by And so the rumors are true: Apple’s new high-end phone really is called the “iPhone 5S,” which Phil Schiller calls “most forward-thinking phone we’ve ever created.” Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, and then presented a video showing the new device in “space gray,” silver, and–yes–gold. Schiller finished off his introduction of the device by quipping, “The team has carefully considered every detail. It is the gold standard.”
The new device is made out of high-grade aluminum with chamfered edges, and it does sport the ring around the home button we’ve seen in recent leaks. After showing off the appearance of the device, Schiller moved on to performance. “The iPhone 5S is a huge leap forward in mobile computing performance,” he said.
Source: The Verge
The new device has an A7 64-bit chip, the first ever on a smartphone, along with with 2x general purpose registers, 2x floating point registers, over 1 billion transistors and a 100 square mm die size. According to Schiller, that’s roughly twice the amount of transistors for the A6 chip in the previous iPhone.
iOS 7 itself has been updated to support this new architecture, complete with 64-bit kernel, libraries, and drivers and Xcode support that’s backwards-compatible for both 32- and 64-bit chips. “Why go through this?,” Schiller asked. “The benefits are huge. The CPU is twice as fast, and graphics are twice as fast as well.” Apparently this all means that the iPhone 5S is around 56 times as fast as the original iPhone.
Game aficionados should also rejoice: The new phone supports OpenGL ES 3.0, which Apple claims will allow for “breakthroughs in performance for graphics-intensive games.” The iPhone 5S also includes a new part called an M7 chip that works in tandem with the A7 chip as a motion processor. With it, motion data will be monitored continuously so as to support an accelerometer, gyroscope, and improvements to the compass. According to Schiller, the chip will allow “a new generation of health and fitness apps” to exist.
Battery life for the device apparently clocks in at 10 hours with 3G talk time with 250 hours available via standby. If you’re just browsing on LTE, expect your iPhone 5S to last for 10 hours, although if you’re just listening to music, that number goes up to 40. Schiller then gave much attention to the device’s camera, which we’ll cover separately in a following post.
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