What exact processor is inside the new iPod touch? TUAW digs deeper

Hey everyone. Can anyone tell me whether the new 8GB Touch is any better than the prevous 2nd Gen 8GB Touch then. Stuff Ive read seems to suggest that only the 32Gb and 64GB versions have the faster processor.

Does that mean the new 8GB touch is basically identical to the 2nd gen? i.e. price has dropped a little on the 2nd Gen so should I just get one of those if buy the 8GB?

Thanks!

Dave... the HTC Hero is stuck with the same 528MHz CPU as the original G1. It doesn't come close to the 3GS.

csnplt ,

Thank you for your detailed reply. Suddenly my new G2 Touch seems sluggish.

s.

im just pissed that my 3G which im still in contract for is now well down in the pecking line for processors, I know hardware moves on quickly yada yada but i can still complain. I think im gonna go for the HTC Hero when my contract is up, on a 12 month deal since the new firmware negates a lot of the speed issues it had on launch

i actually just got my 32gb ipod touch today. i would definitely say its faster than my 3G. switching between applications is very smooth. loading times for apps are quicker as well. it just gives the entire experience a performance boost.

The new processor runs at a clock speed of 600 MHz, and the iPod touch 3G and the iPhone 3GS have 256 MB RAM, twice that of the previous generations. However the ~70 MHz speed improvement from 2G to 3G iPod touch is not the real increase in speed. This alone results in only a 10% performance improvement. Instead, the new processor is based on the ARM Cortex A8 specifications, which dramatically improve performance at the same clock speeds.

In real use, the new iPod touch 3G is much faster than the 2G, to the magnitude of 2x in many cases. In safari, pages render much faster, apps launch easily twice as fast, and the new GPU is on a totally new level, with support for complex shading operations in openGL ES 2.0.

I've written a benchmark application for the iPod touch and the iPhone called Gauge Mathematical Tool, on the App Store, which also has a pi approximator to 1 million digits, a prime number generator, and a Mandelbrot fractal explorer. The version on the app store right now is not effective for benchmarking comparisons, but I've sent an update to Apple for review which greatly improves accuracy of the benchmark and performance of the math tools.

Here are some numbers from the updated version (not yet available)
Main benchmark:
-iPod touch 1G scores 79
-iPod touch 2G scores 100
-iPod touch 3G scores 175
-iPhone 3GS scores slightly lower than the iPT 3G, at 172 (probably due to extra tasks running in background such as phone app that iPT doesn't have - not hardware issue)

Time to calculate 10000 digits of pi:
-iPod touch 1G = 2.1 seconds
-iPod touch 3G = 1.12 seconds.

Time to draw 5000 quartz shapes
-iPod touch 1G = 2.6 seconds
-iPod touch 3G = 1.1 seconds

Time to launch Mandelbrot tool
-iPod touch 1G = 3.25 seconds
-iPod touch 3G = 1.5 seconds

I've also ran some sysctl calls on the new hardware, and that is how I know the clockspeed and RAM amounts of the new devices. (iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3G share same amount of RAM, processor (new revision in iPod touch, possibly capable of running at higher clockspeed than version in 3GS, but turned down to save battery), chipset, and graphics.

There is a huge difference in real use between the two devices, and I was astounded when I ran the updated version of my application, at how fast it ran.

I highly recommend the upgrade, for owners of 1G or 2G iPod touches. The improvement from the 1G to the 2G, even with a larger increase in clock speed, does not compare with going from the 2G to the 3G, because of the architectural improvements of going from ARM11 to ARM cortex A8.

I hope that this helps some people. If any of you are interested in trying Gauge Mathematical Tool, you can now, but the benchmark results will not be accurate until the update I sent is approved in a week or 2. Also, since the binary is not optimized for ARM7 instructions in the current app store version, it does not run nearly as fast as in the submitted update.

Sorry for the very long comment.

The touch's processor probably isn't fast enough to handle that much data coming in anyway.

i've compared the ipod touch 3rd gen vs my 3gs and its slightly faster. apps open a split second faster, not a huge difference, but a difference

It has the N chip inside, but it's not active and we can't activate it.

I thought from the title that TUAW actually had an answer...