Apple recently released iPhone 5. To be fair, the hardware parameters of iPhone 5 are not very good: 1.3G dual core CPU and 1GB RAM. In Android phones, four core CPU and 2GB RAM can be used in a large number, but these hardware parameters are better than those of iPhone The flagship is not as smooth as the iPhone. Why?

First of all, hardware parameters are not everything.

IPhone 5 uses Apple's new SoC (System-On-a-Chip) chip A6. One of the key advantages of SoC technology is that it can reduce the performance limitations caused by the delay of signals coming in and out of multiple chips on the system board. It also improves the reliability of the system and reduces the total system cost. Apple is one of the first companies to use SoC for mobile phone design, and has great advantages in this field.

The A6 is manufactured using the 32nm HKMG process, uses the ARMV7 instruction set, and does not directly use the A9 core. Compared with A5 chip, A6 has twice the CPU and GPU performance. The speed of starting Pages applications is 2.1 times faster than before, and the speed of opening Keynotes files is 1.7 times faster than before 。 Although this chip is not superior in frequency and core, it is not inferior to Exynos 4412, which has the strongest general performance of Android platform, in some single thread tests (see details for general performance evaluation of mobile phones《 》）。

In addition, even though CPU parameters are not dominant, Apple has always been in the lead in GPU, which is why The important reason why the image performance of mobile phone is better than that of Android phone.

Secondly, iOS and Android adopt different methods in image special effect processing.

As we all know, iOS is not an open system, but a system optimized for a few hardware. This allows the special effect processing of images in iOS to use GPU for hardware acceleration, independent of software. Android is an open system. In order to adapt to different mobile phone hardware, many graphics special effects need to be rendered by software, which is inefficient. With "Project Butter", Google has made some improvements in version 4.1, but it is also unable to accelerate all special effects by GPU hardware.

Finally, the system architecture of the two is different.

It starts with history.

Android was founded in 2003. The early Android was aimed at replacing the popular BB/Palm/S60, not a system with "touch" as the core; In 2005, Android was acquired by Google, and Apple began to develop iOS at about the same time The positioning is: a system completely developed for finger touch, a system to subvert the PC/Mac model, and does not target any existing products.

Android is run by Linux kernel plus Java shell and virtual machine. The system architecture of iOS is similar to that of Mac OS. The Cocoa Touch layer is added to Mac OS, while ensuring the powerful functions and stability of iOS system. Compared with iOS's Objectiv-C, Android's Java virtual machine is inefficient, It takes a lot of memory to get a smooth speed, and Android's memory recycling mechanism will directly cause the interface to get stuck. Although Google has improved in version 2.3, it has not completely solved this problem.

After the iPhone was released, Google has made rapid improvements to Android and transformed it into a system suitable for touch operation. However, Android was not originally designed for touch, and there are still some limitations in the framework, but it is impossible to rewrite the UI framework. To put it simply, Android has always patched the original architecture, which is naturally not comparable to iOS.

In addition to the differences in architecture, there are also slight differences in touch screen response and other aspects between the two. iOS puts the user's touch screen operations at the first priority, but Android's handling priority for touch screen operations is slightly lower. When the system is busy, it is naturally not as smooth as iOS.

Although most Android phones are not as sophisticated and smooth as the iPhone, the needs of different users are diverse. The vitality of Android lies in its diversity. After all, no matter how good the iPhone is, it cannot meet the needs of all people. In other words, If everyone around us has the same mobile phone, it will be boring.