Apple wasn’t joking when they said the iPhone 5’s A6 processor was powerful. Designed by Apple, the A6 has twice the performance over the A5, and there’s a good reason why.
According to the teardown from iFixit and Chipworks, the chip has a custom design that was manually laid out on the die. This is actually more expensive and time consuming to manufacture than an auto-layout.
– When compared to the rigid, efficient layout of the GPU cores directly below it, the layout of the ARM cores looks a little homespun—at first.
– Generally, logic blocks are automagically laid out with the use of advanced computer software. However, it looks like the ARM core blocks were laid out manually—as in, by hand.
– A manual layout will usually result in faster processing speeds, but it is much more expensive and time consuming.
– The manual layout of the ARM processors 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.
According to MacRumors:
The report also takes a look into the die, where it confirms that the A6 is manufactured using Samsung’s 32-nanometer HKMG process that was trialled earlier this year with the A5 that made its way into the third-generation Apple TV and the revised iPad 2.
Triple-core graphics? Wow Apple that’s pretty ridiculous for a phone. But I guess that really doesn’t matter to them. They always like to puch out the best possible, ground breaking devices they can.
