The iPhone XS and XS Max Review: Unveiling the Silicon Secrets

In the way that every iPhone has been an iteration on previous models, but here we are. The main feature this year is photographic quality is difficult lighting conditions, particularly low light and with harsh backlighting. Some of the side by sides with pictures taken with last years model are pretty impressive.

In terms of hardware, it used to be that Android manufacturers could get a new component into a phone maybe 6 months before Apple, but nowadays Apple is developing custom hardware features Android manufacturers have now way to replicate. Things like in house developed health sensors, neural engine CPU co-processors for the image enhancements I mentioned above. The 3D face scanning tech in Face ID.

These aren’t things that can be knocked together in 6 months, it takes years, so we’ve gone from occasionally Apple missing a feature for 6 months and sometimes stealing a 6 months March, to its competitors now being several years behind, if they even have a path to effectively competing at all.

But as ever, it just depends what features matter to you and at what price point.

This is true. The problem is that the FPS don't matter so much as latency touch-to-update does. And Apple keeps this latency about 1/2 of what Android can do.

This is the only thing I do not give a shit about. A much slower CPU would be just fine. The true advantage is the UX. Just try to disable automatic grammar correction on both iOS and Android and count the number of items you had to go through. It is insane how much crap Android has for every single thing. Designed by engineers for engineers mentality is the root cause here. Apple puts the user in charge how an mobile OS should look like or should behave and this is the biggest differentiating factor between iOS vs other platforms.

High-end android phones. But the run of the mill android phones that most people I know have... not so much.

Eventually I got the Google Nexus 5, an Android flagship. Its updates ceased about a year after I bought it.

I gave up and got an iPhone 6S. Still getting updates to this day, despite being a 3 year old device. The constant software updates and support that Apple offers is clearly superior to what is provided with Android - even when you buy the 'official' Google phone.

I am sure there is an Android phone out there which has got a better camera, another one that has got better speakers, yet another one with better display and yet another which had got a better build than iPhone. The thing that most people forget is that almost all Android phones have some USPs and in exchange they compromise a lot on something else. Why do you thing the entire Android ecosystem should be treated as a single entity against the iPhone? Show me an Android that does every single thing better (or on par) with iPhone.

My experience has been that iPhones are usually not the absolute best at pretty much anything, but they are usually right up there at the top. Maybe it doesn’t have the absolute best camera, but it certainly has one of the best, and so on. And let’s not even compare the longevity of devices.

And before someone talks about prices, Androids that compete in the same arena as the iPhone cost about the same.

Then there is the app ecosystem. Sure, you have all the big names available on Android. But there are lot of smaller developers with great apps which are missing from Android — simply because of the crappy ecosystem which takes a village to build and support apps for. There are no apps which come close to the likes of OmniFocus, Things etc. And while Google does come up with cutting edge tech like AR, a lot of it is not adopted immediately — if ever — by the third party developers who have to wait for the shiny new version of Android to gain some momentum — something that takes forever in Android land.

So no, it is not just the processor that the iPhone has a clear lead on — it’s the overall experience. I couldn’t care less about the specs as long as the experience is maintained.

Full disclaimer: I am someone who usually carries two phones. This means that given the lack of alternatives, I end up with an Android in addition to my iPhone. And while I like some of the features offered by the individual Android OEMs, I do not consider the ecosystem as a whole to be anywhere near comparable to that of iOS.

Even today, the keyboard on Android forces an entire view refresh, awkwardly jerking the entire view. It's a jarring and unfinished experienced IMO.

In iOS 12 the performance of the iPhone 6s was dramatically improved which was released over 3 years ago. And Apple will continue to release software updates for probably another year or two.

How many Android devices are receiving updates 4-5 years after release ?

Phones are no longer "computers". They are personal items that we all depend on. Processors and RAM simply don't matter.

iPhones are worth more than any other phone 2 years after release.

…didn't Google drop support after Marshmallow?

The more likely explanation is that there is an exponential difficulty curve in CPU optimization and performance that Apple and their admittedly talented engineers are climbing very quickly.

When an Ax chip hits true desktop performance sooner than later, the limit of physics is going to slow down Apple just like it has Intel and AMD. There isn’t any magic they are going to be able to do that suddenly gives them a 2x IPC gain or huge frequency advantage.

I expect the primary difference one will find is that Intel has more "large" cores in their chips (full fledged cores) and the comparable instructions have some "gotchas" (like the flag mention) which make them harder to retire early in the pipeline. Toshiba made a funny comment at one of the Microprocessor forums that for their microprocessors, if you only compare the instructions that both they and Intel implement, the Toshiba processor is better in every way.

What is clearly true though is that compatibility aside, ARM chips are becoming serious contenders in the desktop/laptop space sooner than I expected them too.

1: https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/37572/Skylake

2: https://ark.intel.com/products/91169/Intel-Core-i7-6660U-Pro...

Granted, this probably wouldn't hold up for a more sustained workload since the fanless iPhone's going to hit its thermal limits much more quickly than the full-size laptop, but it's pretty impressive that they're edging this close to Intel anyways (in a much smaller, much lower-power package). It'll be really interesting to see what happens with the more unconstrained A12X that'll likely go into the iPad Pro this year.

[1] https://ark.intel.com/products/97496/Intel-Core-i7-7820HQ-Pr...

Amber Lake Y (a 2-core part with 4.2 GHz turbo) should achieve similar performance on a single-threaded integer benchmark like that, and it's a 5W part. Still, that's incredibly impressive on Apple's part.

Per-core power consumption on that Intel chip is 165/28 = 5.89W.

Apple is pushing similar IPC at 3W instead of 5.89W. In that context, it's not so unbelievable. But it's still really fucking impressive.

Apparently the smaller Tempest core from the A12 is being used as the main core in the new Apple Watch. Talk about, uh, synergy.

Mostly, A-series chips have enormous L1 cache, great cache hierarchy and management, and very low memory latency. A12 specifically seems to have included an almost total redesign of the cache hierarchy.

I'm sure there are many more reasons their designs significantly outperform competitors, but I've not seen any more publicly available analysis.

Android manufacturers have more competition, and have to address the low end of the market too. Their money, and attention, is spread in a wider swath.

>Monsoon (A11) and Vortex (A12) are extremely wide machines – with 6 integer execution pipelines among which two are complex units, two load units and store units, two branch ports, and three FP/vector pipelines this gives an estimated 13 execution ports, far wider than Arm’s upcoming Cortex A76 and also wider than Samsung’s M3. In fact, assuming we're not looking at an atypical shared port situation, Apple’s microarchitecture seems to far surpass anything else in terms of width, including desktop CPUs.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re...

Apple first moved to wide CPU designs with the Cyclone CPU core found in the A7 SOC first used in the iPhone 5s.

>With Cyclone Apple is in a completely different league. As far as I can tell, peak issue width of Cyclone is 6 instructions. That’s at least 2x the width of Swift and Krait, and at best more than 3x the width depending on instruction mix. Limitations on co-issuing FP and integer math have also been lifted as you can run up to four integer adds and two FP adds in parallel. You can also perform up to two loads or stores per clock.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/7460/apple-ipad-air-review/2

I think it's unlikely they'll update their flagship Mac to a new CPU architecture without notifying developers first. On day one, all existing apps would perform poorly, and that's not how you promote a new top-of-the-line system.

But the GHz number on a chip only tells you its clock rate. So if you focus on this, you're missing a crucial aspect of performance (the instructions-per-clock part).

Chip designers can try to increase the clock rate to some insane number, but when they do that, it makes each clock cycle very short, leaving very little time to do productive work.

At any rate, within a particular architecture it's potentially meaningful to look at clock rate. You can expect a 2GHz Pentium 4 to be faster than a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4. It won't be a whole 25% faster, because, for instance, if the processor is waiting for data from RAM, it doesn't matter how fast its clock is ticking, the RAM chips are going to take the same amount of time to get the data that the CPU is waiting for.

But when you talk about completely different designs, e.g., Intel versus AMD, Intel versus Apple, etc., clock speed becomes really and truly meaningless. See for instance the "Comparing" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_rate

I agree that we've reached diminishing returns as far as overall thickness is concerned, though.

Would love to know the split between cased and case-less phone users. I'm in the case-less camp, and even though I think I'm in the minority, I don't think it's as small as it actually is.

- Apple Pay ("double-tap the side and look at the phone, then set it on the terminal" is not remotely as fluid as "rest your thumb on the fingerprint reader and touch the phone to the terminal")

- Unlock the phone while it is laying flat on a table/desk in front of you so you can read a notification without picking the phone up and drawing attention that you are doing this.

- Remove the phone from your pocket and press in on the home button with a registered finger so it is fully unlocked and 100% ready to go by the time you can see it in your field of vision.

Overall, however, I am much more bullish on the long term value of Face ID and the phone knowing whether you are paying attention to it or not that I have accepted these downgrades. There are also several upgraded experiences.