Roger Fingas
The Apple Watch is using "most" of iOS 8.2, with a new subsystem called "Carousel" in place of the Springboard homescreen found on iPhones and iPads, developer Steve Troughton-Smith said on Thursday, also suggesting that the Watch's S1 processor appears to be equivalent to the Apple A5.
Posting on Twitter, Troughton-Smith noted that the Watch firmware contains a PowerVR SGX543 driver. The SGX543 is the same graphics component found in the A5, which Apple first shipped with the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S back in 2011.
The S1 though is a much more compressed chip design, building everything the device needs into a system-in-package surrounded by resin for extra protection. Apple has said relatively little about the technology beyond that, making it difficult to gauge performance.
The Watch firmware is not officially considered a version of iOS. Since it has to interact with a paired iPhone, however, it makes sense for it to be founded in the same general codebase.
Troughton-Smith further observed that all of the Watch Faces are stored in a single framework, called NanoTimeKit. Those Faces use SpriteKit graphics, but animated faces like Mickey Mouse apply OpenGL for rendering.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
26 Comments
imagine the performance of iPhone 5S inside this little puppy...very impressive.
Ugh, the A5 has lived way too long.
Ugh, the A5 has lived way too long.
4S is still used by many out there. What's wrong? It's a damn watch and doesn't need all the power of the latest chip. You like to put 4.0L V-8 engine in a Fiat500?
Yes, it may be impressive but I'm hoping it's not the same exact chip and just smaller. I would hope apple would make it more energy efficient and also hoping it's more of a 64bit compatible. Since Apple is forcing all apps to go over to a 64 bit structure it would only make sense that all future Apple devices are also 64 bit. I would hate to have to buy another watch in 2 years because they force it over to 64 bit if it's not now compatible.
Might have been meaningful to put a 64-bit ARM in there without 32-bit backwards compatible instruction set, since as I remember from the A7 introduction, it was said the 64-bit instruction set was designed to use less power, and that 64-bit apps use less power. On the watch backwards compatible 32-bit instructions wouldn't be required, so all that could be left off the chip. It's a stretch to assume a specific CPU core just because of the presence of a certain GPU.