Next-Gen iPhone & iPhone Nano Speculation

[tangey]

Then again, what difference will you be able to tell between the army of 10.1" tablets with FullHD screens and that 9" 2048*1536?
Amazingly, none.

The most amazing thing about that sentence is that a 10.1" screen is exactly 10.1", but a 9.7" somehow becomes 9" .

The unsurprising answer is that marketing plays as a big a role as technical reasons.

for many andriod devices
4-core cpu
10.1" screen (not 10", is that "0.1" really necessary to mention ?)

or in the case of the new ipad the buzz phrases include
1) 4-core gpu
2) 1M pixels more than your 1080P TV
The fact that they don't have to consider any compatibility issues regarding apps is clearly important too

 

[silent_guy]

Then again, what difference will you be able to tell between the army of 10.1" tablets with FullHD screens and that 9" 2048*1536?
Amazingly, none.

I've no idea which army of FullHD screens I'll be able to buy 2 weeks from now, but I'm sure you'll let us now.

The fact that FullHD 10" screen exist is an almost as impressive feat of human ingenuity. Did you see me say so otherwise?

It's just very unfortunate that the screen aspect ratio doesn't match my iPad/Kindle trained habit of reading in portrait mode. And as long as your army doesn't run iOS it's useless for me personally.

The only reason for that stupidly high resolution is the fact that Apple is afraid of even trying to implement a decent scaler.

Yes, Apple is known to be afraid to tackle technical challenges that are worth tackling. Cowards.

Otherwise, 1600*1200 would have been just as great, without the fact that they now lack the huge bandwidth required for feeding that screen at its native resolution.

A lot of your FullHD tablets will be driven by a single MC Tegra 3 with much worse BW/pixel. So better not bother with your army then?

FWIW: I don't think BW is going to be a main concern for either case.

So yeah, it's just this one thing for all the fans to brag about the device while everything else gets easily surpassed.

Sure, Totts. All 60 million of them.

 

[wco81]

They may have kept the same clock speeds, including the 250MHz on the 543MP4, as I expected.

Seems to still be dual core A9.

So, A5X for iPad 3. The A6, then, would be for either the next iPhone or simply next year…

Seems to me Apple nailed it perfectly: staying out of the futile CPU and MHz race yet pushing the GPU to more cores for the iPad 3's 4x resolution display.

You know the way they branded the SOC and the iPad ("the New iPad") may lend credence to the speculation about another iPad later this year with the A6, presumably with better CPU and GPU cores.

Cook also alluded to more products coming the rest of 2012 as well.

I was going to pull the trigger and buy one but that makes me hesitate a bit. No way I can wait until next year but this fall?

Then again, they said they will roll this out faster than any other product in their history (more countries earlier).

 

[Entropy]

The screen is more than just resolution.
It's evenness in illumination, contrast, viewing angles and color gamut.
It's the (lack of) thickness in the glass cover and its resistance to damage, the quality of the touch sensitive surface.

Apple dedicates resources to aspects of their devices that are important, but difficult to impossible to market to the public.

 

[silent_guy]

I'm betting the new products will be high-res screens on the new MacBooks. It's about time.

If so, it's going to be an expensive year.

 

[wco81]

What about that claimed 9 hour battery life with LTE? That's pretty notable, isn't it?

A lot of LTE owners are turning off LTE to preserve battery life yet Apple is claiming same battery life as the predecessor on 3G.

 

[hoho]

I'm betting the new products will be high-res screens on the new MacBooks. It's about time.

What about new ipod?

 

[wishiknew]

... Did all that extra weight all go to the battery?

The wifi version isn't lasting all that much longer though.

 

[ltcommander.data]

What about new ipod?

With the new AppleTV coming with a single core A5, I'm suddenly worried that the iPod Touch will use it too. A definite step up from the current A4, especially when combined with 512MB of RAM, but still a big performance gap compared to the latest iPad and iPhone. And yet another SoC for developers to target.

 

[benjiro]

A lot of your FullHD tablets will be driven by a single MC Tegra 3 with much worse BW/pixel. So better not bother with your army then?

Actually, this is the exact reason why the Tegra3 got dumped for the "refreshed" Transformer Prime that is to come out. And it was replaced by the Krait ( that has dual channel memory ).

The Tegra 3 its bandwidth seems to be too limited to deal with these new HD Tablet screen craze that are coming out the next months.

Well what a let down.. am i the only one left a bit bemused by this? no siri?? thicker?? yes a nice resolution bump..but seeing as that was rumoured for the ipad 2 that was to be expected... the graphics jump seems nice..im guessing duel core A9's @1.2 -1.5ghz... why are we mentioning only single channel lpddr3 for A5X?? am i missing something?

To me, its not exactly a mass upgrade compared to the iPad2. More like a iPad2S.

The resolution bump is nice, but there are already several Android tablets announced with slightly lower resolutions ( but still massively higher then current generation ).

We already know that for Apple Fans, they will gladly point out the massive resolution compared to future Android tablets, with maybe 1080p or whatever. But in reality, from a viewing point, probably nobody will be able to tell the difference between the two.

To me, last i checked, there are plenty of things that are very much CPU dependent, more then GPU. And i feel that Apple made a mistake by doubling the GPU, and probably just small updating the CPU.

Like holding back stuff for the iPad4 for next year.

Also, assuming that the SOC is made on a lower manufacturing process, i find it strange that the Battery size is increased, to keep that same running time as the iPad2. Screen eating more power? Or is the SOC still made at the old manufacturing process? Or combination of both.

Anyway, i was hoping to put a iPad3 on my shopping list, but with this "iPad2S", i rather look more at the new Android devices ( who do offer more value for buck ). SD support anybody? What's the point in spending 100$ for 16GB more on a iPad, when you can get a nice fast 32GB SD card, for 30$...

Reading several topics on mac forums, you hear people CRYING for more Flash space on the iPad, because people find it limiting ( even the 64GB = 200$ more expensive one ).

What about that claimed 9 hour battery life with LTE? That's pretty notable, isn't it?

A lot of LTE owners are turning off LTE to preserve battery life yet Apple is claiming same battery life as the predecessor on 3G.

That is not a major feat for a simple reason. Recently a lot of progress was made in decreasing the power consumption for LTE. In other words, you will see the same "advantage" also on other tablets in the near future.

O yea, and what Apple claims, and reality can be different things. => A5 * 2 Faster then Tegra 3, so A5X must be 4 times faster. Talk about Marketing stunt.

 

[Grall]

I bet that the screens will have dead pixels like no other.

Don't Apple iThings have a zero-defect warranty?

In any case, we'll hear soon how that screen is working out in reality, since the devices go on sale in just a couple days.

 

[wco81]

I ordered a 16 GB Wifi (took forever to load the online order page). Yeah I really don't like the way they price storage but until people stop buying $100 more for the 32 GB and $200 more for the 64GB, they will keep this pricing structure.

If people balked at paying more of for the higher storage SKUs, they would have stopped doing this and maybe would have integrated an SD card. But it's too lucrative and pads the margins, those other SKUs.

We'll see what kind of screen and build quality those Android tablets with 1080p or better displays have and what kind of software support they get. What is the number of tablet-optimized and designed apps for Android? If you see the video, they just scale up phone apps., wasting a lot of white space.

So Apple will get the software support to get the best out of that screen.

 

[silent_guy]

To me, its not exactly a mass upgrade compared to the iPad2. More like a iPad2S.

Interesting. Last year, the general consensus among 'specialists' was one of disappointment because it was such a minor upgrade. What exactly would have been required to sway you into calling it major upgrade?

Frankly, with the screen reaching its limits, I have a hard time seeing a future with anything else than incremental upgrades.

The resolution bump is nice, but there are already several Android tablets announced with slightly lower resolutions ( but still massively higher then current generation ).

Let's see when those are available on the market. If the other tablet makers are good at just one thing, it's their expertise at making announcements.

 

[wco81]

Yeah one problem is the rumor mill gets way ahead and conjures up all kinds of things way before they're ready. So of course the actual product always disappoints the tech-oriented people on sites like this one.

It was the case with the iPhone 4S too, but it sold like crazy and in the end, lot of sites had to admit it was one of the best, if not the best smart phone, despite crapping on it for still having a 3.5-inch screen.

 

[ltcommander.data]

To me, last i checked, there are plenty of things that are very much CPU dependent, more then GPU. And i feel that Apple made a mistake by doubling the GPU, and probably just small updating the CPU.

I don't see how going quad core like near term Tegra 3 competitors is a solution to CPU worries. Wouldn't increasing threading require Apple and all third-party developers to modify their code to take advantage of more cores? It's a good marketing point, but I don't know how much real world benefit users will see.

We'll have to see if Apple increased CPU clock speed on their dual Cortex A9 since that's probably the most realistic stop-gap, since Apple doesn't have an alternate architecture like Krait to turn to and it appears to be a little early for Cortex A15.

Let's see when those are available on the market. If the other tablet makers are good at just one thing, it's their expertise at making announcements.

It's not glamourous, but ability to produce a high-resolution screen in the volumes Apple needs is probably a quiet achievement in itself over competitors. Likely hundreds of thousands or a couple of millions versus the tens of millions per quarter that Apple goes through.

 

[Lazy8s]

Assuming a device maker "gets it" and so tries to deliver the most responsive user experience they can, the hardware first and foremost needs to support it with as much graphics performance as is practical.

Last year after the iPad 2 launched and equipped as much GPU as was reasonable for a high end design, I figured the next SoC, which would be the incremental update of the two year cycle, could slot in a couple extra 543 cores but only if Apple remained ambitious.

Meanwhile, mobile CPUs, with their high clocks, had already reached levels of power consumption that were disproportionately high compared to their usefulness, considering a well orchestrated system is more a function of smart software and supporting media accelerators.

The quad core GPU and more conservative CPU and clocks therefore make for the ideal SoC, along with the needed increase in RAM to 1GB (as was implied in an earlier response, 2GB would've really hit the spot though considering the need for extreme resolution assets). Also, I've always favored the benefit more resolution brings versus just more image complexity, so the preoccupation with a "retina" caliber display rounds out the selling points that make the new iPad a standout product for me.

 

[ltcommander.data]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5661/the-new-ipad-4g-contains-qualcomms-mdm9600

.ipsw studies suggest that Apple used the 45nm MDM9600 and not the MDM9615. I guess it just wasn't ready in time.

 

[tangey]

I don't buy the reason for going down to a single cpu in the Apple TV as being to save die space.


I see two scenarios.

1) Apple have continued with 45/40nm in A5X. This would mean the die size has increased signficantly over the A5, based on the area attributed to graphics cores in the die shots of the A5 that did the rounds. Surely the relatively small amount they then save on the Apple TV chip by removing a cpu core is in no way worth all the R&D, manufacturer and inventory control involved in have a separate SOC for a device that only ships a few million a year

2) They have gone to 32nm, then even with 4-core 543, the die should be significantly smaller than the A5. The argument still applies that a 32nm A9 core is not gonna to make a lot of difference to the overall size of the chip.


The apple TV chip must be a lot more different that just CPU. Clearly they can remove video encode. And as there is no major game playing, they don't need big graphics support. Have they possibly gone with just single core graphics and made the chip entirely application specific ?

It would STILL seem to me to be more cost effective to have continued with the existing A5 chip for Apple TV, unless they have other price sensitive devices in the pipeline for a cut down Soc.

 

[Mariner]

Couldn't the new Apple TV contain harvested A5 chips, in much the same way that high-end GPUs with hardware faults are often released as lower-end models with modules/cores disabled?

 

[tangey]

Couldn't the new Apple TV contain harvested A5 chips, in much the same way that high-end GPUs with hardware faults are often released as lower-end models with modules/cores disabled?

It could well be as simple as that, much more likely than an actual absence of an A9 core for die cost reasons.