Apple system on a chip

  • Unknown
  • Cyclone ( S5L8960 )
  • Swift ( S5L8950 )

Samsung S5L is a set of system -on-a - chip ( SoC) which are primarily manufactured by Samsung for Apple. They combine an ARM CPU and possibly PowerVR graphics processor, memory and some controllers for example, NAND memory and audio on a chip. They were introduced in 2006 by Apple with the iPod Nano 2nd Generation. They are mainly used in Apple devices such as the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. The design of the S5L series is used by Samsung for its own SoCs. S5L SoCs are also under the name of APL and Apple A4 - known Apple A7.

  • 2.1 General
  • 2.2 design
  • 2.3 main processor, memory and graphics
  • 2.4 Microarchitecture
  • 4.1 S5L87er series
  • 4.2 S5L89er series

History

In 2006, the iPod nano 2nd gen and the iPod Classic was introduced by Apple. Also in development there was the internal " Project Purple" called the iPhone. Apple needed new SoCs for this planned expansion of the product range, the S5L87er SoCs for less leistungsbeanspruchende iPod family and the S5L89er SoCs originated touch, and iPad for the more powerful Apple devices iPhone, iPod. The S5L87er SoCs replaced the portal player processors previously used in the iPod. Initially, it was not planned that software would run third party on S5L89er - Socs - the GPUs were accordingly rather designed for power savings. With the introduction of the App Store, this changed. Then Apple bought in 2008, the chip design firm PA Semi and developed from the S5L8920 the nearly identical SoCs S5L8922 and S5L8930 to meet the increased demands. Since 2010, Apple marketed the S5L89er series as " Apple A" chip. The first advertised as SoC was the S5L8930 under the name Apple A4. 2013 Apple introduced parallel to the A7 chip a M7 coprocessor for the calculation of moving data. However, this is manufactured by NXP Semiconductors and shares with the " Apple A " series only the origin of the Verkaufsbezeichung. The S5L87er series is not specifically advertised.

Origin of the name

The term S5L is the internal name for Apple's SoCs. She turns up in the source code of iOS. Since the acquisition of P. A. Semi is the name on the chips APL. In the source code of iOS chips but still hot S5L. The marketing name of Apple is Apple A, the S5L8960 and S5L8965 both as an Apple A7 be marketed, although they are two different SoCs.

Labeling

During the first chips printed on only the number after you got S5L (eg 8701 when S5L8701, see picture right) after the purchase of PA Semi the name printed in mirror image with the modification APL - it is from S5L8940 mirror APL0498. With the introduction of S5L8930 the designation APL0398 moved to the edge, while in the middle of the marketing name A4 moved. However, the first prototype of the A4 chips rejected this label does not end there.

Technology

Generally

Samsung S5L systems on a chip are the most important chip of iPods, iPhones and iPads dar. All these devices are portable powered with lithium - ion battery computer for playback of electronic media and therefore, the central components of a computer on: Central processing unit ( CPU), memory, bus, input and output unit. The S5L chips combine all these components. Thus, the advantage is that fewer components need to be installed and as production costs fall while the efficiency increases.

Competing architectures of similar products are Qualcomm's Snapdragon, Texas Instruments ' OMAP 4, Nvidia's Tegra 2 and Samsung Exynos.

Method of construction

S5L a chip comprises a plurality of superimposed layers with in this multi-chip module design. The uppermost These are usually of the memory of the chip, the bottom which contains the processors, such as the main processor, graphics processor, and memory controller.

Main processor, memory and graphics

The main processor in a S5L SoC is an ARM - compatible microprocessor. This is adapted to the requirements of the device. While a simple iPod primarily used for playing music, offers an iPad compared so more advanced features. Accordingly, the performance of the processor must be increased. Thus, the instruction sets supported by the rather simple ARM9 rich to Apple's specially developed derivatives of the powerful 64- bit ARMv8 architecture and the core clock frequencies of several hundred megahertz to 1.4 gigahertz. Likewise, there are different manufacturing processes, which also affect the efficiency. The number of cores is between one and two. While the simpler SoCs have only Level 1 cache, for example, the S5L8965 also has Level 2 and 3 cache.

The memory in a S5L SoC ranges from DRAM to LPDDR3 memory, the memory size of 32 up to 1024 MB. The memory speed is realized at frequencies of several hundred hertz up to 1333 MHz. It comes partly before that differ not only different SoCs S5L series in memory size, but a SoC with different memory sizes is produced, such as the S5L8720 with 32 and 116 MB, or 504 MB and 254 S5L8930 with. Since Samsung is a manufacturer of memory modules, the memory in S5L SoCs often comes from Samsung, but also other manufacturers.

A graphics processor have only the S5L89er SoCs and some of the stronger S5L87er SoCs. The iPod Nano 2nd generation, for example, is not able to play videos, a missing graphics processor here is the reason. The iPhone was originally supposed to play only video and record photos, applications such as Games were not planned. Therefore, the graphics processor of the iPhone PowerVR MBX Lite is also one which is primarily designed for energy efficiency. With the launch of iPhone 3GS Apple switched to PowerVR SGX graphics processors, these are powerful. With the iPhone 5s Apple switched again, this time for PowerVR G64 series. The number of GPUs also varied while until the iPhone 4, only one was used has the iPad Air four GPUs. All S5L Imagination PowerVR GPUs GPUs.

Microarchitecture

All S5L chips up to and including the Apple A5 use the respective micro-architecture of the ARM main processor, which is based on the SoC. Apple used ARM926, ARM1176, Cortex- A8 and Cortex- A9. From the A6 chip Apple began to develop the micro-architecture in-house. The processor cores are licensed by Apple not directly from ARM, but by means of a so-called ARM architecture license, inter alia, also uses the chip maker Qualcomm for its Snapdragon SoCs, even developed. Since Apple itself out is no technical information, there is no reliable information on the micro- architectures. Until long developed Apple Swift and Cyclone.

Block diagram of Cortex A9

Block diagram of Apple's microarchitecture Swift as it was presented on July 9, 2013 at the Conference on ARM system development.

Block diagram of Apple's 64- bit microprocessor architecture Cyclone

Design errors

Due to a design flaw can be carried out up to and including S5L8930 arbitrary code, which was mainly used by the jailbreak using the so-called Limera1n exploit on any S5L SoC. This is not patchable through software updates bug allows among others the passcode lock the iPhone by executing a brute force program to read within a few minutes without much effort. This error has been fixed with the S5L8940.

List of S5L SoCs

S5L87er series

  • S5L8700 (2006)
  • S5L8701 (2006)
  • S5L8702 (2007)
  • S5L8720 (2008)
  • S5L8730 (2009)
  • S5L8723 (2010)

S5L89er series

  • S5L8900 (2007)
  • S5L8920 (2009)
  • S5L8922 (2009)
  • S5L8930 (2010)
  • S5L8940 (2011)
  • S5L8942 (2012)
  • S5L8945 (2012)
  • S5L8947 (2013 )
  • S5L8950 (2012)
  • S5L8955 (2012)
  • S5L8960 (2013 )
  • S5L8965 (2013 )

Technical details of the S5L87xx SoCs

Technical details of the S5L89xx SoCs

Trivia

At the presentation of the iPad 2 Steve Jobs showed a picture of the Apple A5 SoC. This image, however, was a photomontage which was mistakenly printed with APL0398, the name of the Apple A4.

Flash memory#NAND memories Apple M7 Cache (computing) Computer memory Apple A6
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