Apple A6 Die Revealed: 3-core GPU, < 100mm^2
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 21, 2012 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- SoCs
- Apple
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- iPhone 5
Our good friends at UBM TechInsights sent over the first diffusion images of Apple's new A6 SoC. It's still too early to tell a lot but we have confirmation of a lot of things. The image above shows two 32-bit LPDDR2 memory channels and three GPU cores. We're likely looking at a PowerVR SGX 543MP3 running at 266MHz.
UBM estimates the die size at 95.04mm2 and the manufacturer as Samsung.
We'll have more details about the A6 and its performance shortly.
Source: UBM TechInsights
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Jamezrp - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
3 GPU cores? That's been trouble in the past. Why the hell...I almost don't even want to know. The A5X has 4 GPU cores, basically the same as the PS Vita (different setup, same general build).There are so many problems with this whole iPhone 5 hardware thing that I can't even rap my brain around it.
tipoo - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
Why would it be trouble? The SGX cores are built to scale to whatever number you want, this isn't like SLI or anything. What are these other problems you can't wrap (I assume you're not trying to write a song :P ) your head around?BrianTho2010 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
What problems are those?DerPuppy - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
Indeed, what problems? Nvidia/AMD cut-down cores are regularly asymmetrical in some way without problems. I feel it would pose more of a problem if the memory channels were asymmetrical than if the actual GPU core count weren't some regular power of two/arbitrary happy numbertipoo - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
I suspect he's thinking this is like a triple SLI or Crossfire implementation, but I'll not put words in his mouth.Blazorthon - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
A lot of Nvidia cards have an odd number of memory controllers. Anything with a 192 bit bus has three 64 bit memory controllers.Blazorthon - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
Also, the memory chips on Nvidia's cards with 1GB/2GB configurations on 192 bit buses have one controller that has 1GB of memory while the other two have 0.5GB of memory, so they don't even need to have the same memory capacity per controller, although it is more optimal.DerPuppy - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link
I believe it was mentioned that asymmetrical memory controllers for GPUs have deficits in certain areas depending on access patterns, whereas this is just the core (memory buses are still symmetrical) so what you mentioned isn't quite as relevant.KitsuneKnight - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
So many problems? Mind elaborating?Penti - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
It's three "compute units" nothing wrong with that and the SoC seems perfectly fine. Basically 3/4 of the power of the A5X just from the GPU-config, might have better clocks though. So roughly the same, but in phones. It's not three gpus or any SLI/Crossfire/Lucid configuration.They do stuff in parallel, they don't have three memory interfaces, the driver/software just schedules the work for the available units, but so does any other GPU. And it is tiled-based rendering regardless of how many cores you have here,1-16 is supported. Regardless of how many threads it's core can keep active. The tiles are handled in hardware. The scaling is pretty linear and don't have much overhead. It's not like having to copy frame buffers over the PCIe bus. Most mobile GPU's does do tiling as does the Xenos Xbox360 gpu. All have some type of multicore setup. Should make no difference that it is an odd number here. Rendering are already subdivided and multi-threaded even with one core here.