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>Apple's strength is not in its chips. It's in its software and tightly integrated stack Huh? Every time an iOS device is released, it usually is the industry

• rm999 14y ago
  Can't you say the same thing about top-of-the-line android phones, e.g. Galaxy S3? Of course the newest stuff will have the best hardware.
• ajross 14y ago
  Apple doesn't design the CPUs, they license the IP (from ARM and Imagination Technologies primarily) and put it on a SoC chip. The A5/A5X were distinguished by the very large SGX cores, but that's not really an engineering triumph -- it's just a bigger chip. Other manufacturers were first with things like dual channel memory, PoP assembly, integrating the A8 and A9 (and SGX, for that matter) cores, etc... SoC design at that level really that innovative. You take some IP, throw it onto a floor plan and contract with a fab. Apple having their own designs is more about optimizing their production chain than it is about driving innovation.
  • wmf 14y ago
    But Apple "curates" the best Imagination GPU (edit: or the biggest number of GPUs) and for some reason all their competitors don't...
    • ajross 14y ago
      No, it's exactly the same SGX core. Apple just uses more of them. Other players in the high end space right now happen not to be PVR-based (Exynos 4 is Mali, and of course Tegra 3 is NVIDIA). Frankly if you really want to argue (and for the record I think such an argument is ridiculous), ARM and NVIDIA have much more "elegantly scalable" solutions that don't require high level brute force duplication of the core.
  • koko775 14y ago
    > Apple doesn't design the CPUs, they license the IP [citation needed] I know someone who works on processor stuff at Apple. More detail would obviously be bad for him, but they have digital design expertise which they are actively using to design (presumably) their future generations of chips.
    • ajross 14y ago
      I really need to cite the fact that Apple uses an ARM Cortex A9 and PVR SGX? You couldn't look that up on wikipedia?
      • Steko 14y ago
        You guys are just talking past each other. Apple, just like everyone else, makes modifications/optimizations to the base ARM designs. Look it up on wikipedia if you like.
        • ajross 14y ago
          No, that's simply wrong. There's certainly nothing on wikipedia to back that up, nor anywhere in the industry press that I'm aware of. The A9 in the iPhone 4S is 100% indistinguishable from the same core in Exynos 4 or OMAP44x0.
          • mtgx 14y ago
            You're right. All Cortex A9 chips are the same. What might differ is the fab process. A company could make it at 40 nm, another at 32nm and another at 28nm, so you would get further optimization from that as well. Apple's A5X SoC is 50% bigger in surface than Tegra 3. Considering the Tegra 3 SoC contains 4 CPU cores, and Apple's A5X only 2 CPU cores, plus taking into account all that extra space, I could see how A5X's GPU easily doubles Tegra 3's GPU in size, if not more. That's where the performance increase is coming from. Hopefully Nvidia and others will be smart enough to build bigger chips with in the next generations.
          • Steko 14y ago