The A10 Fusion chip
Apple’s new phone chip isn’t just an A9 beater. It’s also a MacBook beater…
Significant advancements in Apple’s latest processor.
For nerdy technology lovers like us, a big part of the excitement around new iPhone launches is seeing the new Apple processor. In recent years, Apple has become one of the most innovative chip design companies, producing amazing advances in computing power with every new model. This year is no exception, with Apple revealing the A10 Fusion processor alongside the iPhone 7, promising a 40% improvement in processor speed over the A9, as well as a 50% faster graphics chip, and a smart new design that includes four processor cores, instead of the dual-core design of the A9. That doesn’t mean the A10 is a quad-core processor, though: the Fusion part of the name refers to the fact that it has two high-power cores that are the fastest Apple has ever produced, and another two that are much lower power. The idea appears to be that the iPhone will use either the high-speed cores or the low-speed ones, depending on how demanding the task at hand is. Editing in iMovie? The fast cores will keep things smooth. Uploading something to Dropbox in the background with the screen turned off? The low-power cores can take
What’s really got us excited about the A10 is how it performs compared to processors in the MacBook Air, and even 13-inch MacBook Pro, in benchmarks. Its single-core performance matches even the higher-end Intel chips in Apple’s notebook line-up, while its multi-core performance beats low-end machines. Put simply, we appear to be at the point now where Apple could replace Intel’s processors with its own in certain MacBook models without a serious drop in performance. Now, these are just benchmarks, not real-world usage, and Intel’s processors scale up to more powerful computers in a way that Apple’s may not. But the potential is huge: at the time of writing, we haven’t seen the likely A10X processor that may power the iPad Pro’s successor, which could be even more powerful. It may even add extra cores: there’s precendent in the A8X, which was triple-core, while the regular A8 was dual-core.
The question still remains, though: if Apple does harness this power to launch a MacBook that runs on its own processors, what operating system will it run? over, performing the task with lower battery usage. The A10’s high-speed cores run at 2.33GHz, which is a big increase over the 1.85GHz speed of the A9. It also appears to have other design improvements to speed it up, and 3GB of RAM in the 7 Plus is another boost, over the 2GB in the iPhone 6s.