Iphone 4 Display

by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/30/2010 4:06:00 AM Posted in Smartphones , Gadgets , Apple , iPhone 4

Screen - Retina Display

Right out of the box, the iPhone 4's new 326 PPI, 960x640, 3.5" display is arguably the single most striking change the new iPhone brings. In a word, it's dazzling. Text and high res images look amazingly sharp on the iPhone 4’s retina display. It’s an improvement over the 800 x 480 AMOLED screens that have been shipping on most Android phones. But if you’re comparing it to an iPhone 3GS the difference is huge.

iPhone 3GS
iPhone 4
Text on the Google Nexus One
Text on the iPhone 4

The dot pitch is truly remarkable, so much so that Apple makes the claim that their display outresolves the human eye; its advertised ability to do so has earned it a new Apple tradename, "retina display."

Text on the HTC EVO 4
Text on the iPhone 4
AnandTech Logo on the EVO 4G
AnandTech Logo on the iPhone 4

Immediately after hearing Apple's claim that the Retina Display outresolves the human eye, I snapped into optics mode and crunched the numbers, and tweeted that the results were valid.
In the days that followed, there was considerable debate about the validity of Apple's claims. However, nearly all of the debate really just hinged on a debate over angular resolution of the human eye, and a little more over viewing distance. They're both entirely conventions.

As you've probably discovered by now, the human eye resolution can really only be characterized in angular subtense. Hold something closer to your eye, and you can see smaller features better (in theory), move it further away, and you can't make out small spatial details. The minimum angle visible with the human eye is the angle at which features (for the most common definition, a black and white square wave) stop being visible, and are indistinguishable from each other.

Most measures of visual acuity test with this implicitly - the Snellen eye chart's use of the capital "E" is literally a perfect example, which has given rise to a "tumbling E" eye chart. At twenty feet, the capital E subtends 5 minutes of arc, and conveniently has five half cycles of white to black (from top to bottom). So 20/20 implicitly implies an angular resolution of 1 arcminute (1/60 degrees).

As an Optical Sciences and Engineering undergrad, I've had 1 arcminute drilled into my head more times than I can count as being the "normal" angular resolution of the human eye system. In practice, this is 20/20 vision, which is "normal," yet not perhaps the absolute maximum for human perfection. We can play games of course and argue that a small subset of the population has better than normal uncorrected vision, and thus an angular resolution of below 1 arcminute. I have above average uncorrected vision, which I've measured to be 20/15 on average, giving an angular resolution of approximately 0.75 arcminutes. Of course, the definitions stem from the spacing of cones in the fovea, the highest resolution part of the retina.

The other informational quantity needed to test the Retina Display claims is viewing distance. Again, there's a commonly agreed upon convention - standard viewing distance is considered to be 1 foot. This is another drilled into my brain number tossed around for comfortable viewing and reading. In practice, you can focus on objects much closer to your eye - this is called the near point and is often given as 10 inches, though as you get closer you increase strain aren't likely to keep it here.

Maybe not exactly the limit, but close enough.

Given the two most common standards tossed around, 1 arcminute and 12 inches, do the math out and you'll arrive at around 286 pixels per inch as the limit for eye resolving power, comfortably below the 326 on the Retina Display. Move to 0.75 arcminutes at 12 inches, and it's 382 pixels per inch, higher than the Retina Display. Honestly, I can't see the pixels at 12 inches.
Of course, the real story is even more complicated. Remember how the definition comes with the implicit assumption that we're dealing with a square wave pattern from white to black? That's a factor too - the contrast of the two pixels. Lower the contrast, and the eye's ability to pick out features decreases even more. So far, everything we've talked about has been first order, and without aberrations. Toss in spherical and astigmatism, two aberrations common to the eye system, and eye performance drops way more.

The human eye system is actually pretty poor, and shockingly easy to outresolve. In fact, if you saw the image your eye forms on your retina, you'd likely be appalled; it's your brain that makes the system usable. But at the end of the day, Apple's claims that the display outresolves the human eye are good enough for us.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/4

Iphone 4 Battery Benchmatk

Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/30/2010 4:06:00 AM Posted in Smartphones , Gadgets , Apple , iPhone 4

Incredible Battery Life

I’ve publicly praised Apple for its honesty in reporting battery life over the past couple of years, and the iPhone 4 gives me no reason to stop.

The 4 has an integrated 5.25Whr battery. That’s around 95% of the battery capacity of the HTC EVO 4G, despite having much lower power frequirements. It’s also a 16% increase over the 4.51Whr battery that was in the iPhone 3GS. This means at bare minimum, assuming the iPhone 4 doesn’t draw any more power than the 3GS, we should get 16% more battery life.

In reality, we get much more.

When Apple introduced the iPhone 3G it dropped battery life to a level that we’d been stuck at ever since. The 3GS improved battery life a bit through better CPU power efficiency but you still didn’t have enough juice to get through a day without charging.

The iPhone 4 changes all of that. The combination of a larger battery and a more power efficient SoC results in an incredible amount of battery life.

Our first test is a basic web browsing benchmark. We've scripted almost two dozen webpages to load, pause for 20 seconds, then forward on to the next page. None of the pages use any Flash. This process repeats until the battery is dead. Screen brightness on the iPhones was set to 50% and the screens remained on the whole time.

Battery life improved nearly 38% with the iPhone 4. It's clear that while the A4 improved performance, the real improvement was in battery life. This test has enough idle time where good power management and low idle power can really impact the results. There's simply no other similar smartphone that can touch the 4's battery life.

We then repeated the same test over WiFi instead of 3G:

Apple claims the iPhone 4 will last for up to 10 hours over WiFi, we measured just under that at 9.96 hours. The improvement here is only 12.8%, which tells me that we're nearing the limit of how efficiently Apple can manage power in WiFi mode. There's a wall that we're quickly approaching with this current architecture.

To measure talk time we play MP3s on repeat into the mic of a phone and use it to call the phone being tested. The process continues until the test phone dies. In this case the screen is allowed to go to sleep, as it normally would be if you were talking on the phone:

Apple promised up to 7 hours of 3G talk time with the iPhone 4. We measured 7.47 hours. That's an increase of 54.9% over the iPhone 3GS. While in a phone call the majority of the A4 SoC is powered down, so the efficiency improvements here have to do with how much less power the A4 consumes while off and the new Skyworks 3G modem (the iPhone 3GS used an Infineon modem).

In our iOS 4 review we looked at the impact multitasking had on the iPhone 3GS' web browsing battery life. I ran our 3G web browsing test while playing music through Pandora in the background. I repeated the test with the iPhone 4 for today's article:

We actually see our largest battery life improvement in this test. With a 57.7% increase in battery life over the 3GS, the iPhone 4 is not only more efficient at idle workloads but also when the SoC is constantly busy. The A4 SoC is rumored to be built on a 45nm process compared to the 65nm SoC used in the 3GS. With a moderate increase in clock speed we should be seeing a lot of the power savings that a full node shrink brings to the table.

The battery life offered by the iPhone 4 is spectacular. My iPhone 3GS could hardly get through a full day of work while traveling, I'd always need to hunt for an outlet before heading into my dinner meeting. I'm about to take my first trip with the iPhone 4 but I get the feeling that I might finally be able to make it through dinner.

Early reports of 20 and 30 hours of battery life are simply exaggerated. They're only possible if you let the phone idle in your pocket for the majority of that time. In other words, if you don't use the phone it lasts for a long time. While that's a testament to the platform's incredible idle power, the real world usage is good enough to stand on its own. It's better than any iPhone or Android phone I've tested thus far.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/13

Iphone 4 Performance Benchmark

by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/30/2010 4:06:00 AM Posted in Smartphones , Gadgets , Apple , iPhone 4

Performance

When the 4 was announced, my curiosity (and perhaps yours as well?) was about the flavor of Apple’s A4 SoC inside the phone. The rumor was that the A4 in the iPhone 4 had a full 512MB of memory, compared to 256MB in the iPad’s A4. iFixit took an iPhone 4 apart (with relative ease I might add) and confirmed the presence of 512MB. Look at the A4 in this picture, the Samsung part number on the right edge of the chip starts out K4X4G. The K4X denotes a Samsung mobile

DRAM and the 4G refers to its density: 4Gbit or 512MB.

More memory should mean a smoother multitasking experience on the iPhone 4. Remember that iOS 4 keeps all fast task switching enabled apps resident in memory even after you’ve switched away from them. They are only kicked out of memory if you run low or if you force quit them. With more memory you should be able to keep more apps in memory without unwillingly forcing them out. The 512MB of RAM should also give the OS more breathing room in lighter multitasking scenarios, a problem many are already seeing on the iPhone 3GS running iOS 4. In practice the 4 is smoother when running iOS 4. There are still some hiccups but not as bad as on the 3GS, and definitely not as bad as on the 3G. The OS was clearly designed with the iPhone 4 as the performance target.

The big question that remains is what clock speed the iPhone 4’s A4 is running at. The assumption was 1GHz however Apple was very careful not to mention clock speed, unlike at the iPad launch. Saying nothing usually means there’s nothing good to say.

I ran a whole bunch of benchmarks on the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS running iOS 4 to try and figure out what CPU speed we might be dealing with. The early reviews imply that the A4 in the iPhone 4 is running at a speed greater than the 3GS’s 600MHz, but slower than the iPad’s 1GHz.

Let’s try and find out what it’s really running at.

We’ll start with the real world tests, first SunSpider. A javascript performance test this benchmark is completely network independent but it measures the performance of the browser as well as the underlying hardware. It is small enough to make memory size differences negligible so between the two iPhones we should be seeing a pure CPU comparison:

The iPhone 4 manages a time that’s 25% faster. Note that this test is just as much about the software stack as it is about CPU/platform performance. The Froyo update makes the Nexus One ridiculously fast in this benchmark. It just shows you how much room there is to improve performance on these Android handsets. The next leapfrog is going to be once the entire Android world moves to 2.2.

Next up is the Rightware BrowserMark. This test combines JavaScript and HTML rendering performance:

BrowserMark spits out an overall score but with no indication of what the score actually means. In this case we’re looking at 18.4% better performance than the iPhone 3GS. The iPad is 34% faster than the 4, which supports the theory of the A4 running at ~750MHz in the new iPhone.

There's also the possibility that the A4 CPU clock varies depending on load and other factors but the run to run consistency in all of our tests seems to indicate otherwise. We also can't ignore the fact that the iPad and iPhone now run vastly different OS revisions. In some cases iOS 4 actually takes a step back in performance compared to iOS 3.2. That undoubtedly makes the iPad vs. iPhone 4 comparison about much more than CPU performance.

Froyo's improved Javascript performance sends the Nexus One nearly to the top of the list here, only bested by the iPad. While Apple has definitely improved performance with the iPhone 4, it seems that it will only take a software update for Android phones to surpass it.

To measure web browsing performance I downloaded a bunch of different web pages and saved as much of them as possible locally on a server. I used WiFi on all of the devices to connect to my local server and timed average load time. I repeated the test at least 3 times and threw out any unusually high or low numbers. Performance was from a clean restart with no additional programs running in memory.

Note that these numbers aren't comparable to other reviews as we've updated software versions on two of the phones. The iPhone 3GS is now running iOS 4 which resulted in some numbers going up while others went down. And the Google Nexus One is running the officially released build of Android 2.2, codenamed Froyo.

What these tests should show is the overall performance of the platform when all network bottlenecks are removed. Obviously hiding in a tunnel under a lead umbrella will make any phone slow, but we’re looking at peak performance here.

The first test is the new AnandTech front page. Here we’ve got tons of images and HTML, meaning we’re stressing both bandwidth and code parsing speed.

The iPhone 4 is no faster than the 3GS (actually slightly slower, but we'll chalk that up to timing variance) here. The Froyo update to the Nexus One makes it lightning quick, almost as fast as the iPad in our first test.

Next up we have the first page of our recent Zotac XBOX HD-ID11 review. The balance shifts from tons of images to more HTML processing:

Here we see more of what I expected: the iPhone 4 is around 25% faster than the 3GS running iOS 4. Android 2.2 running on the Nexus One is basically as fast as the 4.

Using our Print this Review function, this next test loads our entire 2010 15-inch Macbook Pro review. While the other two tests had some flash ad content, this one is completely devoid of it so the HTC phones shouldn’t be penalized:

Here the iPhone 4 is 11% faster than the 3GS and about the speed of the iPad. There are other bottlenecks at play here so we don't get further performance scaling. The Froyo update helps the Nexus One a bit but the iOS devices are still quicker.

Our most intensive test is up next with a load of the Engadget front page:

The Nexus One is ahead of the 4 once more with its Froyo update. And the iPhone 4 is 34% faster than the 3GS.

Our most CPU bound test is up next. I put together a custom page with a ton of tabular content and a single page copy of our 15-inch MBP review to make the load take some time at least.

Surprisingly enough there's no difference between the 3GS and the 4 here, perhaps my test is less CPU bound than I thought. Froyo improves the Nexus One's performance a little bit.

Low Level Synthetic Tests

If we assume that we’re mostly CPU bound in all of these cases (a fair assumption given how fast Atom can run through all of these tests), then we’d be looking at a ~750MHz clock speed for the iPhone 4’s A4 assuming no other architectural changes. That’s actually a pretty big assumption. The A4 is widely believed to be a 45nm SoC using an ARM Cortex A8. At 45nm there should be room for a larger L2 cache than what was used in the iPhone 3GS’s SoC.

Perhaps some more synthetic tests will help us figure out what’s going on. I turned to Geekbench, now available in an iOS version.

Geekbench spit out a number of overall results that gave me a good enough summary of what’s going on to make an educated guess:

The CPU specific tests all indicate the iPhone 4 is around 25% faster than the iPhone 3GS. That would imply at least a 750MHz clock speed if all else is the same. Assuming we don’t get perfect CPU scaling with all of these tests, I’d venture a guess that 800MHz is more accurate. If the A4 does indeed have larger caches however, Apple could get away with a lower clock speed.

The memory results are particularly telling as they all scale very well going to the iPhone 4, better than the CPU results in fact. This could lend credibility to the theory of larger internal caches or perhaps to an improved (faster) memory subsystem.

Unfortunately until we get the iPad on iOS 4 we can't get a better idea of CPU scaling. I'm not even sure how reliable that will be at this point. If Apple was willing to change the amount of memory the A4 package housed between the iPad and iPhone 4, who is to say that it wouldn't have a slightly different design for the iPhone 4 (e.g. larger caches). The designs may not be physically different but we may instead be looking at binning. Given Apple's unwillingness to talk about the architecture here I think the safest bet is that we're looking at an 800MHz ARM Cortex A8 core in the iPhone 4 and a 1GHz core in the iPad.

Why the lower clock? It's all about battery life.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/12