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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ImSpartacus - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link
But remember that A6 uses a slightly newer GPU, so performance is more than 3/4 of the A5X's GPU. As mentioned in the performance article, the two are rather close together in GPU muscle.Death666Angel - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link
It doesn't use a newer GPU, it's the same SGX543 by all accounts, only with slightly higher clocks, which results in the 3 cores here being competitive with the 4 cores in the iPad or twice as fast as the 2 cores in the iPhone4s.ImSpartacus - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link
You're right. I don't know why I thought the A5 used SGX540MP2/4.Penti - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link
It's just clocked slightly higher, with a much faster cpu to accompany it. Making it roughly as fast or even a bit faster despite less bandwidth etc.Zink - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
The iPhone 5 is an amazing piece of hardware if nothing else (the OS is very basic). This is the first time in 6 years of iPhones that Apple has been able to double CPU performance two years in a row. This hardware is 4x faster than the iPhone 4 and Galaxy S etc. from 2 years ago with over 10x the 3D performance. The efficiency needed to get better battery life than the 4 and 4s is only possible currently with a custom optimized SOC and that is what this is.Battery life is the #1 feature in a phone. It wouldn't be hard to make the iPhone 5 3x as fast as the 4s but only getting 5h of battery life would make everyone hate it.
jameskatt - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link
IOS is pretty much a UNIX OS with far more sophistication. It is essentially Mac OS X but customized for multitouch and tablet use. The power is hidden. But when jail broken and a terminal installed you will see that it is very sophisticated.Apple products are always the blend of custom software to custom hardware. They can't be teased apart from one another. And they are more than the sum of their parts.
tipoo - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link
OP does not deliverLoki726 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
The advances in automatic synthesis and place-and-route tools are really staggering.You can clearly see the distinction between the SRAM macros and the synthesized logic. Yet another incredibly hard problem falls to machine learning algorithms.
I can only imagine how many engineers would have been up late into the night to do that layout by hand.
Loki726 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
Here is a paper that describes the underlying technology: www.princeton.edu/~chaff/publication/DAC2001v56.pdfBecherovka05 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
I find it hard to see the difference between the GPU cores and what i am guessing is memory.Well its not my field so I leave it to the experts