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So has Apple removed the proprietary DRM IC's in the lightning cable?

All modern NAND flash memory does "quasi-RAID".

That depends 100% on the sort of controllers & memory layouts that are involved.

Do you have specific information that Apple does this? I don't.

Given that:
- nearly all modern smartphone/tablets/etc. do no go the extra headache to implement some weird custom solution for their mass storage.
- instead they all go for simple, standard, cheap of the shelf technology.
- [ BTW: eMMC (embed MMC - i.e.: an SD Card, without the plastic package, but directly available over an MMC bus) seems to be the most frequent solution ]
- Most of the flash anywhere, including thousands of SD Cards on the market right now, follow the exact same tendency: bigger model have more chips and can spread their write/erases among more chips ("quasi-RAID") giving better performance. That's why the "Class 10 UHS III" SDXC cards are only available on the bigger models, smaller models are slower. Same difference between microSDXC and regular SDXC cards (bigger cards can pack more chips and you have a greater choice of faster cards. At the micro level, it's only 128GB and above capacity that usually come with "Class 10 UHS III").
- Even more gory details if you care to read the benchmarked read/write speeds of each card. (again, more chips - found in larger package or bigger capacity - manage higher write/erase speeds).

Given all the above, there's high expectation that iPhones are following the trend..
But hey instead of speculating and calling each other names, let's check actual real heardware :
iFixit, Chipworks, SK Hynix Datasheet

What a surprise~ iPhone are exactly everyone else~ and source cheap of the shelf parts instead of re-inventing the wheel~~ Who would have though this~~~

iFixit's 32Gb iPhone use H23QEG8VG2ACS - a stack of 4 chips, with 256Gibits total (or 32GiB if used alone like in this phone).
Chipworks's 128GB iPhone use - a stack of 8 chips, with 1024Gibits total (or 128GiB when used in alone configuration)

So without even taking into account anything else, 32GB iPhone can only spread their writes among half of the chips available to a 128GB iPhone.
So they already start with a 50% malus at the hardware level.

That said, 128GB should only be 4 times faster than 32GB, so if these figures are correct then the 32GB units are also using lower spec memory.

Nope. At all. Like you said it entirely depends on the flash configuration. 128 isn't necessarily 4x more chips than 32.
Some constructor would go for 8x more chips of half the capacity.
In Apple case, they went for 2x more chips at 2x more capacity (more expensive but faster, enabling them to have bigger marging on the smaller/slower 32GB).

Which again goes back to the point of what I have posted... and this article.

Which goes back to the answer which you were given:
- YES, nearly every last constructor of flash is doing "quasi-RAID", i.e.: stacking/bonding more chips in the same package and spreading the write/erase among that.

That single fact can account for a huge part of the difference between models.

Then the thing is designed by Apple.
They run iOS on it. i.e.: the same "Darwin" core ( Mach microkernel + BSD monolithic kernel + BSD user space) as Mac OS X, only with a different interface.
They probably *still* use the same asinine file system as always HFS+
And that one is completely inadequate for flash.

It's a classical "inplace" writing file system.
This dramatically increase the "write amplification" typical with random-writes flash media. (each time you need to change some data, you would need to erase and re-write a whole block).
This probably *also* accounts for the dramatic performance

Gallium Nitride transistors have a lot of nice characteristics, but low yields and high costs have slowed their introduction. Two tiny laptop chargers, the FinSix Dart and Avogy Zolt, were said to use GaN transistors. The Dart still hasn't shipped, a year past its claimed release date. The Zolt has but is apparently using older Silicon Carbide-substrate transistors instead (Also see here.) (I received my Zolt recently and it is working well.)

It won't be a surprise to anyone following this technology that it can make inverters more efficient - that's what FinSix and Avogy have been claiming/demonstrating for two years at least.

Chipworks had some interesting eye-candy die photos and a breakdown of the iPad and A4 for those who haven't seen that yet:

iPad Teardown

For reference - http://www.chipworks.com/A4_is_Samsung_45nm.aspx ...about as conclusive as it can get

Chipworks based in Ottawa Canada specializes in chip reverse engineering for patent litigation and technical analysis. They have reverse engineering reports ranging from the Xbox360 to CPUs to analog chips.
They also have a neat chip art gallery.

Chipworks based in Ottawa Canada specializes in chip reverse engineering for patent litigation and technical analysis. They have reverse engineering reports ranging from the Xbox360 to CPUs to analog chips.
They also have a neat chip art gallery.

Back when Motorola hid a sword on the G3 (XPC750) die, we came across these silicon art things I dug up the url again : http://www.chipworks.com/gallery/gallery_home.asp

The silicon zoo page is so old and busted.

Here's a dose of new hotness: Chipworks

How these guys can reverse engineer in the day of DCMA astounds me. Speaking of greyscale images are interesting.. And I'll hint people towards looking at a Transmeta chip.

The picuture of Dilbert is included in the second image gallery from Chipworks silicon art. It also shows up on an ICE poster

The picuture of Dilbert is included in the second image gallery from Chipworks silicon art. It also shows up on an ICE poster

The picuture of Dilbert is included in the second image gallery from Chipworks silicon art. It also shows up on an ICE poster

My first time as a karma whore... here's a link you can click on:

http://www.chipworks.com/art/siliconart.htm

I actually used to work with some of these folks. We used to see all sorts of cool stuff.

This assumes that the code is all locked up in a single chip. If not, why not just pull an Xbox to bits, read the binaries out of the ROMs and decompile?

According to http://www.chipworks.com/news/11Xbox.htm, it does use an Intel Pentium III. Ignoring certain information returned by a processor can falsely indicate its speed and model. Early releases of Windows 98 said PIIIs were PIIs.

I would probably say that the Atari 2600 "Adventure Dot" was one of the first documented eggs. It was created by Warren Robinett. I think that eggs and cheat codes are for the hacker types who like to understand and take apart what they are working with. What fun would it be finding codes if they "just tell you what they are?" That is why you buy a game in the first place. Eggs and codes can show up in the most interesting places, the fun is finding them.

I used to work for Chipworks which does reverse-engineering for a living. Most of their work is to protect intellectual property from infringers.

They also used their tools to recover data from a flight computer in the Swissair crash. Is that a bad thing?

I used to work at Chipworks, which reverse-engineers integrated circuits. Here's how *hardware* RE works; I'll get to software later.

You remove the chip from the package by popping it open or (if it's a plastic package) dropping it in boiling sulphuric acid. You prepare several samples, etching each one to a different level of interconnect. The last sample is etched down to the transistor level.

You then create large photomosaics of the chip. If you do it with conventional film cameras, you end up (for simple memory chips) with huge "carpets" of images about 8 metres long and 1.5 metres high.

You get a team of engineers to crawl around on the photos for a few months, marking interconnect, labeling signals (first with tentative names; then with real names) and extract circuitry.

You get a team of engineers to eyeball the schematics for a few months and organize them. Gradually, the picture of how the chip works emerges. Note that this is for simple chips like DRAM or Flash memory chips. It's totally impractical for a complicated chip like a microprocessor.

If you're dealing with flash memory, you have to worry about programming algorithms. These chips usually have on-chip ROMs or PLAs which control programming signals. You spend another few months decoding the PLA's and coming up with the algorithms.

For software, you have to know the background. It really helps if you know which language, compiler, OS, etc. was targeted. Most compilers produce standard assembly blocks for common constructs, so this helps you recognize things.

In my youth, I partially reverse-engineered the ROM of the TRS-80 Color Computer. Since this was written in assembler, the reverse engineering was not too hard. It's basically a lot of staring.

Here's what's in the new Palm VII.

(Disclaimer: I get paid by this company to hack/rev-eng the hardware, not marketing.)

Single-chip TCP/IP stacks aren't far off, and I was at a workshop not too long ago showing some of the R&D going into millimeter-wave (GHz frequency range) antennas integrated into a single chip.

Half the battle lies with the tools. Getting the electrical (digital/analog/RF) talking to the mechanical, to the thermal design tools and data is a major challenge. Holistic design is what it's called.

Very neat stuff; I'm glad I'm in the industry. :-)

Look here -- it's expensive, but if a bunch of Linux companies threw some money in the pot...