The folks of Anandtech have dug into the numbers related to the Apple A6 SoC that powers the iPhone 5 and revealed some interesting details about it. We also found out from them that the new iPhone features 1 GB of RAM, which is actually sourced by Samsung. This is DRAM at 1,066 mHz we’re talking about, made of two 512 MB dies in a dual channel LPDDR2 package with 32 bits per channel.
Anandtech also lists the speed of the iPhond 5 memory at 8,528 MB/sec, a 33% increase of the iPhone 4S RAM, but below the 12,800 MB/sec of the iPad 3 RAM. What’s really interesting is that this time Apple actually make the A6 processor in house, using math units too new for the ARM Cortex A9 architecture, that was present on the A5 or A5X. Strangely enough this isn’t Cortex A15 either, so what is it? The A6 is the first Apple SoC sollution to rely on its very own ARMv7 based processor design.
The CPU cores aren’t based on the A9 or A16 design, but rather on Apple’s own customization. What this CPU is able to do, as shown in the slide here is launch a Pages app 2.1 times faster than the iPhone 4S, save an image from the iPhoto app 1.7 times faster and load the music app with songs 1.9 times faster. Pretty cool right? The iPhone 5 ships with iOS 6.0 and only runs this OS, that has support for a new architecture designed for the A6 SoC: armv7s.
More details can be found in the source link at Anandtech, since these guys know tech and can detail it easily.
