Slashdot Mirror
Apple's A6 Details and Timeline Emerge
MojoKid writes "For a CPU that hasn't seen the light of day, there's a great deal of debate surrounding Apple's A6 and the suggestion that it may not appear until later in 2012. The A6 is a complex bit of hardware. Rumors indicate that the chip is a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU built on 28nm at TSMC and utilizing 3D fabrication technology. While the Cortex-A9 is a proven design, Apple's A6 will be one of the first 28nm chips on the market. The chip will serve as a test case for TSMC's introduction of both 28nm gate-last technology and 3D chip stacking. This is actually TSMC's first effort with an Apple device. The A4 and A5 have both historically been manufactured by Samsung."
Steve's not dead two weeks and already Apple fumbles the ball. STACKED chips? How is the next iPad going to be as thin as it can possibly be when they start stacking chips?
Awkward, off-topic and pathetic rabble. Troll credentials rescinded for immediate review by troll committee.
The Admin and the Engineer
I love my quad core desktop processor, but I find myself scratching my head at the idea of quad core CPU in a tablet. Even with iOS 5's enhancements there's no true multitasking in it or any other tablet/phone OS - every application is interacted with in a full-screen monolithic manner.
Dual core CPUs allow the OS to do one thing in the background and not bog down the device for the running application, but what on earth are you going to do with 4 CPUs when you can only interact with 1 program at a time? This seems like it would only be of benefit to games and a couple other niche uses, otherwise a processor with fewer cores and higher per-core performance like the A15 mentioned in the article would be far more beneficial.
I bet they'll try to patent this "innovation" -- even though they clearly stole the idea.
For goodness sake, Pringles has been stacking chips since the 1960's.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Apple has already had problems in the past with low-stock at launch. Why would they risk having even worse problems using unproven tech at a fab they haven't used before? There's always problems with supply when dealing with smaller fab tech, which will probably be worse with 3D being thrown in.
The A4 and A5 are not even that old.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
FTA:
" Given the iPhad's dominant market position, "
I wonder who slipped that in there?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So TSMC's 28nm is going to be what is behind AMD and nVidia's next gen GPUs, despite their poor handling of 40nm for both companies. Those guys (nVidia in particular) also have a large first dibs on the production.
So if they are planning on the A6 from there later in 2012, well I could see it. Both nVidia and AMD want to launch new GPUs soon. I'm sure they want a Christmas launch though realistically it'll probably be early next year. Ok well they do those, tons o' chips are made with the 28nm process, the big surge of demand is met, then things are good. Mid to later 2012 comes along and the 28nm TSMC process is stable and the kinks worked out, good to go.
However if they are going to try and do it early 2012, well I think that'd be bad. They'd be seriously supply constrained fighting with nVidia and AMD. While no doubt TSMC would love to give Apple what they want to get their business, they have standing contracts with nVidia and AMD (which aren't small either).
From 3D stacked chip, I'm assuming that they'll be stacking multiple die on each other, like in an MCP.
Stacked chips having been happening a long time. The A4 and A5 are stacked with the CPU and the memory on top of each other. Technically there is no reason why they can't stacked CPUs on top of each other. Practically, I suspect heat is a problem.
The other part of the question - iOS - is it something that's as SMP enabled as OS-X is? From what I've seen of i-PADs, they are not multi-tasking OS's at all - all they do is save the state of an app once you exit it, and resume from that point if you return. If that's the case, how does multiple cores help for this case?
iOS is based on OS X which is based on BSD so yes SMP is there. Your knowledge about iPads is very out of date. The hardware itself is capable of multitasking as you play music while surfing web. The APIs that Apple exposes limits how applications access the multitasking. Fast-switching is the most common used version because most applications don't really need to keep running while not being used. However Apple provides seven different multitasking models in iOS 4 released more than a year ago.
Finally, Apple can make this chip even better for themselves by moving their macs and airbooks to this processor, so that they have just one CPU platform of their own, making it easier to have a common code base for their apps, like Safari, Mail, et al.
Except that ARM and x86 instruction sets are not compatible. You can emulate x86 in an ARM environment but it will be painfully slow. Emulating ARM in an x86 environment will work but there's no real point other than coding and debugging for something like iOS.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Apple can afford to bring out iPad3 with a CPU that is not much faster than the current one.
What they can not afford, is stalling GPU performance.
If rumours are correct, and iPad3 will have a retina display, it will need a lot more shader performance to fill that screen with 3 million pixels. As it is now, it is hard enough to get 60fps on non retina displays with moderately complex OpenGL ES2 shaders.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Apple has been twisting Intel's arm (that IS a pun) about power consumption and threatening to dump their chips in favor of ARM. Another way Intel limits Apple is that their product cycles are tied to Intel's product cycles, which constrains Apple to a parity with other laptop vendors. By moving to a homebrewed CPU, it would give Apple even more architectural control / freedom which would assist in differentiating Apple products from their competition.
Funny how it all comes full circle. Apple suffered from having its unique RISC architecture for many years. Then Apple conformed to X86 for just a few years and leveraged that to get enough marketshare that they can move back to an independent architecture again.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!