If you’re wondering roughly how powerful the Apple Watch’s S1 SoC processor is compared to other ARM chips, the answer appears to be that it’s roughly equivalent to an A5 chip, as seen on the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, first iPad mini, and the Apple TV, at least as far as graphics chutzpah is concerned.
That’s what iOS developer Steve Troughton-Smith pointed out today on Twitter, who says that it’s also running “most” of iOS 8.2, with a custom UI called Carousel instead of Springboard.
Nothing suprising – it’s running most of iOS 8.2 with Carousel instead of Springboard. Has a PowerVR SGX543 driver, so it’s A5-equivalent?
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) April 23, 2015
Note this doesn’t refer to processing power, which is probably underclocked compared to an A5, but only the core graphics chip. Even so, the S1 seems powerful.
Troughton-Smith then went on to discuss the GPU achitecture of the Apple Watch, based on his own experiments, which shows that the Disney Mickey Mouse watchface is unique amongst all the possible watchfaces:
All the Apple Watch faces are housed in a single framework, NanoTimeKit. Mickey Mouse renderer is OpenGL, faces are all SpriteKit
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) April 23, 2015
Users on Twitter speculate that the name of that framework, NanoTimeKit, may carry over from the days of the iPod nano, which was the first device Apple tried to sell as a watch, and which actually inspired the Apple Watch effort.
From Apple’s perspective, of course, the Apple Watch doesn’t run on iOS. Of course, iOS isn’t considered a branch of OS X either, even though it’s built on the same kernel. All of Apple’s operating systems tend to share a little bit of DNA.
Source: Troughton-Smith on Twitter