The Anandtech A7 Review is up. Some thoughts,
(1.) THANKFULLY STILL DUAL CPU CORE. Awesome that Apple dedicates a large amount of chip area for the GPU. This is exactly what I want as a developer.
(2.) ARMv8. Does 64-bit mean that the entire flash drive is direct mapped into part of the 64-bit address space?
(3.) ARMv8. They have 64KB L1's, more efficient ISA (streaming loads and stores), larger 64KB L1's, double the register file, 3 instruction issue with dual register load or store in a single instruction. I really like the ARMv8 ISA.
(4.) POWER VR G6430? Some noted improvements from prior SGX series. GL_MAX_COLOR_ATTACHMENTS=4 means multiple render target support up to at least four 32-bit/pixel targets. MIN_PROGRAM_TEXEL_OFFSET=-8 means 4-bits of immediate texel offset (great for more efficient post processing assuming this style of fetch is full rate).
(5.) 3.3 GTEX/S MEASURED. This is huge. The Xbox360 has 3.8 tex/ms/pixel at HDTV native 1920x1080. This A7 phone has 4.5 tex/ms/pixel at native 1136x640. This phone has the tex/pixel rate better than the Xbox360. Now most Xbox360 games ran 720p (or lower) resulting in 8.6 tex/ms/pixel, and the same rendering lower than native resolution could easily be done on the A7 phone too.
(6.) 76.8 GFLOP/S ESTIMATED. To place this one in perspective, the Xbox360 has 115 flops/ms/pixel at HDTV native, and this A7 phone has 105 flops/ms/pixel if Anandtech's estimation is correct. So pixel work could in theory approach what was done in Xbox360. However total Gflops is roughly 1/3 when not normalized for resolution, so geometry density (tri/frame) would need to be much lower than what was pushed on the Xbox360. The measured 68.2 Mtri/s benchmark results confirm this.
(7.) LOWER DISPLAY BRIGHTNESS AND LARGER BATTERY? 9.35% more battery and 16% less Nits. Maintaining this performance scaling is getting harder each generation.
(1.) THANKFULLY STILL DUAL CPU CORE. Awesome that Apple dedicates a large amount of chip area for the GPU. This is exactly what I want as a developer.
(2.) ARMv8. Does 64-bit mean that the entire flash drive is direct mapped into part of the 64-bit address space?
(3.) ARMv8. They have 64KB L1's, more efficient ISA (streaming loads and stores), larger 64KB L1's, double the register file, 3 instruction issue with dual register load or store in a single instruction. I really like the ARMv8 ISA.
(4.) POWER VR G6430? Some noted improvements from prior SGX series. GL_MAX_COLOR_ATTACHMENTS=4 means multiple render target support up to at least four 32-bit/pixel targets. MIN_PROGRAM_TEXEL_OFFSET=-8 means 4-bits of immediate texel offset (great for more efficient post processing assuming this style of fetch is full rate).
(5.) 3.3 GTEX/S MEASURED. This is huge. The Xbox360 has 3.8 tex/ms/pixel at HDTV native 1920x1080. This A7 phone has 4.5 tex/ms/pixel at native 1136x640. This phone has the tex/pixel rate better than the Xbox360. Now most Xbox360 games ran 720p (or lower) resulting in 8.6 tex/ms/pixel, and the same rendering lower than native resolution could easily be done on the A7 phone too.
(6.) 76.8 GFLOP/S ESTIMATED. To place this one in perspective, the Xbox360 has 115 flops/ms/pixel at HDTV native, and this A7 phone has 105 flops/ms/pixel if Anandtech's estimation is correct. So pixel work could in theory approach what was done in Xbox360. However total Gflops is roughly 1/3 when not normalized for resolution, so geometry density (tri/frame) would need to be much lower than what was pushed on the Xbox360. The measured 68.2 Mtri/s benchmark results confirm this.
(7.) LOWER DISPLAY BRIGHTNESS AND LARGER BATTERY? 9.35% more battery and 16% less Nits. Maintaining this performance scaling is getting harder each generation.