Mikey Campbell
The team at Chipworks on Friday posted a tentative look at the iPhone 5s' A7 system-on-a-chip, finding a few changes from the previous A6 processor, including the addition of a mysterious SRAM cell never seen in A-series silicon.
Continuing its comprehensive investigation of the new A7 SoC, which on Tuesday confirmed a 28nm manufacturing process, silicon experts at Chipworks are digging deeper into the processor's major structures and overall design.
The firm notes in the report that the latest findings are currently just "best guesses," as circuit extraction testing has not yet been performed to yield conclusive data.
Taking the caveat into consideration, one of the more interesting findings would be the "secure enclave" used for Touch ID fingerprint data storage that Apple discussed during the iPhone 5s reveal earlier this month.
Chipworks was unable to identify the area in today's image, however, but guesses that a new SRAM cell located above the GPUs is a prime suspect as the rather large storage space is a new addition to the A-series lineup. Extrapolating the size of the memory block and comparing it with metrics of known technology, the firm estimates the SRAM module to have a density of about 3MB.
Moving to the CPU, the A7's dual-core unit and accompanying memory, estimated at 1MB for L2 cache and 256KB for L1, takes up about 17 percent of the die area. Located across from the CPU setup is a quad-core GPU with shared logic, which accounts for 22 percent of on-die space.
A side-by-side comparison of the A7 and last year's A6 show the chips' CPUs do not share the same layout. The new A7 appears to be closer to a conventional automated design, which would be a departure from Apple's most recent custom-architected A-series SoCs.
Aside from the above discoveries, the rest of the A7's design appears to be carried over from the A6. Of note, the USB, LCD and camera interfaces are identical to those found in Apple's A5, A6 and A6X chips.
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12 Comments
Where's the Image Signal Processor, the Audience (replacement) audio processor, and what's the other unlabeled half of the A7 doing? Kind of funny Chipwork's sleuthing is like brain experiments trying to figure out how it works, and also an archeological dig attempting to describe dinosaurs by their bone fragments.
How much space was saved by offloading some tasks to the M7 since "the A7 SoC no longer services the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass".
[quote name="22July2013" url="/t/159819/preliminary-look-at-apples-new-a7-processor-reveals-new-architecture-quad-core-gpu#post_2407359"]How much space was saved by offloading some tasks to the M7 since "the A7 SoC no longer services the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass".[/quote] It's hard to say since those components aren't the same as before, but if you look at the M7 it's not very large. The reason for offloading it was likely so that devices that won't ever get something as sophisticated as the A7 can also use the M7; and iWatch. It surely doesn't appear to be about space or the 3MB for the presumed Secure Enclave may not have been there or so large.
How much space was saved by offloading some tasks to the M7 since "the A7 SoC no longer services the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass".
Not so much I think.
All sensors was and are still outside of the A6/M7 chips, I believe (can be wrong here) the task was handle by software and depending on which bus was used for the CPU to communicate with the sensors no special hardware was put on the A6. The M7 is merely a controller a lightweight and dedicated arm CPU that handle his task independently of the A7.
The guys at Chipworks are a bit slow if you ask me. 3MB is just the right size for a GPU frame buffer for the iPhone. If this is the case the memory array could be significant in power saving as the GPU would not need to go off chip nor trash the cache, simply to keep the screen updated. Of course we may not know for sure for a very long time. I understand Apples need to protect itself from the competition but this is very interesting technology.