iPhone 5 A6 SoC Teardown: ARM Cores Appear To Be Laid Out By Hand

MrSeb writes "Reverse engineering company Chipworks has completed its initial microscopic analysis of Apple's new A6 SoC (found in the iPhone 5), and there are some rather interesting findings. First, there's a tri-core GPU — and then there's a custom, hand-made dual-core ARM CPU. Hand-made chips are very rare nowadays, with Chipworks reporting that it hasn't seen a non-Intel hand-made chip for 'years.' The advantage of hand-drawn chips is that they can be more efficient and capable of higher clock speeds — but they take a lot longer (and cost a lot more) to design. Perhaps this is finally the answer to what PA Semi's engineers have been doing at Apple since the company was acquired back in 2008..." Pretty picture of the chip after using an Ion Beam to remove the casing. The question I have is how it's less expensive (in the long run) to lay a chip out by hand once instead of improving your VLSI layout software forever. NP classification notwithstanding.

Comments

Re:Automation versus human instinct

[Pseudonym]

I think you underestimate how good compilers have become.

I think you may have misunderstood the realities of what a modern expert assembly language programmer does.

An expert assembly language programmer knows when to write assembly language and when not to write assembly language. Assuming that raw performance is the metric by which programmers are judged (which isn't necessarily the case), an expert assembly language programmer will still win over any high-level language programmer because they can also use the compiler.

It's the same with hand-laid-out VLSI. It's not like some team of hardware designers placed every single transistor. That would cause just as much of an unmaintainable mess as writing a large application entirely in assembly language. Rather, the hand-layout designer worked in partnership with the automated tools.