iPhone 5

[a_unique_person]

Apple A6 Processor is a Custom Apple Design.

More a case of taking standard 'components' and putting laying them out on your own silicon flooring. According to that link, they have chosen a custom layout to maximise speed and minimise power usage, but it's using standard pre- designed 'components' to do so. Much as they buy standard components to put on the circuit board, but have a unique mix when they do so.

 

[frskeptic]

More a case of taking standard 'components' and putting laying them out on your own silicon flooring. According to that link, they have chosen a custom layout to maximise speed and minimise power usage, but it's using standard pre- designed 'components' to do so. Much as they buy standard components to put on the circuit board, but have a unique mix when they do so.

Using pre-designed components is almost always how people design circuits. Usually, when you're using an external foundry, it's cheaper to have them give you their library of standard components, then you do your circuit with it, than design everything down to the single transistor. Component reuse is necessary in the industry, you can't design manually every single transistor when you have billions of them.
It would probably have been worse (in terms of performance, efficiency, reliability,etc), if they designed everything from the ground up.

Source: Microelectronics phd student

 

[This is The End]

I think a_unique_person was just pointing out how an average person would read "Apple A6 Processor is a Custom Apple Design."

Just your average slightly misleading propaganda headline.

Fans eat it up, and it occasionally sways a consumer.

 

[kajata]

I think a_unique_person was just pointing out how an average person would read "Apple A6 Processor is a Custom Apple Design."

Just your average slightly misleading propaganda headline.

Fans eat it up, and it occasionally sways a consumer.

Misleading? The headline said they designed their own chip and they did and probably spent half a billion dollars to do so.

Here's an article with lots of boring details...

http://www.linleygroup.com/newsletters/newsletter_detail.php?num=4881

What's misleading is a unique person saying Apple just bought an off the shelf processor which they did not.

 

[frskeptic]

If only headlines werre accurate, that would be perfect, clearly
One of the take-home messages is also that: this Apple-design ARM is touted as something magical that only apple does, and is touted as a major advantage or something, and means the iphone is made of fairy dust or something. In fact, custom designed ARM are nothing new, e.g. the snapdragon from qualcomm, which is the basis for litterlay hundreds of android handsets.

 

[kajata]

If only headlines werre accurate, that would be perfect, clearly
One of the take-home messages is also that: this Apple-design ARM is touted as something magical that only apple does, and is touted as a major advantage or something, and means the iphone is made of fairy dust or something. In fact, custom designed ARM are nothing new, e.g. the snapdragon from qualcomm, which is the basis for litterlay hundreds of android handsets.

Wait, so you're saying Apple isn't the only company that designs its own chips? The iPhone is not made of fairy dust? You're going to have to back up these outlandish claims.

 

[This is The End]

Misleading? The headline said they designed their own chip and they did and probably spent half a billion dollars to do so.

That is not in dispute. We were just pointing out that to a layman that could be read that they actually built it from their own parts, not just designed the layout.

 

[This is The End]

iOS 6 should be available for download for almost all iGadgets in just a couple of hours.

Get it while it's hot.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409876,00.asp

 

[frskeptic]

They did use standard design blocks and components, and I said there's nothing to be ashamed of, it's standard procedure. It's almost mandated by the founder (the one who does the manufacturing of the chip, which is not apple, but someone else like tsmc, nxp or even samsung)
It depends how you view "designed their own chip". They did design their own chip, it doesn't mean it's magical. People design their own chips all the time everywhere for all purposes, it's nothing magical. There can be massive inefficiencies and bad performances from custom designed chips.
Until we have a peek inside the A6 silicon, we can't know what's going on really. The A6 does implement ARM v7, so it's not a completely custom chip, they had to support standards, and for that they had to sacrifice something. To what extent the customisation they added adds anything to the table is unknown. If they used the same ARM A9, added customization and made it 2x snappier, that'd be impressive. They used a different ARM, A15, for the basis of the A6. So the only thing we can say is "we don't know". Maybe without the customization it would be 1.8x faster. Maybe without their customisation the battery life would be worse, we can't know for sure.

 

[This is The End]

Most iPhone 5's are currently going for at least a grand on eBay (Apple sells them from $649 to $849).

Even contract versions are going for several hundred dollars on eBay.

I am betting eBay iPhone 5 prices will at least double by the end of the weekend.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57515644-37/ebay-sellers-iphone-5-is-yours-for-a-mere-$1600/

 

[a_unique_person]

I think a_unique_person was just pointing out how an average person would read "Apple A6 Processor is a Custom Apple Design."

Just your average slightly misleading propaganda headline.

Fans eat it up, and it occasionally sways a consumer.

It's Toasted.

 

[TheL8Elvis]

If only headlines werre accurate, that would be perfect, clearly
One of the take-home messages is also that: this Apple-design ARM is touted as something magical that only apple does, and is touted as a major advantage or something, and means the iphone is made of fairy dust or something. In fact, custom designed ARM are nothing new, e.g. the snapdragon from qualcomm, which is the basis for litterlay hundreds of android handsets.

No, it does not mean that is necessarily better ... but which android based phone manufacturer designs thier own arm chips specifically for thier phone and the underlying OS?

 

[frskeptic]

Apple has only one phone model, in essence the comparison is not fully relevant.
As I said, custom designed arm exists, and are used in android OS phones. They're not designed by the company who made the phone, they are designed by the chip designer (like qualcomm), for specific purposes (mobile usage, maximizing performance and battery life), but it's not much different from what apple does: the chip is not done by the people who design the phone, but by people assigned to that task, with input from people designing the phone. It's not much different from the other non-integrated way of doing things, where the chip is designed by people at qualcomm, with input from its customers as for what they want in terms of what the chip should be able to do.
In a way, apple is innovating in integrating everything in one company, it does not mean it is better in any way.

 

[Dcdrac]

Not a great fan of Apple the company ties its users in compeltely not a fan of that, and although they make some great product and some so so product thats over priced, their notebooks, they are not a nice operation.

And they are pigs to fix when they go wrong, most of the calls my team deal with are for bust Apple products and yet only 10% of our office use the things.

 

[TheL8Elvis]

Apple has only one phone model, in essence the comparison is not fully relevant.
As I said, custom designed arm exists, and are used in android OS phones. They're not designed by the company who made the phone, they are designed by the chip designer (like qualcomm), for specific purposes (mobile usage, maximizing performance and battery life), but it's not much different from what apple does: the chip is not done by the people who design the phone, but by people assigned to that task, with input from people designing the phone. It's not much different from the other non-integrated way of doing things, where the chip is designed by people at qualcomm, with input from its customers as for what they want in terms of what the chip should be able to do.
In a way, apple is innovating in integrating everything in one company, it does not mean it is better in any way.

Which customer did qualcom design the snapdragon for ?

Again, I agree nothing makes it necessarily better. But you certainly can agree that only having one base model of device and one OS is a benefit when designing the chip, right ? In reality, it is kind of different than qualcomm making a generic arm chip to sell to many mobile device manufacturers.

 

[OCaptain]

That is a good point. It is my understanding that there are tons of 3GS users that skipped 4 and 4S completely.

Either they had 3GS since launch way back when (09?), or else they got it more recently in the 4/4S era because it was dirt cheap.

Almost all of them have been waiting for this day.

So add to that the die-hards that update ASAP every time there is a new version.... We are going to be looking at huge iPhone 5 sales numbers.

They need it.

Android/Samsung have been absolutely gobbling up the smart phone market share:






Apple is seriously hoping this (3GS users like Vermonter) is one of the reasons, if not the main reason, why they have been losing market share.

Apple is aware of the difference in new phone releases between them and HTC, LG, Samsung, et al. Whereas Apple releases a new phone with (hopefully) compelling new features once a year, Android handset makers are doing so every couple of weeks. Apple has to know that it is a game of leapfrog, and that now is their turn to overtake Android. Big push, regroup and design, and work out supply chain issues. Repeat.

This is not news.

 

[malicus]

That chart says it's user submitted results so they are not verified. For the Samsung, there are significant differences between the North American and international versions. The S III will be significantly faster on the benchmark once the latest OS is officially released for it (some say over 1700).

Artificial benchmarks mean nothing, except when I run them and they are high

*cough* Nexus 7 1960 *cough*

 

[frskeptic]

Which customer did qualcom design the snapdragon for ?

Again, I agree nothing makes it necessarily better. But you certainly can agree that only having one base model of device and one OS is a benefit when designing the chip, right ? In reality, it is kind of different than qualcomm making a generic arm chip to sell to many mobile device manufacturers.

It's a benefit for Apple, simpler to integrate everything together. But it's not sure how much it changes things.
One thing to consider from all this thing with the A6: A lot changed from the A5 to the A6, process dimensions (apparently 32nm instead of 45), the architecture (apparently based on cortex A15 instead of A9), so we can't be sure what the improvements are due to: the process (which every chip manufacturer can get), the architecture (which is chosen by phone manufacturer and everyone can get too) or the apple in-house designed customisations (which are limited by the chip needing to support the same set). I wouldn't bet my ass on the 2x improvement being fully due to the customisations.
It's easier for apple to design stuff if there is only one platform to support, sure, but it's not that much difficult for other manufacturers. Probably wrong (don't have sources) but I heard that the new snapdragons and similar will be or are optimized for the dalvik JIT compiler, so for Android, and that means many different phones with different manufacturers will get the benefit. I might be wrong but I haven't seen any massively insane improvement in benchmarks between an iphone's chip and a similar phone' chip. As as been shown by how software updates behave on the iphone platform, the OS can mean a large increase or decrease of the overall phone performance, so I wouldn't bet my ass that the iphone's famous (maybe overrated, IDK, never had one) responsiveness/speed is entirely due to its chip.

As always, it's a lot more complicated than the headlines and hype are saying, it's not to say that iphones aren't marvels, they are, every single chip with billions of transistors is a technological marvel, let's not get over hyped, or over-credit a company, with stuff that might be more nuanced.

 

[The Dark Lord]

No, it does not mean that is necessarily better ... but which android based phone manufacturer designs thier own arm chips specifically for thier phone and the underlying OS?

Samsung.

 

[TheL8Elvis]

Samsung.

If you are being serious, you'll need to provide some additional information, like the chip, the phone it was designed for, etc...