LONDON – The A6 processor inside Apple's iPhone 5 mobile phone is a dual-core Cortex-A15 design manufactured for Apple by Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. in its 32-nm HKMG manufacturing process, according to analysts at Nomura Equity Research.
It is thought this would make the Apple one of the first companies to bring out a Cortex-A15 based processor. Cortex-A15 is the highest performance processor core from intellectual property licensor ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England).
Notably Samsung said it had started sampling the industry's first dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor late in 2011, the Exynos 5250, made in Samsung's 32-nm HKMG process and intended for volume shipment in summer 2012. The Exynos 5250 included Mali graphics and was intended for use in high-end tablet computers. At 2-GHz clock frequency it was claimed to double the performance of the previous 1.5-GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 based Exynos.
Apple has launched the iPhone 5 with relatively little detail about what is driving the product in terms of its application processor and graphics capability. The company said that the A6 processor has twice the CPU performance and twice the graphics performance of the A5x inside the iPhone 4S.
Nomura did not give a source for the information nor a clock frequency for the processor. Typically mobile phone application processors are run with clock signals of up to 1.5-GHz. However, the use of Cortex-A15 could help explain how Apple has achieved the equivalent talk time to the previous iPhone 4S
It is expected that Apple has remained faithful to graphics intellectual property licensor Imagination Technologies Group plc for the graphics rendering portion of the chip. The Apple A5 processor is reported to use the dual-core PowerVR SGX543MP2 so the A6 could use the quad-core version, the PowerVR SGX543MP4.
Foundry maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan) had been reported as working on a version of the A6 processor for Apple back in 2011. At the time that was rumored to be a quad-core design for implementation in 28-nm manufacturing process and debut in the third generation iPad.
If Samsung is the sole supplier of the A6 processor – as indicated by Nomura analysts – this squares with recent predictions that TSMC is working on pulling in its 20-nm process and working to supply Apple in the second-half of 2013 using that process.
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