The current Apple TV[1] is nearly two years old. That’s why it’s not surprising to learn that Apple has been working on a new device for a while. This weekend, an upcoming build of iOS 11 for the next iPhone was leaked[2] and contains a ton of information about unreleased products, including the next Apple TV.
A previous leak[3] of the HomePod firmware already indicated that Apple was working on an Apple TV with 4K video support. The new device could also support various high-dynamic range standards, such as Dolby Vision, HDR10 and Hybrid Log-Gamma. The company could announce 4K videos on the iTunes Store as well as in the Netflix app.
And now, Steve Troughton-Smith[4] discovered some of the technical specs of the next Apple TV. According to him, the media player is going to receive a major performance gain with a lot more computing power and RAM:
…I guess three cores would make it the A10X Fusion. Correction!
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) September 11, 2017[5]
Apple first shipped the A10 with the iPhone 7 last year. The A10X is an updated version of this chip optimized for the most recent iPad Pro. It’s a surprisingly fast system-on-a-chip. It’s sometimes even faster than a MacBook[6].
The current Apple TV sports an A8 system-on-a-chip, the one that was developed for the iPhone 6. It’s a bit hard to grasp Apple’s progress when it comes to silicon. According to Geekbench[7], when you compare the A10X with the A8, the A10X is 1.7 times faster for single-core tasks, 2.8 times faster for multi-core tasks and 5.7 times faster for...