The new iPods that Apple announced this morning were outed a couple of weeks ago, but the insides of the new iPod Touch were still a surprise: Apple put an A8 in the new Touch, the same SoC that powers the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

The iPod Touch is quite a bit smaller than either iPhone, though, and preliminary benchmarks suggest that the chip's speed has been reduced somewhat to keep the temperature down and the battery life up. Geekbench tests run by TechCrunch say the A8 in the Touch is running at about 1.1GHz, down from 1.4GHz in both iPhones. They also confirm that the A8 includes 1GB of RAM, the same amount as the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

The scores in that Geekbench run suggest that the slowed-down A8 is roughly equivalent to the 1.3GHz Apple A7 chip in the iPhone 5S, which if accurate still represents a substantial improvement over the A5 in the fifth-generation Touch (Primate Labs' John Poole told us that he believes the listed clock speed to be accurate). What we don't know is whether the GPU's speed has been similarly reduced and how aggressively the A8 in the Touch will throttle its speed as it warms up.

Worth noting is that even if the GPU is slowed down relative to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, it's still driving a smaller, lower-resolution display than in either of those phones. Games on the Touch will likely run even faster than they do on the iPhones, and we expect the old fifth-generation iPod Touch to be blown out of the water and into outer space. We'll be doing a more thorough performance analysis in our full review next week.

By: DocMemory
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