Apple A6

The Apple A6 and the Apple A6X are developed by Apple and manufactured by Samsung System-on -a- chip ( SoCs ). They combine an ARM CPU with a PowerVR graphics processor, and also take over the functions of a conventional PC chipset. Often called Apple A6 or A6X alone is used for the ARM processor, but this is not strictly correct. The A6 is one of the S5L SoCs.

The A6 was introduced on 12 September 2012 as part of the iPhone 5. The A6X was presented on October 23, 2012 as part of the 4th generation iPad.

Predecessor of the A6 is the A5, successor to the A7.

Technology

A6

The Apple A6 ( S5L8950 ) is 96.71 mm2 with 22% smaller than the A5 ( 122.2 mm2). It is manufactured in 32- nm process and has two ARM V7S - processor cores that operate with a maximum clock frequency of 1.3 GHz. In ARM V7S is an extended Apple ARM v7 instruction set. As a PowerVR SGX graphics processor 543MP3 comes with three clocked at 266MHz processor cores from Imagination Technologies used. First synthetic benchmarks show a performance improvement 4s of 250 % compared to the A5 processor in the iPhone, Apple even advertises a doubled computing and graphics performance.

A6X

The Apple A6X ( S5L8955 ) has two ARMv7s processor cores with a slightly elevated compared to the A6 clock frequency of 1.4 GHz. As PowerVR SGX graphics processor comes a 554MP4 used, which - like its predecessor A5X - consists of four processor cores that are clocked higher than the A6 or A5X. The A6X should each provide a doubled CPU and graphics performance, according to Apple, compared to the previous model A5X. The A6X is also manufactured in 32nm process, and the size of about 124 mm2.

Microarchitecture

The cores of the Apple A6/A6X were not licensed by Apple directly from ARM, but by means of a so-called ARM architecture license, inter alia, also uses the chip maker Qualcomm for its Snapdragon SoC, developed itself under the name Swift. Since Apple itself out is no technical information about Swift, there is no reliable information about the microarchitecture.

By means of an iPhone 5 and self-developed apps, the electronics editor Frank Riemenschneider attempts to draw conclusions about the microarchitecture of Swift and presented the results on 9 July 2013, one of ARM and the WEKA professional media GmbH held ARM developer conference in Munich. The system presented at the conference block diagram of Swift is so far the only published its kind During his presentation, however, Riemenschneider had to also admit that it is impossible without cooperation from Apple, details such as to determine the size of buffers for dynamic branch prediction.