At Apple’s big unveiling event yesterday, the company claimed that the latest A8 processor in the upcoming iPhone 6 and 6 Plus is 25 percent faster than last year’s A7 model. That is thanks, in part, to the smaller manufacturing process, which brings the chip size down to 20 nm from 28 nm; doubling the number of transistors to two billion; and improving the speed slightly to 1.4 GHz from 1.3 GHz. The A8 is, however, a dual-core processor just like the older A7, and unlike major competitors such as the quad-core Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8.
Outside of this information provided yesterday, very little is known about the newer processor.
A8 Rumors and Capabilities
Hardware specialist Ryan Smith at AnandTech took a deep dive into the circulating rumors and available information regarding the latest iPhone chip, and he confirms Apple’s performance claims considering the available hardware, both for the CPU and the graphics processor. By confirming that the graphics processor can only be one of several models, Smith stipulates that the recently leaked Geekbench scores on Mac Rumors are in fact accurate, which matches Apple’s performance claims almost perfectly and also provides additional information about the iPhone 6, such as 1 GB of available RAM.
Smith goes into further detail about the graphics processor, which Apple claims is 84 times faster than the original iPhone (or 1.5 times faster than the iPhone 5s).
However, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will share the same processor, even though the larger phone has over two times the number of pixels to process. There is no word yet on how the size of the larger phone will impact performance, if at all.
Do you think the A8 processor is enough to power the iPhone 6 Plus?
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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