The ICT industry has been particularly hot in recent days, as Apple released the iPhone7/7plus and unveiled the new quad-core processor A10 Fusion. Shen Sijun is also a long-term concern about the communications semiconductor industry. He has written many articles about Qualcomm Xiaolong and Huawei Unicorn before, but Apple chips have always been slightly "mysterious", "still immersed in half-face", every press conference Basically, it is the only opportunity to talk about its chips. God Silicon Jun naturally can't let go of this opportunity, watch the battle day and night, and also consulted a lot of information, and now publish the information and opinions published and share with everyone.
In the early morning of September 8, Apple officially released the iPhone7/7plus at the 2016 autumn new product launch. Although the new iPhone is hard to say, there is a big surprise, but the change of "core" hidden under its gorgeous appearance is particularly attractive. The new iPhone is equipped with a new A10 Fusion processor, which is Apple's first quad-core processing. Device. Apple claims that the A10 processor has achieved host-level performance.
Running far beyond the Snapdragon 820, A10 performance is excellent
Apple's four processors, the A10 Fusion, announced that it is Apple's fastest processor to date, with a 64-bit design, 3.3 billion transistors built in two big two small four cores, running 40% faster than the iPhone6s A9. 2 times faster than the A8, built-in quad-core GPU, performance increased by 50%, is 3 times that of the A8 chip GPU, 240 times that of the iPhone generation.
According to the previous GeekBench 4 exposure score data, the A10 processor's single-core run is divided into 3379 points, and the dual-core run is divided into 5495. In particular, the single-core run scores have exceeded the previous A9X processor and will also be Snapdragon 820. Behind me, but its memory latency is still not as good as Kirin 955, memory bandwidth is not as good as Snapdragon 820/Exynos 8890.
At the same time, Apple claims that with the help of the A10 Fusion chip, the iPhone 7 can still be used for more than two hours longer than the iPhone 6s, becoming the "longest iPhone." From the current situation, Apple A10 processor performance is very good in all aspects, in terms of power consumption and performance may be the first product closest to 3D-IC (beyond Moore's Law), A10 has the reputation of host-level performance.
A9X, A10 continue to go against the sky, Intel x86 status å°´å°¬
In fact, at the Apple Autumn New Product Launch last year, Apple said that the iPad Pro with the A9X processor is faster than more than 80% of the notebooks on the market. The performance test results of the iPad Pro are also the same, the main frequency has been maintained at 2.16GHz A9X, single-core performance surpasses the 2015 MacBook Air with the Core i5 processor, 13-inch MacBook Pro.
It can be seen that the Intel x86 architecture, which is known for its high performance, is no longer superior to the ARM A-series based on the ARM architecture. And with Apple's performance on its own processor, Windows10 also announced support for ARM architecture, plus the advantages of ARM architecture in low power consumption (this Apple A10 Fusion quad-core adopts two big and two small models, also for While improving performance without significantly increasing power consumption, Apple and Huawei Unicorn based on the ARM architecture are relatively best in terms of performance and power consumption. In the future, with the blurring of the boundaries of PCs, tablets and mobile terminals, the competition between x86 and ARM in various terminal platforms will become more and more fierce. It is not known whether Intel x86 can continue to lead in the PC-end market.
Will Macs give up Intel in the future? In view of the superior performance of the Apple A10 desktop-class CPU, Shen Sijun predicted that Apple will apply its own A-series chips to the Mac product line in the future, so that it will become possible to completely abandon the Intel chip. In fact, last year, after testing the Geekbench 3 with the A9 processor, the iPhone 6s found that it surpassed the MacBook in terms of speed. Although this does not mean that the latest A10 Fusion achieves or is close to the level of the Intel Core i3, at least it can be proved that Apple has completely abandoned the potential of Intel's true independence in the research and development capabilities of its own processors.
Of course, now let Apple completely give up spending more than 10 years to build, the ecosystem time based on Intel x86 architecture chip and Mac X is still not mature, after all, it still has considerable competition and profitability in the PC industry. And for the Apple Mac product line, the introduction of the A-series chips is not simply a replacement of the chip, but a change in the entire ecosystem. This revolutionary change is not something that can be done overnight. But in the future, it is hard to say that Apple always likes to consider the character of “controlling the upstream and downstream industry chain channelsâ€.
At present, the chip based on ARM architecture lacks sufficient trials on the PC side. In the future, the superior performance of Apple A10, Qualcomm Xiaolong, Huawei Kirin and other research and development capabilities are no less than Apple, its flagship chip performance may be no less than Intel. The big Android flagship chip makers, what surprises they will have in the new products in the future, we will wait and see.
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