This is an example of how to use the new UICollectionView with NSFetchedResultsController. Unlike UITableView, which has beginUpdates and endUpdates methods, UICollectionView requires updates to be stored, and then submitted as a block to performBatchUpdate:completion:.
NSFetchedResultsController is designed for use with UITableView, and as such is tuned for some of it's quirks. Table views allow updates to items within sections that are also being updated. UICollectionView runs into exceptions if you add items into sections that are being added, delete items from sections that are being deleted, etc. This means that when using NSFetchedResultsController and UICollectionView, you need to filter the updates so you do not perform changes within sections that are also changing.
Supported as of iOS 8. When using Swift, you may want to consider using JSQDataSourcesKit or translating this to Swift.
Clone the repo and look in the UICollectionViewController subclass. The logic inside the .m file shows how to queue updates.
Section updates are stored in _sectionChanges while updates to objects within sections are stored in _objectChanges. When controllerDidChangeContent: is called, these updates are dequeued, coalesced, and then submitted as a block to the UICollectionView.
Some of the logic for this is taken from this gist. Additional thanks to SixtyFrames for the significant update adding change-filtering.