AppleInsider Staff
A closer look at Apple's new A6 processor found in the iPhone 5 has found that the system-on-a-chip includes two CPU cores, three graphics processing units, and a full gigabyte of RAM.
The teardown of the A6 chip was conducted via a collaboration between Chipworks and iFixit. They used an ion blaster to remove layers of silicon and find out exactly what's inside Apple's custom-made chip.
Under a microscope, they found that the device has a gigabyte of Elpida LP DDR2 SDRAM. That same RAM is also used in the recently released Motorola Droid Razr Maxx.
The A6 chip itself was fabricated by Samsung via their 32-nanometer CMOS process. It measures 9.70 by 9.97 millimeters.
Though the A6 was manufactured by Samsung, it is the first chip custom designed by Apple, based on the ARMv7s instruction set. Apple's first-ever complete control of the design allowed the company to customize the performance as they chose.
Inside the A6, the most prominent features are the dual ARM cores and the three PowerVR graphics chips. Chipworks found that the ARM processors are laid out manually, which can result in faster processing speeds but is also more expensive and time consuming to develop.
"The manual layout of the ARM processor lends much credence to the rumor that Apple designed a custom processor of the same caliber as the all-new Cortex-A15, and it just might be the only manual layout in a chip to hit the market in several years," iFixit said.
With their microscopes, Chipworks also took a look at who manufactures the cameras featured on the iPhone 5. They found that the rear 8-megapixel camera is manufactured by Sony, while the forward-facing FaceTime camera is built by Omnivision.
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60 Comments
Ion blasting? Wow. Astonishing tear down.
Yeah, this kind of teardown is so helpful for consumers (very sophisticated analysis), but I'm guessing Apple hates it. The telecommunications industry for years and years and years has been incredibly secretive about hardware specs, presumably on the basis that it slows down competitors.
[quote name="gregquinn" url="/t/152879/teardown-of-apples-a6-processor-finds-1gb-ram-2-cpu-3-gpu-cores#post_2198053"]Yeah, this kind of teardown is so helpful for consumers (very sophisticated analysis), but I'm guessing Apple hates it. The telecommunications industry for years and years and years has been incredibly secretive about hardware specs, presumably on the basis that it slows down competitors.[/quote] The competition can buy the device and simply do their own teardown but this makes that much easier.
Based on this with 75% of the GPU cores (which may be faster than the iPad's GPU cores) the 4th gen iPad should be much thinner and lighter with a hybrid A9-A15-esque chip (if they don't go with a custom chip all based on A15) and the 32nm process.
Yeah, this kind of teardown is so helpful for consumers (very sophisticated analysis), but I'm guessing Apple hates it. The telecommunications industry for years and years and years has been incredibly secretive about hardware specs, presumably on the basis that it slows down competitors.
I'm sure competitors can do similar analysis. In fact a key competitor actually built the chip.