being actual successors to the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus they're closer to next-generation replacements, but with some significant differences. In that respect I do regret missing out on the iPhone XR for this review, as I think it’s going to be an incredibly attractive alternative to the XS models.
Design wise, there’s not much to talk about the XS: the smaller variant is nigh identical to the iPhone X, with the only visual differences between the phones being the added antenna lines on the XS, virtue of the new 4x4 MIMO cellular capabilities of the phones.
The XS Max sports Apple’s biggest screen, and in a sense I do like the design more because it does have a bigger screen-to-body ratio. Apple’s bezel design is intentional, but I did hope they had shaved 1-2mm off the sides, as I’ve gotten used to other, more full-screen devices. One thing to consider about the XS Max, is that’s it’s really heavy for a phone, passing the 200g mark at 208g.
The screens of the XS and XS Max are the best displays among any devices on the market: While Samsung still has a density advantage, the Apple phones just outgun competing phones in terms of colour accuracy and picture quality. The 10-bit panel allows seamless colour management between sRGB and Display P3 modes depending on content, and Apple’s still the only vendor able to do this without having significant drawbacks.
The Apple A12 is a beast of a SoC. While the A11 already bested the competition in terms of performance and power efficiency, the A12 doubles down on it in this regard, thanks to Apple’s world-class design teams which were able to squeeze out even more out of their CPU microarchitectures. The Vortex CPU’s memory subsystem saw an enormous boost, which grants the A12 a significant performance boost in a lot of workloads. Apple’s marketing department was really underselling the improvements here by just quoting 15% - a lot of workloads will be seeing performance improvements I estimate to be around 40%, with even greater improvements in some corner-cases. Apple’s CPU have gotten so performant now, that we’re just margins off the best desktop CPUs; it will be interesting to see how the coming years evolve, and what this means for Apple’s non-mobile products.
On the GPU side, Apple’s measured performance gains are also within the promised figures, and even above that when it comes to sustained performance. The new GPU looks like an iteration on last year’s design, but an added fourth core as well as the important introduction of GPU memory compression are able to increase the performance to new levels. The negative thing here is I do think Apple’s throttling mechanism needs to be revised – and by that I mean not that it shouldn’t throttle less, but that it might be better if it throttled more or even outright capped the upper end of the performance curve, as it’s extremely power hungry and does heat up the phone a lot in the initial minutes of a gaming session.
On the camera side, Apple made some very solid improvement all-around. The new sensor’s increased pixel size allows for 50% more light sensitivity, but the improved DTI of the sensor also allows for significantly finer details in bright conditions, essentially increasing the effective spatial resolution of the camera. SmartHDR works as promised, and it’s able to produce images with improved dynamic range. The telephoto lens is the one use-case where the XS really stands out over the iPhone X as exposure and colour rendition are significantly improved, one of the weak points of many telephoto cameras nowadays. Overall in daylight, the new iPhone is easily among the best smartphone cameras on the market.
In low light the iPhone XS also sees a big improvement, however it’s not enough to quite match Samsung’s hardware and Huawei’s processing. I do hope Apple will make use of the newfangled computational photography in more use-cases, as we’re seeing some great innovation from the competition in this regard.
Video recording of the iPhone XS is also a major improvement of the phone. From better dynamic range, better stabilisation, to better and now stereo audio recording, Apple makes a significant leap in the video performance of the new iPhones.
In terms of battery life, it was surprising that the iPhone XS wasn’t much of an upgrade over the iPhone X in our test. I’m still not sure if this is something related to some sort of hidden inefficiency of the A12, or maybe something to do with the new WiFi or cellular modem. For the latter, we’ll be revisiting the topic shortly, and to also re-validate the battery life numbers of this review.
For the iPhone XS Max, I wasn’t surprised to see battery life be less than on the iPhone 8 Plus – the OLED screen is less efficient than the LCD display of last year’s phone – and the increased battery capacity is not enough to counter-act this. It’s just something to keep in mind for the big-phone users out there eyeing the iPhone XS Max in particular.
Overall, are the new iPhones worth it to upgrade to? If you’re an iPhone X user, I think my answer is no. If you’re coming from an older device, then my answer is… wait it out. When having a hands-on with the XR at the keynote event, my first thought was that this would be the model that would see the most success for Apple this generation. The problem here is that Apple is asking for a lot of money – if you’re entrenched in the iOS ecosystem, I think it’s best to evaluate the individual pros and upgrades that the new iPhone XS brings over your current device.
The value proposition aside, the new iPhone XS and XS Max are, as always, extremely polished devices, and the best phones that Apple has released to date.
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eastcoast_pete - Sunday, October 7, 2018 - link
Apple's strength (supremacy) in the performance of their SoCs really lies in the fine-tuned match of apps and especially low-level software that make good use of excellent hardware. What happens when that doesn't happen was outlined in detail by Andrei in his reviews of Samsung's Mongoose M3 SoC - to use a famous line from a movie that "could've been a contender", but really isn't. Apple's tight integration is the key factor that a more open ecosytem (Android) has a hard time matching; however, Google and (especially) Qualcomm leave a lot of possible performance improvements on the table by really poor collaboration; for example, GPU-assisted computing is AWOL for Android - not a smart move when you try to compete against Apple.varase - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
I have serious doubts that Android would even run on an A12 SoC - I thought Apple trashed ARMv7 when it went to A11.Strafeb - Saturday, October 6, 2018 - link
It would be interesting to see comparison of screen efficiency of iPhone XR's low res LCD screen, and also some of LG's pOLED screens like in V40.Alistair - Saturday, October 6, 2018 - link
The Xeon Platinum 8176 is a 28 core, $9000 Intel server CPU, based on Skylake. In single threaded performance, the iPhone XS outperforms it by 12 percent for integers, despite its lower clock speed. If the iPhone were to run at 3.8ghz, the Apple A12 would outperform Intel's CPU by 64 percent on average for integer tests.iPhone XS and A12 numbers from: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs...
Xeon numbers from: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12694/assessing-cav...
spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ipKIh4i56o...
image of chart: https://i.imgur.com/IAupi9p.jpg
Think about that, the iPhone's CPU IPC (performance per clock) is already higher in integer performance now. Those tests include: spam filter, compression, compiling, vehicle scheduling, game ai, protein seq. analyses, chess, quantum simulation, video encoding, network sim, pathfinding, and xml processing. Test takes hours to run.
SanX - Saturday, October 6, 2018 - link
Yes, and while Apple and all other mobile processor manufacturers charge $5 per core, Intel $300yeeeeman - Saturday, October 6, 2018 - link
It might be faster in single thread, but in MT it gets toasted by the Xeon. The Xeon is 9000$ for a few reasons:- it is an enterprise chip;
- it supports ecc;
- it supports up to 8 cpus on a board;
- it supports tons of ram, a LOT of memory channels;
- it has almost 40MB of L3 cache, compared to 8mb in a12;
- it has a ring bus architecture meaning all those cores have very low latency between them and to memory;
- it has CISC instructions, meaning that when you get out of basic phone apps and you start doing scientific/database/HPC stuff, you will see a lot of benefits and performance improvements from executing a single instruction for a specific operation, compared to the RISC nature of A12;
- it supports AVX512, needed for high performance computing. In this, the A12 would get smashed;
- and many more;
So the Xeon 8180 is still an mighty impressive chip and Intel has invested some real thought and experience into making it. Things that Apple doesn't have.
I get it, it is nice to see Apple having a chip with this much compute power in such a low TDP and it is due to the fact that x86 chips have a lot of extra stuff added in for legacy. But don't get carried away with this, what Apple is doing now from uArch point of view is not new. Desktop chip have had this stuff 15 years ago. The difference is that Apple works on the latest fabrication process and doesn't care about x86 legacy.
Alistair - Saturday, October 6, 2018 - link
"It might be faster in single thread, but in MT it gets toasted by the Xeon"That is totally irrelevant. Obviously Apple could easily make a chip with more cores. Just like Cavium's Thunder. 8 x A12 Vortex cores would beat an 8 core Xeon in integer calculations easily enough.
eastcoast_pete - Sunday, October 7, 2018 - link
Agree on your points re. the XEON. However, I'd still like to see Apple launch CPUs/iGPUs based on their design especially in the laptop space, where Intel still rules and charges premium prices. If nothing else, Apple getting into that game would fan the flames under Intel's chair that AMD is trying to kindle (started to work for desktop CPUs). In the end, we all benefit if Chipzilla either gets off its enormous bottom(line) and innovates more, or gets pushed to the side by superior tech. So, even as a non-Apple user: go Apple, go!Constructor - Sunday, October 7, 2018 - link
CISC instructions generally don't really do much more than RISC ones do – they just have more addressing modes while RISC is almost always register-to-register with separate Load & Store.
That just doesn' make any difference any more because the bottleneck is not instruction fetching (as it once was in the old times) but actually execution unit pipeline congestion, including of the Load & Store units.
There's already a scalable vector extention for ARM which Apple could adopt if that was actually a bottleneck. And even the existing vector units aren't anything to scoff at – the issue is more that Intel CPUs are forced to drop down to half their nominal clock once you actually use AVX512; It could actually be more efficient to optimize the regular vetor units for ful lspeed operation to make up for it.
We actually have no clue what Apple is investing in behind closed doors until they slam it on the table as a finished product ready for sale!
tipoo - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
I'm hoping Apple takes the ARM switch as an opportunity to bring an ARM AVX-512 equivalent down to more products, like the iMac.