With Apple set to announce its latest line of iPhones on September 12, we’ve all more or less settled on the idea that Cupertino will introduce the iPhone XS live on stage. But how much faster is the iPhone XS? Apple events are usually chock full of easy to read bar charts saying how their new device is X-times faster than the last, but rumors suggest we won’t even need those informative Powerpoint slides to break the news. Expect better battery life by proxy, too.
Each year sees Apple bump up iPhone performance over the last iteration – though they now have a reputation for slowing those performance gains down over time. When they’re fresh out of the box, though, the iPhone XS is expected to trump what came before.
iPhone X vs iPhone XS: How Much Faster is the iPhone XS?
So just how much faster is the iPhone XS? Compared to last year’s release of the iPhone X, a 20-30% raw performance increase is expected. There’s no way to say for certain until Apple dishes out their marketing material and reviewers issue a final verdict, but The India Times is suggesting a 20-30% increase over the iPhone X is likely.
The reason for these lavish gains comes from the decision to continue a long-standing relationship with Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC. The A12 chip expected to power the iPhone XS will dial down to 7nm as opposed to the 10nm A11 Bionic chip found in the last year’s handsets. The smaller chip is said to allow “1.6X logic density, ~20% speed improvement, and ~40% power reduction.” according to TSMC (H/T Macworld).
The idea here is that a smaller chip uses less power, meaning the A12 processor should still yield those performance gains we expect each year, while sapping less of that precious battery life. Jason Cross of Macworld notes that the performance gains of the A11 Bionic chip were so great at the time that we shouldn’t expect such a profound increase in this year’s model. A 20-30% increase isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but pairing it with some noticeable power consumption reductions and a slightly bigger or higher-quality battery could offset the concerns Apple conjured up with the public thanks to some troublesome battery behavior.
As for GPU performance, it’s worth noting that a rumored 40% increase might not mean much if Cupertino refuses to upgrade the amount of RAM in the iPhone XS.
