Apple A7: Way more power than a phone needs to have

When Brian Klug joined me on the Vector podcast last week, I asked him if including the Apple A7 chipset in both the iPhone 5s and the iPad Air and Retina iPad mini meant the phone was way overpowered, or the tablets were way underpowered. He answered in the best way possible - that the phone was ridiculously overpowered. As part of his iPad Air review, Brian's colleague, Anand Lai Shimpi, puts some context to that ridiculousness. From AnandTech:

This is the first Apple SoC that's able to deliver good amounts of memory bandwidth to all consumers. A single CPU core can use up 8GB/s of bandwidth. I'm still vetting other SoCs, but so far I haven't come across anyone in the ARM camp that can compete with what Apple has built here. Only Intel is competitive.

As John Gruber pointed out on Daring Fireball in his review, it's roughly the same amount of raw power as a 2010 MacBook Air. That's the machine I primarily ran iMore on for a year. And now that's in my phone, and in my tablet. Insane.

Pop open Wikipedia and go read Anand's whole review.

Source: AnandTech

Rene Ritchie
Contributor

Rene Ritchie is one of the most respected Apple analysts in the business, reaching a combined audience of over 40 million readers a month. His YouTube channel, Vector, has over 90 thousand subscribers and 14 million views and his podcasts, including Debug, have been downloaded over 20 million times. He also regularly co-hosts MacBreak Weekly for the TWiT network and co-hosted CES Live! and Talk Mobile. Based in Montreal, Rene is a former director of product marketing, web developer, and graphic designer. He's authored several books and appeared on numerous television and radio segments to discuss Apple and the technology industry. When not working, he likes to cook, grapple, and spend time with his friends and family.