Next-Gen iPhone & iPhone Nano Speculation

Actually, the pointy thing was only liquid metal for a small number of 3GS models, everything else since use regular steel. The tray is also aluminium, or possibly steel like the rest of the sidewall in iphone4(S).
 
Since we're presumedly nearing the reveal of a flagship implementation of PowerVR's new Series 6 architecture with the iPhone 5S and A7 SoC, I'll go out on a limb and put in my guess on performance.

Compared to the current highest performing competitor, the LTE Advanced edition of the Galaxy S4 with its 2.3 GHz S800 and accompanying Adreno 330, I project the new iPhone will outperform it by 50% and the new iPad will outperform that Galaxy by over 120% in a modern graphics workload like Gfxbench's T-Rex test.
 
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Compared to the current highest performing competitor, the LTE Advanced edition of the Galaxy S4 with its 2.3 GHz S800 and accompanying Adreno 330, I project the new iPhone will outperform it by 50%...
I doubt this. As efficient and powerful as Series 6 might be, to deliver that improvement against the 330 which is already a huge GPU would be bloody murder and unreasonable to expect in that kind of power envelope.
 
Since we're presumedly nearing the reveal of a flagship implementation of PowerVR's new Series 6 architecture with the iPhone 5S and A7 SoC, I'll go out on a limb and put in my guess on performance.

Compared to the current highest performing competitor, the LTE Advanced edition of the Galaxy S4 with its 2.3 GHz S800 and accompanying Adreno 330, I project the new iPhone will outperform it by 50% and the new iPad will outperform that Galaxy by over 120% in a modern graphics workload like Gfxbench's T-Rex test.

It will be faster alright, im guessing a7 could hit 30% or so faster in gfx bench...probably consume less power and/or be exposed to throttling less than s800.

Im more interested to see if they stick 4 improved swift cores in there and what frequency we can expect.
 
Compared to the current highest performing competitor, the LTE Advanced edition of the Galaxy S4 with its 2.3 GHz S800 and accompanying Adreno 330, I project the new iPhone will outperform it by 50% and the new iPad will outperform that Galaxy by over 120% in a modern graphics workload like Gfxbench's T-Rex test.

I'd love to hear what logic (or math or data or anything else) that you are using to come up with these figures.

Think logically about what you are saying. The iphone 5 currently achieves a score of 6.8 fps as it's top score on this benchmark. You are suggesting that the iphone 5s [on a 28nm fabrication process] will achieve 5.82x higher performance on this benchmark than iphone 5, and that iphone 5s will achieve 2.07x higher performance on this benchmark than ipad 4! Your ipad 5 number is a bit more believable, but even that would require 3.04x higher performance on this benchmark than ipad 4, and it would be only 1.47x higher performance than your "projected" iphone 5s number, which just seems downright bizarre.

Also keep in mind that Apple will be forced to make the transition to a quad-core CPU at some point in the near future. It may not happen until 20nm fabrication next year, but that will eat up some SoC die size area and will increase SoC peak power consumption (all else equal). At that time, they will no longer be able to dedicate so much more SoC die size area towards the GPU relative to other quad-core SoC's.
 
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Also keep in mind that Apple will be forced to make the transition to a quad-core CPU at some point in the near future.
"Forced", how? First off, apple isn't easily forced in any direction, they tend to forge their own path, often using weaker hardware than competitors and still prospering. Second, what would be the motivating factor, forcing them? Where would the benefit lie? Computing doesn't seem to be majorly limiting current smart devices, and in fact, if you do any major computing on them you just run down the battery in short order... :p

I'd rather believe apple would introduce some littleBIG scheme with one or perhaps two weaker cores alongside dual main cores instead into their SoC than expect a straight, symmetrical quadcore design.
 
There is such a thing called "competition". The entire industry is moving towards quad core CPU processors in high end ultra mobile parts, including Intel, Samsung, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, etc. Apple cannot sit on dual core CPU processors forever or they will be left behind in that area. Apple of all companies has never been about "using weaker hardware than competitors".
 
Customers generally don't give a shit about specs (other than battery/standby MAYBE), nor do 90+% of them even understand them. They just want what they percieve as a good phone. If you tried to explain the benefits of a quadcore CPU in a phone (realistically: almost none) to a random person on the street, all you'd get would be a blank stare (and/or possibly disinterest) in return.
 
And so what? Just because an average joe doesn't know the difference between a dual core CPU and a quad core CPU doesn't mean that there are no tangible benefits in going with a quad core CPU (unless you are of the opinion that Intel/Samsung/NVIDIA/Qualcomm all got it wrong here). Make no mistake, at some point in the near future, Apple will go with a quad-core CPU in their high end ultra mobile devices. This is not a question of if but when.
 
I do believe an ARMv8 64-bit solution would be more important that simply tacking on two more cores.

Rather dual-core custom ARMv8 than a quad-core Swift. They could give us both, 2 cores synthesized for power usage and the other cores for performance but right now, we are limited by single core performance, not multicore performance.

Let the rest race to 8-core and other silly solutions.
 
64-bit and quad-core CPU processors are not mutually exclusive. There is little doubt in my mind that Apple will be moving towards incorporating both in their high end ultra mobile products soon (though not necessarily at the same time).
 
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Just because an average joe doesn't know the difference between a dual core CPU and a quad core CPU doesn't mean that there are no tangible benefits in going with a quad core CPU
So what exactly are they? I'm still using an iphone4, it's eminently serviceable for every task you care to throw at it (except heavy duty gaming, which is more the weak GPU's fault, and if I want to game I own better devices than a phone anyway) without even dual cores, much less quad.

(unless you are of the opinion that Intel/Samsung/NVIDIA/Qualcomm all got it wrong here).
It's no more wrong than intel gunning for clock speed back in the pentium4 generation. It's marketing, they're hoping that by flashing fancy razzle-dazzle specs people will buy their stuff.

Make no mistake, at some point in the near future, Apple will go with a quad-core CPU in their high end ultra mobile devices.
Perhaps. Still, there's little to no tangible benefits right now with more than two cores in a phone, I'm sure apple is well aware of that.
 
Quad cores have numerous benefits...the multi tasking element is obviously not much good on ios due to tomb stoning, however games could be coded effectively to use 4 threads (low clocked) video and photo editing apps could certainly use every slice of power as well as zip files which can be multithreaded effectively.
-Arguably the best use for iphone power consumption.

Note I said arguably. ..there will be some scenarios where 4 cores will consume more power than a dual however with throttling likely to be an issue, I severely doubt any quad core can even maintain 1.5ghz in a smartphone for any sustainable period of time before being throttled, let alone krait 400 levels of frequency, so throttling would likely cap any power consumption peaks with four threads.

Anandtech has some very interesting data points comparing performance of dual core s4 pro @ 1.7ghz vs s600 @ 1.7ghz.
Surprisingly the dual core moto x had the advantage in cpu bound graphics benchmarks due to the high tdp headroom for the dual core to run at a higher frequency, where as the quad core kraits spread the load across 4 threads and lowered voltage and frequency = consumed less power...bit with less single thread performance.

Which brings the rather interesting debate to which is the better option for outright performance in a limited tdp smartphone device.

Interesting.
 
Name some iOS apps which are currently CPU-limited.

I think people care about battery life, how fast apps. load, etc. For the latter, more RAM may be noticeable than more cores.

Look at the most popular games and apps. Are those taxing the CPU or GPU?
 
The fact that basically the entire industry (including Apple!) is moving towards quad-core solutions in the ultra mobile space is further evidence that you're wrong.
I've never said it never will happen or never should, just saying the benefit just isn't there in a phone, because nothing you regularly do with a phone benefits (much) from a quad core setup. Multitasking? Who DOES that on a phone...? I play music via spotify and browse the web on my single-core iP4, works fine. That's about the heaviest multitasking you'll see in a phone, and it doesn't even need dual cores to work. The browser is largely limited by javascript, which doesn't scale across multiple cores and thus would not benefit at all, and so on.

Apple will go quadcore, no doubt, but not because some percieved "market pressure" or other shit you've mentioned so far. Phones just aren't CPU limited to any significant extent, heavy content creation or processing, image editing, video editing, and such is largely impractical on a device of that size. The screen is too small and input methods imprecise and very limited. Quad cores (or heck, more) is overall of very marginal benefit, at best.

Edit:
I'd expect to see quad cores in iPad well before they ever appear in iPhone TBH. There you could at least have some reasonable use for it, with the larger display, more room for UI and so on.
 
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Browsing is more often than not limited by single threaded performance (Javascript).

Oh I know that. I wasn't arguing for more cores, just that I wouldn't mind more CPU performance. I'd prefer Apple to just improve the performance of the two cores they have. I see little benefit for Apple to go with more cores.

That said, I'll probably never buy an iPhone.
 
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