Apple A7

The Apple A7 is a standard developed by the U.S. company Apple Inc. and manufactured by the South Korean company Samsung Electronics System-on -a- chip ( SoC). It combines a 64- bit ARM CPU with a graphics processor and main memory and also takes over the functions of a conventional PC chipset. He belongs to the S5L SoCs.

History

A7 was the first chip of Apple, based on a 64-bit ARM architecture. It was unveiled on September 10, 2013 as part of the iPhone 5s and is supported in this device from the sensor co-processor Apple M7. The manufacturer installed the A7 chip also in its devices iPad Air and in the second generation of the iPad mini. The A7 is the successor of the Apple A6.

Technology

The 5s in the iPhone and iPad mini used A7 SoC have the chip designations S5L8960X. They each contain two 1.3 GHz clocked RISC processor cores that support 64 -bit ARMv8 instruction set and 32 -bit ARMv7 and ARMv6 instruction set are backward compatible. The microarchitecture under the name Cyclone is a proprietary development of constitute Apple The A7 addressed in both units via a 64- bit wide address bus 1024 MB SDRAM memory ( LPDDR3 ), which is clocked at 1333 MHz. In addition to the memory and the processor is located on the A7 a GPU cluster Imagination PowerVR G6430 of the type with 4 cores, which can encode and decode video in HD resolution and OpenGL ES 3.0 support. In addition, a memory controller for SATA peripherals and NAND flash memory and a private audio subsystem are integrated. The A7 will be manufactured in 28-nm-High-K/Metal-Gate-Prozess of Samsung Electronics.

The variant used in the iPad Air ( chip name S5L8965X ) works in a metal housing with a clock speed of 1.4 GHz and has no own RAM.

Microarchitecture

The cores of the Apple A7 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 Cyclone. Since Apple itself out is little technical information about Cyclone, there are only limited reliable information about the microarchitecture.

Using a number of published information from Apple, an iPhone 5S and self-developed apps, the electronics editor Frank Riemenschneider attempts to draw conclusions about the microarchitecture of Cyclone. The presented block diagram of Cyclone is so far the only of its kind published