Gadgetory

hello I'm Gary Sims from Android or authority now every year when Apple release a new iPhone they generally release a new process at a new system on a chip to go with it and this year has been very much the same we had the release of the iPhone 8 the iPhone 8 plus and the iPhone 10 and all three models are using a new processor from Apple called the Apple a 11 Bionic now some initial testing on Geekbench and other benchmarks has shown that this is a really fast processor and seems to be remarkably fast compared to the process as we have in Android and that raises the question is it really that fast are the benchmarks a good way to measure it is it a fair comparison well let me explain so first of all a bit about the 11 Bionic it's a hexa-core processor musical 6 cores it's based on the arm 64-bit architecture it's been designed by Apple in-house as has the CPU and the GPU that go inside of the SOC it's got two high-performance cores and for power efficiency calls now there are some big changes compared to the a10 fusion the chip that came before it from Apple most significantly the high performance cores are up to 25% faster which is a significant increase but more importantly the low energy cause of power efficiency calls are 70% faster than the same calls that you find in the Apple a10 but most significantly this particular processor can use all six cores at the same time there's something we've been used to on Android for several years now but apples last post of the a-10 could was effectively a dual core processor or either used the two high-performance cause all the two power efficiency calls but now all six cores can run at the same time in the a 11 which is one of the reasons why we're seeing such a big boost in the multi-core scores that we'll talk about in a moment now if we compare the a11 Bionic with the a-10 and with a leading Android SOC like the Snapdragon 835 this is what we get the a11 is now built on the same process technology as the Snapdragon 83 5 has 10 nanometers the 18 fusion was built on 60 nanometers we've gone from a quad-core process which could really only use two cause of the time to a hexa-core processor of which you can use all six calls at the same time compared to the Snapdragon 835 which of course is an octa-core processor using for high-performance calls and for power efficiency calls and we can see the core scheduling there has changed its now per call which is also what we get on the Snapdragon 835 we've got a three chord G PU which Apple aren't telling us very much at all about from in the a11 Bionic and of course got the Adreno 540 in the Snapdragon 835 all three chips use the LDP less low-power ddr4 ram but of course when it comes to the benchmarks this is where we see the major differences the Snapdragon 835 has a single core score of just under 2,000 that was already been beaten by the a-10 fusion with its 3339 and now the single core score of the alien Evonik has jumped up to over 4,000 but the real jump we see here is in the multi-core test because of course the Snapdragon 835 was beating the a10 fusion with its score of six thousand seven hundred sixty-five because it had eight cores which you could form use at the same time the a-10 fusion was basically a dual core setup and therefore it was still performing remarkably well but 5380 but look at this now a doubling from the a10 fusion to the a11 Bionic we've gone from 5,000 to 10,000 and that's absolutely 10,000 compared to the 6,000 of the Snapdragon 835 so an absolutely massive increase there so the first question is why is the Apple 1811 by onek and in fact the a10 fusion in each generation why were they so fast what is Apple secret well first of all let's start with a bit of history up until 2013 everyone was shipping 32-bit ARM based cores and in fact Qualcomm were the leader in that area with their crate calls and they weren't really were fast for their time but in 2013 Apple basically took everybody by surprise by launching a 64-bit processor in the iPhone 5s now that was even before really that even arm itself of course defined the architecture had products with their 64-bit calls it in fact they were expected and 2014 so here we are in late 2013 an apple have already got a 64-bit processor in their smartphone and this we needed to take everybody by surprise and then over the years that come Qualcomm tried to battle that first of all they release the the chip with the Quartus 8:57 it then they had their own proprietary one which is the cryo and then the Snapdragon 835 we've got this kind of built on cortex technology which is basically it's understood it's a cortex a7 t3 but Qualcomm have been allowed to tweak certain things about it to make it a semi custom CPU but every time this has been happening Qualcomm have been first of all trying to play catch-up and then they've been going from the arm 1 to their own worm to the semi-custom one apple of year-in year-out been releasing a next-generation 64-bit CPU next generation 64-bit CPU and now the a11 Bionic is the fifth generation CPU that Apple have made so basically historically Apple are two generations ahead of everybody else and that's a significant lead when it comes to process of manufacturing so they really have got a head start and they are ahead of the field because of that early head start they had and everybody else has been trying to play catch-up and they haven't yet caught up with what Apple have been doing now that's one part of the story that have this leave but there's also other parts of the story for example Apple their entire process is integrated what I mean by that is the people that are working for Apple designed the processors the people that are building the iPhones work with the people that build the processors it's a tightly coupled scenario and everything from the next specifications for the next iPhone and its next poses that are discussed all in-house and they're all done together now it's slightly different to weight the way the rest of the world works because you've got core designs that are coming from arm they're maybe being implemented by Qualcomm or by Huawei or by mediatek and then those themselves have to come out and then I are shipped in phones so although these are good cause and they're high-performance that there is that lack of tight coupled integration that means that most Apple can shave some weeks off the development cycle but also it means maybe they can their CPUs to be specifically for what they need in those phones and that gives them an edge which we'll talk about more in a second because it doesn't it means they're not trying to sell to a general population and so this is a problem that people like arm and Qualcomm have they tried to sell their chips to a general audience and that general audience might be a router or a switch maker and in networking sonar it might be some rebuilding something for a television set or it might be someone's building something for a a smartphone now arm therefore and chip makers like Qualcomm media to produce many variations of their chips with more cores and less cores and more cash and less cash and higher clock frequencies and better GPUs and worse GPUs leave you just look at the Snapdragon range itself there are a whole range of processes that call core mate you know the 800 series in the 600 series in the 407 even the 200 series they've even got chips that they put inside of wearables now Apple will basically make one chip for one product so that's a very different focus when it comes to what they're doing but it also allows them to do something that other people like call comment and meet it can't do Apple's chips are basically I mean this is rough talk about twice the size in terms of silicon then everybody else's chips now why is that important well silicon is expensive so some low-end chip manufacturers would argue that their profit or loss is can be found in one millimeter squared of silicon the actual process that's where their margin is that's the profit they're going to make on that chip is whether they can shave off one square millimeter from that design apples chips are just double the size of everybody else's and that means that clearly Apple are putting in a lot of investment into the chip and they're cutting their cut making cut back to a design decisions elsewhere in the phone to compensate for that expensive CPU now they cause price it as a single unit they have the design and they have the CPU and that's the screens and the memories and everything else they going to do and at the end of it they come up with a price for that screen now maybe they are they can take away bits of profit and loss from other parts of the phone too compensate for such a big CPU now arm and call common and and Samsung the meet it can't do that because arm need to make a profit so they make their phone they make they designed and they send them off to be like Qualcomm Qualcomm need to make a profit because they sell those chips to people like Sony and LG and Samsung and of course in the smartphone maker needs to make a profit so they have to make money what they're doing so every stage here you've got people making money on what they're doing and they've got employees and their pension schemes and they've got you know shareholder and they've got all these things that need to do and each one of those is adding on there little bit on top and so that's a different business model a different motor networks because obviously Android is the most popular operating mobile operating system in the world there are some fantastic handsets out there but it's a different model to what Apple are using there's one more thing worth mentioning all that extra silicon space is actually in Apple's chips is being given over a lot of it to cash size so for example up until the a10 fusion Apple were using level 3 cache and if you don't know what cache memory is I've got a whole video on about it that I will link here in the description below but basically s main memory on the board lpddr4 is slow compared to the speed of the chip is running at so it has this cache miss intermediate memory where it can stick values so you can get them quickly without having to go back to main memory and that speed up performance and the more cache memory you've got that's high speed memory the faster your processor can go there are some rules of thumb about you know returning diminishing returns but basically if you can invest memory there you're gonna get the returns in the on the performance now applet chips have been using up until now even level 3 caches of up to 4 megabytes now armed and even support level 3 caches on the cortex a57 the cord is a t-72 in the call it 873 is only now being supported on the cortex a 75 which we haven't yet seen any chips for and not only were they using big level 3 cache those are using big level 2 caches so you find maybe 2 or 3 megabytes of level 2 caching whereas on some Android chips you might find down to maybe one megabyte or something like that and then no level three of course each silicon maker Qualcomm or meets it can decide what they want to do but the maximums of level two cache was only four megabytes and you couldn't get level three now funnily enough on the a11 Bionic Apple of shift to shifted away from a level three cache and they've only got a level two cache of cores and a small level one cache and the level two cache is eight megabytes so that's a huge amount of level two cache that's built in there on the chip and I'm sure that gives them a bunch but that's expensive it's really expensive to make a chip that big and maybe these chip makers don't have a business model where they can try to sell an OEM like Sony or LG such an expensive processor whereas Apple can incorporate that in their overall pricing so if we look at that there's there's a history Apple have got a head start they they really are two generations ahead of everybody because they went to 64 bit earlier than anybody else there's also because the chips are big okay and they've got big amounts of silicon on them which also includes big amounts of cash and also because they are the designer and the designer of the chip and the design of the phone there is a kind of tight coupling in their process which may be able to help them shave off time of a development cycle which of course in the end means that they're a heavy of the game again now does this mean that Android chip makers you know Qualcomm and media taken and others are never gonna catch up well I don't know I think there is a possibility of course that one year maybe Apple will release a bad chip it didn't go according to plan the performance increases aren't as good and that lead that they've got could be reduced that could happen it doesn't look like it's going to happen but that could happen second of course a chip manufacturer like Qualcomm or or mediatek or Samsung can actually produce a chip that is way advanced compared to what they've had a generational leak that would also reduce the catch-up that they've got and also probably this is where I'm think is really going to happen we are moving into a kind of a new era of where CPU performance isn't going to be as as it was before we've already caught seen that with GPUs you'll have a fast GPU doesn't matter how fast your CPU a GPU you're not going to be getting the graphics performance but now we're talking into the area of digital assistance of voice recognition face recognition and even Apple have got a neural engine the ki-rin 970 has got this new processing unit and maybe in the future we're going to see different parts of the the SOC function to be taken up by different parts of neural network simulations are going to happen inside the SOC and if Qualcomm and our almond and mediatek and Samsung and while we can produce processes that lead in that area that will maybe reduce the lead that Apple have but kudos to Apple it is a fast processor and that's just a fact so no point crying about it there's no point getting upset about it we should congratulate them for making such a good processor and then it should be a wake-up call to the people in the Android side to step up their game because competition is always good competition pushes people on to innovate more and to produce better but having said that don't think that the Snapdragon 835 will be equivalents from X and also the ki-rin 970 are somehow sluggers they're higher performance processors and they do an excellent job and when you use your smartphone the user experience will not be diminished by that but when it comes to raw numbers on paper the 11 Bionic is faster just a fact well my name's Gary central authority I hope you enjoyed this video let's have a good discussion in the comments below we don't want any Wars we don't want any nasty neurs let's just talk about the technology and let's talk about how things are progressing and let's talk about the benefits to the consumer let's talk about why we should applaud any innovation if you do like this video please do give it a thumbs up please don't forget to subscribe to android or thority youtube channel hit that notification build so that you get sent a message every time there's a new video on the channel and of course last but not least do go over to Andrew authority calm because we are your source for all things Android