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The iPhone 5's A6 SoC: Not A15 or A9, a Custom Apple Core Instead
- DenisM 14y agoHey, I had no idea that Apple discontinued armv6 support from the latest SDK... learned something new.
- rsynnott 14y agoThe latest SDK only supports iOS 5 and up (if you want to target 4 you have to install an old one), and there are no ARMv6 devices which can run iOS 5, so it makes sense.
- DenisM 14y agoOuch. Do you have to have two Xcodes side by side, or can you install old SDL into new Xcode?
- rsynnott 14y agoYou have to have two side by side.
- paxswill 14y agoOfficially, side by side is the way to go. Unofficially, you can sometimes merge the actual SDK bundles into the most recent Xcode directory.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoJust FYI: New Xcodes install into /Applications/Xcode.app (and things like instruments are now in /Applications/Xcode.app/bin/Developer/Instruments.app or something like that) and the old Xcode is in /Developer. So, it's not as bad as it might seem.
- dmpatierno 14y agoIt's actually iOS 4.3+
- oofabz 14y agoIt's not necessary to support armv6 anymore. The only iPhones with armv6 were the original and the 3G, which was released more than four years ago. The 3GS and everything since has been armv7. Every iPad has been armv7. The last version of iOS to support armv6 was 4.2.1, released almost two years ago.
- polshaw 14y agoI'm not surprised, it was too early for an A15, and Samsung would not give it to Apple before they used it themselves. Similarly, they were unlikely to be high clocked A9s because of battery life- apple has a history of using low clocked cores too. I see this as Apple's long-term play for competitive advantage, while their main previous ones- refined OS and high PPI screen- have become the norm.
- bryanlarsen 14y ago"Samsung would not give it to Apple before they used it themselves." two mistakes in that phrase: - A15 isn't Samsung's to give to Apple -- they license that from ARM. Yes, Samsung manufactures Apple's chips, but the chip is designed by Apple using IP licensed from ARM, Imagination Technologies and others, but as far as Samsung is concerned the chip is a black box. - Samsung has given technology to Apple before they used it themselves several times in the past. I also doubt the first part of your statement. It's early for an A15, but it's certainly within Apple's power to persuade ARM to help them get something they want to market early. Spending their billions to bend supplier's arms is one of the things that Apple does best.
- polshaw 14y ago1. Samsung are poised to be the first manufacturer to bring an A15 based SOC to market. There are no doubt many issues involved in the reality of manufacturing a new arm core, no one else is as close as Samsung. So i maintain that Apple would have needed Samsung to enable them to use an A15. 2. Yes, they have supplied apple with stuff that only they can make before using it themselves - eg. the iPad screen (but IIRC LG were meant to be supplying too), but i still don't think they would want to give apple a CPU platform that was undoubtedly better than their flagship phone so soon after releasing it. 3. ARM aren't really a supplier to apple, they just licence designs. ARM have no manufacturing expertise.
- objclxt 14y ago> "i still don't think they would want to give apple a CPU platform that was undoubtedly better than their flagship phone so soon after releasing it" You need to bear in mind that the division of Samsung that sells the chips is totally separate from the division that sells the phones. The silicon division doesn't particularly care about the phone division - they care about their bottom line alone. And Apple turning up with a dump truck of cash, which is basically what they've been doing to secure component supplies, is not something they wil turn down lightly. Apple is somewhat unique among consumer electronics companies in that it is very singly focused. Samsung, along with Sony, Microsoft, and others, are multi-conglomerates, with vast reaching business interests, and Samsung's chip fab division only really cares about the profits their division is making. Money from Apple, money from an internal cross-charge: profit is profit. > "3. ARM aren't really a supplier to apple, they just licence designs. ARM have no manufacturing expertise." I don't think this is what you mean. You mean ARM have no expertise manufacturing at scale. ARM have extensive manufacturing expertise, because they need to supply reference designs that work in production. ARM has manufacturing expertise because they need to produce designs that are easy to manufacture.
- aidenn0 14y agoI'm pretty sure power scales quadratically not exponentially with voltage, right?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mbell 14y agoIn a general case P = V^2 / R That said, at the manufacturing scales of these parts leakage in the transistor can be as big a power consumer as the switching. Leakage current increasing as voltage increases at a rate that is of the order ~e^Vth I wouldn't really say its strictly either exponential or quadratic, you'd have to know a lot more about the process and the implementation to know how significant leakage current is in the design.
- mercuryrising 14y agoYes you are correct, the power used to switch a transistor is P = a * V2 * C * f. The static power dissipation from leakage currents though is Ileak = Isat * (e(qV/kT)-1). http://www.siliconintelligence.com/people/binu/perception/node13.html http://www.siliconintelligence.com/people/binu/perception/no...
- skept 14y agoDynamic power is quadratic with voltage and is work-load dependent, i.e P = c * AC capacitance * Freq * V^2. Static (i.e. leakage) power has an exponential component (P = AVe^(k*V)), although k is typically pretty small. I'm not sure about the static vs. dynamic power breakdown of Apple's designs.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoWow, I hadn't realized Apple had bought into the 'Sun' model that to be the best you had to have your own CPU. Well I knew they were doing their own silicon, I think that is actually kind of nominal for folks who want to innovate in the small device space since you can't get to the components otherwise, but to change the CPU architecture in the process is a pretty bold step. Sun discovered that you can get a jump on the competition like that, the first SparcStations really blew away the competition, but ultimately you can't outspend even three other competitors at the same time. Of course this was also why Samsung has been a much bigger threat to Apple than the other Android handset makers, they too make their own SoC silicon. So we get to see three companies pursuing products in the same space with three different strategies: Apple - Custom OS (iOS), Customized Silicon Samsung - Third party OS (Android), Customized Silicon Asus/HTC - Third party OS (Android), Third party silicon (nVidia) These kinds of situations don't come around that often so when they do they make for great learning experiences.
- ohazi 14y agoI'm not sure that Sun is the best comparison here, as they did both the ISA and the microarchitecture on their chips. If the claims in this article are to be believed, Apple is doing their own uarch, but keeping the armv7 ISA (and gluing some other ARM building blocks together). When Sun's architecture started to fall behind, there weren't really second sources for compatible chips. Combine that with a greater reliance on ISA optimized assembly than today, and you can see why their customers started to leave. If Apple did roll their own ARM this time around, they almost certainly built prototypes of the iPhone 5 with a "standard" ARM9 design for contingency reasons. Getting the software to work on either hardware should have only been a matter of setting some optimization flags and swapping out a few header files. Easily worth the risk, in my opinion, as they can always revert back to a uarch designed by ARM if their own designs start to lack performance or become too expensive in the future.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI agree it certainly isn't a 'clean' comparison, but at the time Sun didn't have the option of licensing the 68K architecture from Motorola and extending it in their own silicon. I still remember a talk with both Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsteim where Bill was over the top enthusiastic about finally having the ability to change the CPU to work better with the software rather than having the software work around what the CPU thought was best. I don't doubt for a minute that he at least would have been just as enthusiastic if the 68K could be augmented in a Sun specified way. There is a huge efficiency in customizing the CPU to do what you want. This I found interesting: "If Apple did roll their own ARM this time around, they almost certainly built prototypes of the iPhone 5 with a 'standard' ARM9 design for contingency reasons." How likely do you suppose it is that they did exactly that and called it the '4S' ? Having worked in places doing new CPUs (Intel in the '80's, Sun in the '90s) you always make a product based on the old stuff in the event the new stuff doesn't hit the schedule. The Sun-3/60 was exactly that machine, it was the 'in case the SparcStation 1 slips' machine.
- arrrg 14y agoIf this is true, it's strange that Apple didn't tout it more. I guess "And this Apple designed chip we told you is Apple designed already the last few times is even more Apple designed now!" is a hard message to sell, and from a consumer's perspective, those implementation details are completely irrelevant anyway. I guess Apple will tout completely irrelevant tech specs when it sounds good and fits the message, but when it would just cloud the issue and be confusing they just leave it out, even if those tech specs would put them in a positive light.
- polshaw 14y agoApple have touted it. Twice as fast as 4S, longer battery life. That is all that matters to the consumer and those are the benefits brought by the CPU.
- arrrg 14y agoThat's the boring part. Sure, that's what's actually matters (or at least a good deal closer to what actually matters), but Apple hasn't been shy to share some technical details at pretty weird opportunities.
- doe88 14y agoI think part of the problem is they already have introduced the cpu as "theirs" in a previous iteration (I don't remember which one) when they introduced for the first time the "Apple Ax". So I think it would now be difficult to explain that the cpu was not really completely made by them, that now this it is their design (built on the ARM IP) and put in silicon by Samsung... Too much hassle to explain I think for too few marketing gain.
- 6ren 14y agoThey could have said "completely redesigned* - the closest they came to that was calling it "A6". They are right to sell the benefits, because that's what sells. Even Woz chastised them for saying "quad-core" graphics for the iPad 3. This time, they didn't even say that - just "2x faster graphics".
- _djo_ 14y agoThis is an important development, as it marks Apple's first use of an internally-designed ARM core in any of its products. Apple's acquisition of processor design expertise is going to start paying off at a much more fundamental level than it has in the past. I'm excited to see where this leads, as Apple possesses for the first time the ability to design the SoC for a device like the iPhone from the cores up. It's a huge step for Apple.
- jjtheblunt 14y ago"Apple's first use of an internally-designed ARM core" : ARM itself was a joint venture including Apple, for just this reason.
- hristov 14y agoThis is just a bunch of rumors and the author patting himself on the back for being well connected and talking to the right people. Well it may be true, but this article does not really prove it. This is one of the things that, if true, would come from official apple channels rather than un-sourced rumors.
- objclxt 14y ago> This is one of the things that, if true, would come from official apple channels I don't think Apple have ever commented on their chip architecture, at least at this sort of level. It's going to be verified by somebody throwing the chip under an electron microscope, rather than Apple releasing documentation.
- recoiledsnake 14y agoDismissing Anand Lal Shimpi as one would dismiss a blogger is not right. He carries a lot of reputation and experience. >This is one of the things that, if true, would come from official apple channels rather than un-sourced rumors Err, Apple has a policy of not officially talking about even the amount of RAM, so we need to rely on third parties for this info.
- mtgx 14y agoAnd yet he was dead wrong about the new iPhone having Cortex A15 in the other post, that made everyone on the Internet think that Apple uses Cortex A15. So much for his reputation. I wonder what will remain of it if this proves wrong, too.
- w0utert 14y agoHe speculated on the options Apple had for the iPhone 5 SoC, and speculated wrong. No big deal, it happens to every tech website or blog that tries to predict future products. Now he has some tangible evidence about the nature of the A6 core (the fact that XCode now has build profiles for ARMv7s + VFPv4) and supposedly got confirmation from someone in the know that the A6 is a custom design. Seems like a safe bet this is right to me. It almost seem you want Anand to be wrong, you have some personal beef with him?
- sauce71 14y agoIs this really a surprise? http://gizmodo.com/382929/apple-buys-itself-a-little-chip-company-known-for-super-efficient-processors http://gizmodo.com/382929/apple-buys-itself-a-little-chip-co...
- redcircle 14y agoRight, Apple bought P.A. Semi, and assuming that those guys stuck around after Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel, Apple has a proven CPU devel team.
- wmf 14y agoMany of the PA Semi team went to Google via Agnilux.
- majormajor 14y agoThat purchase occurred a couple of years after the Intel switch. In retrospect, it looks a lot like a purchase intended for the newcomer iOS lineup.
- redcircle 14y agoOh yeah. I merged things together in my memory.
- huxley 14y agoApple bought P.A. Semi in 2008, a bit over two years after the Intel transition. Apple also bought Intrisity (in 2010) which was made up of staff and IP from PowerPC licensee, Exponential Technology.
- mendocino 14y agoIt is interesting to note that Apple now designes their own programming language, the compilers, the operating system, the processors and the products all that tech goes into. That's a pretty rare configuration of a company that hasen't existed since what? the 80s? [1]. That's a really unique opportunity to do really wild things, I hope they don't squander it. But I guess that requires a bold visionary, not of the Jobs type, more of an academic. [1] I guess IBM still counts, but mainframes aren't that sexy anymore :)
- achille2 14y agoOracle. In addition they make their own Storage, Servers, virtualization, OS, Compilers, Database, Middleware and Applications. - Storage: Storagetek - Virtualization: LDOM, Xen (OracleVM), VirtualBox - OS: Solaris, EOL Linux, and also Jrockit (Java running on top of Xen) - Compilers: Java, Pl/SQL (Compiles to ADA bytecode), C - Database: Oracle, MySQL, BerkeleyDB - Middleware: SOA Suite - Applications: Fusion Apps (EBS, PeopleSoft JDEdwards) In Addition, Oracle has their own Appliances: Exalogix, Exadata, etc.
- dnos 14y agoYou might be able to group Google in that category too, depending on how far you take it. In a way, I think it's exciting. It should allow them to do some cool things and Apple definitely has the resources to do such. Although, when I put my tin-foil hat on, I find it a little worrisome when one company controls everything. But ultimately I keep going back to my capitalism hat (don't ask me what it looks like) and I find it to be the best for us consumers for the competition it creates. :)
- stusmall 14y ago
- programminggeek 14y agoOne thing that makes Apple in a very special situation is that they have $100 billion cash to fund various forms of competitive advantage. From the supply chain to the hardware design to the software to the retail delivery experience, Apple can invest an optimize every point in the whole process. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out.