Understanding the iPhone 3GS
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 7, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Final Words
I always feel like I need to congratulate or somehow gift those readers who make it all the way through an article like this. Maybe I'll start handing out lollipops one day. If you made it this far you'll know that there's a lot of concluding that needs to happen.
First, the phone itself. Honestly, if you have the original iPhone then this is absolutely the one you'll want to upgrade to - you'll feel like you've been swept off of your feet one more time (assuming you did like your iPhone). Upgrading from the 3G is also a good idea in my opinion, just because of the tremendous increase in performance. Where the upgrade recommendation becomes stickier is if you have to pay full price for the phone. Unlike the iPhone 3G launch, AT&T isn't letting everyone move to the 3GS at the $199/$299 upgrade price (16/32GB models). Under immense pressure from the market, AT&T has made terms a little more favorable but there is a sizeable population that won't get upgrade pricing until later this year. At $500 or $600 I'm not sure the 3GS is worth the price today, simply because I'm expecting an updated model around this time next year. Remember that Cortex A9 based phones will be out in 2010 and Apple also has the option of using a multi-core A8 variant as well, especially at 45nm. If you have to spend that much money, either wait until the next iPhone or wait until your upgrade price drops; $500 can buy you a Core i7, it shouldn't be the cost of a CPU upgrade for your phone.
Next, there's the Palm Pre. I continue to be impressed by not only how much Palm was able to do in such a short period of time with webOS but how frequently Palm is updating the OS on the recently launched Pre. We're now up to four OS updates since its launch in June and I fully expect more from the Palm crew. By the time the Pre debuts on Verizon and AT&T the phone should be sitting pretty. If you don't mind being on the bleeding edge of a platform that needs work and real developer support, the Pre is a real alternative to the 3GS - and in some senses, a better device to use.
Finally, there's the hardware itself. The real story behind the 3GS isn't that Apple took longer than necessary to move to the Cortex A8. No, the real story here is that both ARM and Imagination Technologies are significantly improving the CPU and GPU performance in high end smartphone SoCs at a rapid pace. There's significant room for improvement in both CPU and GPU performance, right now all we're limited by is power consumption. Within the next year we should see more SoCs transition to 45nm and at that point I'd expect to see multi-core ARM implementations as well as wider PowerVR SGX cores. Then there's always ARM's Cortex A9, the first out-of-order ARM core. In the distant future we also have to start thinking about Intel; Atom was always intended for the smartphone market, and at 32nm I'd expect to see an Atom based CPU in an iPhone-sized device.
If you're bored by performance improvements on the desktop, then keep an eye on the ultra mobile space. Smartphones are going to see significant performance gains over the next few years. The iPhone 3GS is just the beginning.
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MrJim - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - link
Why no mention of the heat issues?ViRGE - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - link
Anand, if you haven't already, jailbreak the 3GS and grab SysInfoPlus from Cydia. It may be able to tell you the clock speed of the 3GS's ARM, although to what extent I'm not sure since it hasn't been specifically programmed for the A8.ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - link
I don't suppose that program can also tell the GPU clock speed too?I always thought that the MBX work at bus speed, ie. 103MHz for the iPhone/3G and 133MHz for the 2nd Gen iPod Touch instead of the 60Mhz that Anand has speculated. Assuming the iPhone 3G S has a 150MHz bus speed, the SGX could run at 150MHz which is a reasonable compromise between Anand's 100MHz and 200MHz estimates.
fyleow - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - link
How useful is the new GPU? The iPhone's performance has come a long way from the first generation but I don't see developers taking full advantage of the jump. If you bump up the graphics of your game it might run smoothly on the 3GS but end up lagging on the 1st gen iPhone.The increase in load times and battery life is much welcomed, but when do we get to see some apps that take advantage of the upgraded hardware in other more interesting ways? I can see a resolution increase as being one way to do that. The game would look better on a higher resolution screen but performance wouldn't suffer on the older models because the lower resolution would place less demand on the hardware.
2010 will be an interesting year. There should be a bigger upgrade to the iPhone, most likely a resolution bump and a significantly modified OS that supports background tasks. Apple has been keeping all the devices on the iPhone platform on feature parity so far with the OS upgrades (minus obvious limitations due to hardware differences). It would be interesting to see how they handle the switch and the resulting two classes of phones that come from it (i.e. old "legacy" iPhones/Touch vs new iPhones/Touch).
ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - link
You're right that it's difficult to take full advantage of the SGX without writing a separate dedicated code path for it and one for the MBX. However, there are simpler ways to take advantage of the iPhone 3G S power without writing 2 separate code paths. For example, you can scale draw distance based on hardware. Firemint demonstrated the iPhone 3G S accelerating 40 cars in Real Racing compared to 6 in the iPhone 3G, so the potential for better scalable AI is there. For a RPG, perhaps having more NPCs walking around to make the environment more lifelike. This can all be done using existing OpenGL ES 1.1 code playable on all iPhones/Touches, optimizing for each device, without making older iPhone users feel like they are playing some Lite version of the game as implementing shaders and HDR using OpenGL ES 2.0 in the iPhone 3G S might do.I believe the reluctance of Apple to change the resolution is that it could break the interface layout for existing apps and/or make things ugly if apps haven't used vector graphics. It would have been nice if they had enforced resolution independence early on, but I don't believe they did. Resolution independence is also what is needed for Apple to introduce an iPhone nano with a smaller screen and presumably smaller resolution.
smallpot - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - link
Thanks for the article Anand. Your long-form articles are the reason Anandtech is my number one tech website. I'm thinking of articles such as this, your articles on SSD performance, and the long-form story behind the RV770. After reading such articles, I really feel like I've learned something, rather than just had performance metrics thrown at me without context.Baron Fel - Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - link
Interesting article.As far as portable gaming goes, the Ipod Touch/iPhone/Zune HD dont have a chance against the DS or even the PSP. The software support just isnt there.
PSP hardware runs circles around the DS, so why is the DS killing it in sales? Good games.
and are we getting more SSD articles anytime soon? I think thats what we want to see :D
ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - link
Given all the media attention about discoloration and possible heat issues with the iPhone 3G S, I was wondering if you could comment on your experience in this area. Do you think it's a real concern or just stories popularized to generate page hits as Apple related stories tend to do? The latest reports on discoloration indicate that it might actually be from a reaction with some third-party cases that may be reversed by cleaning with alcohol.Similarly, there have been lower-key reports of build quality issues with the Palm Pre having a wobbly screen from it's slide-out keyboard. Has this been a major issue for you and do you think it'll be an issue over time?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - link
I haven't seen anything to indicate heat as being a bigger concern with the 3GS. It's a new processor so there's bound to be some bad chips out there, but I wouldn't be too concerned.The build quality on the Pre did bother me. It's something that I think bothered me more because of my experience with the iPhone. The screen was a bit wobbly and overall the device just didn't feel as well put together. Part of it is because of the slide out keyboard, but part of it has to be cost/experience related. I think you'd get used to it over time, but if you then held an iPhone you'd quickly grow tired of the build quality issues once again :)
Take care,
Anand
tomoyo - Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - link
Btw Anand, the chart for number of stages in the cpus shows the Iphone 3GS as 8 stage instead of 13.