Early iPhone 6 Benchmarks Show Small GPU Performance Improvement

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InvalidError

Titan
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Even if you double the raw GPU power, that does you little good unless you have nearly double the memory bandwidth to support it.

The A8 might have 50% extra raw GPU power but require architecture-specific software tweaking to reduce its memory bandwidth dependence before the extra processing power can be leveraged.
 

lightofhonor

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It could be that they are talking about total GPU power and not relative power. The 37% increase in screen resolution and still pushing 16% faster equates to about 50% to me.
 

JOSHSKORN

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Typical of Apple. Make their phones such that their specs look good on paper but in the real world, no one notices the differences. Fanbois will always be delusional enough to think that they notice a difference, but in reality, there probably isn't one.
 

Bloob

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If they weren't all talk during the keynote, then the biggest advance would be efficiency. Will have to wait and see if talks of less heating during gameplay holds true.
 

qlum

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I am no apple fan but even if their cpu's are still relatively low clock speed dual cores they do perform pretty well. I sometimes get the feeling that the high clock speed quad cores are the FX of the mobile world. Lots of cores, lots of clock speed yet not the performance you'd want.
 
Leaks suggest the iPhone 6 is also still crippled by a pathetic 1GB of RAM (good luck multitasking with that). The fact that Apple hasn't mentioned memory in the press releases strongly imply this is indeed the case.
http://bgr.com/2014/08/18/iphone-6-rumors-ram-memory/
 

The Net Avenger

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Leaks suggest the iPhone 6 is also still crippled by a pathetic 1GB of RAM (good luck multitasking with that). The fact that Apple hasn't mentioned memory in the press releases strongly imply this is indeed the case.
http://bgr.com/2014/08/18/iphone-6-rumors-ram-memory/

Read this aloud, "1GB of RAM is easily capable of running the desktop version of Windows 7/8."

Now remember, not everything is Android and insanely memory hungry. WP is the leader when it comes to performing well with lower amounts of memory, but iOS is not bad and if Apple is doing their job and optimizing, iOS8 should run well on 1GB of RAM.

 

InvalidError

Titan
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Having lots of cores does you no good when most software makes little to no meaningful use of threading.

In the Android Development Kit guidelines, they tell developers to use threaded objects to do things like load images to avoid bogging down the main thread so applications can feel more responsive. This is fine as far as responsiveness is concerned but in terms of CPU performance scaling, those extra threads will be waiting on IO most of the time so overall performance remains mostly the same and perceived performance is dominated by single-threaded performance: how quickly the main thread can manage the UI's layout and parsing.

So I have no trouble believing a lower-clocked CPU with fewer cores but higher IPC can end up generally more responsive than CPUs with more cores and higher clocks.
 

the1kingbob

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If the boost is coming from the API, won't the 5s see a boost as well once it is updated to iOS8? They must have just boosted the frequencies and factored in the API improvements. They might have to amend to say, "50% increase of 5s running iOS7"
 

ZolaIII

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How about that I tell you that its a same slightly redesigned GPU to be more power efficient or faster & it happened after Nv marked to Imagination how their GPUs are power not power efficient. IPs did happen almost at the start of the year bat this will be the first commercially available part.

Where did Apple got those performance projections?
How about a little quote: "Series6XT GPU cores are up to 50% faster clock for clock, cluster for cluster compared to their Series6 counterparts".
Who wants to read more about it can officially @:
http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/new-powervr-series6xt-gpus-go-rogue-ces-2014
Why didn't they go with more clusters?
Well ask the rotten Apple not me.
 
Leaks suggest the iPhone 6 is also still crippled by a pathetic 1GB of RAM (good luck multitasking with that). The fact that Apple hasn't mentioned memory in the press releases strongly imply this is indeed the case.
http://bgr.com/2014/08/18/iphone-6-rumors-ram-memory/

Read this aloud, "1GB of RAM is easily capable of running the desktop version of Windows 7/8."

Now remember, not everything is Android and insanely memory hungry. WP is the leader when it comes to performing well with lower amounts of memory, but iOS is not bad and if Apple is doing their job and optimizing, iOS8 should run well on 1GB of RAM.

7/8 can run on 1GB but it certainly should not. It is not smooth nor is it fun. I have tried. Even 2GB of RAM is cutting it close.

My main problem is that everyone was touting the 64Bit Apple CPU yet it is pointless with 1GB of system RAM. The biggest benefits of 64Bit is that the OS can allocate more than 4GB and the apps can access more than 2GB (without the need of PAE of course which even still limits it to 4GB).

Overall it shows that Apple is still behind the curve. The S6 is going to be a 64Bit CPU, probably 3GB+ system RAM, rumors of a 4K display but most likely a 5.5 inch QHD screen and even the possibility of it having the same wrap around screen as the Galaxy Edge.

This just shows that it is the same fluff Apple always does. They finally catch up and tout it as revolutionary when in fact it is not. NFC is not new. Hell my phone has NFC (S4) and I can even share movies between Galaxy phones. And it is almost 2 years old.

Still though people flock like sheep to the iPhone as if it is Gods gift to man.

On another note, I have been playing with WP8.1 and I like it so far. Smooth and fast. As well it has made me realize that the iPhone is babies first phone.
 

ferooxidan

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Ha ha ha! This result and still EA claims that iPhone 6 is better than PS4 and Xbox One! So delusional. Is it a coincidence that they are similar? oh, wait! EA.... Eventually Apple.... hmmm no wonder then.
 

Drejeck

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I'm so sorry I bought an M8 just few days ago, 128gb sd, bluetooth keyboard and UAG maverick cover, for less than the cheapest iFisher-Price phone 6 :D
 

The Net Avenger

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This is getting a bit technical, but a lot of what you are discussing is very Android specific. (And I'm not disagreeing with you.) It helps when the OS and platform/model is assisting with the threading, where Android offers almost nothing.

One tiny example specific to your post would be WP/Windows - grabbing an image using the OS APIs not only automatically creates the thread for the developer, it also uses whatever hardware is available, even using the GPU for decoding if it would be faster and is available. (This is why Win7/8 on the desktop would be able to load media and images so much faster than XP, as it was using the WDM/WDDM driver and shoving the decode through the GPU and threading the loadimage APIs.)

The development on WP and Android is night and day, and where most of the performance difference of WP comes from when people talk about Apps and the UI being more responsive and faster, as the OS is managing these things for developers and using more of the hardware than Android uses.

Side Note - This is why Microsoft required dual core devices for WP8, as the App platform it uses is highly threaded - even if the developers don't use/consider/understand threading, as it automatically gives developers a lot of background concurrency that Android and even iOS don't have.


The main CPU bump Apple had with the 5s was due to the ARMv8 differences that incorporates more CISC functionality into the ARM RISC model. (Being 64bit had little difference, especially with virtually no OS level support for 64bits.)

The GPU differences they are touting for the iPhone 6 are more than just iOS optimizations, but they are not huge.

I even if you take the percentages that Apple gives out at face value, they are a 50% gain, which is easily consumed in pushing the extra pixels on the screen.

The iPhone GPU isn't some major new revolution.

If you look at the numbers it barely beats the Adreno 330 GPU with the 801 Qualcomm. Even the Nokia 1520/Icon with the older Qualcomm 800 is in the same performance range as the new iPhone 6. So the iPhone 6's new GPU is just keeping up with a Win8 phone that was released in November of 2013.

(The Nokia 1520 and Icon both held the 3D/gaming title until the new HTC came out, and that is still questionable, as the HTC was found to be using tricks when it detected benchmarking software.)


 

therealduckofdeath

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Read this aloud, "1GB of RAM is easily capable of running the desktop version of Windows 7/8."

Though, if you are running your PC with 1GB these days, you're seriously doing everything you can to avoid multitasking. It's possible, if it's used for things like a media player. But don't come and try saying 1GB is enough for more than just simple single-tasking.
 

deppman

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Tegra K1 shows nearly 29k @1200p vs 15k @ 750p for the A8.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8296/the-nvidia-shield-tablet-review/5

That's around 4.5x the performance when normalized for resolution (pixels x score). Sure, the K1 draws more power at that level, but drop it to match the performance of the A8, and it probably remains close to 1.4x more power efficient as shown with the A7. It will be even more interesting when the maxwell based Tegra shows up next year with ~2x the perf/W.

Maybe it's time Apple change its GPU provider?

 
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