Apple Announces A7, World's First 64-bit Smartphone SoC
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 10, 2013 1:36 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- SoCs
- iPhone 5S
Apple just announced the iPhones 5S featuring the A7 SoC, which is the world's first consumer ARM based SoC with 64-bit support. We're likely talking about an updated version of Apple's Swift microprocessor with ARMv8 support.
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michael2k - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
Actually, no, TMSC is at 20nm currently.danielfranklin - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
Not at this kind of volume, no way its on TSMC's 20nm. Samsung 28nm for sure.frostyfiredude - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
AMD has stuck 1.5B transistors into a 123mm^2 28nm die with Cape Verde (HD7770) or 2.1B on 160mm^2 28nm die with Bonaire (HD7790) as another example. nVidia too has put 1.3B on a 118mm^2 28nm die with GK107 or 2.6B on 221mm^2 with GK106. Those are considerably denser yet than 1B on 102mm^2 here so it is more than possible the A7 is 28nm.Besides, only Intel has the capacity in 22nm to make Apple chips and they don't make chips for direct competitors.
Kevin G - Friday, September 13, 2013 - link
Though Intel has loosened up a little is an fabbing chips for other companies. Mainly FPBGA and some networking gear.The real oddity about Intel's efforts is that they're not part of the US government's Trusted Foundry program.
danielfranklin - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
No way, $10 says these are on Samsung's 28nm. TSMCs 20nm is not at the stage of being able to pump out this kind of volume and Intel are not providing their fabs, yet...tech01x - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
Note that this is an ISA change with doubling the general purpose registers and floating point registers. Not just a 64 bit pointer, which by itself isn't useful in a phone at the moment.Eidigean - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
Don't forget that much of the kernel and APIs are shared between OS X and iOS. They dropped support for older 32-bit platforms from the OS X kernel. Now that iOS is running on 64-bit hardware, they can begin to have a unified 64-bit codebase again.danbob999 - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
Not really. ARM and x86-64 are two different architectures. If you are going to compile for x86-64 and ARMv8, you might as well compile for x86-64 and ARMv7.They can't drop ARMv7 anyways, they just announced a brand new phone using it.
Flunk - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
Right, it doesn't matter one bit that they've dropped i386 support. ARM v7 is totally unrelated.Krysto - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
They might even start supporting ARM for Mac OS, which is what I've been trying to say for a while, and it's a whole lot more likely they would go that route than put Intel chips in iPhones and iPads (which is what Anand crazily sustains). This shows Apple is very committed to ARM chips. You'll never see Intel chips in iOS. Never. Ever.