You can focus on the GPU, or the CPU, but the major system performance benchmark in mobile is PCMark and it remains exclusive to Android. I've brought back BaseMark OS II for this review, although unfortunately the reason has less to do with wanting it back in the benchmark suite and more to do with there being very few cross-platform general system benchmarks nowadays. So for the purposes of high performance benchmarking, this means we're benchmarking the big cores nearly exclusively.Īnyhow, we've run our standard suite of benchmarks on the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus to see if A10 Fusion stands up Apple's performance claims. Meanwhile it should be noted that while A10 technically has four CPU cores – the two Hurricane cores and the two smaller cores – this is not a heterogeneous design, and only two cores are active at once. Based on our testing so far, Hurricane is not radically different from Twister (A9), but Apple has been making some optimizations. This gives a theoretical improvement of 28% on its own, and the remainder will have to come from improvements to the architecture in Apple's (big) Hurricane cores. A10 Fusion's peak frequency is 2.3GHz, up from 1.8GHz on A9. While an in-depth look at A10 Fusion will have to wait until our seperate technology deep dive, we can still take a look at how performance has changed at a higher level. However, device performance seemingly must improve with each generation, and Apple is advertising a 40% improvement in CPU performance and a 50% improvement in GPU performance with A10 Fusion compared to A9.Ī10 Fusion's Floorplan (Special thanks to Chipworks) It's important to note that one of the goals of A10 Fusion is improving dynamic range, so the focus isn't solely on improving performance. Any improvements will be the result of architectural improvements, as well as improvements that have been made to TSMC's 16nm process since the release of the Apple A9, which was Apple's first FinFET SoC. With the iPhone 7 Apple doesn't have the benefit of a new major process node to help improve performance. Specifications in a smartphone actually matter quite a lot, even if the user isn't actively aware of all the individual components that make up their smartphone's SoC. On top of that, performance is something of a gating factor for software development, as the innovation that happens in software has to happen within the boundaries of what can be done with the hardware. Modern smartphones with high resolution displays and complex interfaces would not exist if the available CPU and GPU processing power hadn't advanced as much as it has. While there's now an increasingly common belief that specifications don't matter, the truth of the matter is that almost all of the software features that users now take for granted in a smartphone have only been made possible by the continued improvements in hardware performance. At the heart of a smartphone lies the SoC.
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