It looks more and more likely that most of the extra transistors in the A8 were spent on extra SRAM. Maybe they decided to dump the entire frame buffer onto the on-die cache. That'd be at least 9 MB to take care of the entire iOS lineup.
Increasing the L3 SRAM was actually my first thought regarding the ballooning of transistor count as well. It both provides a boost in performance and increases efficiency at the same time. (Costs far less power to transfer data to/from on-die SRAM than it does any off-die memory.)
Yeah and let's hope they'll get cache location correct at their first try this time :biggrin:Can't wait for the Chipworks tear-down...
Interesting. A8 supports H.265 in hardware.
In contrast, A7 does not.
Fail if true. With the 6 Plus they are going to need a lot of GPU grunt to push those additional pixels.
The spec indicates the function is Facetime-only, and as it's Apple, I doubt they'd open the decoder up for general use until there's a "legitimate" content delivery service for H265.
Maybe there'll be a thing with 4K iTunes and the iPad refresh. Some partnership with Netflix and/or Vimeo seems likely too.
This isn't confirmed and is GPU related but it appears that preliminary GPU benchmarks of the iphone 6 are out.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-iphone-6-gpu-benchmarks,27668.html
Merely speculation but its possible that the 50% figure may have been under a best case senario.
Everyone complaining about 1GB of memory cites Safari's tab reloading. Is there any app besides Safari that could take advantage of more than 1GB of memory?
The 1GB is for the entire phone. All your apps, OS etc.
The iPhone simply relies on swapping to make it work.
iOS doesn't swap. That's left up to the developer.
I'm asking all the people complaining about the memory what it would actually be used for.
Its a case of build it and they will come.
Currently no app exists that really uses that much memory because no device has that much memory.
Everyone complaining about 1GB of memory cites Safari's tab reloading. Is there any app besides Safari that could take advantage of more than 1GB of memory?
I don't even care about other apps. The app I use the most on iDevices is Safari.
No, and that's also avoiding the question. There's no app that uses 1GB either because the OS doesn't allow it.
And that's a pretty good reason not to have that much memory if it just allows bad programmers to waste resources.
No, and that's also avoiding the question. There's no app that uses 1GB either because the OS doesn't allow it.
And that's a pretty good reason not to have that much memory if it just allows bad programmers to waste resources.
GPU that needs to push a 1080p display when running a game?
Will this make the experience on the 6+ worse then the smaller phones?
This is something that worried me when I saw these numbers, too.