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A Close Look At Apple's A4 Chip
PabloSandoval48 writes "Apple's A4 processor is heavily influenced by Apple's long-established relationship with Samsung and represents an evolution rather than a revolution in circuit design. A team of experts takes a look at the evidence on A4 in an attempt to determine its origins and the influence of recent Apple acquisitions in the area of chip design."
A team of experts takes a look at the evidence on A4 in an attempt to determine its origins and the influence of recent Apple acquisitions in the area of chip design."
The team of experts concludes the A4 was designed by Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Revolver.
I hear that the new A4 chip will allow the iPad to grow to 210 × 297 mm!
...but if I remember correctly, the same A4 chip in the iPad is supposed to be showing up in the new iPhone. Can someone confirm?
Apple does list the processor in the new iPhone 4G as being an A4:
iPhone Design
Sapere aude!
I don't see what's so interesting here. It's a standard, general-purpose, consumer-grade embedded processor. There are billions of these around in all sorts of devices.
Is this one of those things that people get excited about just because it's from Apple, but is otherwise totally unremarkable?
The A4 chip doesn't really seem to have any really fancy technologies in it. Mostly, it's just repackaging and combination of other components that already exist, but instead of combining them in the generic, general purpose manner they normally are, putting them all together in one chip allows a bunch of superfluous stuff to be eliminated.
Are you adequate?
I don't see what's so interesting here. It's a standard, general-purpose, consumer-grade embedded processor. There are billions of these around in all sorts of devices.
Is this one of those things that people get excited about just because it's from Apple, but is otherwise totally unremarkable?
I think it is just because it is Apple. For some reason, the thought of Apple being involved in processor design makes these people jizz in their pants.
Apple is not a semiconductor company. Sure, they bought one but it's not their core competency. So like everything, they thought they could do a better job than everyone else at this too.
They're going to have to spend money keeping the A4 competitive with other ARM SoC offerings from companies who make them for a living. They're going to have to keep them competitive with the ever-improving Atom chips which are slowly encroaching on sub-watt territory held by ARM. Otherwise, their hardware will lag behind. They're already in a world of hurt with so many vendors ramping to release Android portable devices of all sorts form factors, now they have to compete in the CPU arena too?
I just don't see the point. It'll be interesting in 3 years to look back and see if this was a wise decision.
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
What? Pay people more? Unthinkable.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Are there ARM designs yet which support the Trusted Platform Module specification? (Remember this fuzz years ago wrt. Microsoft and TCPA/NGSCB?)
If I were a hardware company and want to sell DRM'ed content with a hardware dongle, this would be the way to go, having the encryption key which ties the media to the device stored directly inside the CPU would make my platform very attractive, maybe even a de-facto standard, for certain media control freaks. And you could make sure that only signed code runs it from the moment it boots, turning it into the ultimate closed system where the producing company stays in control.
3. A forced 30% cut of all software sales for the iDevices.
4. And now a 40% cut of ad sales in Apps(while conveniently banning Admob).
So Apple reduces developer's profit, but they still continue to support them, helping along their growth in to a monopoly.***
And if they do becoming a monopoly, they will have the power to cut of a developer's "oxygen supply" but banning them from their app store.
***Lets face it, iDevices are on the verge of being the "standard" platform for mobile applications.
PS: I figured since my karma is already shot from criticising Apple in a previous story might as well let it going all the way down.
This is overly pedantic, but it's the "iPhone 4", not the "iPhone 4G". It is the 4th generation of the iPhone, so it's "4G" in that sense, but it does not make use of any 4G mobile network.
Say what you will about the position Apple is currently in, but they have been screwed over many times by other companies (Microsoft with Office, Adobe with Premiere, IBM with PowerPC @ 3ghz), and they figured that it was critical to their success that they take control of their own destiny.
What they've done is made a streamlined version of an ARM processor that is useful for their current needs; they do not need to "keep up" with anyone in that they get their processor to do what they want it to do for this particular need. If anything, by not having to cater to anyone but themselves, they have the ability to have custom hardware, but still based on the widely-used ARM architecture, so they don't have to completely re-tool when they come up with an A5 or A6 or whatever. Jobs himself said that they are not in the business of licensing their technology. You won't see an A4 being offered in lots of 100 to anyone for other purposes, it's a chip for Apple and their products only.
I was wondering too about the wisdom of this move, but it shows that they are not going to hitch their wagon to anyone's horse but their own, and that they have the ability to modify the horse to pull whatever load is necessary at that moment, a new iPad, new iPhone, AppleTV, whatever.
You do realize that the suicide rate at that Chinese plant is actually *lower* than the national average, right?
What boggles the mind is why can't they pay a few more bucks to the people working in Foxconn(who are jumping off buildings) who actually make these iDevices?
Because Apple isn't responsible for the salaries of Foxconn employees? And why do you single out Apple in contrast to the dozens of other huge companies that contract with Foxconn like Microsoft, Logitech, Intel, Cisco, Dell, Nokia, HP, or Sony?
Didn't samsung end up as the last supplier licensed to use Alpha tech?
Since I choose to believe that Apple has resurrected Alpha, no reasoned argument can change my mind :)
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Looks like Apple is looking to dominate the entire vertical space from the silicon in the chip and selling directly to consumers with Apple stores along with all the software that consumers buy. And it wants a cut of everything:
For your conspiracy theory to make some sort of sense, Apple would have to get a cut of anything that Samsung makes. It doesn't. Apple contracted Samsung to make a chip for them. Like other customers, Apple created their own design for Samsung to manufacture. Unlike other customers, Apple went deeper into the design customizations than other customers. Samsung does not owe Apple for any other ARM chips they make for other customers; and it is unlikely that Apple will allow Samsung to manufacture the A4 for their other customers.
1. Hardware of the iDevices
The last time I checked, Apple made their hardware or contracted parties to make it. This is no different than any manufacturer these days. Dell, HP does exactly the same Are you objecting that these companies make money off their own products?
2. Monthly kickback from AT&T on iPhone users monthly fees. (This is the real reason for exclusivity to shitty AT&T, Apple is just too greedy)
Many cell phones makers have exclusive contracts with carriers for certain models that have kickbacks. When a carrier advertises "free" phones, do you really think that the manufacturer really got no money when you got a free phone with a new contract/contract extension.
3. A forced 30% cut of all software sales for the iDevices.
I believe that is something called "overhead" that Apple charges a developer to sell through their store. I don't know if you ever developed for mobile devices before but that is very reasonable. Before the App store, some stores charged 45% plus fees. And this is no different than other stores like Android. If a developer charges no fees for the app, Apple will not charge the developer.
4. And now a 40% cut of ad sales in Apps(while conveniently banning Admob).
Apple is setting up an Ad system. They expect to charge for fees. Are you objecting that they should charge for their work?
Looks like Apple is leaving no stone unturned to make money hand over fist and is rolling in billions of cash. What boggles the mind is why can't they pay a few more bucks to the people working in Foxconn(who are jumping off buildings) who actually make these iDevices? Couldn't hurt Apple's bottomline really that much, can it?
First of all, Apple is not Foxconn's only nor biggest customer. Almost everyone from Dell to nintendo to Intel uses Foxconn. Second, Apple did raise the wages for the employees that work on their products. .
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
we've always had different names for different products in the same family.
Intel x86 and Atom are the same x86 family
Arm and A4 are in the same Arm family
Cell is a powerpc core with added cores for "multimedia processing"
Well, if it's off-the-shelf, where can I procure it ?
This SoC is no more off-the-shelf that any ASIC, even if built from already-designed IP blocks.
Did you read the actual article? Do you know anything about how the ARM architecture works?
Its sort of a "plug and play" architecture-- they license out the core design, the Cortex A8, but that design isn't set in stone. It includes options and modules that you can decide what to include or not, and there's all kinds of ways you can choose to optimize it and modify it to suit your needs.
Some people take this design and market their own customized version of the architecture for various purposes -- Nvidia's Tegra is one such. Its an ARM chip, but not all ARM chips are created equal (and it depends greatly on the purpose one customized an ARM chip for).
The A4 isn't some entirely new sort of chip-- its not as custom as Quallcomm's Snapdragon-- but its also not the same as any other chip on the market. They left some things out. They added some things in(or, more, changed some things). They tweaked its design to suit their purposes. Its not a general-purpose chip, needed for multiple vendors and different device types, so they left off some things to optimize it.
Therefore... its not off-the-shelf. You can't buy one. If you're an ARM-licensee, you could make one if you really wanted if you peered close enough and figured out which modules all the various parts on the die are.
Scary maybe, though I note that the ease of moving between mobile platforms means that Apple is unlikely to ever achieve any real lock-in of users.I think you're pretty far off, though, on items 2, 3 and 4. More basically, it's with the concept of a company being "greedy," which I'll get to after I address the specific points.
Yes, Apple apparently did initially get a portion of the monthly fee. (Piper Jaffrey's analysts put that at $18 per phone per month, IIRC.) I don't believe that is the case any more. My understanding is that this went away when they started offering the iPhones subsidized by the carriers. Even if they still do get a portion of the fees, though, so what? It's a part of the cost of service, not a tool of generating monopoly. (If anything, it's the opposite, as higher-priced iPhone service plans turn away users.)
Yes, Apple gets a cut of 30% on sales of third party apps. So what? They take 30%, and give me (as an iPhone app developer) a platform for sales, a distribution system and a much reduced cost to advertise. The 30% they take for those services is utterly worthwhile, particularly for independent developers.
Yes, Apple takes a 40% cut of ad sales through iAd. And no cut at all through other services, which pay (last I looked) between $0.30 and $1.00 eCPM. Given the ad customers Apple is signing up, I'd be amazed if iAd didn't pay better. (AdMob is among the worst in terms of eCPM, which is the only number that matters to a developer that wants to make money off of advertising.) As to banning AdMob, what do you think would be Google's reaction to Apple seeking analytics on Google searches about mobile devices? My bet is that it wouldn't be much different in effect than what Apple has done. Apple is under no obligation to provide their competitor with a competitive advantage against Apple.
As for companies being "greedy," that's really an utterly irrelevant consideration. All companies exist first and foremost to deliver a profit to their owners/shareholders. If they don't maximize their profit, they are not doing their fiduciary duty, and in most countries (certainly including the US) can be sued for that. Maximizing profit, though, is trickier than you might think. For example, Android is a real competitor to Apple in the phone business. If Apple gets too stupid (as they are in serious danger of with many of their app store policies, and particularly with the lack of transparency to developers and the interminable delays to get bug-fix releases up on the store), then Android will cannibalize iPhone sales. (Eventually, there will be similar competitors for the iPad and the iPod Touch, one assumes.) Thus, Apple can charge so much that customers flee to other platforms, or be so awful to developers that they flee to other platforms taking customers with them, and in the process Apple would have overreached and the market would correct that. So "greed" isn't really involved, because being "too greedy" inevitably leads a company to failure, unless the government is propping the company up. Or, in the American case, the unions whose workers are employed by the company is more to the point.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
If Apple is so innocent, why do you even have to mention the names of the other companies???
If Apple is so guilty, then why NOT mention those other companies?
You have to answer that first before you are allowed any more paranoid rants. You are trying to defect all ills of the world to fall upon Apple's shoulders. Has any other company but Apple in fact even offered a bonus to workers who work on the products the companies are having produced there?
Even if all of them are evil, Apple is less so if only because of that one aspect. Yet, you single Apple out - so obviously you have some other motive in mind rather than Foxconn worker well being. It's pretty sick to take advantage of Chinese suicides to further your own holy crusade against Apple (and Apple only).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What boggles the mind is why can't they pay a few more bucks to the people working in Foxconn(who are jumping off buildings) who actually make these iDevices? Couldn't hurt Apple's bottomline really that much, can it?
Uhh, they did -- http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/05/31/said.to.stem.from.internal.investigation/
Further... You know that Foxconn plant isn't like, an Apple exclusive manufacturer don't you? Dell, HP, Playstations, Wii's, Xbox, the Kindle... phones by plenty of other people, and basically practically anything electronic.
But Apple's greedy and is running the sweatshop and should direct a few bucks to the poor guys (... which they did, a 30% raise). No one else does. Bad, evil, greedy Apple does.
The whole suicide thing is way overplayed in the media. Its a sweatshop and can't have anything to do with the fact that Foxconn was paying silly amounts of compensation to families when this happened (a year's salary!), practically giving incentive in a society with very different social values then western ones (look up the differences between a shame and a guilt-based society: they're the former, we're the latter). And it can't be anything like a suicide chain which has happened more then once in this country.
No, It's Apple's fault.
Apple is not a semiconductor company. Sure, they bought one but it's not their core competency.
Why can't it be?
Why would a company so focused on making consumer electronics and computers, not decide that over time it is of benefit to move in the direction of also being strong in semiconductor design?
After all, it's not like they built the A4 from scratch thinking they could do better than anyone. That would be hubris. No, instead they took the ARM core and customized around it, which seems perfectly within the limits of what Apple can do given the companies they have acquired. There's no reason to think they are overreaching in abilities here.
Over time they may do more actual design, but it makes perfect sense to start down that road now that they have the capital given the direction they are headed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How is it not the 4th model of the iPhone? There was the original, which spoke the 2.5G Edge protocol, then there was the 2nd one which spoke a 3G protocol, then there was the 3rd phone - the 3GS - which added a faster processor and video recording, and now there is the 4th phone, dubbed the iPhone 4.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
That sounds like the basis for a religious text.
Plenty of companies do this. They do it sometimes without being experts in processor design, by having others help them customize off the shelf processors. They're just taking an ARM core, and then adding stuff on the periphery. They're not changing the core itself; not optimizing the pipelines, not adding instructions, etc. It's not even to the level of re-design.
Processors chips are basically at the stage now where you can customize them. This is analogous to me going to a store and building my own PC from off-the-shelf boards and parts; or maybe going to a web site and choosing which components I want in my PC.
This article is of interest in terms of the detective work and reverse engineering though. But it seems uninteresting in terms of it being about Apple.
(After a detour to intel who bought patents and quashed them.) The alpha CPU was quite respected in its day. But since it commercially failed like nearly every other none x86 chip family.
Isn't that sorta like saying a Core i7 is just another x86 chip. It's a standard, general-purpose, consumer-grade processor. I don't know about you but I can't design an ARM chip and you discount the work of engineers who did the design work.
Doesn't the article discount the work of ARM's engineers by pretending that Apple created this thing?
I'd be very surprised to see Apple computers based around processors that are "Apple" in anything more than name and, possibly, specific arrangement of cookie-cutter functional units around a licensed ARM or x86 core.
Apple has historically and to the present day, shown considerable distaste for entering low margin markets(with occasional exceptions in the service of making their high margin gear more attractive: the original "airport", for instance, was actually cheaper than the Lucent gear that it was a rebadge of; but it was sold to give the high-margin macs the "wireless" feature comparatively cheaply and easily, for the user). Chips, unless you are the top dog(like Intel, who after their rather embarrassing P4 vs. A64 era, are pretty firmly back on top of the x86 world) or a huge supplier of licensed blocks(like ARM), are a cutthroat business. The poor bastards churning out commodity Flash or DRAM seem to be losing money and/or going out of business all the time.
Apple might well(and, indeed, already have), commission a big stack of semi-custom chips, with their own preferred core and functional groups, and have somebody fab it, and(with an order of that size) whoever is contracted to package it will be happy to stamp whatever Apple wants on the casing. However, actually going into chip design/fabrication in a serious way would be entering a seriously cutthroat market to no obvious advantage.
On the x86 side, Intel has already demonstrated a willingness to give Apple some months of exclusivity and press hype for their newest gear(Xeons in the mac pros, small-package core2s in the macbook air), presumably in exchange for better margins than dell and HP's knife-fight-in-a-telephone-booth offers. As long as Intel is willing to do the hard, capital intensive, work of running cutting edge fabs, and provide their fanciest silicon at modest per-unit cost, with an exclusivity period, what would Apple have to gain?
On the ARM side, the world is crawling with vendors who have their own, slightly different, spins of ARM core + functional units. The barrier to entry to having your own isn't exactly huge; but neither are the margins or differentiation. The fact that Apple also has one, to suit their particular embedded devices, isn't surprising; but it isn't a huge strategic thing. All the assorted ARM licensees of a particular ARM generation are pretty similar.
Look at all the hype the shiny "A4" name has garnered them despite it being essentially made with commonplace cores that are already widely used. The switch to Intel took away the special "uniqueness" factor that Macs had on 68k and PPC. This is just a marketing ploy to convince the fanboys that these new platforms have something extra special that you can't get with any old beigebox phone.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
It's unlikely the CPU core was modified much, they probably used some more efficient in comparison to what they had DSPs/etc., or throttling methods of those; so A8 part doesn't really come into consideration (and even if - then Apple has it just in time for A9 SoCs showing up, for example)
Oh, and you overestimate how designing SoC can often look nowadays... (screenshot; yes, even basically point'n'click CPU customisation)
One that hath name thou can not otter
IOW. There is no reason for this to be news. The only reason anyone even noticed or bothered to submit it here is the fact that it is Apple.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Think Programming instead of IC design.
These days design of chips like A4 is more like programming than IC design of the 80s.
- Import the ARM Cortex 8 library, customized with configuration
- import other libraries e.g. memory controller, graphics chip etc
- write code to bind them together
compile... oops.. I mean send to foundry. Get back A4 or your Snapdragon.
ARM processors don't come pre-packaged. You license the core design, then you have to do everything else is needed to turn that into a physical chip. That's what *every SOC manufacturer* who uses an ARM chip does. Thus every ARM-based chip out in the wild is "different from any other chip". And we should get a slashdot story for each one of them.
Except, Apple's got a microarchitecture license. They haven't really used it much, aince the A4 is a modified Cortex A8, but the other licensees are Marvell (who got it from Intel, who got it from Compaq, who got it from DEC...), and Qualcomm (for the Snapdragon).
Next, Apple acquires Intrinsity, who up to then had been working with Samsung (who used to provide the processors for Apple) to modify the Cortex A8 core to be faster or more power efficient.
Apple's bought a lot of VLSI talent. They have PA Semi, who are well known at making very low power PowerPC chips, and Intrinsity, who are great at modifying existing designs. PA Semi may be working on a brand new ARM-compatible chip, while Intrinsity works on improving the A8/A9/etc, so Apple has a range of options for processors. Intrinsity gets them a processor "now" (since it's modified A8 plus peripherals), while PA Semi works on a future processor.
The A4 isn't interesting at all. The next gen chips, though, are. And Apple is poised to be a gadget provider that makes their own processors. If PA Semi + Intrinsity comes up with a super high speed design or super lower power design, it's all Apple's IP and technology, and Apple doesn't have to share wirh anyone else.
Well since we are being pedantic, the iPhone 4 (and 3Gs for that matter) has full support for a variety of 4G networks being deployed, basically LTE.
AT&T is supposedly doing some trials next year and rolling out 4G in 2011.
That is not correct. The current iPhone implementations, including iPhone 4, only support existing GSM networks (GPRS, EDGE, HSPA). LTE would require new hardware.
Verizon will be the first to adopt LTE in the US (by the end of this year), and hopes to have the first LTE handsets available by mid-2011. AT&T's LTE network will come later.
Sigs are for losers
It's really more like Apple is sprouting up a bunch of ARM devices and sadly, not opening them as much as any given x86 system.
Note that ARM is widely used on mobile computing platforms in general, of which Apple are just one little fish in a big sea; for example, ARM CPUs are used in about 98% of the more than one billion phones shipped a year. They've shipped more than 15 billion proessors in total.
And thankfully, these devices are far more open than Apple's :) (Well, to be fair, I dislike that phone platforms in general still tend to be less open than Windows or Linux, but at least nowhere near as locked down as Apple's feature phones.)
So investors are caught up in the hype and RDF as much as the media or anyone else right now...
But yes - maybe now people can drop the myth that Apple are a "little company": "Look how amazing it is that Apple have done so well, managing a whole 5% of the phone market in just 3 years" they cry, as if Apple weren't some billion dollar company that can easily enter any market it wants. Or "Isn't it amazing that Apple can create a device for me to access the Internet" as if this was anything special in 2007 onwards; or "Let's all root for the small guys, against those nasty big companies like Intel and Microsoft"...
If your implication is that the Apple A4 is going to outdo Intel x86 just because of market cap, I don't think so. Intel x86 is well established on the desktop (as well as laptops and netbooks), and isn't going anywhere, especially with the dominance of Windows. And anyhow, the A4 is based on ARM anyway, so it's they who ultimately get the credit for owning the embedded/portable market.
Because Apple isn't responsible for the salaries of Foxconn employees?
Apple IS responsible, because they know the workers' conditions, and still accept to make business with their direct employers. Those workers work FOR Apple, it doesn't matter how long the control chain between Apple and them is.
Interestingly, among all the companies using that factory (Dell, HP, Nokia, ...) Apple is the only one that has insisted in reviews and reports about the conditions even before this suicide row.
And please don't stop there. 99% of the other chinese crap (not limited to electronics) you buy has been manufactured under conditions that are probably much, much worse than those at Foxconn.
Apple has become a scapegoat of certain people and I totally hate that. Not because I love Apple so much, but because it lets others get away who are often much worse.
This PDF has photographs of the S5PC110A01 and A4. It's clear that, aside from the Cortex A8, they don't share much in common. The S5PC110A01 is 9mm^2 bigger, so you can tell that they aren't the same chip just from the size of the die, but the Cortex A8 is not even in the same location on both. They both use the A8, but so does the OMAP3500-series, like the one found in the N900 - it's pretty much the standard core for the current generation of handhelds.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I hope you have never shopped at a BP petrol station, since then YOU are responsible for the oil spill, it doesn't matter how long the control chain between BP and you is.
That, too, is not correct.
LTE is actually something of a marketing plan and strategy as much as it is any certain technology. Its multiple technologies and something of a roadmap. Its a multi-stage process. It begins with sort of 3.9GPP; and that is what Verizon and then AT&T are rolling out first. This is not 4G. This is UMTS, HSPA+, and such. Its actually faster then Sprint's 4G, but its not 4G yet. This is what the iPhone4 supports: it will run fast on the new LTE networks that Verizon and AT&T are rolling out. /Then/ comes the next step, LTE Advanced, which is the true 4G, to come around in a couple years(+).
Except that it is an A8.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Depends on what you mean by "licensed core". If you look at the history of Apple, you'll see a clear pattern: Apple licenses other people's cores or buys their chips at the end of the design process, but is quite frequently involved in designing those cores to begin with.
Let's review:
Apple has a long history of working with chip vendors and adding significant functionality to their designs. Sure, those bits end up in other companies' products, but there's Apple IP in an awful lot of CPUs out there, including many of the CPUs that have appeared in Apple products over the years....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.