It's interesting to note that the people designing that chip at apple used to work at PA Semi, and before that, a lot of them worked at AMD. Circa 2006 AMD deci

It's interesting to note that the people designing that chip at apple used to work at PA Semi, and before that, a lot of them worked at AMD. Circa 2006 AMD decided that all it's future chips are going to be laid out automatically, and got rid off their expert chip designers who were responsible for the manual layout on the K8 (original Opteron) chips. As Apple A6 is one of the very few modern chips designed by hand, it's pretty much the latest argument by some of the best chip designers in the industry against automatic routing & layout. It will be interesting to see how it will fare against the machine-designed Cortex A15.