Daniel Hruska When this fall, Apple introduced a new iPhone 5s, most of the fuss revolved around irreplaceable fingerprint sensors touch ID, slow-motion videos, new color variants and 64-bit processor A7. But along with the powerful dual core, the body of the iPhone 5s hides another processor, more precisely the M7 coprocessor. Although it doesn't seem like it at first glance, this is a small revolution in mobile devices.
M7 as a component
Technically speaking, the M7 is a single-chip computer called the LPC18A1. It is based on the NXP LPC1800 single-chip computer, in which the ARM Cortex-M3 processor beats. The M7 was created by modifying these components according to Apple's needs. The M7 for Apple is manufactured by NXP Semiconductors.
The M7 runs at a frequency of 150 MHz, which is sufficient for its purposes, i.e. collecting motion data. Thanks to such a low clock rate, it is gentle on the battery. According to the architects themselves, the M7 needs only 1% of the energy that the A7 would require for the same operation. In addition to the lower clock speed compared to the A7, the M7 also takes up less space, only one twentieth.
What the M7 does
The M7 co-processor monitors the gyroscope, accelerometer and electromagnetic compass, i.e. all data related to movement. It records this data in the background every second, day after day. It keeps them for seven days, when any third-party app can access them, and then deletes them.
The M7 not only records motion data, but is accurate enough to distinguish speeds between the collected data. What this means in practice is that the M7 knows whether you're walking, running or driving. It is this ability, combined with skilled developers, that gives rise to new great applications for sports and fitness.
What M7 means for applications
Before the M7, all "healthy" applications had to use information from the accelerometer and GPS. At the same time, you had to run the app first so that it would run in the background and constantly request and record data. If you haven't run it, you'll probably never know how far you've run or how many calories you've burned.
Thanks to the M7, the problem of having to launch an activity recording app is eliminated. Because the M7 records movement all the time, any app you allow to access the M7's data can process it immediately upon launch and show you how many kilometers you've walked in a day or how many steps you've taken, even if you haven't told the app to record anything.
This eliminates the need to use fitness bands like Fitbit, Nike FuelBand or Jawbone. The M7 has one big advantage over them, which was already mentioned – it can distinguish the type of movement (walking, running, driving in a vehicle). Earlier fitness apps could mistakenly think you were moving, even if you were just sitting still on the tram. This of course led to skewed results.
What the M7 will bring you
Currently, active people who are interested in how many kilometers they walk a day, how many calories they burned or how many steps they walked will be excited about the M7. Since the M7 runs continuously and collects motion data without interruption, the results are very accurate. That is, assuming you keep your iPhone with you as much as possible.
Some applications already fully utilize the potential of the M7. I would name for example RunKeeper or Moves. Over time, the vast majority of fitness apps will add M7 support because they have to, otherwise users would switch to the competition. Battery saving and automatic data collection and analysis are two strong reasons.
What the M7 brought for Apple
Apple likes to highlight its own chips. It started in 2010 when it introduced the iPhone 4 powered by an A4 processor. Apple constantly tries to tell us that thanks to its chips it can extract maximum performance with lower power consumption than the competition. At the same time, the specifications of other hardware are often neglected. Does the average user care, for example, about the size of the operating memory? No. It is enough for him to know that the iPhone is powerful and at the same time lasts all day on a single charge.
How does this relate to the M7? This is just a confirmation that the custom software system works great on the custom hardware, which is best seen in high-end models. Apple with the M7 ran away from the competition by many months. While iPhone 5s users have been able to fully enjoy M7-enabled apps for weeks, the competition only offers coprocessors on the Nexus 5 and Motorola X. The question remains whether Google offers an API to developers or whether it's a proprietary solution.
In some time, Samsung will come (no pun intended) with the Galaxy S V with a new co-processor and then maybe the HTC One Mega. And here is the problem. Both models will use a different co-processor and both manufacturers will probably add their fitness apps. But without a proper framework like Core Motion for iOS, developers will be trapped. This is where Google has to come in and set some rules. How long will it take for that to happen? Meanwhile, the competition will at least increase the number of cores, megapixels, inches and gigabytes of RAM. However, Apple continues to have its way forward-thinking on the way
This path of specialized chips is undoubtedly excellent and is much better than the path of 4 or more core CPUs, the user has no chance to know it, mostly it is about performance on one core anyway..
But... Of course, the applications could detect the context of the movement already on the drive, but they had to use their own algorithms for this, the advantage of this is that it is directly on the HW, so it is faster and more economical, plus there is no need to run the application in the background.
Another thing is that the Motorola X even contains two co-processors, one for recording data from the accelerometer, the other for speech recognition, so Apple probably doesn't have such a head start as it might seem from the article.
Likewise, Android 4.4 has a new API for event batching, which is basically the same (I don't know, but the exact details, to be honest) - this again requires support in HW - the Nexus 5 has it here, and maybe the Moto X there too, if they didn't think of it as proprietary.
I somehow overlooked the Moto X, and that's when I read its review. I only read about speech recognition there. It was either a bad review or bad marketing by Google.
Nexus 5 also includes a similar coprocessor:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/31/google-unveils-new-nexus-5-with-m7-like-motion-tracker-android-44-kitkat
Thanks Dan; I thought that I would have to research what the M7 could be good for, and I suspected that it might be interesting. Thanks for the interesting information!
HTC One-> HTC One Max-> HTC One Mega- > HTC One Giga -> I can't think of anything else :DZ from this point of view, I'm glad that Apple is simply Apple! ;)
And that's exactly it... Whenever my classmates start "taunting" me that my shop for 20 thousand only has 8 mpx and 1 GB of ram, I just smile, because unlike their super boosted HTC or Galaxy Cosi, it rarely happens to me that an application crashed or something didn't work, and my photos are about 10x better quality than their cameras with twice the resolution, which they can only masturbate over, because they still display the photos on a monitor with a resolution of 1280×960. :)
Excellent article! The more of them, the better. I really appreciate the author :). When I first looked at it, I thought that the 5S was just a faster phone with a fingerprint reader, but such "little things" make the difference. However, unfortunately, this does not change the fact that the 5S is still an astronomically priced phone. I'm willing to pay 40 for a MacBook, as well as 10-14 for an iPad, but almost 20 for a phone that can do a lot, but not really. My last iPhone was a 4S, which I bought from Vodafone back then for 9500CZK with a six-month contract, but since then I haven't had one and I don't even plan to, given the crazy prices.
After 10 km of road running, Runkeeper shows me 6 km short, so I can't see the practical use :-( the only option is to use GPS to measure the distance traveled...
Hmm I use the Moves app, works great. Even though I didn't ride a bike and I have a recorded bike ride there :D I must have stepped on 100 animals :D But I don't want to update when I turn off the app and turn it on after two days. I can't load any data. I am currently offline. And I have an iPhone 5s..Don't know what the problem is?