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."

Comments

Unbelievable

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Quad Core In a Tablet/Phone?

[rsmith-mac]

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.

Re:Quad Core In a Tablet/Phone?

[Stevecrox]

For me it's more about the manufacturing yields, the article mentions TMSC are struggling with their 40nm production process and this thing is 28nm being released next year. From what I understand TMSC is being used to remove Apples reliance on Samsung, I wouldn't be surprised if this allows Samsung, etc.. to jump ahead as TMSC don't sound ready to mass produce the chip.

Dual core makes sense because of power saving issues, you can have one low clocked core which is enough for basic phone functionality which is turned off when you started using the phone. In this sense I could even understand a triple core chip, you would have one low power core for when the phones not being used, then when it is you can move OS/Background processes to one core and have a 3rd core for running the main process.

Surely a purpose built GPU would give far better gaming improvements than an additional A9 core.

Re:Quad Core In a Tablet/Phone?

[Graff]

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?

You do know that iPhone apps can do quite a lot in the background, even if only one app can have focus at one time, right? Right now apps are deliberately curtailed to only certain background activities because of the limitations of the amount of cores, adding in more cores and more powerful cores will allow apps to do more in the background.

The limitation of being able to interact with one app at a time is due to UI constraints. Even on a regular computer there isn't much case for multiple programs being visible to the user at one time. For the most part a user isn't able to fully interact with multiple programs at a time, the usual case is to view a document in one app while doing work in another. A better solution to this is to allow programs to share their display engines so that a single program can run and display documents from other programs while only having one program running at a time.

The model of one application running with a few lighter weight processes doing background work makes sense for devices with tight resources and that's the model that iOS is attempting to follow.

Re:Quad Core In a Tablet/Phone?

[perlith]

Maybe Apple has finally decided to support Flash?

Re:Quad Core In a Tablet/Phone?

[Anonymous Coward]

One core for the OS, one for the apps, one for the antivirus and one for the rootkit.

Re:Quad Core In a Tablet/Phone?

[rust627]

And one core to rule them all .......

no, wait, wrong story ........

Stacked Chips

[narcc]

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.

Re:Stacked Chips

[TheRaven64]

Pringles claimed that they were stacking cakes. They lost a court case in the UK over this a couple of years back - for strange historical reasons, you pay VAT on crisps, but not on cakes. Pringles had been avoiding paying VAT by claiming that, because they were made from baked dough, they were cakes and not crisps.

Re:Stacked Chips

[itsdapead]

They lost a court case in the UK over this a couple of years back - for strange historical reasons, you pay VAT on crisps, but not on cakes.

The strange historical reasons being that some bright spark thought they could be really clever by only charging VAT on "non-essential" items, thus creating endless work for lawyers and committees arguing over what was "essential".

...and as anybody who watches QI knows, the official definition is that "cakes" go hard when they are stale, whereas biscuits* go soft.

* That's biscuits as in British English, i.e. cookies or crackers - not scones (which I guess are cakes).