Developers are what make the App Store successful, and the last thing that Apple wants to do is make developers angry. They are already pushing away many with the closed nature of the touch device’s software. Imagine someone telling you that your bank account has $40,000 dollars in it, but you can only spend $20,000 on the new car that you want to buy. They are dangling the other half of your $40,000 above your head, and you aren’t allowed to use it. This is similar to what Apple would be doing if they told developers that the iPhone 3GS had 256MB of RAM, but they are only allowed to use 128MB of it. Naturally, there would be devs out there that would want to utilize all of the RAM that the device has to be able to make the best possible application, but again, Apple doesn’t want them developing an app that can’t run well (or at all) on the older devices which only have 128MB of RAM.
By ‘tricking’ developers into thinking that the iPhone 3GS uses the same CPU and same amount of RAM, devs will continue to produce applications that are cross compatible with all of the touch devices released to date. Of course Apple would have to go to some lengths if they were really trying to trick developers. I haven’t used the iPhone SDK, but I would imagine that devs have access to technical information including RAM status. If Apple was really trying to hide an increase in RAM, it would need to make the system RAM totally separate from the RAM that gets allocated to applications. This could be done through a hardware design, or more conceivably, some software manipulation. But how long could a charade like this last, and how would developers feel if they found out that Apple wasn’t simply being up-front with them?
I think the tale will be told once someone gets their hands on the iPhone 3GS and rips it open, or I’m sure that the jailbreak community will carefully look over the iPhone 3GS for the real specifications once it gets into their hands. If this double RAM theory turns out to be the case, I would bet that it would create some interesting opportunities for jailbreak devs, as they would potentially be able to use more of the RAM in the iPhone 3GS and create iPhone 3GS specific applications that have increased performance over other touch devices. Well… there is my theory, anyone else care to have a jab at it?
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New article: A theory on why Apple is keeping quite about the iPhone 3GS specs http://cli.gs/9E4743
A theory on why Apple is keeping quite about the iPhone 3GS – good read from @chippy http://bit.ly/xI7W8
@chippy sorry @benz145 … good piece – http://bit.ly/xI7W8
It could be that “up to 2 times faster” sounds much better than “128MB more RAM”.
It is all about apps. The day Verizon and Sprint offer iphones, the days of all other smartphones, balckberry, pre, WM… are over.
Then please explain how everyone is still doing nicely in Norway, where you can get the iPhone on contract on both major carriers, and if you buy it unlocked, you can use it whereever you like?
Strangely, Nokia, SE, Samsung, LG, HTC are still surviving quite fine here. Blackberry and Palm never had a presence in the market here.
I love the fact that the iPhone is here, even though I don’t like it personally. Because the carriers here have finally realised that including data usage in the phone plans instead of having seperate “mobile broadband” plans might actually be a good idea.
So after iPhone got here, buying any smartphone has gotten a lot more interesting, as you can actually use all of their features without paying out your ass for data usage :)
Quiet, not quite (in your title).
Interesting theory. I’m sure we’ll know one way or another after people get their hands on the real thing.
or may be they are talking about hsdpa
Actually, what happens if an iPhone is running low on memory is the OS gives the currently running app a warning to clean up its act. Only poorly coded apps would crash. Well coded apps would free up as much memory as possible. Likewise, when you switch away from an app, it’s supposed to store away its state on the SSD as part of its shut down.
In any case, we already know that the 2nd generation iPod touch is clocked faster than iPhone 3G. Likewise, we know that iPhone 3G is clocked faster than the first generation iPhone. Developers have already had a year of dealing with touch devices of varying capability. They have a vested interest in writing apps that work on as many iPhones and iPod touches as possible. Apple doesn’t need to trick developers into this.
Given that Apple has always been straightforward and accurate with the information gotten through the SDK, I don’t you think can argue honestly that Apple is tricking developers at all. Also, they’ve said that iPhone 3GS is up to twice as fast as the iPhone 3G running exactly the same software, and they’ve said that the internals of the iPhone 3GS are brand new. They’re not making numbers available, but they’re not trying to make people think that iPhone 3GS is the same hardware as iPhone 3G either.
I think Apple is not making these details available because they’re trying to project the notion of an iPhone as an appliance. Most people don’t concern themselves with what processor their portable media player uses or how much RAM it has. Yes, you do much more with an iPhone than you do with an iPod. However, Apple’s strategy for marketing iPhone is much more akin to marketing iPod than marketing Macs.
Short answer: They’re not tricking anyone, but they’re not making the specs easily available either. Developers should be able to find this stuff out easily. Tech specs for every previous iPhone and iPod touch has shown up on the web very soon after they are actually for sale.
Strange assumptions…
The iPod CPU is actually running faster and this isn’t an issue for the applications.
In fact, it’s a known fact that games are running better on the iPod.
So why wouldn’t they change the CPU or clock it up ?
Doesn’t the Ipod Touch 2g use a Processor that’s 100mhz Faster then the Iphone 3g? I can see them doing that, as all the applications still function on both the 3g and the touch, with such a small increase…but still it’s something.
I can remember a hack where they used video out on the Iphone and the Touch 2g….the Iphone could not handle it, but the Touch 2g could. I can’t remember though if they where playing back a video, or using it as a external monitor to an application/game.
If Apple had put some new snazzy processor under the hood of the GS you can be sure that they would tell you about it. I reckon the X2 speed increase is a result of the extra RAM and the standard ARM processor clocked at 600MHz.
… Having said that, would an extra 200MHz account for a 3 fold increase in JS performance? The mystery continues.
I’m not at all surprised apple didn’t announce any details about the new processpr or ram. They sell iphone like they sell ipods and apple tvs: a consumer electronic. They didn’t announce any specs about the original iphone either. They wouldn’t even confirm it was running on an arm chip let alone which one. Apple didn’t say anything about the cpu becuase they don’t need to and complicated details like that get in the way of marketing phrases like “3x faster”. iphone is a mass market device and apple sells it that way.
Apple has gotten very good at providing development tools that support multiple archs / configurations. In xcode supporting ppc, 32 bit and 64 bit x86 is as simple as a couple check boxes in the build screen. There is no reason to think iphone won’t be handled the same way
It could be that they didn’t upgrade the ram.
Sharing: A theory on why Apple is keeping quite about the iPhone 3GS specs: A quick look around the iPho.. http://bit.ly/1RPEGd
i think if you open up the 3GS and look at the ram you will find 128mb , however if you dont open it it will run as though it has 256 mb much like in quantum mechanics and the wave/particle duality therom.
The quicker web page rendering should be accomplished by a mobile implementation of the new, ridiculously fast JavaScript engine technologies, already present in Safari 4 or Google Chrome. A slighltly faster CPU is likely to be present, but definitely not responsible for such spectacular (2x) performance gains. More RAM was painfully necessary and it would be at least irresponsible for Apple not to have had this addressed. On the other hand, afaik, Apple has never officially published RAM or CPU specs for any of their iPhones. Whatever info we know is from teardowns and software.
Like JC said, the 3GS runs existing applications faster, not only Safari. I reckon they’re either using a higher-clocked ARM11 (600+ MHz) or more likely, a next-gen ARMv7 core like the Cortex-A8. We know Apple are looking for developers who have experience with coding for ARMv7 SIMD but the question is whether it is in the 3GS or next year’s model.
BTW, a 400MHz Cortex-A8 core has approximately twice the processing power of an ARM11 core. This would back up Apple’s claim that the 3GS is “twice as fast” as the 3G.
In the keynote they didn’t even mention performance gains in apps. They only said that things get launched more quickly; same thing for the video walkthrough, they didn’t say that apps run faster, but they launch more quickly from one to the next and load more quickly.
I dunno. I see a lot of signs which point to a faster CPU in the 3GS.
I didn’t watch the keynote but several websites claim that Apple “brags about 2x to 3.6x speed performance improvements over a wide range of apps.”
In the walkthrough, it mentions “better performance and improved graphics also mean a better gaming experience” and “whatever you’re doing, it’s going to be more responsive”
Also on Apple’s webpage, they have a small “Compare iPhones” section where they have the 3G and 3GS side-by-side and one of the features listed for the 3GS is “Improved performance”.
I suppose we’ll find out definitely in a week when people start comparing the 3G and 3GS with OS 3.0
Then a few weeks later we’ll get more details once the jail-breakers break Apple’s protection and other people take the whole thing apart to analyse its guts!
The reason they dont reveal the processor speed is because it is not faster. They simply added 128mb ram. They dont want to go head to head with the palm pre on specs.
If they did, the 600mhz 256mb Pre and the new i phone 3gs would be a virtual tie. The Pres Texas Instruments integrated processor lets it run multiple apps, the apple gives you way more GB. But if you dont need a huge GB hard drive the Pre is faster.
no
the future is: MID Phones, not iphone (AKA pPhone(Period Phone)
Well, actually we know the iPhone 3GS has a different CPU (actually SoC) from the fact that it supports Open GL ES 2.0 (should say PowerVR SGX here), in contrast to the first iPhones, so it is a different SoC. Perhaps an Apple specific one. We will know more details when it will be shipped and it gets dissected.
The iPhone 3GS DEFINATLEY has a new processor! Why?:
-Prevent Jailbreaking…a new cpu is the only way to prevent/delay ability to jailbreak and iphone
-Latest revamp of the iPod Touch has a newer processor than the 3G..ergo, the 3GS must have one(seeing as stingy apple never lets their precocious iPhone be 1up’d
-same reason as mentioned above, GL ES 2.0
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say it is a similar underclocked variation of the ARM cortex cpu seen in the open pandora project…just makes since and fits.
Yes, it’s really interesting, if iPhone 3GS use ARM Cortex or its a rewritten software
When will be full flash support, not only Youtube?
There won’t be any Flash on any iPhone anytime soon, period. Not because the hardware wouldn’t support it, it’s because Apple DOES NOT WANT Flash or any other code interpreter on their devices. Why? I’ll give you just one example – think of all the FREE online flash games that would suddenly be in direct competition with the App Store apps. This has been discussed before and that’s just the way it is, no need to whine about it, we’ll just have to live with it.
Not to mention they would ruin the user experience when the flash app didn’t fit on the screen *and* the control schemes just wouldn’t always play nice with a touch-only driven device. There’s no easy or straightforward way for handling them all. Apple doesn’t want bad rap, as even when it isn’t their fault (users trying to run a flash app that was designed for a desktop browser with a large screen and a keyboard and mouse in mind), it would be a horrible user experience – worse than losing out on flash altogether.
Maybe they don’t mention it because they were not upgraded and they don’t want to hurt upgrade sales. All the improvements they site can be attributed to software optimizations. The market speak they use indicates this “up to”
A 1% increase in speed can be included if they say “up to”.
It isn’t really an upgrade its a money grab.
Except I already told you why there IS a new cpu…
Apple is not stupid enough to leave the same cpu in there that is 100% “pwnable”(ergo jailbreakable) which allows unjust little kids to run cracked app store apps they did not pay for.
You see the only thing that can stop the dev team from pwning a device is a new processor…that is why the 2g ipod touch took sooo long to crack, it had a new processor(even newer than the 3G), while the original 3G took just days(because it used the same processor as the original iphone)
Apple wants their money…that is their number one goal in everything they do, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get it.
Oh ya, and not to mention the fact that it is simply not possible that the new iphone would be Open GL ES 2.0 compliant with the cpu found in the previous iphone…so basically you are still wrong.
the press release from t-mobile has specs on the 3gs.
600 MHz and 256mb ram
Apple stellt iPhone 3GS vor
Die neue Generation des iPhone hatte gestern auf der Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) Premiere. Mehr als 1.000 Apple-Techniker sowie 5.000 Entwickler und andere Vertreter der IT-Branche kamen zur Auftaktveranstaltung der fünftägigen Konferenz, um bei der Präsentation des iPhone 3GS dabei zu sein.
Verkaufsstart des neuen iPhone 3GS in Deutschland ist der 19. Juni.
Das iPhone 3GS ist schneller und besser ausgerüstet als seine Vorgänger. Die neue 3,2 Megapixel-Kamera beispielsweise verfügt jetzt über einen Autofokus und ermöglicht Videoaufnahmen. Die Videos können dann gleich bearbeitet und per Email, MMS oder über die Plattformen MobileMe und YouTube mit anderen geteilt werden. Das Design bleibt beim iPhone 3GS unverändert, lediglich der Name erhält den Zusatz „S“ für „Speed“.
Schneller und länger
Die 400 MHz-Prozessoren werden durch schnellere Versionen mit 600 MHz ersetzt. Der Arbeitsspeicher (RAM) wird auf 256 MB verdoppelt. Außerdem unterstützt das iPhone 3GS für eine schnellere mobile Datenübertragung 7.2 Mbps HDSPA. Applikationen können dadurch mit zwei- bis dreifacher Geschwindigkeit heruntergeladen werden und Seiten aus dem Internet werden fast dreimal so schnell geladen wie bisher.
Trotz der gestiegenen Geschwindigkeit können sich Nutzer auch noch über eine längere Akkulaufzeit freuen. Ein digitaler Kompass und die Navigationsfunktion machen das iPhone 3GS zu einem noch praktischeren persönlichen GPS-System. Videos können jetzt direkt vom iTunes-Shop gekauft oder gemietet werden – die Zwischenstation Computer entfällt.
Neu für alle: die Software
Die Software iPhone OS 3.0 wird ab dem 17. Juni allen iPhone Besitzern weltweit kostenlos zur Verfügung gestellt. Zu den Highlights der rund 100 neuen Features von iPhone OS 3.0 zählen die Funktion “Cut, copy and paste”, die Möglichkeit, MMS zu versenden, und die Suchfunktion “Spotlight”.
In Deutschland wird das Apple iPhone 3GS ab dem 19. Juni wieder exklusiv bei T-Mobile erhältlich sein – ab 1 Euro (im Tarif Complete L).
still not clear – ARM11 or Cortex?
Anand reckons it uses a 600 MHz Samsung SoC with the Cortex-A8 and PowerVR SGX:
http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3579&p=2
http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/10/iphone-3g-s-processor-specs-600mhz-cpu-256mb-of-ram/
I think Anand has it bang on actually. it makes the most sense. Why apple does not want to get into a specs war is simply because they can then string the hardware for as long as possible until they have to renew it. Plus I am sure that it is part of their marketing mantra to highlight the ‘real world’ feel over the actual clock/MB ratings. Remember how they tried to sell G3/G4 architectures on a ‘feel’ basis rather than a Mhz basis? Yet for all their trumpetry a G4 at 1Ghz still runs heavy flash websites worse than a PIII tualatin core at 1Ghz…
I don’t believe that they could have clocked the old SoC with the Arm11 and MBX-lite up to 600Mhz for the arm11 and got the power savings reported – even with a better screen and perhaps lower power ssd and memory. 256MB ram is also going to boost power usage so maybe they are not releasing the specs because to save on power usage the iphone will treat it in blocks and power on/off the memory as required. instead of a single 256MB block.
Still, you never know – there might be licensing issues involved that means they aren’t willing to disclose the information. Shortly someone will rip it apart and tell us anyway. They might have improved the OS enough to get ‘real world’ improvements of 2.5 times or so. I will be surprised if it is arm11.
As a real productivity device I believe the HTC Touch pro2 is not getting enough love from UMPCportal – shame on you ;)
Though the iPhone 3GS might have a 600MHz CPU as indicated by t-mobile, I have a feeling that it isn’t running at the full 600MHz, just as the iPod Touch 2G doesn’t. Though it seems like we got it right with the RAM increase. Again, I’m saying that it won’t be running at 600MHz, if it was running that speed and devs have access to all 256MB of RAM, there is no way that apps will be backward compatible to other generations of devices, and they will need to split the app store to show those that are designed for the 3GS and those that are not.
There are plenty of applications that are either iPhone and not iPod compatible, or only 3G (w/GPS) compatible vs. 1st gen iPhone, each app says what it is compatible with. So why would 3GS be any different? Obviously you can’t use apps req GPS on 1st gen iPhones etc etc…
EC, I don’t believe that there is any app currently that can’t be installed on every single touch device so far released. Even ones that are oriented for GPS and LBS can be installed and used on any of the iPod Touchs or iPhones. Though they may not have the necessary components to make the particular app useful (for example, a microphone), they can still be installed and will run.
Apple will need to overhaul the app store to make a section of apps specifically for the iPhone 3GS as the older models won’t be able to run apps that are being developed with 265MB of RAM and a 600MHz CPU in mind. But that isn’t something that I can see Apple wanting to do. How do you convince devs to create applications that will only run on the iPhone 3GS when you have an audience of 40,000,000 iPhone/iPod Touchs? To me, that move doesn’t make sense, which is why I feel like there is something else afoot here rather than devs having full access to a 600MHz core and 256MB of RAM.
How hard would it be for the iTunes or/and app store on the phone/iPod to recognize the device type and only show the suitable apps?
I would imagine very easily. They already do it by country and they can stop you installing if you have the wrong OS.
Apple has to break from the older devices eventually, otherwise they will get left behind by newer more powerful phones. Phone and MP3 users are fickle and want the latest tech and can often afford it due to phone subsidies. Apple don’t need to convince developers to move, they will adapt or limit their market…
Developers already cope with varying speeds of processor. There are games on the app store that, for example, have more opponents in racing games on the new Touch than on the iPhone and some games run smoother on the Touch than the iPhone etc.
Games developers have been coping with this for years, PCs have lots of different hardware and clock speeds and can adjust frame rate accordingly or offer options to lower visual quality.
“I don’t believe that there is any app currently that can’t be installed on every single touch device so far released”
That definitely isn’t true, developers can compile to different versions of the OS and to the device.
I’ve seen cases where a friend with a v2 Touch couldn’t install an app, when they tried it said it wasn’t compatible with their device. They contacted the developer and he said he’d forgot to included the new model in the build options (as it was written pre v2). They submitted a new version that day and a week later my friend could install the app when it made the store.
Marc,
The scenario your friend had I would however class as “unintentional non compatibility” if that makes sense.
Oh, yes, I agree. But it shows it is possible to target your applications.
arm11 and cortex use very different methods to achieve low power consumption. arm11 chips strive to limit power consumption at the expense of performance which is why underclocking them works. cortex chips use the more modern idea of race to idle and use better manufacturing techniques to achieve low idle draw. By crunching numbers more quickly cortex chips spend more time idle running the same program as arm11.
in terms of compatibility I don’t see it as being that big a deal. OS X already has development and runtime tools that make multi arch very simple. The biggest change is actually the graphics not the cpu. there are likely going to be games that are 3GS only but regular apps shouldn’t be a huge difference. They might just accomplish more complicated tasks like javascript and gps route calculations faster on the new hardware.
It’s a 600Mhz CPU. TI’s OMAP 3430 (same as the Pre) which uses an ARM Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU.
http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3579&p=2
iPhone 3G (ARM11) iPhone 3GS (ARM Cortex A8)
Manufacturing Process 90nm 65nm
Issue Width 1-issue 2-issue
Pipeline Depth 8-stage 13-stage
Clock Speed 412MHz 600MHz
L1 Cache Size 16KB I-C + 16KB D-C 32KB I-C + 32KB D-C
L2 Cache Size N/A 256KB
hmmmmm… informative.