While early reports said that Apple will leave the production lines of Samsung and leave the production of mobile processors to the manufacturer TSMC, server Chipworks.com decided to look directly at the processor of the new iPhone and reveal forever who took care of the production of processors Apple A7 for the new generation iPhoneOf course, Apple announced this year that inside the new 64-bit SoC processor there is also another chip called M7, which is in charge of working with accelerometer, gyroscope and also compass data. And who actually makes the new processor?
Chipworks discovered that the chip itself Apple The A7 is again in charge of Samsung, which once again knows what it has to catch up with in the future. The novelty is again based on the ARM architecture, but this time it uses the 28-nanometer manufacturing process from Samsung, and also has the ARMv8 instruction set, designed specifically for 64-bit devices. Procesor is again dual-core, and as the first tests show, it again works at a frequency of 1,3GHz.
Alongside the revolutionary mobile processor, however, the device also houses the second aforementioned chip, the M7. As the server found out, the processor was manufactured by the Dutch company NXP Semiconductors and is based on the ARM Cortex-M3. This is a modified one variant chip NXP LPC18A1 with the ability to process motion data from the new iPhone. This single-core coprocessor achieves maximal frequency of 150 MHz and 90-nanometer technology was used in its production. The chip supports the ARMv7 instruction set, so it is clear that it is a 32-bit coprocessor, as opposed to a 64-bit main processor.
I still don't understand why Samsung makes Applu processors, when he himself uses (mostly) Qualcomm...:D
Marshall: I think it's because no one else could produce these processors in the quality and quantity that you would Apple wished.
I suspect Marshall was referring to why Samsung doesn't make its own processors.